Janet Cardiff

I had head of Janet Cardiff’s work before, and the one thing everyone seemed to describe it as was spooky, now I can see why. Her use of the three-level spatial structure fooled your mind into hearing and believing in noises that were not even there. I was not even on one of her guided walks, and there were some points where I didn’t know if what I was listening to was real or just a part of the audio piece. She uses the three-level spatial structure as almost three different levels on which to disorient you. On one of the levels you can hear Cardiff’s voice guiding you, and your mind initially focuses in on this level as the level on which she is sending you different sounds, the fake level, but as she adds sound to the background and foreground you realize that you can no longer distinguish from what is real and what is just sounds she is feeding to your mind. Some of her comments I found extremely wired and I couldn’t place them, but I imagine that is one of the things you would pickup and understand better if you were on the actual walk.

Ectoplasm - Lance Winn

I went to Lance Winn’s lecture on ectoplasm, or the tactility and form of art. What really struck me about this lecture was how well he described his process and intent for his artwork. He came up with all these different and crazy ideas and then worked them through for results that he would later build off of and improve on. He just took stuff he was curious about and went for it. At first I was a bit skeptical, I mean I found the lawn ornaments were a bit, well, out there, but as I saw him build up his though process and explore these different areas of art that we usually ignore or take for granted I was sucked in. Some of my favorite pieces of his were the landscapes he built out of his mistakes. He just kept on cutting away at the paper until he found something he was happy with. This idea of just working on a piece of art with no preemptive design or motives is sort of refreshing, you just work on it and work on it until you get to a point were you are comfortable with it. That and I, for one, have in the process of making of my own work encountered several mistakes of my own, that I have had to work around, and for the most part the results that occur from fixing these mistakes invoke creative solutions and usually an unexpected result that on many occasions turns out to be better then the original idea.
Lance Winn’s combination of the 2D and the 3D aspect of art, PBS art tips, and name tracing took simple ideas and applied them in new and creative pieces of art.

Audio Project

Stormy Night
This is my first audio project it's supposed to emulate a stormy night.


The audio pieces I used to create this project belong to these following people:

By pryght one
harp.wav

By gim-audio
Torden og lynild 4.wav

By tnickles
delayedsoftnotes.wav

Journey Audio Project Proposal

My journey audio project will be based off of the idea of journeying through a short period of time. It’ll be based off of the uncomfortable silence found in a room full of people that have nothing to say or relate to each other. The journey aspect of the project will take root in the listeners mind as they journey through the same uncomfortable silence and anxiety the person in the recording is having to deal with. Of course seeing as it is an audio project there will be an underlining of constant sounds throughout the whole piece so while in theory I’m setting up a situation based off of silence there won’t actually be any silence in the recording. The main common thread I will use while emulating this silence will be the ticking of a clock, not only does this make the listener feel like they are journeying through time and progressing onwards it will also help increase the anxiety or unease of sitting in silence. To create the awkwardness of sitting in a room full of people in complete silence I will have a series of background noses that will work to increase the discomfort of the situation; someone shuffling around, some nervous tapping, random periods of annoying whistling, humming, coughing, chewing gum, and a whole bunch of other activities that someone might hear when sitting in a room in silence with several other people. Who knows I might even add in a little snoring. Now that would really be annoying.

Consumed ~Melissa Dean

Melissa Dean’s lecture Consumed dealt with the different aspects of our consumerist economy. Most her works were built off of the different material objects found within the realm of the consumer market, many of them coming from Target catalogs. She would then take the different objects, draw them as contours, and then overlap them to create intricate designs which would then be applied to her works usually through the method of printing.
Of all the works she showed us the ones I thought to be the most interesting were the ones where she took individuals and had them pick out the items that they would like to purchase from a Target catalog. Once everyone had selected their choices she would compile all the objects into a print for every individual as a sort of measurement of that person’s willingness to take part of the consumer economy. The people with the most overlap seemed to be more entrenched in the consumerist life style compared to the people with little overlap. This is probably not an accurate way of measuring individual consumerist natures but it is an interesting idea and way of portraying the individual.
When you think of consumerism it usually comes with a negative undertone, but Dean seems to pickup on consumerism with an almost a nonchalant attitude. She recognizes the consumerism in our culture and instead of building up on the negative aspects of consumerism she seems to just treat it for what it is, a factual part of our society. She sees the drive toward material goods in our culture, yet she also willingly admits to playing into them like everyone else. It’s almost as if she finds it amusing that we are caught in a constant cycle of buying and accumulating material objects. Many that we know we do not need, but insist on getting anyway.

Flute Music

Here is a short flute clip I got off of freesound. It was done by Kerri Lake, a flutist. This small clip is part of one of her original Native American flute pieces. When I first listened to this clip I found it very calm and soothing, but as I continued to listen to it I started to pick up some daunting and almost spooky undertones. While this piece is beautiful and calming it also holds a mystery to it, a mystery that creates a loneliness and melancholy to the music.

Clip Art Project

This is a clip art project I found on Rhyizome. The project pretty much consists of 787 different pieces of clip art that are meshed together into a 1:05 minute segment.

http://oliverlaric.com/787cliparts.htm