Mr. Dot

Artist Statement:

         Imagine, if our eyes can only capture a single picture per minute. The only thing that matters to other people's eyes is that single moment of every minute. You can do potentially anything in that minute to perfectly portray yourself to others. For example, each minute, you can jump at the exact time that people can see. To others, you are flying! This is what inspired me for my shot film stop motion animation, Mr. Dot.

Synopsis:

         Mr. Dot is a stop motion film with a playful taste of different interactions between objects in two and three dimension. The main character, Mr. Dot, is a black colored dot on a whiteboard. He never was satisfied with his current life. One day, he decided to set off for a new adventure.  Lost in his world, Mr. Dot travels from place to place seeking for something new in his life. By some dumb luck, he finds a strange hole that leads him from the two dimensional whiteboard into the three dimensional world. He meets new objects, slowly opening his eyes to the new world. What is going to happen?

What is New Media???

Lev Monavich

Let me first say this, I have never heard of the term "New Media" until I read the book The New Media Reader. Apparently the new media has something to do with internet and society. Well, I am a computer scientist, born with a keyboard in my hand. Anything to do with internet is within my grasp, yet this term has never made it to me. After reading New Media from Borges to HTML by Lev Manovich (one of the author of The New Media Reader), it seem that I have missed something important.

Manovich talks about the new media by listing the following eight propositions:
-  not cyberculture
-  distribution platform
-  digital data
-  mix between culture and software
-  aesthetics that accompanies the early stage of every new modern media and communication technology
-  faster execution of algorithms
-  metamedia
-  parallel articulation of similar ideas of post WWII Art and modern computing

After reading all this, I think to myself, "and?". Sure, Monavich can come up with all this stuff and talk about it for many pages. I just don't see the point of coining the term and go on so long about it. It does not seem to concern me, a  hardcore computer scientist. Maybe I am just pessimistic or tired of reading such a useless long article that holds no new information for me. Maybe it is for Art community as some people mentioned. Maybe there is actually someone who can use this stuff out there. But I for one, do not salvage anything from reading it.

People who kind of agree with me. They know their stuff, yet does not really care:


On an unrelated note: I have also read "From A Thousand Plateaus" by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. They try to describe the Rhizome. What I get out of it is, the idea of something being connected to other things. In the end it is all connected. I guess it is a structure reference. Like the internet per say, one website in connected to other website and those connect to others, and so on.

Nam June Paik: The Elvolution of His Work

Nam June Paik

 Nam June Paik was an artist who was quite ahead of his time. Some referred him as the father of video art. Paik was born in Seoul, Korea in 1932. His early interest was music but with a fortunate luck, he met up with John Cage and George Maciunas. He then found the Happening and Fluxus. From then he start to take on interest in art. By 1963, he has his first art piece up, TV Clock. His fascination about television led him to spend the rest of his life creating video arts.

TV Clock, 1963

He transformed from his early works that deals with only a single straight line on 24 black and white televisions to dealing with 1003 televisions with full color display playing different things at different time. His most renowned work was the Electronic Superhighway in 1995.

Electronic Superhighway (313 TVs)

The More the Better, 1988 (1003 TVs)

In 1984, he was the first one to do live satellite installation work. It was called Good Morning Mr. Orwell. The piece refers to a book from 1949 written about 1984. The book talks about Mr. Orwell's dystopian. The community where free will and privacy and taken away by all the surveillance and mind control. I linked the video down below. Enjoy!

Messy Age => Mess Age => Message!

Early Portrait of professor Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a media theorist who wrote a book called The Medium is a Massage. The infamous book title was a misprint of his original quote "the medium is a message". To understand the statement, we need to explain his definition of medium and message. In our society, we always separate technology and its contents into two different categories. Technology refers to television, telephone, electricity, and etc. Whereas the content refers to television program, speech from the telephone, messages on billboard with lights and etc. Medium in this case is the technology that carries the message, hence the medium. On the other hand, message is the content that came through the medium, hence the message. For McLuhan, there is indeed no difference between the two. 

The gun replica was a cut-out from the book The Medium is a Massage

Here is why: McLuhan believed that the content distribution is made possible by the medium. Without one, the content could never have been published. Thus the making of the medium is the beginning of a message and is a part of the content. Some people said that the 'content' (ie, TV programs) is what moves us forward, but McLuhan said otherwise. The technology is what moved us forward and it is the change in technology that shape the society.

    

A page from The Medium is a Massage

I say, while that is very insightful and deep in a way, I don't agree with it totally. McLuhan claimed the absolute and ignore the 'content' (refereed above). I think it is the combination of both worlds. Side to side the technology and the content shapes up our society. Take Facebook for example, the making of it helps us to connect to other people. But to actually connect to one another, one needs to post pictures and messages. Otherwise, the website has no meaning. Even if the implementation of the website could not have been better, the lack of content will render the website useless.

After the book publication took off so well, he published an audio that contain a similar technique he used in his book. This is the visual recreation of it by celestial elff.

The Medium Is The Message - Watch today’s top amazing videos here

There is something in the water!

Photo of water drops by *Corrie* from Flickr

    It has been told that human body is made up of 60% of water. The world is made up of 75% water and the rest land. It is simply amazing how we take water for granted. I can be all green and environmental about water but that is not my intention of bringing the topic up. We see water drips everyday everywhere but most of us did not take time to appreciate it.  Look at the picture above. It is taken by dropping two drops of color water. Of course, we cannot see such a thing everyday, and when it happens, it is too fast for us to appreciate. So as a tribute to the beauty of water, I dedicated my project to water and its beauty.

For my first video, the task was to shoot a minute video without editing. I once learned a trick with wine glass and water. Yes, it is the glass harp. I gathered up all the wine glasses I can find (from Dorothea) and fill the water up to the exact frequency of different sound waves. The rest is simply setting the angle and make some music! The result? Check it out below:

The second video was to find the footage on the internet and remix them into some meaningful way. So going back to my water theme. I found a couple of water footage in slow motion. With a bit of cutting and looping, I was able to make some connections between them. I also found the song Will of the Heart from a Japanese Anime Bleach that fits perfectly into what I am trying to bring out. With a little cut up and remix, the song lines up like magic! To ensure the copyright people do not come to take me away, I added water dripping and soft rain sounds. However, it hinders the full experience. Anyways, here it is, Sounds of Water.




To be completely honest, I ran out of ideas for the third video. The rules were that I suppose to find some footage online, create some on my own, and mix them up in a meaningful way. So I thought I should just combine the two ideas above. The making of it was painful. Glass harps are not easy to make when you have access to only one kind of glass. I wanted to play the harp with a selected song. I ended up spent 2 hours filming different notes from the glasses. Then I notice that some notes were simply impossible to achieve. So I have to work with what I got and find a song that matches it. Unfortunately, 1 more hour of song search did not turn up well at all. So I gave up on the song that match, just went with whatever I feel like, and worked with it. So I found this Arabic music. it sounds really relaxing and goes really well with the sounds of glass harp. I sync up my harp notes with the song and some really really cool footage of water droplets. I call it Arabic Water Motion, to honor the song.



I hope you enjoy the show!