David Antin - Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium

In this article, Antin starts out asking about what video art is. He goes on to talk about how shabby and low-quality video art is compared to "high class" television. But he also suggests a bright future for video art. He goes into detail about commercial television being controlled by big corporations.
He compares television to telephones (transmitters and receivers).
Antin then writes about live television. If we see video from across the country, even if an event happened a few hours beforehand, we still accept it as a live occurrence.
I like what he writes about "boring art." He basically says that we see a work of art as boring if we expect it to be something else. If we see the art as accomplishing a goal, it isn't seen as boring. A lot of video art I've seen has been boring to me, but maybe I was just expecting it to be something else.
Antin then breaks down television programs and commercials into intervals. He even breaks down sports events into specific parts to make a comparison between sports and other television programs. He sees no definite stylistic distinctions between commercials and programs.
It was interesting to read about the costs of some of the early video recording and editing equipment. I have more respect for early video art because of the costs of some of that equipment, as well as the apparently difficult early editing techniques.
This is an interesting article. Started off a little slow but then got pretty interesting.

David Antin - The Distinctive Features of the Medium

This article focuses on the two main disclosures associated with video arts young life thus far. The first is a sort of enthusiastic welcoming prose that stands for the parameters of culture and what allows one to express that culture through technology. The second is more of an attempt to locate the properties of the medium that is video art and find where artists fit in, which is a stupid way of saying the difference between art and film. It would be much simpler to discover the difference between video and art without the modern day television. Television is neither video nor art because art and film are rarely if ever represented within that medium. As the article says, "the politics of the art world is, for good reasons, rather hostile to pop." And television represents the popular cultural through and through. Yet television is undoubtedly a part of the video culture, which is somewhat paradoxical. The article proceeds with a basic and very bias history of the television industry. Basically what was meant as a marketable, expensive technology, transformed seemingly overnight when the camera became readily available to the average working man or woman. Because the transmission of the images is more costly than actually receiving them on a television, a generic social hierarchy was unofficially created for the television industry. One of the more interesting pieces the article talked about was wipe cycle, which takes video of the viewers without them noticing for 16 second time lapses at first followed by an 8 second time lapse second. The article really seems to focus on the "fact" that the current social and economic distribution of technological resources that come out to date have a major effect on the semiotics of the technological resources that are available in that time period. Point to fact: a camera is still a camera whether the user is an artist or not. Film is by no means the same thing as television as film focuses on the world of illusion rather than "real time" as with television.

Sergei Eisenstein - Film Form

In contrast to Lotman, Sergei Eisenstein seems to think that montage is the central element in film, or rather a sort of collision of two given factors that create a sort of concept. His friend and peer, Pudovkin on the other hand states that montage is a linkage of pieces in a film, or rather the building blocks of the central idea. The author of the article mostly seems to think that Einstein is more correct than Pudovkin in this discussion of montage (which it looks like they discuss a lot). Einstein will have us think that montage is absolutely not a simple matter of stringing shots one after another like a building block, which is much different from Lotman's way of thinking. Also according to Einstein, Montage is a "collision" of singular shots that are often opposite each-other that tend to generate significant responses from viewers. But he could never fully explain how any sort of real concept arises out of this collision for the sake of montage (which he seemed to really be into). The simple approach to portraying a collision followed by a concept is to make a sort of conflict for the viewer to follow along and get attached to. By which this said spectator "would either strengthen how political and social consciousness or jolt him out of his ideological preconceptions to look at the world anew."
Einstein apparently abandoned his belief that montage represented a "series of explosions in a combustion engine" and turned his definition to a sort of combination of ideas with shots that focus on one idea, and shot and framed in a a way that are meant to stimulate the viewers minds. Or that by simply cutting up the images of everyday lives and stringing them together a sort of story and thereby emotional response is the result. This article was interesting because it asked very hard questions. Einstein argued cinematography to be montage itself, and that the social arrangements we obtain in our social society are where the cinematographer gets his work material. We live in a materialist world that shapes our very consciousness. Therefore social backgrounds make up the way that film-makers put their shots together to create a sort of higher meaning or even a story.

Yuri Lotman - Semiotics of Cinema

From what I gained from the article, Yuri Lotman was a semiotician who taught at Tartu University in Estonia who wrote a book that came out in Russia in 1973. Because he was a semiotician, he tended to see the different film shots as the building blocks of the cinema world. He claimed that the different shots that made up a scene are kind of like the words that make up a sentence, and that the "syntax" or rules by which we go about using to make up and then speak full sentences is in some respects like the different shots that make up a specific scene.
If Cinema is a representation of what we see, then the shot itself carries a certain amount of information that can have multiple interpretations. Lotman's central argument was that semantics that are used in cinema in order to give scenes meaning, or rather allow them to generate meaning. Every viewer in cinema brings their own home-grown education, socioeconomic class, and own brand of cultural upbringing, so interpretations of a film will always be different. But because everyone interprets things differently, there is a percentage of the audience that will "skim off" several layers of meaning throughout the film/text based on whether or not he or she truly understands it. This notion has many applications for modern day media. And it partially explains why children and people of less physical/mental development enjoy simple shows and movies that aren't terribly difficult to comprehend. Furthermore, it directly implies that texts and films effect our different intellectual and emotional stages of development.

Inside the Art

When you all have a chance check out muralist John Pugh. He got a Gift!

John Pugh
www.illusion-art.com/pubimg.asp

As We May Think by Dr. Vannevar Bush

In the beginning of the article, he definitely recognizes that this piece does not necessarily apply to every single working scientist. For some, like biologists and medical scientists, nothing has really changed, and the ending of the war is certainly not going to change that. But for others, like physicists and other scientists who dealt directly with the war, the game has really changed. Dr. Bush goes on to say that science has provided mankind with the fastest forms of communication between individuals, thus making the flow of information and knowledge available to a broader group of peers, rather than to just a few individuals. Despite this new flow of information and new data that can be accumulated through the science community, he seems to think that the current methods of “transmitting and reviewing” the material gathered are by nature completely inadequate for their purpose (which considering this was written in 1945 I think we can all agree he’s correct). His main point he seems to be making behind all of this is that human history is created with important findings such as these that they were making; they needed to be well documented and compared with others around the world in order for them to be accepted. And further calling out to the booming economy of the time that had been set on making marketable products using assembly lines and other forms that brings thousands of little pieces together into one product or object.

In second section he seems to be really focused on how men of science have been recording their findings and then sharing them with the world in the simplistic fashions that they had at the time. He focuses a lot on simple camera use with the (I’m sure what was new then) universal focus method that has a shorter focal length and built in photo-cells. He theorizes about easy snapshots of scientific findings, a primitive form of “dry photography”, picture scanning, and microphotography. He takes it a step further in the third section when he talks about actually making the scientist data record with the use of more sophisticated machines than they had available in 1945. He suggests that authors will be able to talk directly to record, that would be transcribed automatically into a typed record by taking advantage of existing mechanisms like the Voder and Vocoder in order to alter his or her current language. After this he goes onto say that a machine like this could even be used to do arithmetic, business related math, and perhaps far into the future even differential, functional and integral equations.

In the fifth section of this article, he brings to light that scientists should not be the only interested party in these sorts of machines, but more-so used for anyone who uses logical processes of thought that requires information. The machines at the time were used primarily for problem solving, and Bush theorized that with the uses of transforming the mathematic equations that helped them solve problems into actual logic would soon be within their grasp in society. Thus making the machine ever-ready to help us find things that we want to know about, “We may someday click off arguments on a machine with the same assurance that we now enter sales on a cash register.”

The sixth section is I believe the most important section of this entire piece because, basically, Dr. Vannevar Bush just described a full on at-home computer system. He first speaks of how humans select the things that they are interested in learning more about or possibly spending money on. How the human brain operates by association, using one basic thought and moving instantly to another by a collection of different thoughts about whatever the former was. He goes onto say that man can probably never hope to completely duplicate this very mental process synthetically, but that we can certainly learn from it: “Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, 'memex' will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may b consulted with exceedcing speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.”

My working theory is that this guy is from the year 1996 and used his limited computer knowledge to write this article. I’m just kidding, but holy shit; right down to the very desk and keyboard Dr. Bush had the idea for the modern-day computer and its functionality, as well as what we all use to upload and download information such as he described, known as the internet. Suggesting that these “memex” contents can be purchased and inserted into the memex itself. And that Books, pictures, periodicals, newspapers, and even videos can be viewed from it as the users disposal or pleasure.

He ends this article by once again suggesting that science can come up with new ways in which mankind produces, stores, and consults the human record. He recognizes that technical difficulties of all sorts have been ignored in the article, but does strongly suggest that these ideas may outline the instruments and machines of the future and at least give them a direction to go with. His conclusion seems to lie in hope that the human spirit should be wanting to review the past in order to study the flaws and create somewhat of a better future. It seems that ultimately he wants the human population to learn from its own wisdom and experience and rather than fight against each other learn to live and share together. Altogether rather optimistic ending, all in all though this article was incredibly interesting. I was kidding about the time machine, but Dr. Bush laid out what would be the foundations of the modern day internet with surprising accuracy considering the time period in which this was written. It puts our whole world wide web into perspective when you take a look at what our great grandfathers probably wanted us to do with it.

eriks Intro/apology

After realizing how behind I am on actual reading responses/other things, I feel that it is time to completely catch up on everything that you’ve all done that I haven’t posted. I am apologizing in advance for ALL of the future posts I am about to make in the next few days(most of them are incredibly long). Feel free to punch me next class if you feel so inclined.

First: A short summary about me, which I guess was the first thing we were supposed to post (whoops).

My name is Erik Anderson, I’m from Berkeley, California, and I have been living in Chicago and going to Columbia for four years now. I’m what we call a super-senior(or retarded, depending on who you ask). I originally started going here for music, but then about two years ago switched to Game Programming with a minor in Mathematics and Web Development. I play drums for three bands, like to surf, skateboard, and just found a little dachshund that apparently has doggy aids? I enjoy long walks on the beach, talking about my feelings, I read Catcher in the Rye at least once a day, and Asparagus is my favorite food……….glad that’s over.

Once again I’m very very very sorry about all the long posts I’m about to put up, I know that everyone in my class will read every single one, so I’m very sorry…….:p

love,

erik