"The Quintet of the Astonished" by Bill Viola

http://vimeo.com/15130088

      This is a very short work in time but is also very slow. Even a breath can be last for half of one minute. The name of it is easy to understand, all the five people`s expression shows their astonished and sad. Maybe they have just gotten the news of losing some loved ones. I can see the every second detail of the changing in the motion. Even without sound and words, I can perceive their naturally reveal of sadness.

      As for the picture of the work, this is a very important element because the position of the five people don`t change a lot and it is more like a slightly transformation picture. We can see that the five people are tightly together, but this cannot help ease the grief. What`s more, the color of it is quite dark but by no means it is not able to draw the audiences` attention.

      Anyway, this distortion of time gives us a new aspect to learn and understand the world.

Jaka Zeleznikar: Fragments of Distances (a short digital story)

          

               This is my first time to see someone using the moving Google map as the background. It makes me feel like I am flying and looking at the ground. At first, I was quite wondering why this work could be defined as generative art. After I have browsed the whole work, I think the four pages make up this work and they are one. The map, the picture and the text remind me of the big and beautiful world and the love between human beings. Maybe we are so small in this world, but we have so many things to enjoy and to give others. Our life is meaningful.

Jared Tarbell's website

 

http://www.levitated.net/daily/levIsoblocks.html 

         In this work, I can see dices in different colors, sizes, positions and orientations appears one by one in the screen. And some appears just inside or outside a larger one. Their places are in a specific order and the color is gradually changed from left to right. It makes viewers think about the new things born one by one and this process seems will never end, such as the rebirth and death of life and the repeated history. The growing number of dices are units, and they makes up the dynamic screen which is the entirety.

         As generative works, Jared Tarbell`s works on website is much different from other generative art. They have more technique on computer science and they can be interactive. (In this work I choose, there is no user interaction. ) what`s more, it is very creative to show art programme on the website. 

Sol LeWitt`s generative works

 

 

"Solomon "Sol" LeWitt (September 9, 1928 – April 8, 2007) was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism.
LeWitt came to fame in the late 1960s with his wall drawings and "structures" (a term he preferred instead of "sculptures") but was prolific in a wide range of media including drawing, printmaking, photography, and painting." 

——Wiki

LeWitt not only paints abstract painting, but also design many generative architecture.

Generative Art

According to wikipedia the defenition of generative art is:

“Generative art refers to art that has been generated, composed, or constructed in an algorithmic manner through the use of systems defined by computer software algorithms, or similar mathematical or mechanical or randomised autonomous processes.” 

  

                             

I think the is a quite typical form of contemporary art. I think if finishing this kind of work in a traditional method, it will take a very long time to do it and it is quite difficult. However, nowadays we can complete this king of design with the help of programming which makes it much more precise in the mathematical way.

      As for the artists, they can do the design more casually than making other kind of painting. Through the changes of color and lines, the outcome may be amazing to the audience. And the beauty of Generative Art not only in the elegant graph which bring us the visual sense, but also in the different imaginations brought to different people.

 

mediations——Gary Hill

     

       This is a work of experimental cinema. In the picture, a loud speaker is saying what is happening and a hand gradually covers the loud speaker with sand. As a result, the sound becomes vague as the sand on the loud speaker more and more.

     

          I think what Gary Hill tries to express is that the power of people`s thinking and speech can`t be turned down by some outside elements. The sand just stands for a kind of natural things, which tends to cover the voice and make it silent. However, the sound can`t totally disappear no matter how much sand over the loud speaker. And the sound just keep repeating ”A voice……” which sounds peaceful and ignores the sand. I think it is an interesting idea to do this.

Wavelength——Michael Snow

Snow is considered one of the most influential experimental filmmakers and is the subject of retrospectives in many countries. In his 2002 Village Voice review of *Corpus Callosum, J. Hoberman writes: “Rigorously predicated on irreducible cinematic facts, Snow's structuralist epics—Wavelength and La Région Centrale—announced the imminent passing of the film era. Rich with new possibilities, *Corpus Callosum heralds the advent of the next. Whatever it is, it cannot be too highly praised.” *Corpus Calossum was screened at the Toronto, Berlin, Rotterdam, and the Los Angeles film festivals amongst others. In January 2003, Snow won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Douglas Edwards Independent Experimental Film/Video Award for *Corpus Callosum. His numerous films have premiered in major film festivals all over the world. Five of his films have premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). In 2000, TIFF commissioned Snow with Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg to make short films, Preludes, for the 25th Anniversary of the festival. Wavelength has been designated and preserved as a "masterwork" by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada[3] and was named #85 in the 2001 Village Voice critics' list of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century .

                                                                             ——http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Snow 

      I guess this film is made by three fixed videos taken by camera. One is a row of windows and a street in front of it, the other is the back of a room whose color and exposure changes and light is flaring. There are also people appears in the picture. I can see a person with a coat walking on the street and lain down（maybe die?）. I can hear some people sing a song. And there is an electronic sound going through the whole film, which becomes higher in the end.

   

     This film is structurally like a dream. Because the sound and the people`s behaviors are no related. Everything seems has no meaning but actually this is our life, which is so simple and peaceful. The sea appears in the end of the film takes the place of the normal life. I guess the artist want to compare the daily life of human beings to the sea which will never stop flowing.

Meshes of the Afternoon——Maya Deren

           “ Maya Deren (April 29, 1917, Kiev – October 13, 1961, New York City), born Eleanora Derenkowskaia (Russian: Элеоно́ра Деренко́вская), was one of the most important American experimental filmmakers and entrepreneurial promoters of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer. The function of film, Maya believed, like most art forms, was to create an experience; each one of her films would evoke new conclusions, lending her focus to be dynamic and always-evolving.[1] She combined her interests in dance, voodoo and subjective psychology in a series of surreal, perceptual, black and white short films. Using editing, multiple exposures, jump cutting, superimposition, slow-motion and other camera techniques to her fullest advantage, Deren creates continued motion through discontinued space, while abandoning the established notions of physical space and time, with the ability to turn her vision into a stream of consciousness. Perhaps one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema was her collaboration with Alexander Hammid on Meshes of the Afternoon. She continued to make several more films on her own including At Land, A Study in Choreography for Camera, and Ritual in Transfigured Time – writing, producing, directing, editing, and photographing them with help from only one other person, Hella Heyman, as camerawoman. She also appeared in a few of her films but never credited herself as an actress, downplaying her roles as anonymous figures rather than iconic deities.”

                                                                ——http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Deren

  

                This movie is very exciting though it makes me indeed very confused. A woman picked up a flower, opened the door, a knife on the bread, went to upstairs, slept in a chair…… the repeated scenes and the provoking changes make me very confused. As the story progressed, I think the woman is dreaming and the dream shows her disturbance and suspicion of man.

 I guess the door stands for her mind, and the man comes into it. But she is afraid of his thoroughly master of her. As a result, the man becomes a mirror-face person in her dream. In the end, the woman dies in her suffering caused by herself.

           Another things of the movie impresses me a lot is the way it uses to show the woman`s psychological activity. Such as the shaking stairs, the key dropped out, the changing of the key and the knife…… Although this way to tell a story is quite strange and we may get confused, it is actually very interesting. What`s more, as an experimental films, it is a successful work I think.

Cybernetics

Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems, their structures, constraints, and possibilities. Cybernetics is relevant to the study of systems, such as mechanical, physical, biological, cognitive, and social systems. Cybernetics is applicable when a system being analyzed is involved in a closed signaling loop; that is, where action by the system generates some change in its environment and that change is reflected in that system in some manner (feedback) that triggers a system change. Originally referred to as a “circular causal” relationship. Some say this is necessary to a cybernetic perspective. System Dynamics, a related field, originated with applications of electrical engineering control theory to other kinds of simulation models (especially business systems).

Concepts studied by cyberneticists (or, as some prefer, cyberneticians) include, but are not limited to: learning, cognition, adaption, social control, emergence, communication, efficiency, efficacy, andconnectivity. These concepts are studied by other subjects such as engineering and biology, but in cybernetics these are abstracted from the context of the individual organism or device.

Cybernetics was defined in the mid 20th century, by Norbert Wiener as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.” Cybernetics from the Greek meaning to “steer” or “navigate.” Contemporary cybernetics began as an interdisciplinary study connecting the fields of control systems, electrical network theory, mechanical engineering, logic modeling, evolutionary biology,neuroscience, anthropology, and psychology in the 1940s, often attributed to the Macy Conferences. During the second half of the 20th century cybernetics evolved in ways that distinguish first-order cybernetics (about observed systems) from second-order cybernetics (about observing systems). More recently there is talk about a third-order cybernetics (doing in ways that embraces first and second-order).

Fields of study which have influenced or been influenced by cybernetics include game theory, system theory (a mathematical counterpart to cybernetics), perceptual control theory, sociology, psychology (especially neuropsychology, behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology), philosophy, architecture, and organizational theory.

 all above from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetic

             When I first searched for this word, I was quite wondering what the connection between cybernetics and art was. I have learned that this is to study the rule of communication between animals and machine. I think this rule can not only be used in this small field, it can also refer to our society, science, psychology…… As for art, it can be also very useful because it may explain how the art work affect people and why people come up with a certain idea in a scientific way. We can also discover that what kinds of artwork are more popular in different background…. 

Science Friction 1959（Stan Vanderbeek）

VanDerBeek studied art and architecture first at Cooper Union College in New York and then at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he met architect Buckminster Fuller, composer John Cage, and choreographer Merce Cunningham. VanDerBeek began his career in the 1950s making independent art film while learning animation techniques and working painting scenery and set designs for the American TV show, Winky Dink and You. His earliest films, made between 1955 and 1965 mostly consist of animated paintings and collage films, combined in a form of organic development.

VanDerBeek's ironic compositions were created very much in the spirit of the surreal and dadaist collages on Max Ernst, but with a wild, rough informality more akin to the expressionism of the Beat Generation. In the 1960s, VanDerBeek began working with the likes of Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow, as well as representatives of modern dance, such as Merce Cunningham and Yvonne Rainer. Building his Movie Drome theater at Stony Point, New York, at just about the same time, he designed shows using multiple projectors. These presentations contained a very great number of random image sequences and continuities, with the result that none of the performances were alike.

His desire for the utopian led him to work with Ken Knowlton in a co-operation at Bell Labs, where dozens of computer animated films and holographic experiments were created by the end of the 1960s. Between 1964 and 1967 Vanderbeek created Poem Field, a series of 8 computer-generated animations with Ken Knowlton.

During the same period, he taught at many universities, researching new methods of representation, from the steam projections at the Guggenheim Museum to the interactive television transmissions of his Violence Sonata broadcast on several channels in 1970. He ran the University of Maryland, Baltimore County visual arts program until his death.

 ——http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Vanderbeek

      

         On the last week`s tutorial class, we watch this amazing work which is made up with many moving pictures. It is my first time to see this form to produce a film and it is really funny.

        In the film, there are many similar contents such as scientists, rockets, instruments, leaders…… I think Stan Vanderbeek against the war and at that time maybe the officials asked the scientists to invent more weapon such as rockets or biochemical weapon to make their country stronger. But they ignore the humanity and this kind of pursuit will make the world tends to extreme.

     Actually, all above is just my personal understanding and I think this work is really a fascinating one, not only the rich color and pictures, but also the message it conveys.