WEEK 16: BY HEART

1. FLOW CHARTS  for our upcoming outdoor projection event BY HEART!

TAKING IT TO THE STREETS. (well, in front of the VAC) .
Nick painting a beautiful sign for us <3.

 



We asked what people knew 'by heart', what is committed to memory, what could be recited? We set up a camera, mike,&amp and projected their speaking mouths onto the Art&Art History inscription on the VAC.

We needed to figure out a good place for the projection of our crawling baby, originally meant to crawl across the inscription of the Norlin Library, which led to many of our creative ideas for this event, in particular that crawling baby and the supportive arms we wanted to project upon the columns. hmmm.

 This was our first try, which looked cool but was somewhat washed out by the lights. 

baby  action

But we needed to integrate the three projections into a single composition somehow, so we tried this:

close ups

&speaking by heart:

Heartfelt hanks to Nick, Mark, Clarissa, Amber, Juanito, Ashley, Rebecca, Ellie, Greg, Grant, Brian, Riley, Connor, Calvin, Christopher & Austin for all your energy ,ideas, and courage to try.  As collage/essay filmmaker, media theorist, culture-jammer and raconteur Craig Baldwin said during his recent visit to Colorado, "Trying things out and seeing  what happens takes a  whole lot of radical will: "
yep.
xJeanne
May 2012, Boulder CO

week 15: Brainstorming our collective projection event

sketching out some ideas= visualization

hooking up the tech, & voila! mediated images!!

 small video/mouth  test for  BY HEART

in class , shooting our lovely Rebecca's arms to create the caryatid-like projections

WEEK 14; Social space, inside and out

Tuesday Clarissa led us in a provocative examination of   Dutch  artist Pippilotti Rist's work,  from her 1986 single channel  video "I'm not the girl who misses much" to her 2009 multiple projection environment for MOMA's public atrium, "Pour Your Body Out". Sensual, delightful, digital, female, large scale.

Thursday was our final day for presentations and we  looked at artists working with projections as political actions. Our class happened to take place on the eve of 420, where students were facing serious administrative control of the university's public space, so what better time to become aware of power and control in the spaces and building that surround us, aka the built environment.

Here is one of Krzysztof Wodiczko's outdoor building projections, here on the Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn NY. Wodiczko is an artist originally from Warsaw, Poland, and who now lives and works in New York and Massachusetts. Since the eighties, he has created more than seventy large-scale still image and motion video projections of politically-charged images on architectural facades and monuments worldwide. By using public buildings and monuments as the backdrops for his projections, Wodiczko focuses attention on ways in which monuments and architecture embody collective memory and history. His ART 21 interview is from the season of artist whose subject is POWER.

Last we watched a video from the collective group OCCUPY CINEMA. who have been organizing guerilla short film screenings at Zuccotti Park all year and state that with their mission is to use "the moving image to aid and nourish the Occupy movement." . Their video includes documentation of a recent action where they hand held a projected  video of  ballerina Anna Pavlova dancing  all over  the facade of The Stock Exchange.  Thank the Huffington Post for this story  on Occupy.

Another inspiring week with the comrades of Think Outside the Booth. 

<3

WEEK 13: more projection experiments

Projecting one body onto another for example:

WEEK TWELVE: interacting with media

Tuesday we studied Shana Moulton,  and Thursday we studied Tony Oursler

The Galactic Pot healer, Shana Moulton, performing at Electronic Arts Intermix, NYC 2010

We Have No Free Will (1995) Tony Oursler

and from our own workshop, projecting Ellie's face on a sculptural figure.

read: Thomas Beard's article on the work of Shana Moulton "Now That I'm a Woman Everything is Strange", in Incite Journal #3: New Ages

excerpt: from Kate Mondloch's SCREENS: Viewing Installation Art (2010)

kicking off spring break at Counterpath Gallery in Denver!

Counterpath is also a small press and a bookstore. 

Christopher and Rebecca check out some Ugly Duckling Presse books during setup.

It takes a village. 

Good thing we tested the fog machine first so the smoke alarm could be fetched and silenced for the performance. We had no ladder so we had to um,  improvise .

Ashley and Austin checking the throw.

Amateur astronomy in the Counterpath backyard  while waiting for start time

(Sun setting, new Moon, Jupiter, Venus)

Line Describing a Cone, about midway. Looking away from projector.

 Touching  it!

30 mnutes later & it's back out into the streets of Denver. 

Thanks to Tim at Counterpath Press, to Christina Battle for the fog machine, to Robby at Guitar Center for suggesting 'atmospheric' fog juice, to Film Studies for the projector and stand, 

and to everyone who came out to join us for Line Describing a Cone. 

<curtsies and exits stage>

WEEK NINE: LINE DESCRIBING A CONE, Anthony McCall 1973

http://counterpathpress.org/friday-march-23-8-p-m-line-describing-a-cone-1973-by-anthony-mccall

WEEK EIGHT: THIS ROOM WHERE TIME PASSES

 In 1969 composer Alvin Lucier sat in a room in Middletown Connecticut and recorded himself speaking a short text into a microphone. He then played the recording back into the room,  and re-recorded it. The new recording was then played back and re-recorded, and this process was continually repeated. Eventually <insert duration here>  the words become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself. All rooms have a characteristic acoustic resonance based on many factors including but not limited to shape and size, & certain frequencies will be emphasized as they resonate in the room.   His text is a description of  this process in action—"I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice."

Here is a 1981 recording of  Lucier's I AM SITTING IN A ROOM , but as Lucier is careful to instruct us, this experiment can be performed in any room, with any text, and using any kind of technology. After learning about and listening to the piece  in class, we brainstormed & collectively tried to figure out how we might recreate his experiment in our room. Here are some of the raw results using our smartphones voice memo apps!!! <because we are geniuses, ahem>

11:46 AM

12:13 pm

Speaking of listening, on Thursday we watched several tapes including BOOMERANG, a videotape made in a tv studio in Amarillo Texas in 1974. In Boomerang, Richard Serra trains the camera on Nancy Holt, who, as she speaks, hears her own voice played back, with just a slight delay, through a pair of headphones. Holt describes her experience as it occurs, becoming both the subject and the object of her observation. The spectacle Serra conveys is that of a woman transformed into an image before her very eyes (or ears—in this case) . Boomerang begins to question the effect on human consciousness of living in a world in which reality can be instantly transformed into an image—and not the “natural” image found in a mirror, but the media-inflected image found on a TV monitor.

BOOMERANG (1974) Richard Serra, with Nancy Holt

additional viewing: 

Gary Hill, Soundings 1978

Joan Jonas, Vertical Roll 1972