The Magic of Stop Motion

Pretty impressive... I'm inspired to brush up on my skills with a vis-a-vis pen and dry erase board.

space inflators

From ReadyMade Magazine, FEB/MAR 07 issue #27





More info?
Check out the blog:

http://ibubbles.blogspot.com/

Life Remote Control

I'm not really sure what to make of this. They call it "positive brain-washing" but what does that really mean? The idea is interesting, using our adjustment to the fast-paced world as a tool. But it's still a filter, it's still "them" telling "us". It's all in the edit, just as we were talking about in class the last couple of days. Video editing is where the magic happens. If you have enough film, you can tell any story you want, just by the way you cut and paste things together.

I thought I'd get more information at the website, but it's just as vague. It feeds off the young generation's uneducated distrust of the media and corporations.

www.liferemotecontrol.com

What do you guys think?

perspectives, perception

You know those pregnant belly thingies they put on teenage girls or sometimes guys to make them understand what it's like, or at least give them an idea. And then later they get the creepy doll thing that cries and needs all the attention a real baby would need and it goes on and on and you fall asleep in middle and high school health classes because the whole thing is just so boring. Well, for some strange reason I started thinking about that today as I was walking home in the hurricane this afternoon. The whole point of the body suit and the baby is to make kids think in the proper perspective about the consequences of their actions.

Perspective is such an important part of who we are, but it's also very important to understand where other people are coming from. Things like racism, discrimination, and just sheer disregard for others all root from an inability or nonexistant desire to see from another perspective.

So how could you actually see from another perspective? Once I got to this train of thought, I remembered the story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, from his short story collection Welcome to the Monkeyhouse. In the story, people are all made physically and mentally equivalent by the government. Everyone is handicapped down to the same level by all sorts of weird means. It's not exactly the same idea, but that's where my head went. Anyway, how interesting would it be to see through someone else's eyes? How much does that entail? How would you go about changing yourself, if only temporarily, to understand the world as another does?

It reaches a totally new level of interactivity, at least the way I see it. To become another person, to understand all that entails is not only a (dare I say it) impossible task, but it requires each and every sense to be transformed. To regulate eye sight, to abridge the sensitivity of the nose, to heighten or perhaps dull hearing, and even taste. A person's sense of observation would be varied. In all reality the brain would have to be totally altered.

It's basically unfathomable.

But... what about a smaller scale version? Where do you even start?

When the change does occur, when a new perspective is understood... how does that change the one that experiences it?

video project

There are so many possibilities for this project, and not necessarily any right answer. Our best bet seems to be to leave as much as possible open to the discretion of the individual groups and anyone that contributes through YouTube or other online means. Any general storyline stuff that we agree on in class can be and probably will be disregarded by contributors. We should try to agree on a theme... some well-known fairytale or nursey rhyme, even some kind of journey is broad enough that lots of divergence isn't going to be confusing, odd stories will work together just fine. With a well-known storyline from a fairytale or nursery rhyme, there are plenty of ways to weirdly interpret old ideas and it gives a good creative starting point.

Anything definite will only be definite for us, not for anyone taking part online. Ultimately, we can make our story as rigid as we want and just leave a loose outline or list of guidelines, without rules regarding storyline. Anything goes.

The only structure really necessary will be in the characters -- one or two main characteristics will be key, the rest is up to individual groups and the other contributors.

What's with time?

Have you ever stopped to think about why we measure time the way we do? Without machines we couldn't even keep the schedules most of us have, at least not down to the small increments we usually deem important for getting to class or work on time. Obviously days and weeks and months make sense, but seconds and minutes? Without clocks, it'd be a full time job just keeping track of what minute you're on.

What would happen if you completely confused that sense of time? How would our economy change? How would business practices change? How would sports events be effected (no, I honestly don't really care)?

Time is something we take completely for granted in this day and age, or at least, the way we interpret it, anyway.

The Couple in the Cage

I saw this segment a while ago and have talked about these two artists in a couple of other classes, including a lit class. We dealt very heavily into the post-modern in it and so this piece worked into the curriculum well. It's really strong in its ability to act as a great lens with which to view our culture. The viewers are so obsessed with the idea of the 'other' and it's almost uncomfortable to watch them watching the couple, the "primitives". It's disturbing that no one is flatly outraged by the fact that a couple of human beings are being stuck in a cage and paraded around the world, or at least the Western world, for entertainment and loosely "educational" purposes. A good picture is painted of how ridiculous humans really are, and what's most ironic is that the viewer is the one that looks most ridiculous even though the people in the cage are dressed so insanely.

I guess the novelty of the curio cabinet hasn't been outgrown, we've just had to fill it with newly outrageous things.

Mooninite update

UPDATE:

AOL Blurb
Fox's reaction.
Seattle doesn't find them suspicious.

Mooninites in action...

Boston freaks out

More of the story here annnnnd for more fun, here.

It's not a hoax. It's not a "marketing mistake"... it was on purpose and it was funny, why didn't the other 10 cities invaded with mooninites freak out? Get a sense of humor, Boston.

walls and shadows and Germans

I almost think the sounds that you can just barely make out are more interesting than the visual effect. This could definitely be pushed farther, I'm not exactly sure of who did it, but it's German. It's kind of anticlimactic, I suppose if the "viewer" was really creative, the piece would be far more interesting, but it's kind of a cop out for the creator of the wall to leave it up to the person casting the shadow to make it anything really worth seeing.