UnderWater Gallery

presents One and the other

This April 3oth of  2008

Featuring the Intrinsic works of

Seth Brignell, Kevin Logan, and Barbara Agreste

What is it you’re thinking? You’re thinking you want to buy this right? You’re thinking you want Mommy to buy it, right? You want Mommy’s mommy to buy it.

After I watched Toy Story, years later I realized HOW MUCH IT HAS INFLUENCED OUR CULTURE AND HOW MUCH IT CONTINUES TO. Never since then, and it was created in 1995 people, has film received the amount of attention that Toy Story gets, commands. For good reasons, it was the first completely computer animated film for Pixar. It took marketing and computer art to a whole new level. The mesh of advertising in a completely animated movie, subtly, was until then unheard of. Yet it didn’t just introduce new concepts, it pioneered new concepts to create a culture and name for itself that still needs to be rivaled.

Toy Story is the first and only movie to successfully sell its own products for so many years! The manner in which it is done is even more brilliant. What they did is successfully sell their product in their own movie to recreate the same craze in real life. How song is that! But what makes it more song is that it’s memorable. Surely if you can get customers to remember the product 13 years from then, it’s beyond successful; it’s phenomenal.

The Best Music is Underground

——-What I wrote, transcribed——

Jim Rourke song, I am singing, starts with a gypsy windchime, progressing to a Wizard of Oz-like melody.  Their other melodies remind me of Band of Horses who often use semi-soft, playful, guitar riffs. They lay, on top, a generic sound effect usually heard in scary movie stab scenes.

Visually, these two uncanny mixes bring up old memories of a music video and game. The music video and game do not relate in content; the music video being My Walk by Greg Kaminski and the game I do not know the name of. [The scary beats remind me of the game's monster which wore the face of its victims on its back.]

After getting this horrific image, I imagined more positive visuals. “Can I dance to this,” I thought. The answer: no & yes, if you danced in Bohemian weirdness.

Then I was blessed with a random mind fuck of a future skittles commercial. In its vividness it seemed so real. It’s very typical with a person eating skittles raining from the sky, but the passion matches that of the Notebook. In utter sweetness. I wonder if it will be in your Blue Comet, Bobby. It would work, sliced, in Salad Fingers.

——-Response——-

The transcription does a good job of capturing my feelings for this song. Do give me more music or at least the name of the festival you get it from. Where were you when I needed new music?!

Presentation on Art and Advertising

Now a graphic icon of the 1990s, that 1999 AIGA Detroit poster typifies Stefan Sagmeister’s style.

Striking to the point of sensationalism and humorous but in such an unsettling way that it’s nearly, but not quite unacceptable, his work mixes sexuality with wit and a whiff of the sinister. Sagmeister’s technique is often simple to the point of banality: from slashing D-I-Y text into his own skin for the AIGA Detroit poster, to spelling out words with roughly cut strips of white cloth for a 1999 brochure for his girlfriend, the fashion designer, Anni Kuan.

The strength of his work lies in his ability to conceptualise: to come up with potent, original, stunningly appropriate ideas.

“Stephan Sagmeister.” Design Museum. 2 April 2008 <http://www.designmuseum.org/design/stefan-sagmeister>.

Conceptual Video

Everyday video is dependant on the abilities of who or what is being filmed. It is common to see spontaneous examples of this genre because it is most entertaining. Often, because of this, it is very limited, be it setting, action or resources. Free running and le parkour are spontaneous sports and fit this everyday genre.

In this video the participants of these sports use everyday settings and do what they perceive to be ordinary. The video’s concept is loosely similar to the concept of the movie Crash, an intersection of the lives of various seemingly unrelated people. The viewer doesn’t have to understand this concept to appreciate the skills and concepts behind both sports. These are shown via the characters’ actions and interactions. It shows several men flipping, running and the like to be joined by others. In showing that, it entices viewers to join, iterates the sports’ methodology and subtly advertises.

Russian Ark

Sukurov’s camera man, Buttner, takes you on a historical journey through 33 hermitage rooms.
The idea: to preserve Russian culture and show it all in one continuous shot of biblical proportions, on the sea.The proposal is almost as absurd as our guide, who speaks on Russian discourse with such disdain that you wonder how he is even our guide. Yet Sukurov manages, progressing us to appreciate the finer things of Russia.

The film is shot in one fluid shot, perhaps to establish a false sense of real time. Nestled in real space, he meshes the past of Russia and defies mortality. This space, this continuous shot, then encompasses every movement, every death and birth of Russian life that one can fit into such a film. He even manages to mesh the 2d world with the 3d world by syncing up audio with the paintings to place us in that realm. Still, the journey embraces the good and bad eras of Russian history, touching on the German siege of Leningrad, to heighten our awareness of Russian culture. The guide, all the while, tells us where Russia get its influence and incidentally it manifests into an informal, visually pleasing catalog of Russian history.

Music Video as Art 2 (some1 said you did Radiohead in class)

The Used’s the Bird and the Worm epitomizes music video as art. As art, the lyrics stay true to their message and follow the narrative portrayed in the video. Yet what truly makes it great is the band’s ability to further develop a story the audience already knows.

The Used start by adding anticipation, via known horror tales, to tease and mislead its audience. A modern flair results from diverting from these many sources and continues into the choice costumes and the custom settings. The band’s bellows and cackles, also lend flair to this macabre tale. Overall, with these effects, the story is so well considered that the audience may find it hard to believe the video was created after the lyrics.

Music Videos as Art

Radiohead combines film at different frame frequencies to produce a surreal atmosphere. The result is Street Spirit. Although shot in 1996, it uses incredible technology, a high-speed scientific camera, that is still not widely available for the average user today. Along with this incredible technology, this fantastic art piece exploits the lyrics to evoke a sweet demise that only Radiohead is capable of.

The video, a tragedy, tells its stories by way of controlling uncontrollable circumstances. The lyrics separately describe helpless circumstances to push the reader into hopeless situations in which one can only hope. The lyrics and video don’t sync up in the sense of literal meaning; the focus is instead placed onto their emotional entirety. When they achieved emotional sync, the result is a tragic but beautiful music video.

Response for Burning Chrome & the Futurist Manifesto

When writting about technology, time matters. The Futurist Manifesto & Burning Chrome are prime examples of work that was ideal in its time. When taken out of [that] context, its ability to connect with the reader depends upon its ability to forecast the future.

Only Burning Chrome has this character. It paints the future in vivid hues with its language.

Response for comparing differences of Davis & Benjamin

The differences between Davis and Benjamin on the thought of electronic media are striking. Each writer has a different take on the aura of an art piece created in technological form. Davis praises electronic computers for their ability to improve, preserve, and make accessible ‘original’ masterpieces while Benjamin’s view is pessimistic and contends that taking a historic art piece from its time will strip it of its unique existence and its aura. If duplicated, the work is detached and mechanized. Davis, on the other hand, asserts that this uniqueness is preserved because not only does one see the beauty of the original, but with today’s technology the beauty can be enhanced and recreated into a newer version that also moves and inspirers. Moreover, he points out that Elaine Sturtevant improved on Warhol’s original, all because of the possibility of electronic art. Yet, while they disagree on the aura that electronic reproductions produce, they both realize electronic media as a profound change in artistic process that allows originals to not only be readily accessible but manipulated and recreated by anyone who wishes to revise the original.