Monday, November 22, 2010

Experimental Film

My project is an experimental film called A Schizophrenic Man on PCP.  A schizophrenic guy gets his own super power and fights the evil. In the video, I experimented some fun functions that final cut express provides.

pcp pills

Artistic Statement

As a psychology major, I'm really into psychological drugs and diseases. I have always wondered what would happen if a delusional schizophrenic patient takes some sort of hallucinogens. Schizophrenia itself creates hallucinations for the patients already and it gives the patient credible delusions, with the vivid hallucination that PCP brings maybe the patient will have super power.

My YouTube Channel

Friday, November 12, 2010

From one to more than a thousand

complexity of rhizome

In A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the comparison between writing and botanical roots made me think that human thought process is like a tiny computer system. This idea of rhizome in writing and thinking is kind of beyond my ability to comprehend. However, it did form a image of how our thoughts keep twigging into more and more branches and finally form into a certain types of ideology though the article stated that it's different from ideology. That is how I perceive computer programing: thousands of files are actually the derivative result of one single parent file. In my opinion, this could be similar to all the derivative result of new media like Internet, Web sites, computer multimedia, computer games, CD-ROMs, and DVDs as stated in Lev Manovich's article New Media From Borges to HTML. Through the development of new media, it gradually forms into this new system of rhizome.

Enjoy this new media art installation

Monday, November 8, 2010

Marina Abramovic-The Mirror of The Public


Before I started the research of Marina Abramovic, I slightly browsed through some of her works. My first impression was that there must be something wrong with this crazy woman. Since has when pain and agony become a form of art? When I saw the video on the article on telegraph.co.uk regarding her earliest work Rhythm 10, I started to understand her better. She said that the reason she was doing all those extreme form of performance is because that she wants to bring people's fear of dying, fear of pain, fear of suffering in front of the public. She symbolized herself as the mirror of the public, which means the audiences can see their own fear of suffering through watching Abramvoic.

Rhythm 10


Another work of her made me realize that this mirror also reflects our desire. In her work Rhythm 0, she was placing herself to the public to let people do whatever they want to do to her.

Rhythm 0

Her relationship with another artist Ulay is also interesting to look. They seem to both appreciate this agony as the form of art. Unfortunately, they parted after their epic walk on the Great Wall of China. In my opinion, the walk symbolizes the end of their chronicle cooperating journey.

The Great Wall Walk

Her most recent piece was in MoMA, NYC.  With Marina sitting in the middle of the room, any audience can choose to sit in front of her for as long as they can. Most of them ended up crying. Maybe through the mirror of this great artist, people got overwhelmed by their own agony. This made me realize that Marina's work truly let people to feel the existence of art itself and to literally relate the audiences to the piece of art.

The Artist Is Present

Friday, November 5, 2010

The Message

the medium message

For some reason I got super annoyed by Marshall McLuhan's nearly unintelligible article The Medium Is the Message. Here's what I get from the article. First, the content of one medium can be thousands of things, like a computer can play music and movies, and can allow you to skype with your family and friends. And the message of the medium is like a grammar, like the message of a computer is processing information in a fast way, thus an extension of human brain. At last, one who cannot tell the difference between the message and the content of a medium is incarcerated in an invisible prison. In contrast, one who can interpret a medium can cause a revolution in this world by the medium. For example, IBM is one of the largest computer, technology and IT corporation in the world instead of  being a office supply making company according to the article. If my understanding is somewhat correct, I assume one has to know the meaning or the message of what they are using and wanting in order to create something valuable with that medium.

All in all, my thesis is that, you have to truly comprehend the meaning of a medium in order to utilize it to the fully extent and to achieve its incisive effect on the human society.

And I found this video about a prisoner of iphone4




Wednesday, November 3, 2010

necessity of gore

I made this 3 videos to show the relationship between gore and suspense in films. When film industry was not as flourishing as it is today, the suspense and storyline of a horror film were major parts of our viewing experiences. As cinematic technology developed over the past years, now people can make gory scene more convincing than before. A transformation in horror films began from being more suspenseful less gory to majorly gore and less suspense. I put all the videos in my YouTube Channel.

My first video is Bloody Vomiting. I am actually just making fun of the gory content in contemporary horror film showing that besides bloody red gooey stuff, there's nothing left to see.
This is easy to film. All I needed were corn syrup, food color, toilet paper, and canned soup.

My second video is called From Suspense to gore. I'm trying to show the comparison between suspense and gore in films from the past to today.


My third video is called Self-explanation. I was basically explaining my direction and purpose in the two other clips. I was intending to make it look like a pseudo-professional filmmaker interview.