Saturday, March 1, 2008


For those of you interested in Canadian cinema, this was sent to me by a friend who highly recommended these short movies.

The Human Stain



Hi again, I was looking through New York City's Peer Gallery's website and found an interesting NYC based photographer. In 2006 Will Steacy did a series on found flood-damaged family photographs from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I thought Mya would find these images interesting.

www.willsteacy.com

Friday, February 29, 2008









Howdy, I have been going through the photographs I shot in Canada last month, and want all your opinions on the ones I have selected so far. Many of these images were not shown in class, and I have edited out most of the ones you saw already. I would love to hear from you all.
Have a great weekend!

Composites

Greetings Ladies and Gentlemen,


I was trying to find 35 images on my website to put on Carbonmade, because the free host I use now is ugly... and every time I try to edit down my pics I get a bit confused and then distraught, because they are not as striking as I want them to be, and because I'm really self critical. The solution is to keep working of course, and eventually I'll stumble upon something I'm really really proud of. I tend to feel like I'm on my way, on to something but not there yet, not as successful or polished as I want to be. But there is some past work that shows what I want to do. Blogspot only supports tiny images and has cropped mine...click on image to view the entire thing.

Logan the cat refers to the Sphinx and is my interpretation Carl Yung's theories about archetypes and the collective unconscious (because we know he's reminiscent of the Sphinx) It's also a digital collage (4 layers) and creates a scene.
Logan

Then there's this one, which could be an aerial view of houses or ET or the parachute jump. I like morphing.
Coney Island
These types of long exposures will supplement the collages, whether as backgrounds or mosaics or weaves..
Lights


Videos:
I like to sync my imagery to music, and I want to use that method to enhance my work. Three videos I've done with (sound synced to image) techniques which I will use for my promo. I'm concerned with bass, I want my videos to be heard with strong sub-frequency vibrations...





What I did today:
I have this balcony, with a convenient rectangle of sunshine, and I set up a wooden board and put on a coat and gloves, and played with an old print. I chopped it up with a blade; I made salad of it and tried a few collaging techniques. I took photos and short videos, but now it's time to run to the darkroom to print and develop... I will bring my creation in for the critique on Monday., and here are a few teasers... raw footage, so turn off sound and feel free to browse through really fast, I will probably speed these up 300%.



nt

I stumbled upon this awhile ago and just revisited it so I thought I would share. These are mesmerizing videos which made me wish I skipped those three years of art history and just watched these instead...

500 years of women in western art




women in film



There are a few more of these here. Enjoy!

Thursday, February 28, 2008

MacBook Nano Response


I don't have any answers! Check this out: invention

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Tangled in the net


I find myself online quite often these days. I think it's a result of our technology and net art lectures. I'm really getting into it and I've found some interesting things I'd like to share:

First: MoMa online gallery: Design and the Elastic Mind
This deals with a bunch of projects related to science and design and the resulting art from it. The layout of the site is really interesting. Make sure you use the side arrows to see all of the content.
Some of the more interesting ones I found on here were:
Telepresence: The idea of being present at a real (non virtual) location while wearing having a camera project images through wireless means and a headsetAmbient Experience: Reduce stress and anxiety through images, music, and lighting in an exam room
Smell :Just weird




MoMa is also having an exhibit entitled 50 Years of Helvetica. Since we deal with fonts not only in our html lectures and when designing our business cards but also in everyday life I thought this was appropriate. There's even a movie all about Helvetica! (I'm sure that's on Ron's top 5)


MoMa is also opening a show on March 2 all about Color. It's all about contemporary artists use of color. This looks to be great! So who's free to visit MoMa with me?
Not into MoMa? Let's go to PS1. The Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution show is up. We've been discussing Cyberfeminism lately but it's time to get off the web and see some of this in person.
The rest of these are for you, feminist blogger who posts under the alias Brian...

31 Under 31: Young Women in Art Photography. It's going down at 3rd Ward in Brooklyn. If feminism doesn't interest you and photography doesn't either (why are you in this program?!) then go to meet a bunch of hot female photographers. Oh yea, I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate that comment. Almost forgot the ultimate reason to go: Open bar! Show Opens Saturday March 1.

Girls2! -All female art show

Jonathan Levine Gallery: Lori Earley : Fade to Gray (Blending photorealist painting techniques with Mannerist elements of surreal distortion, Lori’s portraits of hauntingly captivating female figures bring historical context into a contemporary light.) and Tara McPherson: Lost Constellations (Using her signature bold and graphic style, Tara’s imagery explores love, loss and loneliness through variations on strength, vulnerability and female empowerment. )

CineKink: Since we're on the topic of women and we are taking a film class why not go to a really alternative film festival? I'm interested in seeing Shortbus. Um, well I was, but I missed it. Darn!
Kissing Totems: Video Installation. I just found this show, it's right around FIT for you lazy butts. Now go see some art!

CGI

Today you encounter CGI at least once a day between billboards, commercials, movies and even photography. It is definitely obvious that this is no fad that is going to go away anytime soon.

In CGI there are pretty major similarities to photography and film -
3D Software generally can work as an "imitator" - the programs use complicated mathematics to simulate reality (though reality isn't always the objective). For example you get to decide how many times do you want light to bounce off objects in the scene which can be a representation of reality or fantasy. The programs generally allow for a lot of control in these decisions. If you don't want a particular object to reflect light at all it is easily done.


Some of the only things that holds you back in CGI is your knowledge of the program, computing power, problem solving skills and your creativity. That is a persuasive proposition for anybody who considers themselves an artist.









(Definitely enlarge these images and take a look)

Not that photography is dead by any means - or that it will be. To me - there is absolutely nothing currently in CGI like the unexpected that another person brings to an image.

(all images are enthusiast work from www.3dtotal.com)


(2007 3D Artist showreel)


A few links for anybody who wants to see more showreels and the like.

Method Studios : (you will recognize these commercials)

Richard Buchi Painter Reel : This is just pretty cool

Alan Mckay Studio Reels : Video Game Designer/CGI Creative Director

Foliage, Fotographs and Funny Fowl...

So its me, Hillary and this is my first official post!

So i have a few things i wanted to talk about, numero uno being that i recently saw this interesting/amusing/inspirational...kinda...music video by the band Goldfrapp that started out kinda whatever but I thought the way they used costumes was pretty amusing and got me thinking about how i could incorporate this into my own work. i think i just like the idea of it being a little more theatrical and realized how fashion is really costumes too so...::brain connect::...ah hah!
Anyway it's pretty silly:



And you can learn more about the band if you dig them from wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfrapp

Next, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about how Polaroid is totally sinking = ( and he mentioned how at some point last year this company ZiNK was working on both digital point and shoots that printed out the images as they were shot, as well as mini printers that would spit out images bluetoothed from your cellphone. I've found pics of both but can't find out if the camera ever came out (it was aimed for release in late 2007)...has anyone?




Lastly, just in case anyone hasn't seen this, I love this comic strip and think everyone should frequent it....frequently. www.whattheduck.net



what_the_duck_05.gif

I'm out!

hil <3

www.caitlinatkinson.net



Photographer Caitlin Atkinson, Artist Statement from her site at the bottom of post.  I heard a lecture she gave at SVA and in person, speaking about her work she is very akward, timid and unsure of herself.   I think it made her work even more effective because it appears to be very much 'her'.   Do most people present or talk about their wok in a manner that applies to their style or subject of their work?  For example,  Her work is about embarrasment and isolation and she sounds genuinely embarrassed and defeated when descirbing her experiences with it.   

A few nights ago, I locked myself out of my apartment for the third time this year.  While I sat trying to decide what to do, I was overwhelmed with the thought that my life seems composed of one mistake after another; that I am living through a seemingly endless series of disappointments.  No matter how hard I try, I can't seem to get it right.


Statement:
Whether it is an awkward public interaction, unreal crisis, or moment of social disconnection, ordinary life is full of abrupt occurences that create discomfort and isolation.  It is often shocking and painful to discover how unsympathetic and harsh the world can be when we fail.  The consequences of our transgressions, however small, leave  us feeling inept and alone.

The photographs I create are all constructed scenes inspired by my own encounters with fear and failure.  My interest is focused on these breakdowns of everyday life and the subsequent relationship with defeat.  The sad humor and vulnerability in the situations I stage allow viewers to identify with the character I portray.  In exposing my own shame and seclusion, I  am giving name to the anxiety that plagues us all.  The images then serve not simply as an illumination of the feeling of embarrassment, but as representations of disguised human nature.  

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Photos

Your Photo Are Being Hijacked Through Photo Contests & Social Media



<3 Jack

Still vs. Moving Images

I have been at my internship all day. Filing Richard Avedon's old negatives....most of the ones I was working with were of Lauren Hutton circa 1973...before even I was born. It was pretty internresting....My internship is located in the crossfire of midtown and after the day was done I found myself more overwhelmed then usual by the commuting traffic around me. After viewing so many still images for over over eight hours caught in a time frame of over 30 years ago it seemed strange to be caught in present day 2008 trying to catch my train and get home and get out of the rain. What is strange to me is time is pretty much universally understood as something solid.."I'll see you at 2:00pm" is something agreed upon as if time were a place... but where is 2:00pm? You can not touch time and unfortunately I am not even close to a scientist but I find it beyond fascinating that photographs can record a space that does not really exist. So much of what we photograph is stored digitally.Where do photographs live now? Images that we can not always touch. Where does 2:00pm on a Tuesday in 1973 live? It cannot be just in this one photograph, but that is what we have to hold in our hands as proof that day existed. Why do we feel the desperate need to preserve and store time? Are we saving time, storing time through taking photographs? A photograph can bring up''sense memories' but it is the same for some objects. How is a photograph more solid then an object?

Here are a few articles on memory stored without photographs.

By Joshua Foer
Photography by Maggie Steber
There is a 41-year-old woman, an administrative assistant from California known in the medical literature only as "AJ," who remembers almost every day of her life since age 11. There is an 85-year-old man, a retired lab technician called "EP," who remembers only his most recent thought. She might have the best memory in the world. He could very well have the worst.
"My memory flows like a movie—nonstop and uncontrollable," says AJ. She remembers that at 12:34 p.m. on Sunday, August 3, 1986, a young man she had a crush on called her on the telephone. She remembers what happened on Murphy Brown on December 12, 1988. And she remembers that on March 28, 1992, she had lunch with her father at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She remembers world events and trips to the grocery store, the weather and her emotions. Virtually every day is there. She's not easily stumped.
There have been a handful of people over the years with uncommonly good memories. Kim Peek, the 56-year-old savant who inspired the movie Rain Man, is said to have memorized nearly 12,000 books (he reads a page in 8 to 10 seconds). "S," a Russian journalist studied for three decades by the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, could remember impossibly long strings of words, numbers, and nonsense syllables years after he'd first heard them. But AJ is unique. Her extraordinary memory is not for facts or figures, but for her own life. Indeed, her inexhaustible memory for autobiographical details is so unprecedented and so poorly understood that James McGaugh, Elizabeth Parker, and Larry Cahill, the neuroscientists at the University of California, Irvine who have been studying her for the past seven years, had to coin a new medical term to describe her condition: hyperthymestic syndrome.
EP is six-foot-two (1.9 meters), with perfectly parted white hair and unusually long ears. He's personable, friendly, gracious. He laughs a lot. He seems at first like your average genial grandfather. But 15 years ago, the herpes simplex virus chewed its way through his brain, coring it like an apple. By the time the virus had run its course, two walnut-size chunks of brain matter in the medial temporal lobes had disappeared, and with them most of EP's memory.
The virus struck with freakish precision. The medial temporal lobes—there's one on each side of the brain—include an arch-shaped structure called the hippocampus and several adjacent regions that together perform the magical feat of turning our perceptions into long-term memories. The memories aren't actually stored in the hippocampus—they reside elsewhere, in the brain's corrugated outer layers, the neocortex—but the hippocampal area is the part of the brain that makes them stick. EP's hippocampus was destroyed, and without it he is like a camcorder without a working tape head. He sees, but he doesn't record.
EP has two types of amnesia—anterograde, which means he can't form new memories, and retrograde, which means he can't remember old memories either, at least not since 1960. His childhood, his service in the merchant marine, World War II—all that is perfectly vivid. But as far as he knows, gas costs less than a dollar a gallon, and the moon landing never happened.
AJ and EP are extremes on the spectrum of human memory. And their cases say more than any brain scan about the extent to which our memories make us who we are. Though the rest of us are somewhere between those two poles of remembering everything and nothing, we've all experienced some small taste of the promise of AJ and dreaded the fate of EP. Those three pounds or so of wrinkled flesh balanced atop our spines can retain the most trivial details about childhood experiences for a lifetime but often can't hold on to even the most important telephone number for just two minutes. Memory is strange like that.


This too is slightly related and amazing.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur9Ro-llkrA

modernmechanix.com













I saw this image on http://blog.modernmechanix.com/category/photography/

Color Theory Visualizer

A great site for helping you pick out colors. It probably has too many options.
ColorJack



<3>

Monday, February 25, 2008

Mobile desktop


On February 9th Improv Everywhere put on a performance entitled The Mobile Desktop at the Starbucks across from FIT! I recognize the location from the photographs. This performance involved undercover agents entering Starbucks, purchasing coffee, and setting up their ginormous desktops in the location. Check it out here.
Who posted that (the one before Evan's Oscar discussion)?  It wasn't me!
We should all be sure to ask Allison about her experiences with the Parsons shows at Calumet, and see what she thinks about show locations etc...(she's exhibited quite a bit, and has a lot of good info/ideas about this subject).
I agree....we should nail this down soon, so that we can actually look at how much space we have for each body of work, and how to layout various projects.

So, anyone have ideas for the next Flickr project?

I say, either choose a color, a word or a passage of text to illustrate, or do the "sartorialist" project....what do you think?

By the way, what did we think of Jeff?

Academy Awards

Normally I don't watch the academy awards - and this time was no exception to the rule. But usually when its over I am curious about who won what. Just so I can be let down by how wrong it all is.

Time and time again you have sub par movies winning the big awards. (normally just due to the directors name or actors)

Here look at the previous (79th) Academy Awards...


Best picture : The Departed 2006




=







Give me a break - they gave a remake an academy award for best picture? The plot is
nearly identical to the original. Its not like this was a remake of "Gone with the Wind", "Infernal Affairs" was released in 2002 - how are you going to remake it just four years later.

To put salt on the wounds - The Departed also won best adapted screenplay... whoa whoa what adaptation? The movies are nearly identical in plot...

With that said, this academy awards finally gave some credit where it was due. With the big winners "No Country for Old Men" (finally saw this last week) and "There will be Blood".














If you haven't seen either of these, go leave your house/apt now and see them.

The thing that intrigues me most about films in general are that you have so many different people all working for the same goal and the message can get muddled so easily. Which can be so similar to photography and relavent to my documentary.

Normally you have four components of major films that convey the message; cinematography/editing, sound, writing and acting. How often have you seen a film rot and die because one of these categories is weak? Thankfully we have a lot less of this in still photography which makes it more of an exact art.

Anyway I was just recently thinking about a movie I gave out that wasn't returned. This happens quite often but I think im going to get this one back.

It's probably some of the strongest imagery I have seen in film in awhile - but I was reminded about it by "There will be Blood". Unfortuntely the plot is a little muddled (but its at least a thousand times better than "3:10 to Yuma"). The trailer was so great I had to buy it.

The Proposition (2006) - imdb
(probably should have won best cinematography/soundtrack but i dont think it was even nominated. It received critical acclaim but just didn't have the buzz)



So throw that up on your blockbuster queue!

Anyway this turned out to be a complaint about the academy awards that should have been split up into two posts. But don't worry this is my last movie writeup for awhile.

Is anyone else starting to freak out...


about our exhibit and the fact that we don't have a set location? After discussing censorship with Brian and logistics c414 is looking better. But I do feel that we really need to get the ball rolling and secure a location. Maybe we should exhaust all options by this week or next because time is running out. I thought of Calumet's gallery space but of course it is booked. Here's their spring schedule: (take note of NYU and Parsons have their senior BFA shows there.)

http://www.calumetphoto.com/ctl?ac.ui.pn=common.CalumetEvents&sl=NY

My concern is that I don't want where we pick to look too amateur especially since there is a likelihood that our show will be compared to their shows. I assume that critics and industry people don't hold us in the same light of what NYU's budget is and expect that for our exhibit. The upside to having a show at Calumet is that industry professionals are in that vicinity often and the exposure of the exhibit would be large. Can anyone think of a place similar to Calumet's?

This is a nice site for NYU's show too. It's probably a good thing if we all start to research what the other schools are doing publicity-wise.

http://photo.tisch.nyu.edu/object/io_1177346138862.html#next

PS Maya this photo is for you! It is from the NYU website listed above. Looks like someone beat you to your idea!


Sex




As I was browsing for feminist inspiration for my thesis this image I plucked out of the files and thought id display to encourage a little female strength today. After all the world depends on our womb to survive. I have also stumbled upon an informative website that I found interesting http://www.sextimeandpower.com ..wait a second though ((to get a bit off topic)) I don't understand why women's half naked provocative bodies need to be displayed on the cover of magazines, billboards, etc. to be the sole lure to a publication or a good selling tactic under any umbrella. I just don't understand when we started selling ourselves. When? When did it become ok to seek approval of a society through well conformed beliefs of "sex sells." And when the fuck did it become ok to turn your head in the other direction and ignorantly believe the small dicked men sitting in high offices dictating how our society of men views us??









Two Photographers

I came across these photographer's work while doing "research" and time killing at my internship. Check out their work, and let me know what you think!!

One is Taryn Simon. Her recent body of work is called "The American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar." Through research and a few years of being persistent she was able to photograph things generally hidden from the American public. The image that she photographed below is something that I have been chewing over in my head for a long time. It is a white tiger but due to inbreeding it is mentally retarded and not considered "quality." Check out her site and her other images. I think they're really interesting and quietly emphasizes the irony that is so typical of American culture. Make sure to read the captions that accompany each image as it gives the reason as to why what she's photographing is hidden and unfamiliar.



This other photographer is Peter Funch. I particularly like his work called "Babel Tales" because it feels like I'm taking a visual comprehension exam and I'm passing with flying colors. Uh, I mean it's just fun to look at his images. I actually saw one of his photographs being used for an advertisement, but I can't remember the brand. The image below is called "Smoking Smokers."


Blogging is fun and I'm glad to see everyone posting interesting things!

MacBook Nano


And I thought the MacBook Air made my MacBook Pro look like a dinosaur.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Marketing: The Flickr Way

A great post about using Flickr.
Marketing: The Flickr Way



<3 Jack

Cool new gallery

honey-space.com

Honey - Space is a new gallery in Chelsea. It opens and closes with no security or curators at all. There are no bathrooms either. Artists basically come in and put up their work. You can even steal the work there. No one is around! I saw info about this in the times.

$99G's to spare?

Yes it's 12:30 am Saturday well actually Sunday. Sigh. I should be sleeping since I am shooting tomorrow but I had to post this:It's the mother of all telephotos. For only $99,000 at B&H you can shoot clear photos from a mile away. Sweet! Read about this bad boy here.

By the way I think it's hysterical how the camera is not on a tripod, only the lens is!