Wednesday, December 10, 2008

A Love Story 2: Based on True Events

I added two other male characters to this video. The idea was to create a life of different loves. The added video ended up being distracting because of the change in video quality. I also felt like the pace was too fast to sustain the meaning through the changing characters. It was also distracting and nauseating. Over all, I felt this was a less successful version compared to my first attempt. My third video will re shot and be slower in pace but maintain the four characters already established.

Portfolio

My first project for intermedia II was a sound project in which i used the sound of breaking glass inside a paper bag.  The video is not located here but it was a fairly simple treatment.  The sound was meant to trigger violent and uncomfortable memories involving the breaking something glass.

My second project was my BFA show installation.  The installation served as a representation of my artistic process.  More specifically, it was meant to highlight the materials and content shown throughout the show.  

My third project was a video stop animation highlighting three elements that have been repeating in my intermedia experience.  The use of figures, non human actors and a two dimensional ground all work together to create a living animated environment highlighting the activation of each element in relation to the other actors on screen.


My final project for the class was also a stop animation.  This time i wanted to show an interaction of drawn elements.  I eliminated the actors for this one and just focused on creating an animated book.  A living, growing drawing.  My intent here is to show the earth and drawing as a living evolving experience complete with both visual and theoretical drama.

Portfolio/final project continued

As we come to the end we have to present what we have contributed to eachother. Transportation, art construction and events focused around us have been many of my own topics. Below I have posted the collages I am sharing for final project. In explaning my portfolio I have posted the essay i shared at my installation at open house. For the final project I have kept my project simple. Collaging and collecting is a large part of my work and I write essays to understand the process. Simply my final project is all of the photo work I have done of projects in this class.
further down the page I have posted my review essay which is a first for writing about my experience as a DJ.

OPEN HOUSE December 5, 2008

soUNDER soUNDER soUNDER soUNDER SOUNDER. Five, for today December 5th is “OPEN HOUSE.” This is my third, how many do you have under your belt? HELLO. Today is a new occasion, where are we celebrating this party and how many new people do we have. Welcome to Installations, Writings, Thoughts, Libraries, Controversies, Happiness, Friendship, Visual Art, Literature, Paper Works and so on.

we have a room with a reel
we have a room with less light
we have fulfillment
we have chaos
we have disbandment
we have loyalty
I have paper
you he she and I have the work celebrated.


HELLO. Intermedia II brought me here. Jill Baker brought me, brought us here. Jill will bring me to the Senior Center on Saturday. I am excited to see Jill’s film on Saturday. There is a reel for us to watch movies submitted by participating artists somewhere in this building. Have you noticed this building, what a trip? I remember telling Kevin, if you imagine yourself here, as Menards … Intermedia work would be located in the Lamps. About the reel, where there are films, a roll of film. SOUNDER. After I heard the news, we counted in letter format 77 SOUNDERS to fulfill the days until Barack Obama, starts his new job. Film which is transported by a roll format. Most of the supplies for two dimensional, paper etc. were on a roll format. Transportation and a roll/a reel/paper are topics of interest for today.

This body is unlike things of OPEN HOUSE in the past. My first, we visited a room. The focuses then were materials, but organic materials. The focuses were senses, smell being the most powerful. I tag a beet as the most powerful organic art material. Second, we were Artists in the Community. We thought of people and their kindness to things, so we made them buttons. This makes me think of something I noticed last night, look at the enterance to the Graduate gallery. Someone has placed a dollar accepting art vendor/a machine. Marvelous!

work to be magnetized
work for sound
work for soundtracking
work that is quiet
work that is still
on the other side of the room
work that is not made on paper.

Next to us is the Library, you will have to ask the creators it’s title. David built the library. David is one of my most favorite people to write letters to. Letter Drawings is a different personal body of work. The elements of the installation before you reference many things to me. Letter drawings as you may read can be a honor to a person or an inanimate object. If you choose, it may honor this roll of paper. If you choose, it may honor a contrast focused. If you choose, it may honor the Grey Scale. This is drawing work as mechanics.

I am not used to such mechanics. So feel free to ask me questions. I am usually one to jump into work, spontaneity is my long lost brother. A half sibling. Sometimes, actuall often multiple formats inspire eachother / by this I mean different media delve into different media. I love to collect things, so even before I knew my theme for this celebration day, I was collecting. I get these rolls of paper from my job. I was collecting them. I collected this box which would ultimately be a podium, from Kirkwood Produce. It once contained tomatoes. When you get one of these boxes clean, in good shape, celebrate.

The paper roll is a movement object, and as we discovered in the BLT/BLT performance of Concepts in Drawing, it could be used for a handheld short film viewer. I think this is awesome. At a special meeting of performance and drawing installation these rolls of paper were used as floor sculptures as you may see it here. The boxes are simply box paintings. These days my two favorite things come on rolls, paper, and film for my 35mm camera. Recording analog on tape is a roll, I love that. This is a viewing sculpture, it has no movement like my last one. You can see a picture taken of it here. This is still work, quieter than many other things I have done. I have learned how to simply have fun, have you?

Portfolio/Final Project






















the Image above is a cut of my installation at Open House.

































Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Portfolio

First off, here's a link to the commentary I have about all of my Fall Intermedia work. I decided to make a video instead of writing out all of my processes and ideas for this portfolio.

Some photos from Flower Installation:


A few photos from Last Stand in Open Country Installation:


Also, here's a link to the Willie Nelson song that accompanied the slideshow. Click on "Last Stand in Open Country."

Here are some photos from my 8 Hours of Art Installation:

"We're all in this thing together. You're not alone. There are people who want to listen. People who can help, because we know how it feels. If you could feel what I've felt you'd want to help others too. I am no martyr. I am no savior...but I could be a friend."

"Moses had horns until roughly 1500 A.D. What else has been mistranslated or completely omitted from your Holy Bible? It's a matter of faith, I understand, but so is wiping your own ass with your bare hand and expecting it not to smell like shit."

"Had Kinnick been flooded last June you can bet your ass it would have been open in time for the first home game, pink locker room and all. So why is it we will have to wait years to get our Art Studios back? Somewhere along the line of rich old white guys running Iowa they forgot what humanity was and how this college creates it through art classes not dumbass over privileged football jocks. Ah, but fuck it, we'll just sell "Mural" and get back to even. I mean who ever got drunk at 6 a.m. and ate a whole fried pig just to go see a painting."

Finally here are some photos of my installation piece at open house:


Once again, all of my commentary is located on the video which I have linked at the top of the page.

-Drew

Monday, December 8, 2008

BIRD NAMES

Bird Names, a band I saw earlier this year, and one of my new favorites was on tour with Dan Deacon. They are a very wierd pop group who are form Chicago. Here is a great video of them playing on kiddie music review show "CHIC A GO GO!" "CHIC A GO GO features bands from chicago!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK5NTUXrlQY

this is a review

Here is my review for our class, it is a bout a guest appearance on my radio show!

Music has intertwined with art for me as long as I can remember. Musical experiences fueling visual projects, vice-versa. Not yet have I embarked a visual project inspired by my alias as a radio DJ. But here it may come and I have been long waiting. I am writing this response to fulfill an Intermedia assignment and as a reference for one of my favorite extra curricular activities. KRUI is the University of Iowa’s alternative student run radio organization, and better tagged as “Iowa City’s Sound Alternative.” It is a family much like this class; you grow and learn a lot, most of all I have a hell of a lot of time doing it. To my intermedia class you may have experienced blogging when I may write about my time at the station. I have worked for KRUI for a year now, and one semester as a persona doing a show with my best friend Kevin, who lately calls himself DJ Mifune. This past Sunday December 7th after the hustle of Open House I played one of my favorite shows to date!
Mifune and I have taken this semester to become more personal with our listeners and be more specific about the music we play. We are general rotation DJ’s, we are considering doing a specialty show covering all things “lo-fi” production next semester if I am still in town. We started this semester strong and decided after a while we wanted to understand our audience and tell them as much about us as we can. On a side note this year KRUI is celebrating its 25th year anniversary. This was a time of happiness yet we couldn’t be. KRUI, normally located in the third floor of the IMU was affected by the flood and was forced to relocate to the Quadrangle Dormitory, sad. At times of frustration and being forced to a much smaller space with a reduced music library everyone was tense and we had to work together.
We had decided to attack every show by making a theme for the night; we would focus on one genre of music and use our knowledge to give facts and history of the musicians involved. My favorite show we have done yet was a history of rockabilly. We have since done a honorary show for our favorite psych/trip-hop label “ANTICON,” who have recently celebrated their tenth year anniversary.
I remember near the beginning of this semester talking to my friend Nick Carney, once the drummer of the Iowa City group The Sullivan Gang. I had asked Nick about performing live on my show. I had enjoyed the idea and wanted to have my work and work of my musician friends performed live on the show. We did this for the first time last night.
I was at work at the Co-op and my good friend Phil had stopped in. Phil and I have shared a lot of music knowledge together. This summer Phil and I bonded a lot while we were spending it’s better half picking blueberries at Bach’s Berry farm. Phil is a photographer and we are both drawing artists. Phil has since the summer created a lot of work around our time blueberry picking. At his show at the White Rabbit during the first Iowa City gallery walk, he showed photographs of our blueberries, sold his home made blueberry jam, and soon the two of us will collaborate on a series of large scale work, abstracting our experience in southern Johnson County in summer sun conversing of political and emotional changes.
To get to the chase, Phil played at my show last night. I laughed when we spoke of how he couldn’t use his real name because there was already a musician named Phil Ochs. The first Phil Och’s was a 1960’s politically active musician, who was friends with others like Bob Dylan. My friend Phil was been talking about putting out a vinyl LP in spring which he would self release and do his own artwork for. Exciting!
Phil did marvelous, and to dodge the name confusion he is “Phil from Star City.” “Star City” will be the alias to encompass all collaborative and solo work on the LP. He played his acoustic Fender guitar which has a great steel body resonator and steel strings, it sounds nice and twang. Phil is a skilled guitarist who has a very blues like finger picking style. He played five great songs, mixed throughout the show and the odd psych pop and noise I rotated. At one point his girlfriend Emma called in pretending to be Phil’s biggest fan in Iowa City to embarrass to talk to him on the phone. Emma requested her favorite boyfriend/musician to play his song “My Girlfriend Wanda!”
I loved this show and was so happy to have Phil with me experiencing one of my favorite activities. In the future I plan to have more friends play live, including myself. So whether you are in my class or just reading this review, I want you on my radio show! Continue listening to your sound alternative. Sounder as music, art as music! Thank you!

À bout de souffle

À bout de souffle (English: Breathless) is a film I recently saw with my French class. It's a very famous film that set the stereotype for French people up until the present day (it was originally released in 1960). Jean Seberg stars in the film as a young journalist living in Paris who has an ambiguous relationship with a criminal. Jean Seberg is actually from Marshalltown, Iowa but moved to France in the 60's and became a very famous French movie actress.

French cinema differs from American movies in a couple ways: French films are usually constructed of conversation more than action. This is a tenant of French culture where conversation is elevated to an artform in itself. The conversations between Patricia (Jean Seberg) and Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) vary from life aspirations to cultural differences, but most of the time Michel is just trying to get Patricia to sleep with him. The film is also different in that there is usually somewhat of an open ended conclusion. A lot of Americans find these types of endings inconclusive, but they are actually meant to stir the viewer's emotions.

I suppose the stereotype stems from Michel's promiscuity and rather unabashed appetite for sexuality (though it's still fairly mild for today's standards, America in the 60's would find it somewhat distasteful and strange). I found the film interesting even if only because it offered a glimpse of what Paris was like in the 1960's. If film noir is your thing, you might enjoy this. I also recommend "Classe Tous Risques" which features Jean-Patrick Belmondo in a somewhat similar role in a crime drama set in France during the same time period. Ciao.

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Nathan's Journal

For open house, I presented a notebook I've been working on all semester with my friend in creative writing class. It consists of poems, short stories, quotes, and little cartoons. I displayed my project in a way that made it more hidden than any other projects. Even though it was in plain sight, many people would just pass it by because they would dismiss it as just someones backpack and not part of the show. This is a continuation of my "hidden art" theme that I've had in previous projects.



The notebook is presented as a personal journal belonging to our friend Nathan. The cover is littered with "Do Not Read," "Private," and "Top Secret" type messages. This was to convey an immature "Keep Out" theme (as if capital letters would prevent someone from not looking) much like one of those elementary school journals and "slam books" that were always supposed to be so private. Presented in an open house setting, I would hope that this would entice people to pick up the book to read it.



The inside of the notebook is filled with negative writings about depressions, bad luck, and suicide. I wanted to present something that was mildly inappropriate and pushed people's comfort zones. Out of context, finding a "suicide notebook" could be hazardous and out of line. Within in art show, however, it could be offensive at worst.
Though, between my friends and I, it is just an inside joke poking fun at our friend Nathan. He has yet to find out about the notebook, and I plan on giving it to him for Christmas.

Friday, December 5, 2008

HOLIDAY THEMED WINDOW DISPLAYS

JUST CAME ACROSS THIS ONLINE.
just some unique window displays for a surf shop.
very cool ideas!

Here is something simple and fun!

Due to the chaos around friday I wanted to share something simple. Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power are from Bristol where they met at a visual art college.

They are the musical duo "The Fuck Buttons." You may know them they are signed To All Tomorrows Parties. They are simply Noise Music, (some people like it some dont... I DO!)
They create thir visuals and everything of their group.

Here is a link to the video for their track "Bright Tomorrow" from the album "Street Horrising!"
And a link so you can see what they do!

Bright Tomorrow: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMRhTMLHBLU

Live on "Juan's Basement:" http://pitchfork.tv/juans-basement/fuck-buttons-part-2-of-2

Let me know what you think










HAVE A MERRY OPEN HOUSE EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Microsoft Tabletop Technology Surfaces



Take a look at Tabletop Technology called Microsoft Surface. It uses "smart surfaces" and recognizes hand movements, and also uploads things like camera pictures wirelessly (think Minority Report). Basically, it's like an iPhone touch screen on an entire table top. Not since computers went to "Windows" has there been such a big jump in the way computers are used.

Microsoft says the technology will be in use within a couple years, with a reasonable pricetag. They'll probably first appear in restaurants, businesses, and eventually consumer homes. Here's Microsoft's Teaser and a real time demo.

There's a lot of talk about how this will change people's lives, mostly in a practical sense. However, not much has been mentioned about its involvment in art. What kinda of opportunities do you think this technology will open for the art world? How could Intermedia use this opportunity in the future?

UH-MAZING STENCIL WORK


LOGAN HICKS is an amazing stencil artist.
he was featured in a DVD i had purchased about two years ago, and i am now finally independently checking his work out.
if any of you have seen my every day work, then you know i use stencils.
when i look at his stencil work, i sorta wanna go crazy, it looks amazing and very time consuming.

CUPROCKING by andy uprock

An alternative graffiti form by ANDY UPROCK

Uprock is a Sydney based artist whos work includes transforming streetscapes into large floating cup installations. The method and practice of his work runs parallel to the culture of graffiti and he titles this movement 'Cuprocking'. 

Andy's work also includes large scale braille poetry; pieces out of cups that can be read with the hands. His long term vision with these works is to communicate graffiti with a poetic message to the blind. He is currently preparing an exhibition of his Braille series titled 'Sign Language' to be shown at the MTV Gallery in November 2008 in association with Vision Australia.

FOLLOW THE LINK... AND CHECK OUT

Artist Books


If anyone is ever curious to check out a great collection of artist books, check out the library's special collections on the third floor.  There you can find a force of artists books from a lot of heavy hitters.  Check out Ed Ruscha's books.  His book nine swimming pools is held there.