Urban Diary + Harvard

Urban Diary

I stumbled across this website while researching my own topic. I think it would be useful for anyone doing a paper on databases/Lev Manovich's essay on databases. The "Urban Diary" is also a part of an art website called "The Place".

Harvard Interactive Media Group

I also found this while reading Kotaku and thought it might be of interest re: video games as an educational subject.

Loops Rearrange Andy Hardy

I looked up the title online and the actual movie is Andy Hardy Meets Debutante, one in a series of Andy Hardy movies.

Forgive my usage of colloquial language, but my first impression of this film was, "This is really weird and creepy." The looping movements, sometimes shaky, looked unnatural and even inappropriate at times. I remember the Manovich essay brought up the point that there are minimal movements that can be looped to make the loop look natural or even real, but the loops in this film were definitely awkward and strange. As I said before, some of the looped movements were distorted and made to look almost inappropriate, such as the first "scene" where Andy is kissing his mother. The slap scene, however, managed to look plausible to me because the suddenness of the slap made it possible to insert it anywhere into the scene. The scene right after, with Judy Garland's character singing, was so unnatural that it became silly, since most people don't move or sound that way. Occasionally the movements would look okay but the sound would still be jumpy, almost grating, even though Judy Garland is a lovely singer when she is not being manipulated with on film. I suppose that Martin Arnold wanted to say that, one, editing can make a film into a completely different story altogether, and more importantly, that loops aren't as natural as they are purported to be.

New Media as the Next Logical Step

As I read through "The Database", I found myself thinking that new media (websites, digital art) is very much an extension of conceptual and postminimalist art, of which Bruce Nauman belongs to the latter. The initial making of new media requires little skill in the production but much in the conception and the execution. Anyone with the right database can make a decent and navigable website with minimal html training. New media is usually interactive, letting the viewer select their own path through the website. As a result, it has multiple narratives and lets the viewer decide which they want to see or believe in. As a side note, this makes it different from cinema, as in cinema the filmmaker/editor chooses the order of the various clips and forces the viewer to watch their conceived path through the film.

Similarly, in conceptual art, the finished product is nothing particularly special or striking visually. As many people said when we visited the Nauman exhibit, it seemed as if all of his works could have been erected by anybody. Every object was so simple and easily formed that it could not be considered art like the Mona Lisa is considered art. Yet, the point of conceptual art is not the finished piece of art itself, but rather the original thought behind it. Just as the average person can make a website, so can he make a piece of conceptual art, and yet it is not the design of the website that necessarily makes us want to stay, but the content.

However, just as Manovich says, we want to create narratives out of random pieces of data, perhaps as a result of our reluctance to part with linear time (we cannot go back and choose another path like we can with websites). Hence, many people who are not art majors or do not know about the origins of conceptual art dislike the post-modern form because of its randomness and lack of "story". The art seems pointless, even though in reality it can rival traditional art in terms of how much interpretation it can hold. The Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile - a subject of debate for many years and for many years to come. John Cage's famous piece 4'33" is a performance piece that is completely silent, which he "wrote" to emphasize the sounds that the audience makes and to make them aware of the "music" around them. People who do not understand his work may interpret it as a protest of modern pop music or of the elite, who can afford to go to concerts. One cannot say that these interpretations are wrong; they are simply different from the artist's initial intention.

Link - Explaining time in a dimensional sense

Imagining the Tenth Dimension

When I read the Time Machine I was reminded of this flash presentation. I think it'll be really useful for anyone inclined towards the concept of time as another dimension. In any case, it's really fascinating and interesting to watch, so everyone can go ahead and check it out if they have time.

Endless Time in La Jetee

One aspect that intrigued me in La Jetée was the loop that the main character creates when he goes back in time all the way to his childhood at the end of the movie. It not only ties the movie back to itself, but it also results in an endless loop of his viewing of his own death as a child and his dying in front of his childhood self as an adult. This cycle of never-ending time is almost like a way to immortality, though it is violent and impossible to break out of -- he is doomed to forever repeat trauma and death. The fact that his childhood trauma gives him the ability to travel in time as an adult further emphasizes this inescapable loop. This loop is very much similar to the concept of the ourobouros - a snake eating its own tail, representing a vicious cycle or things beginning as they end.

The other, almost painfully obvious significant point in the movie was the moving shot of the woman when she wakes up in the bed. This is used as a formal device to emphasize the scene; the scene first moves slowly, then the rate of the photographs becomes faster and faster as she finally wakes up and blinks at the camera. The scene itself could have been used to emphasize the idea of waking up from the endless loops we create for ourselves each day and actually changing something, instead of repeating the same negative habits over and over as if we were machines needing new input from an operator.

There is simply too much that can be written about this movie, and I certainly haven't fully explained these two points, but La Jetée definitely gives us something to think about.

Waking Up Cinema with a Man and a Movie Camera

(Even though I've checked it beforehand, I apologize for any spelling errors this may have. My laptop is in the shop and the loaner doesn't have Word, AKA spellcheck.)

I don't normally watch artistic or experimental films, so Man With a Movie Camera was a refreshing change from the same humdrum summer action blockbuster or romantic comedy. Because of this, I initially tried to derive a somewhat concrete plot, but then realized that the surface of the movie, or the visual itself, was the point of the film. The film, I found, was self-referential, as the "cameraman" would be sometimes shown on the top of an enormous camera or overlooking a cityscape on a rooftop, setting up his own camera. Sometimes the subjects of his film would notice the camera, such as the boy sleeping on the streets, and become more playful or embarrassed. One scene seemed to hint at the theme of the film, showing a camera coming out of its case by itself, setting itself up and filming without a human behind it - thus removing the man from the movie camera.

One scene I felt to be particularly jarring was the scene with a man kneeling on the tracks before an incoming train. The scenes before it were sleepy, slow, and showed many of the same things again and again. Many of those scenes showed no movement at all, as if time stood still and nothing could change. As the train approached nearer and nearer I felt a sense of impending doom for both the man and the film, but surprisingly the scenes after the train showed new life - such as the woman giving birth - and of people waking up and starting their busy lives. Though I am not sure what exactly the man is supposed to be representing, I surmise that he is the old, outdated form of using the camera, and once the train of "revolution," to use Dziga Vertov's word, takes him out, the tired art of cinema can finally have a rebirth.

Some of the other scenes I found to be meaningful were the cigarette factory segment, the salon/everyday task juxtaposition, and the blinking woman. The girls making and filling the cigarette boxes work slowly at first, then speed up faster and faster until they reach a dizzying machine-like pace. I interpreted this scene in two ways - one, that the camera (or rather, editing) can make humans seem like they are working at unnatural speeds, and two, that the machine is slowly taking over human labor in a more industrial era. The salon scene was simply interesting to me as Vertov used the film medium to relate the beautification of the human body with the advancement of Russia. Lastly, the blinking woman alludes back to Vertov's "Kino-Eye" manifesto, showing, albeit in a more exaggerated way, that to film exactly as the human eye sees would make movies an incomprehensible blur of images.