Final

     Hito Steyerl's article talked about the merits of the poor image, and was a sort of commentary on the life of an old image or art movie.  According to her, an old image can be shared over the decades, whether physically or over the internet via torrent or otherwise, and eventually end up a completely different piece because of quality degradation.   This was something I never considered until reading her essay.  I always assumed that an image or video was always the same, even if the same image exists in a different quality.  She argues that that isn't true, that while the ones and zeroes that make the image exist might be the same, the quality transforms it into something different, for better or worse.
     This concept is what I tried to keep in mind while making my final video project.  I meant to take preexisting pieces of video and audio and, instead of copying endlessly to degrade the quality, edit them and put effects on them until they're unrecognizable.  Starting with the audio, half of the sound comes from feedback sounds I found online.  One clip was feedback from a guitar amp, and the other, which is the loud second half of the video, is just a really loud feedback from an unknown source.  Each of these was then altered, duplicated, pitch shifted, and layered in a way so that there is an escalation and crescendo that doesn't end until the video stops.
     The other half of the audio is the white noise that starts out the video and plays underneath the rest of the sounds.  For this, I used audacity in a way that I had never thought of before.  I imported two .jpg images into audacity, one of a forest and one of a desert, and converted the raw data of those still images into a wave form.  I then played with effects on those until I had a desirable white noise effect to act as the foundation of the rest of the audio.  This aspect of the audio relates back to Steyerl's article, as the raw data that makes up the white noise can be seen as the lowest quality image possible, so bad in fact that you cant even see it.  The image was broken down into nothing more than raw data, and then that data was used to help make a dense, claustrophobic soundscape.
     For the video aspect I used the same techniques.  I combined two clips of TV static, and two clips of a kaleidoscope visual and used different effects on them.  This is where I tried to introduce Steyerl's idea of the poor image.  Since I didn't have time to copy these clips over and over until they begin to degrade, I used different effects on multiple duplications of the same clip until each bore nearly no resemblance to the original clip.  On some duplicates I actively tried to make the quality suffer by way of filters, some aptly called "Bad TV," and on others I just layered on so many filters the image became something else entirely, like the colorful vortex that was once a simple kaleidoscope.
     After uploading the video to youtube, I noticed that it has a different aesthetic if watched at the lowest resolution of 144p.  It's not drastically different, I can still tell that it's my video, and the audio is pretty much unaffected, but the first half of the video that is made up mostly of effect ridden static feels different.  The added graininess distorts the finer details of the static particles, making those clips have a different quality to them, though I couldn't say if it's for better or worse.  This seems to be Steyerl's theory in motion, the same exact video at a lower resolution comes off as slightly different.  I wouldn't say that it makes the video into a different life form of sorts, but the difference is enough to be noticeable and make me wonder whether it would end up being a completely different video if the image quality was degraded much more.  Based on her article, I'd have to assume that it would be.

Clusterfuck Esthetics

     Saltz's article concerns installations or artworks that are overly cluttered or organized, or otherwise known as a clusterfuck, as the title suggests.  He thinks that these kinds of works are artists' response to the hectic and chaotic reality of everyday life.  Saltz definitely has a less than positive opinion on these works, calling them desperate, unbearable, and dislocated.  The pictures of a John Kessler installation highlight Saltz's criticisms.  An entire wall of televisions playing the same image, and another room filled with different arrangements of tv's make Saltz's opinions seem on point.
     He goes on to discuss an installation by Mike Kelley, which consists of yearbook pictures that have been retouched, rephotographed and arranged in an obsessive compulsive manner.  Although Saltz says that it is clear and clever, he admits that it feels very empty and unfulfilling.  He felt that the piece, not the artist, generated it's own appeal, and because of that, he makes it seem like a cheap thrill.  Despite these two artists' shortcomings in making works that are 'clusterfucky,' Saltz discusses other artists who's work has a similar aesthetic but ends up being a success.
     The 'clusterfuck aesthetic' is present in pretty much every kind of art, from the sculpture Saltz talked about, to music and videos and beyond.  While it definitely has it's appeal in each medium, there comes a point where it gets too over done or gimmicky, even within a single piece.  Referring back to the Kessler piece he talked about, if it was just a huge wall of televisions playing an interesting video piece that somehow had a message that tied in with the installation, it might have been a lot more interesting.  Instead, there were multiple other installations made out of more tv's.  Saltz's point seemed that there was just too much of too much.  Too much is fine, but when you start pushing well beyond the limits of too much, that's when the 'clusterfuck' starts to weigh down and degrade a piece.

Lecture

     Scott Tschutitani is a "multidisciplinary interventionist" artist from San Francisco.  As an Asian American, he described his goals as an artist as trying to subvert racial and cultural means.  He didn't go to an art school, but his first project as a college student, "Seasons Greetings," displays his goal of challenging cultural and social norms as they relate to his Asian heritage.  He spent a large portion of his lecture talking about his best known work at the Geisha Exhibit at a San Francisco Museum.  Coinciding with the release of the movie 'Memoirs of a Geisha," an exhibit at the museum featured Geisha themed pieces, but the marketing campaign featured a non Japanese model and was based on a westerner's view of Geisha culture, not necessarily a factual representation.  He said the exhibit and it's marketing campaign was "perpetuating the fetish" westerners had for Japanese culture.
     In response, he had a mock advertisement put up in a billboard near the museum featuring a Geisha with his face on it with the text "Geisha: Perpetuating the Fetish."  He wanted to bring awareness to the fact that this exhibit was somewhat offensive to actual Asian and Geisha heritage, and greedily played into the fascination Americans have for Japanese culture.  Years later, he did a similar project regarding a Samurai exhibit, this time making mock pamphlets featuring less than respectable facts about real Samurai and placed them in the museum for people to unknowingly read.  On these pamphlets he informed people of war crimes, pedophilia, and slave labor committed by Samurai of Japan.  Again, his goal was to point out the misinformation, or rather lack of accurate information, in the exhibit and it's advertising that leads people to fetishize samurai culture, just like the geisha project.  He calls this type of project 'Intellectual activism," as it makes factual knowledge more accessible and useful.  Finally, he said he believes his art exists to make things happen, not just to make things.  This is clear as he aims to make a change in the way people see and interact with Asian culture.

Exhibition

     For the exhibition review I checked out the 'Day of the Dude' exhibition at the front door gallery downstairs.  The gallery features works by four artists: Richard Jackson, Ed Martinez, Fred Reid, and Michael Sarich.  The name of the show is an obvious play on the Mexican holiday of Dia de Los Muertos, or day of the dead.  The holiday is about honoring dead loved ones, and this show touches on that.  Almost all the pieces have skulls in them, and a few few like memorial pieces.  One such piece is a set of mounted boxes with a glass window showing a plaster skull and name inside each one.  Each box is also decorate with crosses, pictures of more skulls, and flower designs.  It definitely has the feel of a memorial, but aesthetically it matches every other piece in the show in color, skull integration and style.  Another piece is a set of 12 small heads, each painted different colors and with different designs.  Each has at least one heart on the forehead, and the face of each head is noticeably different.

     The exhibition is very aesthetically pleasing.  There is a nice mix of colors between the different pieces, but they all fit together nicely.  There is a lot of brown from various wood pieces, and various shades of green and red.  I only know generally about dia de los muertos, but from that very limited knowledge, this show does seem to use it nicely as an inspiration.  It's not clear whether or not the exhibition, or more specifically the set of memorial like box pieces, is a tribute to people the artists knew that died, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was.  Considering the high amount of foot traffic near the front door gallery, and the eye catching aesthetic of the exhibition, I'd imagine the artists are happy with the placement and potential for a lot of people to see their work.

Light Box

I wanted to make an image that was mostly bright white and black, as I hoped the light from behind would make it look better than if there was a large variety of colors.  I took a picture of a tree and played with filters until it had a fluorescent quality to it.  When the final product was rotated ninety degrees, it looks less like a tree and more like an aerial view of a city.  The black trunk of the tree resembles rivers, while the white leaves are like lights of buildings.  It almost reminded me of an aerial picture of Venice, but with more white light areas.  This image might look good in the light box as the black and white, fluorescent quality contrasts well from the other, more colorful images.

Monochrome

         For the curator show, we had to make a monochrome work that featured solid color as the main component of the piece.  Instead of doing a painting or video in a monochromatic fashion, I chose to do a deconstruction of a monochrome work.  Breaking down a single color painting into parts seemed like an interesting idea, most monochromes are about the color, not the process or the component parts or medium.  I chose a painting to deconstruct, and broke it down to only a canvas, brush, and the paint itself.  I installed it in a simple arrangement and left it that way not expecting anyone to move it.  After the show I found that multiple had painted on the canvas, turning it into half a monochrome painting.  That's not what I had intended but it's interesting that people couldn't ignore a blank canvas if paint was nearby.  Overall, I think having a deconstructed monochrome was an interesting take on a monochrome themed show, as it was both a completed and incomplete work at the same time.

Dada manifesto

     Hugo Ball's description of dada is very optimistic.  He believes in it, saying that today nobody knows what it is, but tomorrow everyone will be talking about it in Switzerland.  Dada isn't just a local or temporary movement, but an international one that will continue forever.  Ball says that dada is first a word, and that word is what became a movement.  He prefaces other words with 'dada' to show that everything can be dada, even nonsense words that people make up.  Creating your own words is especially important to ball, as he says that "I don't want words that other people have invented."  This seems like a way of saying that dada art should be unlike everything else, even though it can be influenced and reference anything and everything, whether or not it exists yet.
     Tzara's view of the word dada is that it is meaningless.  That opinion is the opposite of Ball, who believed that the word dada meant everything.  It is interesting though, that Ball said in his essay that made up words were central to dada, and Tzara says that they are useless, but writes nonsensical words in his manifesto, such as crystalbluffmadonna and boomboom.  Either this word means something specific to Tzara, or they both share that opinion of words.
     Tzara says that the dada movement was born out of a need for independence and a dislike of togetherness.  He doesn't think that dada artists fit in with any style, as they see their art as protesting rather than interpreting.  He wants art that defies logic and are "beyond understanding," similar to Ball's ideas of newly invented words.  Tzara seems to lay out more clearly the goals of a dada artists, how they differ from the more popular styles, and how they view criticism and praise.  His manifesto is just that: a manifesto, while Ball's is more of a rant on his interpretation of the manifesto.  Both give a somewhat vague idea of what dada is, but it seems like that's the point.  Using the rough outline of the main principles, it's up to the artist to create his own version of dada

Hito Steyerl

     Steyerl's view on piracy is hard to determine.  On one hand, she seems to have a negative opinion of it, calling poor quality youtube videos of an old film a "pile of stuff," while she reveres non pirated yet equally poor quality films.  On the other hand, she says that piracy makes it possible for these films to be circulated efficiently despite not being popular in the overall society.  It seems like she doesn't have an opinion either way, and is just stating what she thinks is fact.  She uses a whole section of her article to talk about how privatization of media production destroyed the art film's presence in the mainstream entertainment culture, but goes on to say that circulation plays into some sort of commercial agenda. It's incredibly confusing to understand her.  It's clear that this article was for people who have some sort of vested interest in this kind of art and who understand the politics and history of art films, not for someone who's looking for a starting point to learn about it.
     One part that I thought was interesting was that she calls it an "art of the people."  She thought that by copying or distributing poor image media, people are also contributing to their production, as the digital copying will likely degrade the image further.  It makes sense after seeing her quote.  It's almost like the audience unintentionally becomes part of a performance piece by unknowingly altering the media when they copy it.  At one point, she talks about intentionally creating poor quality pieces, and I don't really know what the point of that is.  Steyerl says that it pushes against the fetishization of the not poor image, but why? What does a painting of pixelated missiles have to do with a dislike of clear images and modern technology?  I would assume that this kind of art falls under the blanket of conceptual art, and is more about the artist's intent than it is about the actual image.  I like that she describes some of it as the afterlife of an older piece, and that the poor quality copy is the only version of that piece in existence.  Based on the title of the article, I thought she was going to argue that the poor image, in general, was superior to clearer images, but, even though many of her points were to me convoluted, I now see that she was instead saying that the poor image is the only way some pieces can exist and still be appreciated.

Video Project

I wanted to do a video mocking the style of videos we saw in class as examples which showed the artist 'performing' some mundane activity for far too long and calling it art, such as in Bas Jan Ader's creepy crying and the smiling lady's video.  For my pointless act, I chose to film myself writing "I am not an artist" over and over again on some paper on a wall, then tearing it off.  I picked this phrase because anyone can create a video like this, and people will either see it as genius or nonsense, depending on whether or not he is an established artist.  I wanted to show that these kinds of videos, in my opinion, are stupid and ridiculous, but also that it doesn't really matter what I think if the artist considers what he does as art.

Collage Project

I originally wanted my collage to be about the hysteria of mass shootings on schools, hence all the people with guns.  I chose not to go all the way with that idea because I thought too many guns would look bad, plus there wasn't enough room for much else in spots that made sense.  I instead opted for all the pictures of faces and cats to represent the confusion and paranoia that are often instigated by the media after a mass shooting.  Fear mongering is a common tactic used by the mainstream media after a shooting to make the public scared of guns and to shift blame away from the real issue of the link between the killers and their history of mental illness and the prescription drugs that accompany them.