Response to "What Is Digital Cinema?"

This article seemed almost angry to me. I felt like Manovich was upset at the changing techniques of cinema. He talks about the history of cinema, and how now the technology is "destroying cinema's identity as a media art". He seems especially upset since he believes animation is terrible, " ... all of this was delegated to cinema's bastard relative, its supplement, its shadow -- animation" I don't understand why he would be upset since he is a new media person. I don't necessarily agree with him the the use of computers to generate images in film is creating cinema to become a part of animation. I think they may be blurred a little bit, but I still think cinema has its own characteristics that make it unique.

Response to "The Technology and the Society" and "The Television Delivers the People"

"The Television Delivers The People"

I really liked this film. I thought it effective the way it used the medium it was criticizing. I like the elevator type music in the background. It made the message seem so harmless. It used the same tactics normal television uses to draw in its viewers. As a viewer I could see people being very shocked and upset by the messages being shown. The messages were very dated though, I kept thinking about this work in the time I was created instead of today. I think that today it doesn't function very well since this message has been stated over and over.

"The Technology and the Society"

I thought this article was also dated. It was kind of nice to see the background of the medium we are using, but the ideas seemed old and I don't feel like I learned much from it.

Response to In, Around, and Afterthoughts

This article kind of made me loose all my trust and interest in documentary artwork. It took a very negative look at this art form. I always thought of documentary as going out in the world and showing what is going on truthfully, but now I realize thats an impossible task. That means documentary is just for entertainment sake, "Documentary testifies, finally, to the bravery or (dare we name it?) the manipulativeness and savvy of the photographer, who entered a situation of physical danger, social restrictedness, human decay, or combinations of these and saved us the trouble" (180). This goes on to talk about how the photographer creates artwork to entertain the viewer, and then talks about the photo of the man and boy on a bike in paris with berets on a bicycle with baguettes tied to the back on the tree lined streets of paris. This image was completely staged by the artists using his driver and the driver's nephew. This image was used to advertise for tourism for France. The thing is, when I saw this image originally I really thought how nice it looked and how nice it must be to go to France, now I find out that if I did go to France it would be impossible to find a scene like this since it was all staged. This image was then recreated to be used in a Visa advertisement. This makes me so angry, I know not to trust everything I see, but I thought I could trust the documentary art form to show the truth. Later this article talks about how the people in the images will many times live in trailers and never see a dime for their photo, but at the same time the artist makes thousands of dollars from one picture that is reproduced and put up everywhere. There are many times that documentaries can actually hurt the subject. The mud-men for example have lost much of their cultural independence, they used to wear their masks to scare away their enemies, but now they wear them to attract tourism. After reading this article I feel cheated in a lot of what I thought was true, I don't see the good in banking on someone else's pain.

Response to "Bring Da Noise: A Brief Survey of Sound Art"

I really don't like sound. I don't know what to do with it and I have no idea how to work with it. I've tried several times and it's always just been a battle that I end up losing. This article did not give me a love for sound in anyway, but I do think I have a better understanding of what it is now. I really enjoyed getting an overall summery of sound as an art form. I was really shocked to see its been around since 1902, but then I still feel as though it doesn't really have any parameters so you can argue that its been around as long as sound has been around. This article definitely gave me something to grasp and think about when I'm thinking about my own work.
It was interesting to see how the medium changed as the world changed. I also found it interesting that this article stated that sound art has used technology in its practice, but doesn’t make the work about the technology. I keep being torn between whether this art form is very pure without a lot of changes. Or if its forced, a kind of left over from music and spoken word that can’t fit anywhere else.
I was very surprised to see how many visual artists have worked with sound. I had no idea that people like Picasso or Duchamp worked with sound. I really like the idea of the Fluxus artists, which would make sense that so many artists overlapped practices.

Time arts

I made my blog for time arts!