mercoledì 24 febbraio 2010

Appropriation: Boomerang Map

The idea of appropriation is fascinating, the pictures generation of the 1970 and 80's solidified the idea of appropriating imagery for me. Richard Prince's appropriation of the Marlbolo cowboy was the most expensive photo ever sold ($1.2 million dollars) and Sherrie Levine's appropriation of Walker Evans' photographs of the Dust Bowl set a new standard for the appropriation of art by other artists, by changing the context of the photograph she assigned it a new meaning that pertained to modern times.
Richard Prince Untitled(Cowboy)

Sherrie Levine After Walker Evans

When I started a video class I was really lost, I didn't have any inspiration on what type of video artist I wanted to be. I was totally clueless and I admit it 100%. The first assignment was an appropriation. Our professor showed us many examples of work by other artists, students, and himself. Yet, I still found myself uninspired and confused as to how to this could be done from my train of thought. We had to start to collect videos from the internet, so I collected videos of things that I thought would inspire me, and things that I thought were interesting to watch. This was mostly Fluxus videos from the 1960's and videos of jellyfish and squid... not anything that went together very well. I was also at a loss as to how to use the computer program Final Cut Pro, I asked my professor a million questions and told him I was feeling lost. He was patient and kept showing me different tools. Finally he showed me how to see the sound waves mapped for a clip, and inspiration struck.

The following video is a result of this inspiration, where I used the timeline of the Final Cut Pro interface to create a visual map of the sound wave pattern produced in the original clip. 

(example of a sound wave, not the actual pattern produced by my original clip)

(In this photo of the Final Cut Pro interface you can see how layers are built in the lower time line [video on top and audio on the bottom] this is where I used small clips of video to recreate the visual pattern of the sound waves from the original clip)

The original clip used for this piece was a video piece done by Richard Serra and Nancy Holt using the idea of a nearly live feed of audio, Nancy Holt is exercising Performed Listening, where she becomes disoriented in thought

Richard Serra and Nancy Holt Boomerang

The original piece was about the "echo" created by the delay of sound, and how it disoriented Nancy Holt to the point of near speechlessness. You can hear the stress in her voice and can infer the difficulty in which she is formulating thoughts. I wanted to take this confusion, and stress, and magnify and then place it upon the viewer. I achieved this by only building with clips that had occurred within the 1 second before the part of the original clip that they were layered upon (meaning that larger raises in the sound wave required smaller clips layered upon eachother to build the height)

Gabrielle Roth Boomerang Map