Prospectives '12 Paper

Prospectives 2012 International Festival of Digital Media

           

The Prospectives International Festival of Digital Media kicked off on the 18^th of October and continued through the 19^th. There were three events that not only intrigued me, but also fit my schedule. I was able to attend part of the present panel discussion on the 18^th, a street event also on the 18^th, and then a project/sound event on the 19^th.

            On the 18^th I was able to attend the panel discussion that was held in the Joe Crowley Student Union building. Unfortunately, I was unable to go to all of it, but was able to sit through quite a bit of the last panel discussion with artists Morehshin Allayari, Conor Peterson, F. Myles Sciotto and Annie Wan and found what the artists were talking about interesting. I showed up right as Wan was discussing her project of Around the Corner and was only able to catch the tail end of her presentation. I thought that I had missed the entirety of the last discussion panel for the day, but then the question arose of whether or not technology is gendered. Most of the artists agreed that they had never really thought about it before and that males and females will pick things up differently like colors and textures and they look at the world differently, so of course their art is going to be different. They all addressed the fact that there is a clear gap that exists, but that based on gender an artist will pursue their work in a different way and approach technology and the way they use it differently. There was not a lot that I was able to visually see during the panel discussion, but it definitely opened my mind to the different works that we have seen in class over the past few projects and how Carl and Brian have both approached them differently than the rest of us. It has also been interesting to keep this in mind throughout the rest of the semester while listening to their critiques along with Ben’s versus the rest of the class.  When it has been a visual assignment girls are more about how it looks, the color, the images used, is it cute, is it calm looking, and things like that. Whereas the guys in the class have seemed to be more concerned with the meaning behind the project and the underlying messages of ones project rather than the way it looks.

The next event that I was able to attend was probably my least favorite and the least interesting out of the three events that I was able to make it to. The street event I went to was Clint Sleeper’s Card Player and Computer. I went to it the night of the 18^th when it was set up outside the Church Fine Arts building. He set up a bunch of equipment and had a tarp laid out so that spectators could sit and participate in the card game. His piece was supposed to question the relationship between technology and street art. He used an audio processing system and had guitar effects and other neat audio effects playing to combine a somewhat eerie technologic sound. I don’t think I liked it that much because I didn’t really understand what his project was trying to portray or how it was classified as street art. It was just not at all what I had expected.

The last event I attended was my absolute favorite. It was the project/sound exhibit held in dome at the Fleischmann Planetarium. Four artists showed work, which was specifically designed to be shown in the dome and it was seriously neat. The first artist, Brian Baumbush, was my favorite out of the three. He piece involved sine wave samples to create symmetrical scales that produced different tones and beats because of their parallel relationship. As a new sound was introduced the line would change and would go faster or slower depending on the sound that was produced. His project used the dome the best out the four that were shown and I don’t think that it would have had the same visual effect if it were to be shown in a computer screen or projected out onto a flat surface.  Seeing it in the dome really made you almost feel like you were in the project with these lines and different sounds. It was a really neat feeling that I have never experience before and took the idea of being immersed into art to a different level.

The next artist was Josh Golman who used an image of a mouth, which would make different sounds and noises. To me this one was just weird and I didn’t like watching it. It got a little uncomfortable and I found that I can only watch a mouth making unusual noises for so ling before I cannot look at it anymore and had to close my eyes through the rest of it because it just got way to weird. His image was also a flat image that only projected on to the front part f the dome and didn’t successfully use the entirely of the dome like Baumbusch’s project did.

The third artist was Nick Hwang. I think his project was supposed to do more than it actually did because he explained it as a fixed media piece where an expanding line would repeat itself until completed but it just ended up being composed sound and no image at all. This was unfortunate because I think his project would have come through a lot better if the line would have showed up and it wouldn’t have just been composed sound because it was not as visually appealing to sit in the dark and hear sounds. Although I do have to admit that there is something about listening to music in the dark that makes it visually appealing. It allows your imagination to see the music and not just hear it. Once I realized that the image was not going to show up I just used my ears and the composed sound came alive in my imagination.

The last artist was Phan Visutyothapibal and he actually used the audience to help his represent his piece, which made it even more visually appealing because it was like the piece was in the hands of the audience and the people who were able to go up and interact with it. He used a stethoscope hooked up to a microphone to make ones heartbeat visually appear through a projected image on the dome. It was really neat to actually see the heart beat of one appear. It was also cool to see how the lines would change and react differently if one was to speak or make noises. I think this one was one of the coolest because the image and sound depended on the person who was interacting with it. This was not a piece that was fixed it is forever changing, which made it extremely neat.

In conclusion to the events that I attended during the Prospectives 2012 International Festival of Digital Media I found the present panel discussion the most interesting, the street the most confusing and less interesting, and the project/sound event the most visually intriguing. I love working with sound and images so I found it interesting that this is the events that intrigued me the most. I was very interested in the projects that these artists came up with and how they were able to create these images and compose sound to go with these images and make their pieces come together in such unique ways.