Media Fair Use

Copyright issues emerges when the Internet storytelling and sharing trend have evolved throughout the years, In Lawrence Lessig The Failure of Fair Use and the future of Free Culture, Lessig states that creators live with direct and indirect constraints, the constraints that are created by U.S law. Sexuality, copyright issues, and vandalism are especially covered in the discourse. In my opinion, media fair use is still a vague term, the definition of the restraints are constantly changing and violated in the name of art.

Man Ray's photograph of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain for example, sarcastically challenged the notion of copyright and media fair use. A photograph of another artist's art work counts as an independent art piece. In this situation, it is all about the idea that counts as art. The physical form of a piece withhold no signification of the art work than its message conveyed through itself.

In general, the age of Web 2.0 provides more and more chances for people out there to take other people's stuff transforming those to their own work. While contemplating the ownership issues regarding to the phenomenon, we should really pay special attention to the aura, the idea, and the message of the work instead of blindly accusing others of copying.

Transmedia Storytelling

I highly agree with Jenkins's opinion on the definition of transmedia storytelling: "Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story." Jenkins mentioned that we, as grassroots, factor the expansion and the spreading of the transmedia storytelling. In my opinion, the promotion and the circulation of the storytelling of one media is closely dependent on the grassroots.

As Jenkins said, the possibility of initiation to transmedia storytelling needs the original story's group of fans. Only if people like the story, the creator of the story will continue the development of the story world. This can be explained by so many cases. Take the movie Saw as an example, if the first Saw movie was not successful, the producer would not spend the rest of 6 Saw movies trying to explain all the unresolved clues and characters in the franchise.Also, fans contribute to those storytelling. When the second Saw movie came out, some avid Saw fans already guess the identity of the operator who implant the key into the first victim's eye socket in Saw2, some even predicted what happened to the doctor in the first movie who was never mentioned in the franchise until Saw 7. Words have been spread on Internet, and that fan based comics as well. Eventually, Saw video games were made too. And all of this contribute to keep the series moving.

In general, the formation of transmedia storytelling depends tightly on the dispersion of the story itself, and it needs the effort of both the grassroots and the story creator to survive. The interconnection of fans incites the brainstorm of the story, and the creators have an easy access to more inspiration to keep the storytelling going based on the favor of its fans.

Essence Of Photography

The indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity reveals the author's minor concern for using digital archive. That is, the challenge in achieving the goal of getting digital achive to work out is to find out a way to keep the image's aura. I highly agree that digital takes away the originality of the photograph making it not "authentic", whereas film possesses the essence of the image, being purely genuine.

Doane argued that the index of a photography is like trace or imprint, it is the impression of the real object, and it is limited to medium specificity. Doane used the example of M to explain how index is limited by medium specificity. The mise en scène in the frame serves as an index, however, what we see on screen is limited by the movement and the placement of the frame, which is controlled by a specific medium, the camera. The medium specificity of photography plays a huge role in the outcome of the image. Film, as a medium, limits the image to its originality. And, in terms of the original object and the photographed object, film possesses more authenticity of the photographed  objects than digital does. Because film is touched by the user's hands, it carries the stains, the ash, the imperfection at the moment, it reveals the user's trace of trying to fix it, and the most important part is, it possesses physicality and the trace of decay, in other words, it carries the history.The use of the example Decasia really showcased the importance of a image's physicality.

The idea of immateriality sounds fairly promising in the idea of digital achive. It takes aways the physical and retains only all the information, and it surely would make things permanent. However, as Doane said-"The photochemical image is an inscription, a writing of time", digital would lose all the image's history and the trace of time. This is why Doane described digital achive as a "fantasy",  keeping every trace of meaning, every ounce of originality, and the passage of history in digital is nearly impossible.Thus, film embodies the originality, the aura, meanwhile digital keeps nothing of its original but the indexicality.

Online Publishing and Storytelling

The age of web 2.0 provides us a grand opportunity to connect ourselves to the world. Blogging became an inevitable element of the web 2.0 culture and it gave birth to numerous Internet social groups and society. With every debut of all kinds of Noe-society, specific ethical guidelines and certain rules are always brought out, along with strategies on how to get popular. Storytelling is definitely for sure the most important part in succeeding in this new writing culture.

Brian Carroll brought out the issue of blogging ethics in the essay Blogito, ergo sum: Trends in Personal Publishing. Based on Carroll's writing, online publishing should follow similar guidelines as ones for other writings, such as: academic essays, published scholar journals, newspaper articles, etc. The content has to be as realistic as possible, materials from outside sources should be cited, content should be as precise as possible, the author should always remain objective not biased, etc. I personally think that it is responsible for an online publisher to remain ethical because the Internet is accessible to people in all age/professional/ethnic background, nobody would want to be misled, copied, or offended.

When concerning online publishing, storytelling guidelines are just as important. The content of a blog is constructed by text. Web 2.0 brought us so many different ways of storytelling in a multi-media sense. We can compose stories with limited words through twitter and facebook status, we can also use video to replace written texts, and we can document things through photography or audio recordings. The multi-storytelling way is no more innovative than storytelling styles in films. Take Citizen Kane for example, the storytelling style in the movie contains newspaper, flash forward, flash backs, voice over, photo montage, etc. Online publishing really made everyone the director of their own business and films.

Here is a video about a lecture on storytelling theory and practice.

Hypertext

the Idea of Hypertext

The idea that hypertext reveals readers' mental process is extremely agreeable in Landow G and Paul D's essay Hypertext, Hypermedia & Literary Studies: The State of the Art. The traditional way of reading is linear and discrete for the readers. Through traditional reading, we keep our thoughts to ourselves and let the content and the text of the reading material lead us to wherever it goes. However, Hypertext stories force its readers to make conscious decisions.

In general, when we pick a book and decide to read through it, first thing we do is to start following the direction that the author has already set for us. We know that we have to follow the plot in one direction and eventually we are going to be led to one exclusive ending of the material. This is what I mean by that the traditional way of reading is linear. Additionally, when we read the book, we do not keep a tack of our thoughts because there is only one way to go, therefore, we do not reveal our thought processes to others or even to ourselves. This is what I mean by saying traditional reading is also discrete-we keep our thoughts separate from the public and ourselves.

Hypertext provides us the opportunity to actually get involved in the story building process by giving us the option to select different story path. Trough this process, our thinking process would be documented and we actually put in effort making conscious plot-related decisions while reading. Hypertext is obviously the originality of modern Internet gadgets, such as: hyper links. It offers its reader the option to choose what they want to read and what not. This intractability pushed us to think and offers us more convenience to get to where we want to get in the reading.

In conclusion, hypertext breaks down the linear process that traditional reading offers. It provides its readers the option to choose its content-related direction and reveals their thought processes.

Here is a video of what hypertext is.

Gentrification Video Done

After 10 weeks of hard work me and Kanesha finally finished the production of poem and the music video. The video production is aiming to raise the awareness of gentrification in Chicago area. Kanesha did a fantastic job forming the basic concept into the video and making it a serious issue. And I hope it did help to make people aware of the fact that gentrification is destroying the lives of people in the lower social class. The stylish look of the video is only tyring to grasp the attention of the audience, what we are trying to convey is what we really want to show the audience. I will put the video in this post once we upload it online.

oops, here's the video.

Hype Williams

Harold "Hype" Williams was born in 1970, Queens NYC. He's currently known as a music video director. I found his style really unique. The use of color, green screen illusion, and "flashing screen" are commonly seen in his music video. I don't really know how to describe the "flashing screen" effect, but it is basically two frames are shown at the same time in a way of flashing over each other. In Christina Auguilera's music video Not Myself Tonight you can see the effect was shown in the second climax part of the song. Also this effect is also shown in lots of his videos.I'm especially intrigued by his use of color and the modern style he attributes to his work. This is something I want to put in our music video too.

Hype Williams

Here are some music videos of his that represent his style.










About our music video, we finished shooting 90% of the scene last Thursday-both studio shooting and outside shooting. Now it's just the time to put the pieces together and let the magic happen. Kanesha did a good job contributing political and social perspectives in the video and I'm trying my best to make the video stylish and aesthetically enjoyable.

Progress

We did not film any new footage this week, instead we did the intense editing for the whole week. Obviously using Final Cut Express to do green screen editing is a pain. It takes forever to rander! Kanesha finished the poster for the video and post it on zazzle.com.

Next week we are going to speed up the camera to capture some cool effects.



Production Blog

"The Garden of Forking Paths" by Jorge Borges, "Will there be Condominiums in Data Space?" by Bill Viola, and "The World-Wide Web" by Tim Berners all have a fundamental theme, which is the amorphous network. I especially like Bill Viola's point of view that life is supposed to be one big moment from birth to death, it is the days and nights that make us feel there are separations within life. That made me think that the whole data world is one big moment, maybe it did not change from the beginning at all, and what has changed is only our perception and mind. Just like the different online agency websites out there today that help us to promote ourselves,  the network existed from the beginning, however, we keep changing the way it works.

I found this absurd video on YouTube about social network. Enjoy!


We finished about 1/4 shooting for the music video. Here are our production pictures. I have been working on the green screen editing, and I have to say that it is a tedious job!

Mary Jane Jacob, Ray Johnson, and I

I find the idea of merging Buddhism into art quite interesting because I think art is about making statement and expressing thoughts or ideas. The medium of art is like a poet’s pen, and the content of art is the content of the poem. Poets express themselves by writing. Artists express themselves by making different types of art. But Mary Jane Jacob is going for the emptiness of art. After I read the article I somehow agree with lots of things in it. Mary Jane Jacob thinks art should be transient not permanent. Her idea is that the existence of art should only be there when it’s presented in front of the audiences thus the viewing experience of the audiences is a part of art. I have another theory, I think if art is an expression of some sort of emotion and no emotion lasts forever, thus art does not last forever and it should only be a temporary thing. The idea of having audiences’ viewing experience as a part of show reminds me of Allan Kaprow’s happening series. Even though Mary Jane Jacob is not a performing artist like Allan Kaprow, they both make audiences as a part of the show thus people would understand the concept and the essence of the show as an insider.

About Ray Johnson, judging from the depiction from How To Draw A Bunny, I think he made his style into an icon without copyright.

Ray Johnson

I've been writing screen play for the music video. The recording of the song and the poem are done. Too bad I can't upload the audio here because I don't know how.

This is one of the music videos I got inspired from in making our own music video.

Happening

Allan Kaprow's philosophy of art is unique and bold. Using event that is happening as a form of art is somewhat similar to performing art in my mind. However, he's different from lots of performing artist like Marina Abramavic. His way of presenting the art piece is to get the audiences involved and to let them be the part of the piece thus people would understand the essence of the piece while they are in the it. Nam June Paik's TV sculpture is also really avant-garde. The idea of creating an art form that is cybernetic seems obscure yet he successfully present it in front of the audiences. By combining videos with live performances, Nam June Paik managed to articulate his style.

Nam June Paik's TV sculpture

Last Friday, me and Kanesha did the green screen testing. It went pretty amazing actually. We figured out that all we have to do left is to get rid of the green edge in the video and to build a dolley. This project is happening and we might document the processes.

Here's a video of Allan Kaprow's style piece in NYC.

Every moment is art

Joseph Beuys

The idea of Fluxus is that anything could be art and the field of art is a melting pot. I think Joseph Beuys is an epitome among all the artists like that. He takes every single moment/event in life as pieces of art, which could be a little on edge to me. I personally agree that every moment in life could be art. I call it the art of life. I think we should constantly keep records of any events happened in life, in other words, I also think people who write diary are all artist. Bloggers are like sculptors, sculptors make things out of life, and bloggers sculpt every moment in life into their blogs. That explained how I agree with Joseph on the subject that life is art. However, I am not fond of his works of fat. I just don't think it's worth to be exhibited in a museum because it's just unfair for lots of young artists out there who devoted their perseverance and time into their works and still could not get them recognized and on display in a museum.

About my project. We are going to build filming dolly. The song is done and we are looking forward to directing and making it.

Reality Check

Not every story has a happy ending, or not every story has an ending. This is just like that not everything/event in life would have a closure or resolution. Unlike most of the mainstream films nowadays that bring the audiences. into their fantasy world, Stroszek pulls the audiences back to reality and imbues them with depression and hopelessness. At least to me, Bruno in Stroszek is pretty much hopeless, he is either going back to the mental institution back in Germany or he is going to be arrested and immured by American policemen. The ending is ambiguous yet leaving the audiences a few possible thoughts including Bruno might be arrested, Bruno might escape from the police but still ends up being a poor hopeless maverick, and Bruno could die from the cold in the brutal winter of the Midwest. I kept wondering if this is that kind of reality that Werner Herzog talked in the interview where he told the host that being shot was kind of cool. And this is the reality we all have because we cannot predict everything in life and we cannot make things the way we want them to be sometimes. That is why life is full of sorrow and joy. I believe Stroszek is only the epitome of one of those bleak scenes in life and reality is not all about being hopeless because we still have films that are with happy endings.

Bruno Stroszek

The music video project is going smoothly. We planed the timeline out and the first day of shooting is around the corner. I'm just doing research on green screen technology and I found this super cool tutorial online today with Johnny.

being nostalgic dose not make art non-art

Herzog on Herzog left me one impression of Werner Herzog, which is that the guy is obviously living in the past. To better explain my idea, Herzog mentioned in the interview that he dose not think art exists in modern world and creativity is outdated and antiquated. Also when talking about influences, he mentioned numbers of musicians and novelist in the past. He even said that he'd rather bring the Oxford English Dictionary when trapped on an island. To sum all of those up in my understanding, Herzog's ideology still stays in the age when all art pieces were considered original and non-profit. I call that nostalgia. For example, people who watched the 1974 version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when they were young think that film is a horror classic and the new 2003 version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is crap. If you check out the scores and message board on IMDB you will find lots of useless diatribes about how the new version sucks. They complained that the original was the best and the new one was changed a lot. This only means that those people who don't like the new version do not have an open mind for updated everything, thus they reject the creativity in the new one. Just like most people bitch about how much they do not like it when facebook updates its layout everytime. I completely disagree with Hezog's idea that there's no true art today just because he dose not see the creativity in modern days.


The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2003 (which is better than the original one in my opinion)

 
So about my project. I changed my plan from photographing sculpture pieces to making a music video with Kanesha. Unlike Herzog, I call this project art once it's done because it's all about creativity. We are still brainstorming ideas for the video and waiting for the beats finally to be finished. A music video is different from short films or documentaries because it , as being in the category of music video, has a special style. I've read an article on line before about techniques of making music videos and I cannot wait to try them out soon. By combining traditional techniques with new creativity, the work is going to be artistic and enjoyable. We are going to Chicago to take some shots of ghettos and liquor stores soon because the theme for the video is gentrification. I will think of more ideas once I listen to the music.

By the way, just compare the two trailers for the two version of "Massacre" and you will see which is better (clearly the new one is the best!)

1974 original one


2003 new and better one

Production log

I'm not amazed by the whole factory idea of Andy Warhol because of that when in film making, it could not be more normal that people with different backgrounds have to work together. Collaboration in art is especially important in film making because we need the person with cinematography background to film, theater background to act and direct, electronic background to set up the grid before filming, sound background do the sound engineering, etc. What caused my attention was that Andy Warhol's time capsule idea and the way he documented everything in his life. This really made me want to document my works in my sculpture class I'm taking this year. I'm planning on taking photographs of my art work in that class and make them into a book with my description. Documenting every details when I'm making my art behooves me not to be afraid of the loss of them in the future because they are captured permanently by camera.

Here's a picture of things I made the first week.

heels made out of cardboard

I checked out some of Andy Warhol's early work. I was surprised that he made lots of draft of heels just like I did. And the styles of the heels he designed are similar to mine. This gave me the inspiration of making heels. I will try to make all my sculpture art pieces relate to fashion and document them.

Here's a video of Fashion by Lady Gaga

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

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

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

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




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.