Video Projects

This was the first time I really dabbled in iMovie. I have worked with Final Cut briefly but I never felt completely comfortable with it. I now learned how to properly adjust and combine videos using iMovie HD and iMovie 9.

For my first project I created a video mash up based on the infectious activity parkour. 
Parkour is the sport of moving, trying to get from point A to point B as quickly and efficiently as possible. The Office actually created a spoof about parkour, it's one of my favorite episodes. In my mash up, I took on the "serious" side of parkour, with news casters commenting on the dangers of parkour and how hardcore it can be. I mashed it with classical music to pose the non threatening side of the activity. I play with juxtaposition in the comparison of dangerous free running and classical, fluent music.


        


In my documentary, I created a New Paltz/Scranton mix of the popular show The Office. I created my own introduction and included some of the shows characters as well as some of our classes students and teacher. With a guest appearance by Aaron Knochel, this video comments on Tim Leffens lecture and concepts. Enjoy!

Tim Lefens Lecture

Tim Lefens is the creator of A.R.T (Artistic Realization Technologies).
Author of Flying Colors
a.r.t.lefens@artrealization.org
When Tim realized how much he loved art and that he may lose it, he tried to create a way for those who couldn't move to create art. It simply allows those that struggle moving their limbs to control a laser and decide the outcome of their art.

Tim had multiple theories about art itself and the way people think about life/art as a whole.
Here are some of his theories--
Death Bed Theory- If you only had 4 hours left and were on your "death bed" what painting would you want to see on your wall?
Trunkated Pyramid- There are only so many people who can be ballerinas or astronauts. But, Warhol and Duchant sliced off the top of the pyramid and allowed everyone to become equal on this level of art, "joke art."
Double Funnel- You can't get there by calculating or manipulating. You have to go all the way through a funnel and then shoot out of the second. Lefens didn't realize what he was experiencing until he was staring at the stars and had the realization that he was so small in this vast universe. The further down you go in the funnel, the further out you come the second.
Two Plateaus- One on vast land and 6 feet to second plateau. An artists greatest challenge is to take that leap. Take the leap to the second plateau to find the better place.

The body and spirit cohabitate against their wills. the body belongs for the earth, the spirit for the sky.
He believes the secret to finding real art is by losing yourself and letting go. Somehow get yourself out of the literal world. It took Tim a near death experience to have a vision and realization of the beauty in the world. He explained an instance where he saw the sprinkler as beautiful dropplets of water in slow motion. Similar to paint brush strokes. I love this idea of taking something so fast paced and quick and slowing it down to find the beauty we may miss in our fast paced lives.
If you are aware you are looking at art, that it is framed, you haven't gone far enough. "It's only art if you forget who you are or where you are."

Marcel Duchant (signing a toilet bowl) to Andy Warhol (silk screen of a soup can)- these two artists opened up the "floodgates for mediocre art."

I was fortunate enough to attend Cardinal Hayes last year, 2010, with Art for the Exceptional Child. It was an amazing experience to be able to observe the laser technique at work, much different than simply hearing about it. Students in wheelchairs with severe disabilities are able to create art with the help of a laser and a "tracker." Assistants are the trackers and will ask yes or no questions for the students/artists to respond and create their artwork. Students have the freedom to choose canvas size, brush surface, and color of paint. They are able to control the entire piece, all they need is the hands and functions of the trackers.

Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites

After reading the article Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life by Danah Boyd,  I was able to understand a deeper look into the world of Myspace. As well as looks upon Friendster, Xanga, and Facebook.

Skyler, 18, said to mom, "If you're not on MySpace, you don't exist." These social network sites develop significant cultural resonance among American teens.

I checked out some of the sites launched to attract teens.
Faceparty- a site to meet other teens with similar interests, chat, and gossip specifically in the U.K.
Bebo (Blog early, Blog often)- Users receive a personal profile page where they can post blogs, photos, music, videos, and questionairres to which other users may answer.
Piczo- a photo website builder and community, users can add items such as images, text content, videos, glitters, shout-outs, and profile pages. Took off in the UK

These are all similar sites in which a community is created and teens are lured in by constant entertainment. They can simply log in and "stalk" other users, pictures, and videos they post. 

We were asked in class to expand on the section Network Publics.
Here, public is best defined as "a collection of people who may not all know each other but share 'a common understanding of the world, a shared identity, a claim to inclusiveness, a consensus regarding the collective interest.'"

Boyd goes deeper into the definition to focus on the 4 properties that fundamentally separate unmediated publics form networked publics:
Persistence: This is the fact that information posted online can be replicated, copied, or reproduced. Enabling communication, but also extending the period of existence of any speech created
Searchability: We may not be able to find one another in a town or state, but by a couple of clicks on a keyboard, a person can be found within seconds. Words or things they may have said can be found just as easily
Replicability: This is similar to Sweeney's article about cloning. Anything in the networks public can be replicated/repeated or copied. It can be made over and over or be used again and again by different individuals
Invisible audiences: This can cover parents, community, administrators, anyone who has access to the internet. It is virtually impossible to know all of those who come across our path online. 

Most of this has been brought up in our education. As students we have been informed of what is okay to post online and what "the public" is capable of finding or seeing us post on social network sites. I don't think this article changed any of my concepts of the networked public. I have had an understanding that what is put online is easily replicated and searched by simply typing a name into Google. One of the things I would look out for as a teacher, would be issues that arrise with children. This is an easy way of students to get a hold of one-anothers information. It is an easy way for bullies to key in on a students pictures/life/history. 
In one of our previous readings, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, an interesting game came up. It was called Medieval Space. In this game students would create a Myspace for a medieval character such as Henry the VI or Queen Elizabeth. As an art teacher I would be extremely interested in having students create a Facebook for artists. They would have to research information on the artist and plug in the information to create a profile for the artist chosen. As a follow up, students would need to friend other artists created and leave messages on the others walls as if they were the artist themselves. 
They can create photo albums of the artists work, profile pictures, "like" pages, etc. Because Facebook and social networking is a popular topic for the youth, this should be a topic they enjoy and are able to relate to.  

Glogster

If you enjoyed one of my previous posts about Wordle, you may enjoy this site!
It is a similar site that allows you to create a form of posters. This site is more for text and images. You can add videos, animated images, text, or graphics to enhance your poster. Here is a little example of something I threw together when testing out this site.



Pretty cool, huh? You can change the background and rotate pictures/text however you'd like. Try it out here!

This would be great for classes in a similar way Wordle could be great. If the student is finished with a product they can create a poster for the subject they were working on in their class project. They can submit it to a class hard drive or a class blog so the teacher can see what the student works on. 

Popplet

Popplet is this nifty little site that allows you to create a visual outline of something. I practiced using it for my Narrative project for Technology in the Art Room. I actually really enjoyed this. I am more of a visual person, so being able to add images to my audio project was helpful for me. I was able to visualize the point I was trying to get across by sound (which I was having a difficult time with, might I add). Let me know what you think when you hear my narrative piece!

But all in all, I enjoyed Popplet. I think it is a great colorful, eye grabbing tool to have. You can sort by color, topic, and incorporate images and videos. Check out mine!

Show and Tell

 

Gulp

 

Gulp: The making of

Wordle

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. 

This site can be used in art classes for students that are struggling with the use of text and image. If they can plug in multiple words to wordle, a cloud will be created that selects prominent words. Those that stand out to the student can be the words they choose for a project. 

Or as a teacher, this can be a simple day project if a student finishes with an assignment early. They can choose a topic such as the US Constitution, most common crossword answers, or characteristics of a friend. After the cloud is created, adjusted and finalized, they can print or post the final product to a class blog or add it to a class folder.

Le Cadavre Exquis

We Make Money Not Art

After searching through the site a little bit, I discovered the exquisite corpse game taken to the next level! Many of us have played this game as children or read about it in class. We have introduced the idea of creating sculptures based off the final product, adding new materials and creating a collage, and now Brendan Oliver and Brendan Randall have reinterpreted the game to create Le Cadavre Exquis.
Members of the public are invited to record a short stop-frame animation as a response piece to a previously recorded submission. The piece is uploaded online within minutes and textual narrative is then created by online participants through a narrative suggestion feature. 




Nottingham Contemporary 1st September 2011, 13:50:46

As for response from the audience, "Some people have been reflective, a few declined but the overwhelming majority have been excited and more than happy to be involved in something creative and user-generate."



Nottingham Contemporary 4th September 2011, 14:17:18

This interactive piece follows the new media literacy of performance (the ability to adopt the alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery). By having the audience dress up in costumes and react to previous videos, they create the stop motion clip by improvising and reacting to what they see.
Check out my post about Participatory Culture for more information about all of the new media literacies!

Participatory Culture

This weeks reading was Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. "According to Pew Internet and American Life project, more than 1/2  of all teens have created media content. 1/3rd of teens who have used the internet have shared content they produced."
Emphasized in the reading is a participatory culture. By these teens being involved in the culture, they are in a culture with "relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations."

"New literacies" are the way students will be learning and creating. Also the way we will be teaching. There are multiple skills involved with the literacies.
Play- capacity to experiment with on'es surroundings as a form of problem solving
Performance- adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
Simulation- interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world process
Appropriation- meaningfully sample the remix media content
Multitasking- scan one's environment and shift focus as needed to salient details
Distributed Cognition- interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
Collective Intelligence- pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
Judgment- evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
Transmedia Navigation- follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
Networking- search for synthesize and disseminate information
Negotiation- travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms

             I found myself returning to the concept of play and performance. Though the reading did not specify art related instances, I believe through my experience play and performance and wonderful skills to use to engage students in the subject matter.
             If I look back at my little cousins, they are playing video games, watching movies and television shows that educate them with math, art, and language. In the early stages of learning, children are geared to understand a highly stimulated type of education. I find myself losing interest in an average history book compared to a video with music in the background, multiple images on the screen, constantly changing. I was the same as a child as I am now, but I believe with consistent techniques students would grasp more then they do now.
              If my little cousins begin their education with videos and play to learn, they should be able to grow with more challenging play. As teachers, by bringing play and performance into the classroom we are engaging our students, allowing them to experience rather than lecturing hoping they listen.
            Through Theory and Practice we have learned multiple games to play with students as "warm-ups." This is something I wish I had done when I was a student. I remember warm ups being a power point presentation of a couple slides of an artists work rather than artist trading cards.

            An example I am particularly fond of is the game Medieval Space. This is when students are asked to create online profiles for various historical figures studied int heir classes. Since students are already extremely interested in social networks, why not incorporate that into a lesson? Create a Facebook for Picasso. This will allow for students to research artists and become creative with stories and images. This is definitely something I would be interested in doing with a middle school or high school level class.

Photoshop Project: Self Portrait

For years I have been accumulating injuries and ailments that have impacted my life in either drastic or mild ways. In this project I attempted to create myself as if my body were x-rayed, allowing the viewer to see the issues beyond the surface. In creating this final image, I have been able to think about the pain I’ve been through. I have decided I would like to go even further and create an image that reflects the positive attributes of myself.

Photoshop Project: Digital Collage

 

Technology has become a window to the world for some individuals. While for others, it has become a trap. Televisions, computers, cellphones, even automatic toilets and doors have crept their way into our lives. Soon enough we will not need to fend for ourselves because the electronics and technology will do it for us. In this image I have depicted the defenseless, engulfed and overwhelmed by technology.

 

Photoshop Project: Magazine Cover

Honey Bunches of Oats: with Cloud Clusters

So what is a cloud cluster you might ask? 

A cloud cluster is also known as a tag cloud, which "offers a collection of pathways to
understand the visual construction of connotation."

 Through the use of Flickr.com, by searching different terms and words (tags), I was able to acquire a collection of images that assisted in the visualization of specific themes of the Big Idea, as described in my previous post.

As I began with my big idea of Facebook and social networking I brainstormed words for the themes based off Facebook and socil networking. Which led me through the ideas of people being connected with one another, how it has become so simple to see what is happening in someones life with the click of a button rather than a phone call. This then lead me to how we can now hold all of that precious information int he palms of our hands. We have access to information through smart phones at any given second. Some people consistently will have them out relating most of their conversation to their phones, addicted in a sense. 

The themes I have expanded on are Connected, Addicted, Conditioned, and Trained

 

 

 

Big Idea: Technology as Communication

Our practice of the internet is a form of communication. Our lives are deeply affected by the way we communicate. If we update our facebook, we are updating our friends on what is happening in our lives. Art can be shared, job opportunities, even just simply a persons thoughts. Twitter allows people to update their status every minute if necessary describing what they are doing throughout the day.

 

For the past couple years, we have seen video games being a highlight of childrens lives. They wanted to spend all their time challenging others or beating the high score. Wii allowed you to create a "Mii" that looked like you. Beyond creating yourself, the gamer was able to communicate with other Wiis and play them as an opponent. Call of Duty allows opponents to talk and taunt, becoming involved in a competitive game.These games were their own community.

Now we see adults and children holding the internet in the palm of their hands with smart phones. Having the ability to fact check a friend or pull up email with the flick of a finger

 

It has become accustom for us to understand how to use a smart phone. You can pull up a plane ticket on it, use coupons, check email, navigate your way around, even use as a tape measure. At this point, many Americans have smart phones. Of those Americans, most have the phone attached to their hip or have their heads buried in them throughout most of the day. We have become trained, addicted, connected to the internet constantly. 

Good things can come from Facebook

Themes

Identity

Views of Reality

Materialism 

Relationships 

Community

Big Ideas and Interpreting Visual Culture

 
Big Ideas
"Big ideas are what can expand student artmaking concerns beyond technical skills, formal choices, and media manipulation to human issues and conceptual concerns. Big ideas can engage students in deeper levels of thinking." As a student in high school, I rarely was challenged to create something deeper than a pretty picture. Day in and day out I would show up to art class and be asked to duplicate a famous drawing or practice a still life from different angles.
     After a semester or two at New Paltz and reading these articles, I find that having a big idea in an art room can lead to works from students that mean more than what you see.  Some of the examples in the readings have given me a better sense of developing questions for big ideas. Criteria for essential questions may include-- distinction and substantial, realistic in terms of time allocated for the unit, and language that is comprehensible to all students. Many activities involve students investigation in artists works.
When thinking about questions to ask students to spark ideas, this site is helpful and informative with essential questions of education!

 Interpreting Visual Culture

Students of all ages are able to interpret art. They are able to investigate art through phrases, designs, and images with proper guidance through the use of linguistic messages, denotations, and connotations. A linguistic message is considered the words actually seen in an image, denotations are what you literally see in a picture, and connotations are what the things and words imply or suggest by what they show and how they show it.

Michael Ray Charles is an African American artist who creates works that refer to the offensive denotations of Blacks constructed in the past.

 

Art teachers interpreted this piece Cut and Paste by Michael Ray Charles and "emotionally identified with the tragic meaning of the artwork."

 

As you can see here, as the viewer you can "cut and paste" the objects onto the paper doll. By choosing an object we are classifying this and stereotyping the character. 

Towards the opposite end of the spectrum, even kindergartners would be able to join in this activity. When cereal boxes are introduced, students are quickly able to identify "adult cereals" and "children cereals." Adult cereals have fruits, flakes, and milk while children cereals have animals, bright colors, and toy images.

 

 Do you know of any other ads that have underlying messages? I found this ad. What audience do you think this is targeted towards?