Television delivers people

This video/text was interesting because it seems super relevant now in our current society and is information that I had been hearing for quite some time. For some reason it surprised me that television was consuming people in this similar way 30 years ago. Maybe I'm shocked because now more than ever society is bombarded and saturated with images, ideas and influences from the media and corporations, especially considering the visual culture we live in now and the effect it has had on our culture is also pretty obvious.

The video says "you are the product of tv" and this holds true today more than ever, especially for youth whose views are being formed by tv. Social and cultural norms are shaped by tv shows and advertising, and the ideas reflected on televesion are perpetuated into society, and we as viewers simply reflect what television tells and shows us that we are the end product.

Im curious to know and experience the impact of mass media and television 30 years ago. TV now adds to our culture's obsession with celebrities and physical appearances,but this seems like a relatively new (not thaaat new) fad and Im curious to the actual severity of the impact of tv when this article/movie was made.

After thoughts

Rosler says in her article that documentary photography centered more around moralism than revolutionary politics. however, i feel the majority of documentaries that I see (film or photographs) have a revolutionary or political undertones, rather than moral ones. Revolutionary or moral, documentary is still a social action that creates dialog. Currently, documentary is common and prevalent in mainstream culture. When a documentary about penguins is a great American success, it becomes obvious how they've worked their way into culture and popular media. Though March of the Penguins might not be considered "liberal documentary" it still involved issues of poverty and oppression that documentaries often tackle. I like how Rosler says that documentary "testifies" to the bravery of the photographer who entered a situation of some sort of danger to capture the images we are seeing. Despite how powerful documentaries can be, as the viewer you are still removed from the situation at hand, and sometimes forget that some one actually was there first hand to bring us these images.

sound art

Only recently did I become aware to the fact that sound may be considered art. I didn't discard sound as art, I just never though about it as an outlet for art until very recently. When thinking about sound art I agree with Goldsmith when he asks where does experimental music stop and sound art begin. Is experimental music sound art? Is traditional music sound art?
Also when thinking about sound art, I never considered it having specific movements, or sub-genres as there are with "traditional" art. I really enjoyed the sound art that deals with language such as Alvin Lucier's "Sitting in a Room". I think I find the concepts so interesting because that kind of stuff can become very musical and compositional, and when listening to music I am attracted to language and its abstraction.

long take

Long takes are very subjective. They film one specific view, all points of view are missing except for the view of the film taker. Before reading this I never considered that when we watch film, there are always several points of view, even in a simple scene of two people talking. There are shots of both people talking, both responding, the back of one person while the other responds, the perspective of a spectator of the conversation, etc.
I like how he refers to the long take as the present tense of cinema especially in combination with the long take as being very subjective. So the long take is the present tense of one person's view of reality. Many long takes then are montages of the present tense as time goes on for the person "taking these shots" and according to Pasolini a metaphor for life, which is pretty interesting and intense.

digital cinema

Manovich begins his article by saying narrative is not essential to cinema, and it first that seemed very strange to me because I associate cinema with movies, and movies with narratives. A movie without a narrative seemed like a book without a narrative, and a book without a narrative is a textbook, and those are boring. As I later read, he referred to music videos as a digital form of non-narrative cinema. While it's true that music videos don't always form a conventional narrative, they typically have many narrative elements that usually form a cohesive story. CD-roms are also something that I did not think of as a non-narrative form of digital cinema, because I did not associate cinema with things put in a computer.


I also like how in the beginning live action footage was so impressive and technologically advanced, but now with computer animation, live action footage is only one element of digital cinema. No matter what form the input media is: photographs, moving images, digital images, it is all edited in the same way and goes through the same process as the and comes out in the same form as output.


The thing that I found the most interesting about Manovich's article is the comparison between animation and digital cinema. Before cinema, there was animation which tried to recreate reality. The artist would draw an image, and alter it slightly, frame by frame to try and mimic reality. When seeing these films, the artists' hand is always present, and reality was not realistically conveyed. Then, when cinema was created, part of its appeal was that it conveyed reality so accurately. Cinema began as an art of motion, beginning with animation, and now it creatively and successful conveys the reality of motion. Now however, in the "digital age" still images to form a film are edited. They can be edited much in the same way as early animation was, frame by frame. And evven though cinema conveys reality, with this editing it shows something that looks like it's happening, and looks like it could happen, even though it cant, like the feather in Forrest Gump. It's circular how cinema was born form animation and now animation is a huge part of digital cinema.

Connections with Time Arts

At first I didn't think that I had any connections of influences in time arts, but after thinking about it, I think that I sure do.

One of them is the band The Books. This is a band that I've been listening to for a while and I feel like they're really different from a lot of other bands that I like because of the way they make their music and what kinds of things they put in their music. They use a lot of computer generated sounds, along with a lot of acoustic instruments, but they also edit in other sounds not typically found in music like snip its from a phone message, or announcements on airplanes, background conversations and these sounds are sped up, slowed down, repeated or edited in some way to work themselves into the music. Sometimes there is a bizzare juxtapostion and layering between genres of music and conversations and time and speed that there is something a little off about their songs, but these elements also work their way into one another and the "offness" is what's cool.

Another influence to time arts is Janet Cardiff's audio tours. A person could go to her gallery, get a headset and will be provided with a tour of the neighborhood narrated by Janet Cardiff. it's interesting because there is already ambient noise in the recording, so even though it may be winter, there are birds chirping. she combines things that actually exist in the neighborhood, along with made up things such as "You'll go down the stairs and see the green door and Whoa! Watch out for that bike!" and it's interesting because you'll see the green door, but where's the bike? She plays with ideas of time and space and virtual reality versus real reality, and thats pretty sweet.

Another influence is doing an animation in foundations. It involved drawing an initial scene, photographing it and then building on the same image by altering it slightly so the remnants of the previous images still exist in a ghostly way. I only ended up using one piece of paper. I then imported the images and set them to music.