Initially, for this assignment, I was kind of stuck on deciding what to do. Sometimes it feels a little intimidating to show media work at school, since there are so many media pros attending the program. Chris sent the class a link to examples of recontextualization pieces by other artists. This helped focus my thoughts on what to do, though I might have gone a little overboard.
Recontexutalization, as I understood it, was to repurpose a media for something else and, in doing so, changing the meaning of the original. So, for my project, I felt inspired to dub one video with a second video’s soundtrack. For the visual/video portion, I found a religious puppet video sharing a message about religion. For the sound portion, I found a clip of Pulp Fiction where Samuel L. Jackson’s character eventually recites a line from the book of Ezekiel and then shoots almost everyone in the room.
It was really quite difficult to get the mouth movements of the puppets to properly match the spoken words of Pulp Fiction; it was tedious work. But, I’m happy with how it turned out.
For my Spatial Media final, I worked with Igal Nassima on a dance-performance, technology project. It was meant to be a site-specific work, that would eventually incorporate choreography with a specific dancer or dance group.
The inspiration for this project was the dance performance “Mortal Engine” by Chunky Move.
Igal was also particularly impressed with the geometric shapes in this short performance, called “Triadic Ballet”.
We also found other dance-technology performances online, such as this beautiful performance called “Frost”.
As you can see from our proposal, our intent was to incorporate more architectural elements into the stage area of the performance space.
When we actually started to implement the code, we ran into a few problems. First, I’m not so hot at C++ and I felt pretty overwhelmed with the coding challenge. I really appreciated working with Igal, since he’s much more advanced, but it also made it quite difficult for me to really understand what was going on. For example, when I wanted to make a big change to the code, I had to ask for help in order to figure it out. For my section, I used some of the extracurricular work I’d been doing with Jared Schiffman on building grids and changing colors to create different visuals for the project. Igal then incorporated that work into whatever he’d been working on.
We also had trouble with our physical area. Originally, Igal’s designated staging area was too much of a high traffic area for our needs and we had trouble controlling the lighting. We wanted to include 2 cameras, but our lighting/space environment was much too spastic and unpredictable to rely on. So, eventually we shared a space with Molly and Diego, which helped.
We used a one-panel backdrop, a short-throw projector and a web-cam mounted horizontally between 2 AutoPoles. We ended up using 1 camera because we were never quite able to use the TripleHead2Go, despite searching for drivers.
To be honest, I’m not really happy with the end result of our project. Things just didn’t seem to go well from the get go, and I sort of lost confidence early on. By the time we got our code to really work well – as in, the day of – there really wasn’t time for us seriously choreograph anything, aside from general movements you might do when you’re looking in a funhouse mirror. So, during our critique, we didn’t get many useful comments which makes it hard to know how to improve.
I think that for work like this, if you really want to do something spectacular a dedicated performance space is essential, for not just the dancers but also the technologists. And, you also need a space for them to work together. I do remember reading some research on this topic once before, I think at Ohio State University. Their dance and computer science collaboration also had similar difficulties with the collaboration space itself, and the difficulties of miscommunication or of underestimating the amount of time it would take for a computer scientist or dancer to modify their work quickly. I think I assumed that it would be easier for me, since I sort of understand them both. Really, it’s not the same and I’m finding that the lives of dancer or technologist/designer are very, very different. So much so that I think one infringes on the the other. I guess that’s if you want to be a purist and only do dance or only do design. I think it is possible for a dance-tech team to work, but this project I think was doomed from the start, in that I (as the dancer) needed to focus on the programming aspects and not just the dance aspects. If we had separated our work more, perhaps the end result would have been more fruitful…or maybe just more time would’ve helped. I definitely do not think this type of work is easy.
I recently started thinking about work opportunities for women in Southeast Asia – not necessarily Malaysia – because the topic of sex trafficking/prostitution came up for me again in the past few weeks or so. I would like to think more about how to provide better sources of work for women as a deterrent to sex work. And, I just happened to come across this article today. In no way am I suggesting that Malaysia has a problem with sex trafficking or prostitution. I’m just pointing out that IT is an industry that seems to be thriving in a SE. Asian culture amongst women and possibly would be a good avenue for me to look into, if I continue to further think about this issue.
For a Video for New Media project, I worked again with Lucas Werthein, and also Krystal Banzon, on a documentary featuring an intersection in New York City. Eventually we chose Broadway and Prince St., the home of Dean and Deluca and my hair salon. It’s a pretty hectic intersection in Soho that always seems to be busy.
Lucas, who was undeniably the most experienced person in our group, was inspired by a short film called “Latitude_Redux“:
Latitude_Redux is a condensed extract from D-Fuse’s live sonic cinema performance with the split screen representing the 2 screens used in the live show. It is inspired by the notion of drifting through the land + soundscapes of China and uses fragments of conversations, lights, + architectural forms to trace the multitudes of paths, identities + influences which make up the rapidly changing urban environments of Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chongqing.
It’s a really fast-paced short film and you get a sense of the selected urban environments in China, something that could easily be translated to New York’s urban scene. Due to serious schedule conflicts with our team, Lucas ended up doing most of the editing. One of my favorite parts of our video happens about 46 seconds in and last for just two to three seconds. What you see is a blur of many still images of people’s feet walking across the crosswalks in the intersection. We used a Panasonic Lumix and a Canon G10, both on tripods, to record those shots. We probably could’ve gotten many more, but it was really cold that day and the buildings kept blocking out the sunlight as time went on.
Today, I took a trip to two places that I hoped would provide some design inspiration. First, the Official NYC information center which uses these disks as interactive elements as well as a touch screen tv display and overhead tracking mechanism (I think). The displays help visitors find things to do in New York, save them to their disk, and print, email or text the information to their phone, so that they can create a custom guide to New York City.
General view of the centerInstructions to create a custom NYC guideView what celebrity New Yorkers like to do in the cityThe disk is placed onto a reader...Your selections are displayed using Google Earth on a set of large monitorsWall-based touch screen
The second place I visited was the American Museum of Natural Science, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was a brief trip. I just wanted to get an idea of what types of displays they had and if a touch-based display would be appropriate. There’s a lot of information in the museum and I wasn’t there too long. But, here are some of the displays that the museum has, that I hope will become useful to me.
Touchscreen display Display of earthquakes, worldwide Static museum display Buffalo display Earthquake display Map of the floors at the natural history museum
