February 26-28 “Appropriation Consults”

Outcomes

• Activate the process of making, as a way of knowing.
• Technically execute a work of digital art, and apply formal decisions that communicate ideas visually.
• Produce ethical, informed, multi-dimensional, work that is situated in contemporary concerns.
• Practice poesis in an artwork that demonstrates sensitivity of intuition transferred to intellect.
• Identify the characteristics of medium towards the interpretation of an image, in order to make informed material choices for their own work.

Lecture

Appropriation Continued

Lab

As with the mid-term, you may hold personal meeting times this week to discuss project ideas, etc….  You can also extend this into group discussion work/feedback. Individual Meetings, you may want to have students sign up next week’s individual meetings so that they come only for their scheduled time, and avoids people waiting around restlessly. You can schedule this about 6-7 minutes apart depending on how large your class is.  Remind them hey can also use the computers during class time next week to complete their projects.  The following advice is courtesy of former Teaching Assistant, Stephen Wichuk.

Tactics for Appropriation Project
For the Appropriation project, you must do two things.  You must choose and collect interesting and fertile source material but you must also develop a formal and conceptual strategy for using this media. Initial project ideas may blossom either from existing media or from a conceptual strategy.  More likely, it will involve a back and forth process.

Starting with Interesting Footage:

• You may be drawn to specific clip or set of clips because they seem conceptually or formally very interesting even though you don’t immediately know what to do with them. In this case, it will be fruitful to bring the clips into FCPX and then play around with them.  Spend time with the clips – study them at different speeds, watch them without the sounds. Take note of as many formal elements as you can. What elements repeat, which differ? What is the smallest modification you can make to the footage that will change its meaning the most?
• If you get stuck, talk to your teacher(s) we can try to figure out what drew you to the initial media. There is probably a great idea hidden in there, but perhaps you need to find different, but related source material.

Starting with a Conceptual or Formal Framework:

Conversely, you may start with a precise formal or conceptual framework for collecting clips. This means you have a clear, conceptual search parameter but have not yet seen any or all of the footage that satisfies the criteria.

• Search and Re-search
  Research means creating conceptual filters that will help you observe, compare and judge media. However, it can also be a playful process wherein you allow yourself to drift from your original intent and embrace the accidental and unexpected. In either case, you have to search, refine your search, and search again!  Think about how your own research parameters are affected by the ready-made search engines (Google, YouTube). Remember – no archive is neutral.  Every archive tells us something about the history and desires of its archivists.The excess or rarity of certain footage can raise or lower the stakes of your project. Why are there so many clips? Why so few? What does this tell us about the subject? Have other people appropriated the footage already? If so, how has this been done, and how is your own attempt an original gesture?  If you are uninspired by the results of your conceptual framework (too few results, results are too formally different, too obvious) try shifting it slightly.
  For example, I’m generally interested in food storage practices (Tupperware, Ziploc etc.). A first conceptual framework might look for “clips of people demonstrating their homemade vacuum sealing devices“. This gives me a wealth of interesting DIY inventions I could not have imagined, but the styles of the videos are so formally different that no clear strategy for combining them is apparent.
  Therefore, I might decide to shift my conceptual framework to ‘clips of people vacuum sealing objects’ – which simples the collection formally. Now all clips are shorter and show the action of something being vacuum packed. On the other hand I have broadened the field in terms of original intentions. I may now find examples in advertisements, DIY instructional videos, but have also discovered the bizarre YouTube phenomena of people vacuum packing people with trash bags.

Tasks of the Collector: Trimming, Refining, Discarding
Not everything you find should make its way into your project. Collect many clips, but allow yourself to discard all but the most useful, the formally appropriate and highest quality.  With every clip you decide to use, think about what is the most essential moment and trim away the rest.

Modifications & Organizing Strategies
These are *some* general strategies – they are all potentially good or bad, depending on how appropriately and critically you apply them to your subject.

• Time Reversal:
  Possible Uses: Turn back history, trick the viewer or create a sense of the uncanny.
  Example: Imagine (Liselot van der Heijden)
  Dangers: Can be cheesy and dramatic.
• Slow Motion:
  Possible Uses: Expose the mechanics of the image and otherwise unnoticeable elements of movement, create a space for contemplation of the subject.
  Example: 24hr Psycho (1993) Douglas Gordon
  Dangers: Can be cheesy and dramatic.
• Fast Motion & Fast Cuts:
  Possible Uses: Expose changes/movements that occur over long durations, represent excess of imagery, create a sense of the uncanny.
  Example: Various works by Ryan Trecartin
  Example: I’m not the Girl who Misses Much (1986) Pippilotti Rist
  Dangers: Can be goofy and end up sounding like the Chipmonks.
• Extraction or Removal of Formal Element(s):
  Possible Uses: Disrupt the image entirely; subvert the narrative, focus attention on an element that normally would not be noticed.
  Example: Colors (2006) Cory Arcangel
  Dangers: Potentially a lot of work.
• Cropping, Trimming & Erasure of Parts of Image:
  Possible Uses: Disrupt the image entirely; subvert the narrative, shift attention on element that normally would not be noticed, such as the background.
  Example: Caryatid (2004) Paul Pfeiffer
  Dangers: Potentially a lot of work.
• Repetition of Single Clip
  Possible Uses:  Expose the mechanics of the image; create an affective, hypnotic or contemplative viewing experience that could loop. Image parameters may change with each repetition.
  Example: Ontics Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy: Bye, Molly (2005) Ken Jacobs
  Example (with successive modifications): Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper (1970) David Rimmer
  Dangers: Can be excruciating or boring, depending on what’s being repeated and for how long.
• Spatial Juxtaposition:
  Possible Uses: Cause a resonance or dissonance in real time between two or more clips. Clips that were not intended to interact with each other start to have a ‘conversation’
  Example: Through a Looking Glass (1999) Douglas Gordon
  Dangers: With a single channel work (i.e. one monitor or one projector), more clips mean smaller individual videos – make sure the clips are still legible enough to function.
• Temporal Juxtaposition (Montage):
  Possible Uses: Create a conversation between two or more sets of clips. Produce a third meaning in the cut between one clip and another. Compare or contrast two moving image conventions to show how they are related or how they differ. Create false sync or false movements between unrelated clips to produce new a narrative.
  Example: TV Dinner (2003) Liz Nofziger
  Dangers: Beware of the meaningless mash-up video!
• Presentation of Formal Inventory (repetition of similar elements):
  Possible Uses: Collect and organize clips based on repeating formal elements. Create audio or visual rhythms.
  Example: John 3:16 (Paul Pfeiffer)
  Example: This Transition will Never End (2012) Jeremy Shaw
  Dangers: Uninteresting or ill-defined formal frameworks will lead to uninteresting inventories!
• Presentation of Conceptual Inventory:
  Possible Uses: Collect and organize clips based on repeating conceptual elements that are not necessarily formally or compositionally similar (i.e. ‘people using the phone’ or ‘establishing shots from horror films’).
  Example: Telephones (1995) Christian Marclay
  Example: The Meantimes (2002) Constant Dullart
  Dangers: Uninteresting or ill-defined conceptual frameworks will lead to uninteresting inventories
• Audio/Visual Juxtaposition:
  Possible Uses: Remove or replace audio in order to evacuate the clips original intent or alter the meaning.
  Dangers: Don’t simply create a meaningless music video!
• Filters, Effects & Image Processing:
  Possible Uses:  Modify the texture, color etc. of a clip so.
  Example: Shiboogi (2012) Takeshi Murata
  Example: Monster Movie (2005) Takeshi Murata
  Dangers: Filters are easy and are usually superficial and meaningless! Keep in mind that Takeshi Murata writes the digital code for all of his psychedelic image compression tricks. His tools push the image loss that normally happens with online videos to a sublime and beautiful extreme! You should have a very good conceptual reason to use a filter, one that recognizes and plays off of their ready-made, gimmicky nature.

Homework Reminders

• Upload (or provide link to) rough draft of final project to ComPAIR for peer critique by March 4 (end of day) and then critiques are due March 8 (end of day), once again no extensions.
• Final Appropriation Projects are due in lab for critiques from March 12-21 in lab, the critique dates will have flipped, therefore if you were critiqued on the first day for the mid-term project, you will be critiqued on the final day for this project, and vice versa.
• Remind students to bring in their draft next lab!