My Culutural Events

Why post in a nice timely manner when i can post about all five events in one go?
My first event was the Student play in the White Room called life under water. It was intresting as far as student plays go. The idea was that there where several over indulged rich white high schoolers who where tired of there lives and wanted some thing more. What that more was never made clear, but it deffinatly wasn't the lives of there parents who where simply fitting about the place and having affairs with each other. In fact, one of the mothers was having an affair with a man who decided to join his bording school tennis teams current pursit, an upscale male version of a call girl service. That's a life anyone whould want to emulate!

The secound event was Mark Cooly. He talked about his instalation American Dreams. It's about American consumerism and the wars that have been waged by the American government. It's pakages of toys and other bits and peices that have packageing that talk about the American relationship with these contreis and the connection we have militarily. One example was things that were made in Vietnam. I thought that this peice was very cool. I liked the way it was prestnted, as object that where actually for sale

The third event was the talk given by Andrew Kiepter. His peice was a little weird for me. It was three sounds played on a loop and an image played on a screen. Becuase of the diffrent time of the sounds and image, the peice would never repeat, in our life times anyway. I like the idea, but the sounds were to strange for me. Maybe I would have liked it if i had seen less of it. It was played for a while.

The fourth event was going to the Walters over Spring Break. There are two things I love at the Walters. One is the room designed like a Dutch "chamber of wonders" that are set up like the 16th century noblemens room. I particulrly like the gian natulus tusk hanging on the wall. There is also a section for midevil or islamic art that has a saber that is split down the middle so that the attacker can get two cuts in with one blow. I would say that would be very useuful in a time of war.

My last event was the Antropolgy talks given at Historic. There wasn't much said that i didn't already know. Silas talked about the discovery, archeology and reconstuction of Cordea's hope, one of the first shops in the area. While they were looking for it, they found anouther building on the site and couldn't figure out for a while which buiding was which. Ruth talked about the archeology and constuction of St. John's site. Henry talked about the Facade of brick on the Vanswearigen buiding. Basicly what VanSweringen did was build a cheap and mostly sturdy building and then made it look nice. Henry likened it to putting lipstick on a pig, but VanSweringen's lipstick actully made the pig look good. Finally Tim talked about the formal building in the chesapeak. This was a short talk as there are very few building that are formal in St. Mary's CIty.

And that was my cultural quota for the semester.

What? It's Only Money

Yay for it working!
Someday i'll get it right...

Site Map

Here is a site map for a site with 6 pages (and a seventh for acknowledgments)
I was wondering if it was possible to make a site with more than 6.

Ocean City

Words Associated with Ocean City:
Ocean
Tourism
mini golf
crowded
sand
boardwalk
Dolly's
candy Kitchen
kitchy
cheap

Web Site parody

The Ideas I have are both political and not
The political ideas are for The War on Terror, the war on Drugs, and Internet nutrality by parodying the ICANN website.
The non-political ideas I have are on Ocean City, Maryland, and Myspace.

I also stumbled up on this while I was looking and thought it was amusing. The only thing is that it is a real site.
I think

Internet art

The first thing I noticed was that the history of the Internet needs to catch up with what happened to the Internet in the 90s. This blog is an example of how much has changed and been influenced by the Internet. In years past, I would have written my essay/reflection in a paper and handed it in. Now i post it here.
I really like the Oil Standard project. It is really interesting. How many times a day to people see prices as they cruse the Internet. With the united States political climate such as it is, the knowledge of how much oil costs and what it actually means in terms of what we actually buy and money that we can wrap our head around is an amazing use of the Internet habits of people in the United States.
This project not only exploits the habits of people who use the Internet to buy almost every thing but also gives the political message of how much oil, something that seems to be on most people's minds nowadays, costs.

Poe and Booth, Together for the first time

My Idea is to create post cards for touristy destinations that symbolize the two men, Edgar Allan Poe and John Wilkes Booth. Poe's would be for his grave and Booths would probably be for Ford Theater. in the postcards they would be describing there feelings about Baltimore. Poe would hate it. Booth would be fond of it.

Caution

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

And Click here

Burroughs seems kinda Screwy

The idea of cutting up a bit of text to create a poem or story seems like an interesting one. I like the idea of happy accidents occurring in a mash of words. But I have a problem with sucking all the meaning out of a set of words. The cut up of words has some amusing sentences in it. The first sentence is pretty funny. But then there are sentence that have no meaning. What I'm saying is that I think that a piece that has been cut up like this needs to then have some editing, just so that it has some meaning. Or at least makes sense. It seems to me that the words loose meaning if they don't help the whole sentence. But was that Burroughs' point? Was he trying to devlop new meanings for words and sentences by changeing the context?

Let's add some happy little trees.

Or dogs, in this case.
Here is the picture to use in my Brush tutorial.

Dada Triumphs!

This is an untitled piece by Max Ernst. To create this piece, Ernst used photo montage to pieced together photographs that he found of a bi-plane and arms in the sky. He also placed the group of men on the ground. Ernst also drew in the horizon and the ground with pencil. It also looks like Ernst colored in the men and the arms.

This piece is a poster and a work of art in the same space. First, it is a poster for the Dada Early Spring show. But it is also an example of Dada work. It is typography. It looks straight forwad at first glance. It tells you Dada Triumph and about the show, but then there are random little pictures down the side. There is a cow, and other animals, a random word, a huge exclamation mark, and a woman makeing cheese and saying something. Then, in the seal at the top, there are t's and exclamation marks and parentheses and a u. These random pictures form a haron to me, but i doubt that was the intention of the artist. This peice leaves me wondering what "Weshalb bin ich nicht dieser mutige Vogel?" means.

A journey home

This is my audio project. Hope you like it.
This piece is a woman walking home from a club, late on a warm, drizzly night in a city.
The beices that i recorded myself are all the vioces, doors (except for the slamming door), and the footsteps.
The peices from Freesound are
By Percy Duke-Cars Passing.wav
By acclivity -TenorSax1.wav
By gezortenplotz-hospital_tv_channel_change.wav
By dobroide-20061012.distant.ambulance.wav
By djgriffin -acidhouse120 beatnhats.aif
By Micronin -Fenetre2.aif
By digifishmusic -Opel Corsa Door Slam in Garage.wav
By LS-Rain.wav
By AMPUL -MCGameSound2.wav
By zippi1 -sound-meow1.wav

Take a Walk With Me

Listening to Janet Cardiff is an interesting experience. She has a wonderful voice that is pleasant to hear. Even sitting in a chair, no where near Whitechaple, you can imagine everything that she is talking about, and because I wasn't in London when I listened to this piece, I feel like I had more freedom to see what I wanted and to hear what I wanted. The problem with this is that it meant that I may not have seen what Cardiff was pointing at in her piece.
What I liked about her piece was the feeling she evoked by playing with sound. By whispering so close, it seemed as if the voice hadn't come from the headphones, but from someplace inside my own head. The male voice that whispers about a man meeting us on the path by the stairs made me jump. The male voice made me so afraid by the end of the piece. I was convinced something bad was going to happen in the forest when she dropped her flashlight. I also was fascinated with how she used sound and sound depth to make it seem like the band was coming closer to us or the water gets closer than farther, then closer again. There were also several instances where she whispers something in the background, and it almost seems like subliminal messeging. When she tells us to close our eyes and listen to the band, there is a whisper of "trust me" that I didn't catch the first time. In the radio piece, it's mentioned that the background melts into the real background, so that the listener doesn't know what is real and what is not. I really can understand this, because I listened to this piece for the first time while walking across campus. I looked up and couldn't figure out why there were so many birds, until I realized that it was on Cardiff's piece.
I would really like to go on this walk someday.

First Audio Project

Just Laugh
This is the first audio project that I made for class. I messed around with the laughter until it sounded like a crowd laughing around me. And the baby's laughter just made me laugh every time I heard it. There is no real rhyme or reason behind this, except for the emotions.
In my project i used sounds from The Free Sound Project. These are the sounds:
By hanstimm
laughter2.aif
By acclivity
Toby2.wav
By cognito perceptu
bell crowd laughter.wav
By andriala
child laughing.wav

Proposed Journey

My Idea is a walk through a city from a club or a cafe, some night spot, back home.
The actual idea is to start with the club. I'm not sure how I'm going to create this club, but i will. Then have walking. This will be a constant until the person gets to their apartment. Then, every few steps their will be a different sound. Some will be close, others will be far away. I want to include noises like an ambulance, a couple fighting, cars, and my own shoes on the pavement. I can get a couple of sounds off of Free noise. The things I need to record are the sounds of my heels on a floor, a door closing, Keys in a door, a couple fighting, and my own voice.
I want this project to sound a little futuristic, But not totally unfamiliar, like it's set in the near future. To do this, I'm planning on using the doors in the practice rooms for the doors, and beeps for the front of the apartment building.
I also want it to have the ambiance of a half deserted city street late at night. To acheeve this, I'm spacing the noises out and want to use a sax piece i found on free sound, if I'm allowed.

Radio Play

I listened to John Lennon's Radio Play. It was interesting, but I wasn't fond of it. I kept trying to make the sounds more then what they where. The piece is simply John Lennon flipping the radio on and off while he's talking on the phone. With that in mind, the piece has a feeling of waiting for something, but I was just waiting for the end. It is simply static and brief bits of song coming through. The sounds sound like they're a simple melody at first, but if there is a real pattern, I can't find it. I found myself trying to focus on background conversation. Knowing that it was John Lennon talking, I'm curious to know what he was saying. Oh well.
Towards the end, the the static beats sounded like marching and the sound beats sounded like a guitar string being plucked, which is what I found interesting in this piece, though I know it was not the intent.

The project that caught my eye in the reading was Cutting by Alex Bag and Candice Breitz. The reason that I found it interesting was because of the similarity I thought it had with Lev Kuleshov and his experiments with film, particularly the famous Kuleshov Experiment.
The research that I did on Alex bag lead me to a review of an installation of his in New York and a still of a video.

My question is, is Post production art the same as Postmodern art? Or is it different because Postmodern seems to deal with the appropriating symbols as well as material?

A Tale of Two Projects

I've found two projects that I like. One is called eRiceCooker. http://web.media.mit.edu/~rusti/eRiceCooker/

Here is my blog.