Amanda Potts

For this project my focus was on how nature is there even though there are human dwellings. This was shot at Wildwood which is a metropark in Toledo Ohio. The audio is taken at the University of Toledo Visual arts building. There is a stairwell that whistles which I included. My main idea for this was to show the difference between nature itself and show the dissonance I feel when seeing a human made structure inside an otherwise natural setting. Tall grass in the wind is serene but if you look you can see a large former home in back which takes away the feeling. This is a metropark meant to preserve the native species yet it holds multiple buildings and playgrounds in order to keep humans coming and funding it. Nature is beautiful but not fun to live in without the commodities of the urban setting. Although this place is created and used with good intentions there are still some aspects that were not thought through. The ramification of the the building and other structures added aren’t as big of a worry as I feel they should be.

Why does the vertical nature of something dictate the way we view it? Compare a short tree to a tall one. Do you feel something different for each? Looking at a skyscraper and comparing it to a one story home do you feel something different for each? If no to both then forget about it as you don’t see the world the way Bachelard assumes you do. As people we view the world partially the way our brains dictate and partially the way the we were taught. So if we are taught that the sky’s the limit and that we should reach for the stars is it not clear why we associate the vertical with the better? We are taught from a young age that the higher up we go the better. We view positions in the workplace as the higher up the more power there is. We seem to view the world in a vertical manner but do we? Is it truly a vertical nature or does it have a form? Is our world in a straight vertical line or is is more of a pyramid? Do we have more of something at the bottom and less at the top. Are there viewer people in higher positions? Do we view the attic as something more limited than a basement? This is all very literal in its meaning but even if we view the vertical nature of something in a more psychological way it still gets us to the same assumptions. The conscious mind is what is always around and somewhere deep inside ourselves is our subconscious. Even our views of non physical parts of our minds/bodies are viewed in a vertical hierarchical scale. Why do we think of things in this way? Why do we force our thoughts and locations into these scales?

Details are meaningless unless given them. To describe the stairs that have no story is a waste of words. If the stairs mark a part of the history of that which they lead then go and describe them. If they are simply the means to an end of someone moving up and down then contemplate the importance of that person moving up and down. Cities have stories. Locations have stories. Even those locations that are mirrored have stories. Mirrored cities are not equal as one is always the inverse of the other. One will be the reflection of the other. One exists before the other but one exists because of the other. If two copies of something change on their own and then go and copy the other one’s changes which ones a copy? Is either truly a copy? Does this back and forth of repeating the other make them identical or different?

Video art varies in style and format. For example, Nam June Paik with her TV Buddha uses a video of a still buddha statue that sits in front of the screen it plays on. Then there’s Bill Viola with his He Weeps for You which is a close-up shot of a water-dropping that after it drops you hear it land on a drum. Both of these are a single video playing but are dramatically different in style and format. Bill Viola is bringing in the viewer to the work while Nam June Paik is forcing the viewer to think about the way we think. Video art can be a combination of multiple videos. Pipilotti Rist uses two different videos in her Ever is Over All. One video shows her happily breaking car windows with a tall flower. The other video is a happy flow of the same kinds of tall flowers in a field. Then there’s Zhang Peili who uses three videos stacked on top of each other in his Eating. Peili’s videos had one of a cheek chewing the second being from an angle on the arm of a person raising a fork into their mouth and then the third video is of the plate that is being emptied. Even though both of these artists used multiple videos the style in which they did was different.

For this project I played with looping something I use everyday. I struggled to concentrate on one area of focus for a bit but ended up deciding on this. For this the focus was on the repetitiveness of elevator doors. I connected this with the ideas I have about inanimate objects that are designed to resemble living beings. The mannequins are designed to look human and the animal is designed to look cat-like. I used sound of a computer error and a loud bell to distinguish between the objects that resembled humans and the empty elevator. The loud bell or dong was meant to signify the astonishing factor of seeing inanimate objects acting human/animal like. Overall, I wanted to show how odd and potentially creepy it would be if inanimate objects acted the way the things they resemble did.

Although looping seems to be basic, possibly lacking in creativity today thanks to gifs, looping and repetitive actions and sounds can create intriguing art. Looping can be made into repetitive time changing creations. Some loops are simple and edit one portion of an already existing video that repeats. Other videos are made cinematic and shot like a movie. Regardless there is more to loops than the standard gif format that makes something move then plays it backward. Some artists create multiple loops that are to be played together and that create friction between stories. One artist who does this is Cate Consandine. Consandine uses duel-channels to convey sense of time. Consandine work is described as “The viewer, meanwhile, is caught between these temporal rhythms; as Consandine writes, “the internal rhythm of a loop acts on the body”.” This article is honestly tedious to me but I understand what is being said. Generally if feels more like a portion of a textbook rather than a magazine article.

Horsey https://www.vdb.org/titles/horsey

by Frédéric Moffet

I enjoyed the playfulness of a serious topic. Even though this one is talking about horses not having to take sides in politics its also done in a simple but intriguing way. The style of the video is almost cinematic like an opening scene in a movie which intrigues me.

Glorias Call https://www.vdb.org/titles/glorias-call

by Cheri Gaulke

This one was a bit weird to me but I enjoyed the use of a art animation(kinda) and video to create a surreal experience. The animation was more gif style but they helped inform the story being told.

Kurlichtspiele (Reminiszenz, 12. Dezember 1953) / Volker Eichelmann (2004, 6:00)

This one is interesting how it starts and until about a min in. I don’t speak german so I don’t know what’s going on but the use of time and speeding it up in the beginning intrigued me.