Speak up

Artist: Ill-literacy
Viewed: Friday, October 19
Arts 111 @ 7:00p.m

Ill-literacy is a group of four outspoken young adults. They use spoken words to express their thoughts about what's going on around us from the advent of texting by the use of a cellular phone as a main tool of communication instead of calling to the oppression of minorities. Their style is appealing to the younger crowd because they perform in hip hop style, speaking words with a beat sometimes fast and sometimes slow. I was impressed by their delivery style, because they produce a lot of energy on stage, and through encouraging the audience to loosen up. I had not seen a show of spoken words, but I was entertained, delighted, and at times compelled by what they were speaking of. I was glad to see these people with the same color of my skin speak up for what they feel. The absence of musical instruments did not diminish the power of their words...to me it was pure poetry.

Check them out at http://www.ill-literacy.com/

Flash Contest

Design by: Jeffrey Knight
Viewed: October 12, 2007

This website was brought up to my attention by a fellow student in my other class. I think annually Global Solution throws a flash animation contest. Knight is the winner of this year contest. In his work Think Wind, he used a lot of text animation like the picture above. I am impress with his collective ideas for this work. If you watch the whole animation, he pretty much stayed with text animation. However, simultaneously the text themselves where producing images like a factory, a bulldozer, and so on. He was able to create distance by using different scales as the frames move along. I wonder how long it took him to do this piece. By the way, there are many other Flash animations by different people in this website...so check it out.

http://globalsolutions.org/multimedia/flash07/knight

Funky Television

Title of work: TeleBlaster
Artist: Aristarkh Chernyshev
Viewed: October 12, 2007


TeleBlaster is a work by Aristarkh Chernyshev, a media artist. The purpose of the project is to explode television, and also at the same time to show the functionality of it. What you see on the TeleBlaster screen is constantly changing images, and it also allows you to see yourself on the screen in different special mode. Currently the device has two modes, which are Pixel and geometric transformation mode. Chernyshev used a video processor called "ShineBox 1.1" as the heart of the work. As you see the images on the screen rotate, twist, take different formation, and changes, you can also hear what sometimes sound like broken radio signal, and many different audio recording. The different shapes shown in this work is something I probably can use in my designs.
http://www.electroboutique.com/

The bathtub

By: Lingacreations

Viewed: October 11, 2007

Lingacreations is formed by a group of artists, musicians, filmmaker, animators, and dreamers. The group is central in South Africa. They have many other video artwork on you tube. This video addresses identity issues. A woman living in Africa trying to make sense of where she fits in. She is searching for that place of belonging, but for the meantime she finds comfort inside her own personal space inside her bathtub. The audio is clear . I also like some of the shots on the video the storm shot and when she was laying on the grass. Also, I like the really close up shots like when she was stepping on a puddle of water. Sometimes in design or artwork in general, it is nice to have that close up look. Say for example, a close up of an eye. It gives the work a different feeling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhxXTXxDIBg

Ebay art

Artist: Carlo Zanni

Date viewed: October 11, 2007

Carlo Zanni blends painting and fluctuating data on the web. This work is an interactive painting that constantly reginerates itself. Carlo Zanni used a bamboo tree stolen from the CNN'shomepage. The shape of the mountain is obtained from the chart of the eBay.com's stock market charts. The blue sky and stars are generated by the users. It is nice watching the shifting color of the sky and the number of stars while data changes. Zanni is interested in our private and social behaviour influence by the world we live in.

http://www.metapaisajes.com/

Human Candles

Date viewed: October 11, 2007

"Identity correction" is what the yesmen call their work. The yesmen are a group of culture jammers who target leaders and big corporations. Here in the Exxon's Climate-Victim Candles, a group of yesmen appeared Canada's largest oil conference posting as ExxonMobil and National Petroleum Council. Here they made a proposal that the oil industry could transform the billions of people who die into oil to keep the production of fuel, which will be called Vivoleum. This work makes me think of how I can use computerized graphic art to culture jam.

http://www.theyesmen.org/en/hijinks/vivoleum

Flash- Motion Tweening

Lately I have been learning a lot about motion tweening. One of our assignments was to animate black squares. This helped me practice more on tweening. One problem I encountered was using the motion guide. At first I was getting frustrated because the instances were not following the guide. As I worked around with it more, I learned that you have to snap the instance on the first frame with the beginning of the line, and then snap the instance on the last frame with the end of the line drawn. Thank God I finished earlier than I expected.