Teis De Greve - Persoonlijke evaluatie

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7tiRNZ6HpaRa2xmelhIa2E4cVk&authuser=0

Group C - Artist Talk Jesse McLean

Jesse McLean

Jesse Mclean is an American media artist who became fascinated by human behavior and relationships. Though her initial aim was to become an animator, her greater passion for movies started to grow when she first came in contact with found footage. It was a spontaneous result of a work with collage material. For Mclean, it is important to create both visual and interactive experiences for her  viewers. In her work, it occasionally becomes difficult to distinguish the difference between humor and other emotions. Mclean is not a full-time artist, but pursues her arts in her free time  

“If you put any footage before an artist, he will put it together in the way he thinks it fits the best” 

– Jesse Mclean.

In her projects, Mclean does not exclusively focus on the use of randomly found video material, but also includes footage of friends or uses narrative texts as a source for ideas. Especially narrative texts seem to be of great inspiration to her. She chooses stories intuitively, though they come along with a theoretical background as well. Jesse often feels strong compassion and empathy for the people that act in her video material. She connects with the found footage on an emotional level. As she prefers working in a socially familiar environment, Mclean lets her friends perform and act in her films. She searches for material on public and easily accessible platforms like YouTube, or from DVDs. According to her, “Internet is just a portal”. Besides the regular use of footage from YouTube, she also creates her own material. From her position as a media artist, the process of creating the “right” combination of found footage and her self-made videos is an interesting challenge. Producing her first experimental film for example proved to be difficult and very time consuming.   

She prefers the use of film, TV, etc. The Internet is just became an indispensable archive to make her life as an artist much more comfortable.

Magic for beginners

Magic for beginners is her final work of her first three short videos, which took about a year to produce. She has a close bond to the people that took part in this project. The emotional connection between her and the actors is an important aspect. Magic for beginners portrays the stories of people that got attracted by media and made a sort of unreal, ‘magic connection’ with it. 

One girl, for example, tells about the moment she entirely fell in love with Leonardo DiCaprio, an actor from the film Titanic. She went as far as to delusion herself into being in an actual relationship with DiCaprio. Magic for beginners ends with a video collage of little girls and women singing the theme song of Titanic (My heart will go on by Celine Dion) It is obvious here that Mclean used YouTube as the main archive, as the material mostly consists of amateur and home videos. 

Magic for beginners intends to raise the audiences’ awareness about possible effects and dangers of the contemporary media culture. Nowadays Jesse presented her work at museums, galleries and film festivals worldwide, including some of the biggest festivals from Europe.

Group C - Media Archeology III

Media Archeology III

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7tiRNZ6HpaRQTVXTmlpNDJ0Qlk&authuser=0

Group C - Media Archeology 1 + 2

Media Archeology 1

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7tiRNZ6HpaRY05YNEJoU1hRRjQ&authuser=0

Media Archeology 2

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7tiRNZ6HpaRd1pGY29XUzNuZUk&authuser=0

Group C - Artist Talk: Jasper Rigole

Jasper Rigole is Belgian media artist with a background in film. After he successfully finished his studies at the film department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, his interests shifted away from being behind the camera himself and now he solely creates videos and installations with found footage. When Rigole explained this during the artist talk we had, it almost felt to me as if he created a strong aversion for shooting fiction films. Of course it is normal that an artist’s inRigoleterests shift during his artistic career, but the way Rigole spoke about his approach to film making, was unlike anything I heard before from other film graduates. His bio (http://bamart.be/en/artists/detail/907) states the following: “By using an encyclopedic approach and a quasi-scientific precision […] he further investigates concepts such as authenticity and objectivity”, and this is not only visible in the works he produces, but in his whole attitude as a (video) artist.

The found footage he uses in his projects are 8mm films found on flea markets, which he digitized and ordered in a classification system. Rigole states that these 8mm have no real value, except for the memories they contain for very specific people. The memories on these 8mm films are mostly happy ones, and in his work Paradise Recollected, he combines these happy videos with a story that tells about the search for a utopian paradise. By adding a corporate voiceover, the images presented become very alienating and even the feeling of memory is subtracted from them. The fact that the footage Rigole collects in it’s original form (e.g. 8mm home videos) only has a meaning to a very limited set of people is interesting for our own project. But where as Rigole extracts the videos from their original context and makes them available to everybody, we try to do the opposite; limiting access to create an archive that reflects somebody's likes and interests.

Paradise Recollected is just one of the many works Rigole created from his collection of found 8mm film. He bundles this work in the project The International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other People’s Memories (IICADOM). Using the same kind of footage for different projects could become boring and repetitive, but Rigole tries to experiment with different visual languages in his projects. This results in innovative ideas that explore a broad range of questions about the found 8mm film.

The website of the IICADOM also functions as an open archiving system for all the digitalized 8mm footage. Making the footage available for remixing is most certainly a nice idea, but the archive, as Rigole presented it during the talk felt very premature to me. Throughout its projects, IICADOM explores the use of corporate language and elements. This is very visible on the website and I think this is an interesting artistic experiment. However, the whole idea of transforming the tagging of archive content into some sort of game where you could gain achievements felt a bit rash. It felt more or less like something Interaction Design students would create for a school assignment, rather then something that would fit in a refined project liked the IICADOM. 

Group C - Planning

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7tiRNZ6HpaRY01JY3J1ZlJhWFU&authuser=0

Group C - Concept

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7tiRNZ6HpaRY01JY3J1ZlJhWFU&authuser=0

Research Questions: Group C

Online archives, especially those populated with user-generated content, contain a broad range of different videos from all over the world. We would like to investigate the potential of this content to offer a view on the life and habits of people from different cultures all over the world. This interest leads to the following research question:

How can online archives be used to offer a broader perspective on other cultures, events and situations?

Currently most archives present their content as single pages, each containing one video or image. Wonder if this is the best approach, we introduce a second research question:

Is there potential in simultaneously watching multiple videos, as a way to open the viewers perspective?

As the creation of an artwork concerning these two questions will likely result in a selection of images, and thus never be completely objective, we keep a third question in mind:

Is the image that we are presenting accurate enough?

Pitch + Presentation: Group C

Pitch

We want to create an experience that not only uses projection mapping as a medium, but really benefits from the use of this particular technology.

[download pdf]

Feedback & ideas from group discussion

Remarks (group E) 

Subject has to be linked to the 3D surface (it will be hard).

What are the capabilities of the medium?

Maybe the story is not the main point?

Narrative is better when environment is good.

Start with base of a story and then going back and forth.

Remarks (group A)

Is the narrative important? Is the experience not more important?

Thought about some kind of interactivity?

Experience is more important than the interactivity!

Cubes: Be interactive with the objects!

Sound comes from a different place (experience)

Standard images: people can make their own story

Presentation

The use of simultaneous images to broaden the viewers perspective.

[download pdf]

Feedback & ideas from group discussion

Maybe it's better to use the live stream of weathercams available all over the world?

Or find live streams from vloggers?

What about the different time zones?

Make all the video's the same subject (eg. 8am: breakfast, 9am: leaving to work,...)

What about the sound? Let people select? Should we pre-select? General sound fitting all the videos?

Artist Talk: Evan Meany – Group C

In his talk, Evan Meaney gave insight into his current art works and projects that deal with new media forms being exposed to the aspect of decay. Meany sports a strong vision and enthusiasm about the volatility of not only art and media, but also of data in general and eventually of life itself. He bases his work around themes like death, finiteness and the dealing with such. One of the main topics hereby is the loss of information – or rather the fear of losing information.

A very interesting aspect of Meaney’s talk was the revision of an allegedly common belief in digital technology’s superiority to physical preservation techniques; so far, nothing is safe from decay and not even digital technology is capable of avoiding this process. One of the main reasons for this is the occurrence of so-called glitches: disruptions in a digital code that causes the output to distort.

The aim in one of his latest projects is the countering of this process through the collection, fragmentation and preservation of data in a massive data container. The consequence of this process however is the permanent inaccessibility of the data.

On a philosophical level, it could be interesting to question the necessity of the preservation of any data to begin with. Why and when would it be important to preserve something, especially if nothing and no one is going to last – and especially if this information becomes inaccessible forever? In that sense, what does it really mean to preserve something? And is that price too high to pay?

Further, Meaney suggests a connection between glitches and the idea of ghosts.

“For the most part, a ghost and a glitch develop from a similar ephemeral root; meaning that we don't expect either of them, and once engaged, they quickly disappear.”

Gloria!
Hollis Frampton, 1979

He draws out this connection in his short film/ game project ‘The Ceibas Cycle’. Here, the main character dies in the beginning of the plot, resurrects as a ghost and eventually enters the after-life. A digital glitch is placed in that same moment of the scenario, which expands the experience of death and decay to another dimension: It is no longer an event within the predictable and limited frame of a game plot, but affects aspect like the system’s functionality, time and space beyond the borders of the film.

The Ceibas Cycle: Epilogue
Evan Meaney, 2011

By generating it on purpose, Meaney plays with the aspect of glitches as an art form. He changes the original code, re-imagines the original memory and artificially generates the result of a decaying process before the actual process. Consequently, wouldn’t that mean that the “destruction” of something old is the creation of something new? Wouldn’t that mean that the process of decaying, the altering of information and memory, and the supposed loss of the old, is actually a form of rebirth? Like ghosts, an altered form of a human, entering a new life and world? But can something decay and be reborn forever, without being completely gone at some point?