Rhizome

onewordmovie.ch

I spent hours and hours thinking of words to type into this search. The program allows the person to create a movie by typing in a subject to search, as if you were doing something in altavista, or google. It takes images from the web and creates a movie. Depeneding what you are searching, sometimes you get extremely poignant juxtapositions. Besides a creative way of wasting your time, is this truly a work of multimedia?

The very fact that it allows you to create a movie allows a shift to occur between reader and writer or in this case viewer and director. How much of this movie is actually yours and how much is it the person who developed this program. Another dimension to this is whether or not the internet, and everyone who posts pictures dealing with your search word had something to do with this work of art. Which brings up the inherent global aspects of this piece. The internet is an extremely interactive and global space. People from everywhere can post things, edit and search. Every person who adds to the internet will somehow add to the composite of images that may show up in "your" movie.

Abolishing Logic

Being immersed in an academic setting, it is easy to get lost in metaphysical debate. We, the civilized world relies so much authority on a process that we invented. Most inventions break down, they are machines, vehicles if you will to make life if not easier much more interesting. From what I can tell Logic was invented to allow us to find a place where in this space there are other things that allow us to move forward and live. Let's call this mystical place, truth. So what does this have to do with multimedia? In Ted Nelson's book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, the idea of hypermedia is introduced. We use his ideas everyday when searching the internet for facts, pleasure, even truth. Hypermedia however doesn't follow a linear, logical path to truth, it takes major leaps and interesting detours. Yet is the truth we find through this method any more valid than the one we find through logic? Both are human made concepts to help us construct order out of chaos.

Reaction to David Ross Lecture

If the frontier of art is really in question, it seems entirely probable that artists, critics and patrons alike would look to the new innovation of technology to guide the way. Like the ancient Greek culture, most of western society holds progress to be the ultimate goal. Being completely unaware that a lot of art being produced today does not manifest itself in the usual museums and galleries but on URL's coming to you on your personal computer came as a shock. What does this say about our historic way of looking at how art is showcased and commented on? It is well known that the Internet has made volumes of information available to us, but why isn't it known that art as well has become much more available? Why isn't it well known that most of art's innovations are right out there on the web, interactive bits and pieces of a veritable gold mine of ideas? Perhaps this net.art that Ross refers to is still on the fringe, or maybe because not enough light has been shed on this topic to the public, or maybe because the art is so effective as a multimedia it is hard to pinpoint if the piece of programming is for all intents and purposes, art?

Reflections on "Visual Media"

My first impression of the exhibit "Visual Music" at the Hishhorn Museum, oooh cool look at the lights. I wasn't actually sure that I was going to be able to comprehend everything that was going to be displayed. Yet as we took the time to explain the motive behind each movement of art, as well as the techniques used to create it a light slowly came on. As my professor said at the beginning of a music theory class, "music is perhaps the most concise language of emotions ever invented." Whether or not a piece of music is performed well or not, it is hard for the audience not to have an emotional reaction to it. Even when a parent protests a child selection of music and deems it as noise, there was a reaction. With visual art, however it seems easier to ignore, or to look over. In this exhibit visual artists tried through various means to evoke the same kind of response music has with a primarily visual medium. The different pieces addressed the several parts of music, as almost presenting an autopsy of a particularly moving symphony. A couple of traditional canvas, or paper and paint pieces addressed aspects of music such as form, movement, texture, color (timbre). Other pieces incorporated sound with moving images or the absence of sounds with moving images. Each work tries to convey an elemental, emotional response. Some pieces were more effective immediately than others, but each upon closer inspection, began to communicate the ever-elusive essence of music.

Reaction to the Overture

The introduction or overture as it is called in the book Multimedia: from Wagner to Virtual Reality sets up a platform that enables a variegated discussion on multimedia; its concepts, its theory and its innovations. The difficulty to define what is and what isn't multimedia draws strong parallels to the many great philosophical questions of human culture. To ask the question what is multimedia is similar to ask the questions; what is quality, what is music, what is art. What could have been a minefield of incomprehensible explanations became an elegant platform on which to talk about a subject that is forever changing. A plebeian such as I had no idea what Multimedia consisted of, who would of thought that the seemingly archaic art-form of opera could provide the basis of something so cutting edge as keeping a real-time journal of events on a network of incredibly expanding proportions? The historical view of computer technology has made this subject less boring and more accessible. To think that my personal computer came from the artistic desire to communicate interactively with an audience. Scientific advancements through this introduction ceased to be merely cold unfeeling experiments performed in a laboratory. They became innovations in art and society. The computer becomes a vehicle by which to create, and not just a tool to muddle through daily assignments.