ART/FIST 245 Interarts/Installation...Some Installation Artists...

 The idea of installation art is usually considered something that arose from what was referred to as 'Happenings' and 'Environments' and the scene that somewhat centered around the artist/provocateur Allan Kaprow in the US in the late 1950s and early 1960s. 

In 1960 Jim Dine created Car Crash, a happening that played out in an elaborate construction that both performers and the audience where immersed in.

Another prototypical installation is Claes Oldenburg's The Store, seen here re-created in a museum setting.

Again the border between 'Environment' and 'Performance' are blurred. This was also the case with Judy Chicago's Womanhouse, but her later work The Dinner Party existed purely as an environment where the viewer moved through the piece.

Gordon Matta-Clark's work physically deconstructing architecture is known mostly through documentation, although he did create 'souvenir' cuttings of his buildings to circulate as product.

Sometimes the artifacts of a performance become an installation, as seen in Carolee Schneemann's Up to and Including Her Limits,

Many of installation art's pioneers kept re-inventing the form, as we see in Yayoi Kusama's interactive Obliteration Room.

Some artists wanted to make their installations more accessible over time, like Dan Graham.

And also Ann Hamilton, whose The Event of a Thread becomes an amusement-park-like spectacle.

This can be taken to the monumental level, as with James Turrell's work in process, Roden Crater.

Video can be placed in a site in a way which perfectly integrates with it, as seen in Bill Viola's Tiny Deaths.

Or it can totally dominate the architecture, as seen in the retrospectives of Pipilotti Rist. Although primarily working in video, abstraction informs much of their work.

Judy Pfaff's installations reference nature but also embrace abstraction.

Rachel Whiteread's work uses the literalness of the imprint, creating a negative reproduction of her subject matter.

Sarah Sze uses everyday objects in a way that defies their former functions and transforms them into formal constructions.

Danish artists' group Superflex constructs a fake McDonalds here, which they flood, with the final work consisting as a semi-documentary video. Often work falling into the installation realm defies categorization.

Rirkrit Tiravanija's Untitled (Free/Still) serves free curry in a very intentionally constructed, though makeshift looking, environment.

Although solidly viewed in an art context, teamLab is actually a for-profit company, pushing the boundaries between fine art and entertainment.

This Is Marshall McLuhan - The Medium Is The Massage (1967) - The Movie

 

Missing from 'The Medium is the Massage'

 Who's face is missing from 'The Medium is the Massage'? Well many, but given that this book was put together right after the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we need to seriously contemplate the exclusion of Dr. Martin Luther King. The March on Washington of August 28, 1963 was instrumental in getting this legislation passed, and was also a feat of new technologies. About 260,000 people were transported to Washington, mostly on buses traveling on the new interstate highway system. An adequate sound system was considered essential in maintaining order. Equipment was rented at a cost of $19,000. The elaborate set up was sabotaged on the day before the march, and then was successfully rebuilt overnight by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Television had contributed greatly to the success of the event. President Kennedy had watched Dr. King's speech on TV and was "very impressed", and agreed to meet with the march's organizers.

Martin Luther King Jr. speaking on TV. Washington D.C., USA. 1968. © René Burri Magnum Photos

“The civil-rights revolution in the South began when a man and the eye of the television film camera came together, giving the camera a focal point for events breaking from state to state, and the man, Martin Luther King Jr., high exposure on television sets from coast to coast,” wrote the journalists Robert Donovan and Ray Scherer in their history of television news, Unsilent Revolution. 

Many people spoke and performed that day, including Bob Dylan...

The choice of mostly white singers was criticized at the time, and Dylan himself questioned the validity of his own participation, but this is certainly one of his most moving performances ever.

James Blue's monumental film, The March, 1963, restored in 2008.

Kraftwerk

 Here's a great doc mapping the influence of Kraftwerk...

Garagebandland

Three ways to use garageband;

Using MIDI  technology (there are MIDI keyboards at every station in the 013 lab)...

Using pre-recorded loops...

Or multi-track recording...

Software instruments, loops, and multitrack recording...used individually or together. The possibilities are endless, especially when you consider that a project may start with a recording conveniently made with your phone. These how-to videos are all by... 

https://thegaragebandguide.com 

which has exhaustive and always up to date info on using garageband.

Before you export your garageband track try some basic mastering. I discovered the genre-based presets are still there and that may be all you need. Click on master and output on the mastering window at the bottom of the interface. If you double click on compressor, exciter, and limiter and if you go past 'manual' you will see presets. From there you can really beef-up your track. Here's a really well-done article on mastering...

 

https://producersociety.com/how-to-master-a-song-in-garageband/

Photo-quality Inkjet Printing in the Wriston Digital Lab

 Thought it might be good to do this in video form rather than in-person with 14 people packed into a 6x10 foot room! The Wriston digital lab is in the lower level of the Wriston art center, on the West side directly across from the photo area. Only the furthest in computer is connected to the printer. This video is chopped out of a longer covid-era video, so it's not the slickest production. There is also a printed version of these instructions in the lab.

'Enhancing' Images

Before

After

 

This was something I put together for online learning. No longer great subject matter in this image but the enhancing tactics are still good!

You can view the official Photoshop tutorial in enhancement here. My approach is a little different in that it avoids controls with a lot of artificial intelligence (which gives you some artificial mistakes too) and adjustment layers, mostly because I tend to work with 50-100 megapixel files and have frequent crashing problems if I take that approach. Another reason is that it is just faster to work 'destructively' when you know what you want to do.
Here we have a 10 megapixel image made with an iPhone. The first thing I'm going to do here is open this up in Image>Adjustments>Curves

In the curves graph the mountain peaks represent where your tone is in this image (dark left, light right) and the line represents how you're going to pull/shift those around. The steeper you make the line the more contrast you're adding. Digital images seldom have a dead black, and from working in the darkroom we know we want some pure black to make the most of our tonal scale. By moving the very bottom of the line to the right we will make our darkest tones in the first peak dead black.

To shift tones around further we are going to split this image in two, as we need more highlight detail in sky area but we need to maintain bright whites in the poster. To do this we'll use the lasso tool, the third one down on the far left. With this tool you need to fill in a number in the feather box at the top to transition between these two sections. Here, it's a relatively small 15 pixels. Then we'll trace around the area we want to work on and then open curves again.

Here we want more happening in the highlights, so we'll pull our line down on the right side rather severely, and then add points to straighten it out in the midtones. The main reason to use curves rather than brightness/contrast here is that these sorts of radical manipulations often result in tonal stepping (looks like wood grain, but in the sky) when using slider controls.

Next we'll go to Select>Inverse to work on the rest of the picture, and open Curves again.

Here we want just a touch more contrast so we'll make an 'S' curve that steepens the slope through the mid-tones.
Next we'll address color saturation by going to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation. There's a new control called 'Vibrance' that combines saturation with warming, but this image already shows too much color shift in that direction as we will see below.

 

Adding +10 here is making the poster more vibrant, but the pink shift in the library reflection gets really distracting, so next we'll address Image>Adjustments>Color Balance.

We're most concerned with mid-tones here so leave that box checked. Start out playing with the Yellow/Blue to see if you need to warm or cool. Next go to Cyan/Red, you almost always need to go in the opposite direction with it. Next fool around with Magenta/Green, often this will be left at '0'. Okay, so the radical shift illustrated above neutralizes most of the pink cast, but also it makes the picture sort of 'blah', and I think some of the source of this pinkness is in the tinting of the Wriston glass. Maybe we'll just back way down on this.

Here the color shift is mildly toned down with +10 Blue and -10 Cyan. 

This is the basic stuff, there may be a couple more things to try here. Because this is an architectural image taken with a phone it may benefit from some sharpening. We'll go to Filter>Sharpen>Smart Sharpen.

Here we choose Lens Blur as we are dealing with a somewhat primitive optic. If there is camera shake in your image from a long exposure the Motion Blur can be very effective. Because of the type in this image we can't get away with much sharpening at all here, but a little bit helps. This is the default setting -50%.

This next move may be a bit questionable. This image has a bit of a casual 'tip' to it that we would expect to find in a hand held camera image. The Perspective Crop tool, hidden under the Crop Tool, can make this image look like it was taken with a view camera.

What we're doing here is making sure the buildings' verticles are parallel to the sides of the picture and making sure that we maintain an even porportion of crop all around to reduce distortion.

Not sure about this final move. There is a charm to the casualness of the tilted perspective, yet as an illustration this is much easier to look at.

For a good explanation of camera settings look at this;

https://streetbounty.com/basic-camera-settings/

Robert Frank

An older doc on Robert Frank that popped-up on YouTube;

 

Sarah Greenough on "The Americans";

 

 

 

 

Stan Brackhage's Mothlight

 The most extraordinary experimental film we'll be looking at is Mothlight, a physical object collage on film. Although viewing it in facsimile digital video form rather film is not ideal, the magic still comes through...what is projected here is not an optical rendering of things, instead it's the semi-transparent things themselves. 

Writer J. Hoberman explains thus...

...Mothlight was created by painstakingly collaging bits and pieces of organic matter—moth wings, most notably, as well as flowers, seeds, leaves, and blades of grass—and sandwiching them between two layers of clear 16-mm Mylar editing tape."

 And points out that the significance is this...

"NOT THE CAMERA BUT THE PROJECTOR; not a representation but the thing itself, a ribbon of once-living stuff preserved in celluloid coursing along, flashing before our eyes: It was neither Muybridge’s 1879 motion studies nor the Lumière brothers’ 1895 actualités nor even Peter Kubelka’s imageless flicker film Arnulf Rainer (1960) that truly manifested the very essence of cinema but the film-object Mothlight, a three-minute-thirteen-second motion-picture collage assembled and printed by Stan Brakhage..."

You can find the entire article here...

https://www.artforum.com/print/201207/j-hoberman-on-stan-brakhage-s-mothlight-31955

The question we're left with is this...can digital technology be similarly manipulated to bring us so close to the real?

ART/FIST 240 Getting help with Premiere

The most obvious way to get started in Premiere is to use Adobe's 'learn' and 'help' features. The 'help' search is always there in the upper right and the 'learn' window can be opened here;

But, sometimes it's easier to just go to a fast-paced YouTube video;

For me 'Premiere Gal' has proven extremely helpful! You'll find all the videos here...

https://www.youtube.com/@PremiereGal/videos

The first thing to try beyond the basics may be adjustment layers...

ART/FIST 240 Bringing Technology to the People

 

First, and most important it was necessary for computers to have a language beyond mathematics. The vision of Grace Hopper made it possible to communicate with computers using English. At Remington Rand her idea was not accepted for 3 years. In the meantime, she published her first paper on the subject, compilers, in 1952. "I decided data processors ought to be able to write their programs in English, and the computers would translate them into machine code. That was the beginning of COBOL, a computer language for data processors."

Queen of Code doc; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNvS0V7Tr4o

 

Douglas Engelbart (1925-2013), whose vision of collaboration using computer technology to help solve the urgent and complex problems of all of humanity, died on July 2, 2013. His comrades believed that his ideas were never fully realized due to his ideals and generosity of spirit. For example, he resisted patenting the "mouse" he'd invented and it eventually fell into the public domain. The robotic rigidity of institutions is also to blame -- most powerful technology companies in American relegated him to R&D. Ted Nelson, professor and inventor of the first hypertext project, delivered Engelbart's eulogy on December 9, 2013. In his tearful delivery, he said the "...real ashes to be mourned are the ashes of Doug’s great dreams and vision, that we dance around in the costume party of fonts that swept aside his ideas of structure and collaboration...Perhaps his notion of accelerating collaboration and cooperation was a pipe dream in this dirty world of organizational politics, jockeying and backstabbing and euphemizing evil." Engelbart articulated his ideas for collaboration publicly in what is known as The Mother of all Demos delivered on December 9, 1968, over a half a century ago. Some of what he described is still in the process of being realized in commercial forms such as Skype, Google Docs, and more.

 

Ted Nelson inserts a bit of attitude into this history. He detests the evils of limitations and compromise. He questions corporate control. His technical ideas may have not have had as widespread impact as others here, but his spirit, and that of his ilk, is what helped made computing a tool available to most rather than a select few.

 

Steve Wozniak believed that computers could be beautiful machines. Not just utilitarian devices with some industrial design on the outside, but beautiful from the inside out. Art objects. The idea was radical, and has changed our lives. We are now willfully living with computing technology all of the time.

Sophie Calle's First Exhibit

The first official Sophie Calle work of art: 

In 1979, Sophie Calle asked several (23) persons, friends, strangers, neighbors, to come and spend eight hours in her bed in order to keep this bed occupied twenty-four hours a day. These people had to consent to being photographed and to answer some questions. She took photographs of the sleepers and noted the important elements of these short meetings: subjects of discussion, positions during sleep, their movements during their sleep, the detailed menu of their breakfast she was preparing for them... The whole set of these series of photographs (23) was exhibited at the XIth Biennale de Paris in 1980, Sophie Calle's first show, inspiring her to "become an artist."

Yves Klein told by Rotraut

 In 1962, Rotraut and Yves Klein married in Paris. Klein died six months later, while Rotraut was pregnant with their son.

 

Rotraut is the manager of Klein's estate and a highly accomplished artist. http://www.rotraut.com/fr/accueil/

Princesse Elena: Yves Klein's Favorite Model

How many paintings did you take part in?

Quite a lot - we were doing steady ones and ones where he was pulling me and it looked like I was diving and there were the ones on round paper, then there were the fire and water prints.
He was a hard worker.

Did you feel like you were being exploited?

No, not at all. When an actress does what a film director asks her to do, she's not exploited, she's just co-operating.
He was like a director in a way and we were doing exactly what he wanted us to do, but we also wanted to do it.

Did he ask men to do the same?

I think he did it with himself and perhaps a couple of men.
There are some. I think there is a huge one where there is a man flying around in space in a print.
But perhaps it was a hint to the fact there should be more women artists.
There are not so many in history so far.

A lot of people would say he was the artist and you were the object.

No, we were subjects.
The model traditionally was always an object for the painting, object for the public.
But there, especially when we did the presentation in public, we were all subjects.
Also, for the public, we were acting.
We were not just still objects.
I think things are a bit more complex.

How do you feel about the works now?

Oh, I like it very much.
I will disappear sooner or later, unfortunately quite sooner because I'm nearly 82.
But there will be some prints of mine around.
There could be some DNA in the blue paint!

Elena Palumbo-Mosca interviewed by the BBC on October 21, 2016.

From Work to Text

This essay extends the notion of 'the death of the author' to an analysis of forms. The Work is the physical product, the Text comes after the consumption of the Work, where the ideas can live on and mutate. It's almost cliche now to look at an artwork and talk about 'the text that surrounds it', but this idea is relatively new, and represents for many a transition from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism.

In this essay Barthes brings up 7 points that can be briefly summarized;

1)     Method: Work is a thing, Text is a discourse

2)     Genre: Work often identifies as genre, Text transcends genre

3)      The Sign: Work = moderately symbolic, Text = radically symbolic

4)      The Plurality: Work is often singular and always finite, Text is infinite

5)       Filiation: Work has an author, the Text extends beyond the author

6)      Reading: the Work is consumed, the Text keeps giving

      7)    Pleasure: Work = fascination/delight, Text = Utopian Pleasure

What we learn here is that what we mostly get from a cultural product isn't something that's extracted from it, as we may intuit, but something that becomes quite independent of the original thing itself.

Everything we've looked at this term is very well summarized in three videos by the rather brilliant Tom Nicholas

 

 

Library Page

 https://guides.lib.lawrence.edu/art340_540

Research Guides: ART 340/540: New Media in Art: Home

Resources to support ART 340/540 New Media in Art

guides.lib.lawrence.edu

Barthes' Musica Practica

Beethoven quickly becomes the focus of this essay. What was written here seems to evoke his 9th Symphony, created at the end of his life. Music which today can become invisible because of its pre-recorded familiarity, or revelatory in its creation of soul-stirring vibrations.

This doc is a bit cheezy but still a rather moving chronicle of the present day life of this 200 year old piece;

"That because Beethoven was freed {by deafness? maybe} to explore deep within his own nature, he was able to create works that would have a future." And, he most definitely did.

"The truth is perhaps that Beethoven's music has in it
something inaudible (something for which hearing is not the
exact locality), and this brings us to the second Beethoven."- pg.152

It may be important here to think of Barthes as a student of Phenomenology, having an interest in the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. Through Beethoven he may be waxing on the complexity of experience that music, and all other art forms, can stir up.

 

Photography's Mythic Objectivity

Panzani Advertisement from Barthes’s Rhetoric of the Image.

 

Notes on Barthes’s Rhetoric of the Image:

 Linguistic message within image;

    Denoted; What text is there?
    Connoted; What symbolism is there in the presentation of text?

Literal messages;

    Representations of specific things in the image. 

  Accompanied linguistic messages to the image;

    Anchor; What exactly am I looking at? (do these elements create a narrative?)
    Relay; What should I think when I see this? (functionality/meaning)

  Symbolic messages;

    Cultural implications of specific objects represented. (bag, ingredients)
    Cultural implications of juxtapositions. (symbolic color, cuisine, implied actions)
    Cultural implications of image classifications. (still life)

 Denoted message;

    Does the photograph exist as a trace of, or an equivalent of truth? How much truth?
    Is the photograph always a lie? Are there obvious deceptive elements?
    How can these ideas co-exist?

Connoted message;

   Our complete reading of the image/text. (We should want to eat this or we see we are being manipulated or both)


Disclaimer; This is a mash-up of my notes from this essay and may not reflect the author's intent.

Sky Hopinka

This is a certain body
2019
Inkjet print, etching
13h x 13w in

Sky has made a huge impact on a little corner of the artworld over the last decade. The work is strongly content driven and considerably more poetic than narrative. Although working primarily in video his work meanders into whatever territory it needs to medium wise, with projects often combining many forms as listed in the Series of Work section of the artist's web site;

http://www.skyhopinka.com/

Also from the website is this bio;

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non fiction forms of media. 

Unlike most of us Sky can really do well as an interview subject;

https://www.pbs.org/video/native-filmmaker-1674509247/

 

Garageband How-To

So Charles Cleyn, a popular Logic Pro tutorialist, has put out a large number of Garageband tutorials in the last year that are really well done! 

https://www.youtube.com/@CharlesCleyn/videos

This would be a good one on the basics;

If you want to try out the midi controllers in the lab this will get you going;

The only thing that may be lacking in Charles's offerings is a quick video dedicated to pro-level mastering in Garageband. This one by Colin Cross would get my recommendation;