étais

To give some context about this final project, I made this from being emotionally spent. As I’ve mentioned in my proposal, I’ve experienced an excess of emotional turbulence in the past year, and as I’m finishing up my last few days as an undergraduate, I can’t help but reflect on the journey I’ve chosen. I look at this video, and I see it as a result of all of the things I have actively chosen to do - putting myself through risk, augmented responsibility, repetitive self-disgust, the cyclical process of over-analysis and letting go, outputting a vulnerability that continues to shape every new thought and action I have towards myself and towards the people I surround myself with.

These conversations - the part said in French, actual things that have been said to me, and the part said in English , things I wish I had said - is a fragile catharsis of my psychological state and reality. I look at it, and I see it, and there’s a part of me that understands it as a way of reaffirming that these things happened. That these conversations, thoughts, and feelings were real and true. And I think there’s also another part of me that wants to refuse that they existed. In my French literature class this term, the tension between remembering and forgetting is something that must be actively addressed by an individual who has undergone traumatic events. (Hiroshima, Mon Amour)

"Here comes the time of the great Culture of tactile communication, under the sign of the technico-luminous cinematic space of total spatio- dynamic theatre.This is a completely imaginary contactworld of sensorial mimetics and tactile mysticism; it is essentially an entire ecology that is grafted on this universe of operational simulation, multistimulation and multiresponse."(139-140)

My use of video and audio effects constitutes a communication that works in tandem with the dialogue/monologue, which can be seen as a graft upon something, myself, that has been badly burned. I can view this accumulation as a “completely imaginary contact world”, but, as mentioned, I can also see it as a very real imprint that influences the person I am today. 

Progress report

Hi everyone, I forgot to upload a blog post for my project in progress and I kept saving my project over so I guess I’d just like to share a little bit of my inspiration for slightly changing my direction and a few visual snippets as well. I decided to change because I felt like when I was pitching my project proposal, I kept thinking about how it was specifically my conversations with certain people that were making me feel a certain way. It came down to the fact that I was strongly impacted by particular words and sentences, that severely altered the way I felt about the person that was saying them, and severely altered the way I continue to look at them and myself today. Here are a few other sketches I was doing when thinking about this project.

tu étais très belle aujourd’hui

yes

why don’t you want to do the symposium

because i can’t convey how i feel through formal academic restrictions

she might be the most attractive american i’ve seen since i’ve been here

elle est probablement la plus belle américaine que j’ai vu depuis je suis arrivé.

am i not american

why do you want to work for us?

because you are my back up plan.

she’s so stupid i hate being in the same room with her

but you haven’t even talked to her

why do they stare so much

pourquoi ils regardent tellement fixement. 

why do you care you so much

will i see you in new york?

Practice of movement

Hi Johnny, I don’t know if you’ll accept this but for my second reflection post I’d like to write about my yoga teacher. I don’t know much about her – teaching yoga in Esch-Hurvis Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11:10am-12pm is one (her only?) of her side jobs, because she changes into a pant-suit like attire after, and walks across the bridge from Warch, to her parked car? Or her other job? My friends and I think she might be involved in PR, some kind of desk job.

I went to yoga at the beginning of spring term to improve my performance in my dance class, forging a few connections/lessons to my art practice.

1.     She’s unknowingly rushed.

She moves onto the next pose too fast, preventing us from getting the whole stretch. It irritates me, but it’s made me realize the importance of space. For me, that space could be the brief silence in the middle of a narrative, the pause between sentences in a monologue, the steady, unspeaking and un-reacting facial expression. If one is not cognizant of being rushed, then the audience will probably miss out on something you (the artist) wanted to convey.

2.     She forgets the other side.

Most of the time, if not all the time, she’ll forget to do the same exercises on the other side of our body. This has made me think about balance, and how the pull of my artwork is mostly inward. I think it’s important for artists to be cognizant of the inward and outward elements in their work, in terms of how it might speak to others and not just ourselves. This goes back to how I think artists must be very educated and aware about all potential audiences and reactions that their work might elicit.

3.     She doesn’t say enough for each exercise.

I think a major part of yoga is mindfulness, making us aware of each physical gesture and thought that crosses our minds as we move. If we are not fully aware of all of the elements that we put into our work, even if it’s just a few seconds in a video, then is it really our work? While the interpretations of any artwork are definitely not static, I think it’s really important to be aware of the intent behind each element and how it is outputted in order to really own up to the work as a whole.

To be honest Johnny, I did go to Joan’s talk, I just find myself a lot more compelled to write about people that make me think because they have thoroughly engaged me. Not that I didn’t find her talk significant or not interesting, it’s just going to yoga often enough has made me think more critically through the practice of physical movement.

Mary Overlie's Six Viewpoints

https://sixviewpoints.com/thesstems/

The Power of the Doodle

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-power-of-the-doodle-improve-your-focus-and-memory-1406675744

goldstein

I think Goldstein’s work is extremely relevant to Baudrillard and post-modern art. Because he’s really making us re-think our perceptions of certain media tropes and imagery in the media in general, I see how he’s acting as the ‘vehicle’ for society to recognize the detrimental effects of our imagery consumption. 

Untitled

More over, I see how Goldstein kind of went through this phase of deconstructing our perceptions of imagery to reveal something that goes beyond the trials and tribulations of humanity. 

The Jump, 1978.

I feel that he was really trying to transcend the real, in a way that was beyond Baudrillard’s warnings. Personally, I found Goldstein’s work to be inspiring, because there are definitely some visual parallels between my work and his, with his light beams and particle explosions. 

I think it would have been really interesting to see how Goldstein would have existed today, because it seems that he could have gone in the direction of computer graphics, vision, visualization, and contributed something along those lines, with his interest in something greater than humanity. However, because his work simulated digital effects instead of using digital tools with his paintings, maybe that would’ve been a loss of artistic value for him.

2

I decided to put my thoughts about my last project on the back burner for a bit so I could attempt to respond to our second prompt. I'm still trying to wed emotion and sterility, but I think in this short clip I was really thinking about what "resurrection of difference" and "under the spectral light of ethnology" really meant. After reading this week's reading, it seemed that Baudrillard was really trying to drive home that there is absolutely no truth in terms of simulations, which really got me thinking about particle simulations, photography, and specifically Barthes and photography. Maybe I enjoyed Barthes' ideas about deadness and photography too much, because I had trouble trying to not think about him and his ideas when thinking about how to respond to the prompt. Since I saw so much overlap between Barthes and the "resurrection of difference", I decided to include a simulation of a photograph that was of importance to discussion in last term's photography class, and create something different from it to attempt to show how my perception of the photograph is currently being modified, and may change for as long as I decide to create new configurations of it. The thing that I'm kind of unsure of at the moment is where one of my configurations has taken me - it resembles a map of the Philippines. And the shadow/outline of the important explorers is still present. I had no intention of arriving at this kind of colonization output. This project could definitely go a more personal route because I have a lot of thoughts being a Filipino-American, but I think I kind of just wanted to show how a simulation could produce a totally different scenario/reality/idea.

Colleen reflection

Colleen’s work intrigues me because she has bettered the lives of others through her artwork, and given back to communities. I find that hugely inspiring, because I feel that a large part of my academic studies has informed me of art’s more so decorative than functional qualities. (An object of contemplation, only permitted within the vitrines of the white cube) I also found it interesting that she and her sister were both artists, and along with the fact that they are twins – it really got me thinking about how my sisters and I had such disparate career pathways. I found the advice she gave to us young artists to be very helpful, and I enjoyed listening to her journey from a photographer to her grad school years at Syracuse. I think it’s always interesting to hear about an artist’s pathway, to see how their work stems from their prior experiences. I don’t think I’ve been to a lot of talks with artists in an age group close to my parents, so I definitely see her as a role model. I’m glad I got to talk to her at the end to ask her how design influenced her making, because that’s a conjunction I’m interested in pursuing – space has become an increasingly important aspect in my work and everyday life.