Thursday, December 11, 2014
Looking at Cool Stuff
Take us on a journey of sight and sound. Perhaps you will begin on Colossal (at right), perhaps with OK Go, RadioLab, or elsewhere. Find an experience to share that challenges you to think in an unexpected way. Lead us to see what we do not believe. Begin your post with a link, then explain the adventure you and your brain took. Identify the ways of knowing you employed. Finally, compose a knowledge question that is concretely grounded in the real world situation you've shared. Please complete your writing by Sunday at 6 pm. Come to class on Monday with two other people's posts that you'd like to discuss. Happy trails.
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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/11/psychedelic-poured-paint-and-resin-paintings-by-bruce-riley/
ReplyDeleteThe video which struck me most was artist Bruce Riley creating colorful, almost trippy-looking images with paint and resin. The video showed Riley painting interspersed with commentary on what art was to him. My initial reaction to this was emotional - I think we all experienced the "THAT'S SO COOL" reaction to a lot of the things we saw. I felt inspired, impressed, and even a little spaced out as I watched Riley swirl brightly colored paint around a black, glassy surface. He created incredibly detailed images which flowed into one another, sometimes forming identifiable pictures and sometimes just creating colorful nonsense. The predominant WOK in this experience was emotion, but I also used memory in that I could distinctly remember how difficult it was for me to even do anything in middle school art - thus the emotional response of awe. As more and more people saw the video and reacted the same way I did, my sense of astonishment grew.
KQ: How can other peoples' emotional response to a given material alter our own?
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/11/a-story-of-reincarnation-told-through-stop-motion-face-paint/
ReplyDeleteThe artist in this video, Emma Allen, used her face painting and animation skills to tell a story of reincarnation. The animation flows extremely smoothly and it is almost unbelievable that some has this much talent. You can see her face turning old and into a skull, and then cracks suddenly appear with flowers blooming out of them. The amount of work and skill put into the art is incredible and inspiring. Each time the face paint transformed her face into something different, I was even more awed by her talent. The most prominent way of knowing that I used was emotion. I was completely entranced while watching the video. I also used sense perception to see and hear the video. I watched the video twice to get every detail. Another way of knowing that I used was imagination. Seeing the video, I was imagining other ideas she could have used such as painting more of the ground/soil before having the flowers bloom, or having different types of flowers and making them look more 3D. My overall reaction to the video was one of amazement.
KQ: How do the portrayals of the same concepts through different forms of art, such as sculpture or facepaint, affect the emotions of the viewer?
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/12/mona-carons-murals-of-weeds-slowly-overtake-walls-buildings/
ReplyDeleteThis video reflects a collection of street art murals by Mona Caron that focused on weeds. Considering that this video did not start with the artwork itself but rather the inspiration for it, I first used intuition to try and piece together what would be coming next from the information I gathered within the title and what I was currently looking at. Once I saw what was coming next, the actual wall art, emotion and sense perception took over as I stared in awe at the gigantic weeds portrayed in one of the most beautiful forms I've ever seen weeds portrayed. About a third of the way into the video, it depicted some sort of protest occurring and the use of either Caron or someone else's weed drawings as a sign within the protest. From there, I used reason to try and figure out where these murals were being created. I wondered about large protests that are occurring currently that I know of and I payed closer attention to the buildings and signs around the area of her murals. As the video went on I used memory as a way of understanding the murals even more deeply. I associate weeds as things that are unnecessary and annoying because of my experience in helping my mom and Aunts garden, but when seeing weeds in an art form, I was able to find them beautiful despite my prior knowledge.
KQ: How can prior knowledge of a certain thing, like weeds, be changed by viewing that same subject in a different form like artwork?
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/09/interactive-dancing-traffic-light-by-smart/
ReplyDeleteBefore I watched the video, I was visually attracted by the abnormal “don’t walk” silhouette in the traffic light in the pictures above the video. Instead of standing normally, it was in the postures of dancing. It was invented by a small car manufacturer by building a nearby dancing booth that translates the dance moves into the silhouette. While watching the video, I mostly employed my sense of perception, particularly vision. I looked at the dance carefully and discovered how each gesture of dance made the traffic light special. I saw that the dance changes to different actions and rhythms by different people, which made the traffic light varied and interesting. I also used my emotion when I felt its creativity and entertainment. I thought that the dancing is so funny and unique and it makes big contrast with the normal standing silhouette. With my excitement, I felt that “I love this invention”, and “I really want one traffic light like that in my city”.
KQ: To what extent are different senses of perception employed unequally when people are engaged in the entertainment of dancing signal of traffic lights?
http://time.com/3404527/go-pro-dance-building/
ReplyDeleteThis GoPro video of dancers Amelia Rudolph and Roel Seeber was filmed while they were suspended from the sides of Oakland California's city hall. The video gives the dancers the illusion of weightlessness and gravity-defying flight, as it is filmed from an angle so that side of the building appears to be the floor. This unexpected perspective forced me to shift my sense perception, as what I normally perceived as "up" and "down" was skewered. While by reason I knew that these dancers were hanging horizontally, my sense perception as dictated through the lens of the camera enabled me to see the dancers as "right-side up," which enhanced the effect of the performance. On occasion, however, the camera angle would shift to the dancers' perspective and I could see the city twirl underneath them as they jumped and flipped, which increased my sense of vertigo. Since this allowed me to see the height from which they were moving, I also had an emotional response because I was simultaneously terrified for their lives and awed at their strength,courage, and grace. Throughout the video, my emotional response triggered my feeling of breathlessness, and I audibly gasped as I watched the duo slice through the air.
KQ: How does our reliance upon another limited perspective, as viewed through lens of the camera, alter our own sense-perception?
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/12/feathers-form-and-function-new-cut-feather-artwork-by-chris-maynard/
ReplyDeleteWhen I looked at the pictures of these art pieces, I was not very surprised by them, because I thought they were micro carvings of tiny birds figures from colored paper. However, when I took a close look at the pictures and the title, I was so surprised. It is hard for me to believe that The tiny birds were all carved from birds' feathers! What a creative art style! From my previous knowledge, I have only hard about carving on paper, eggs, and nutshells. Carving on these tiny images on these medias have already surprised me a lot, but it is my first time to learn about carving on bird feathers. Thus, the knowledge of a totally different use of media brought my interest and had a deeper effect on me than the posts I did not choose to write about. The artist carved them by using scalpel to shape out the figures of birds from one piece of feather. All the birds had their natural colors and essences even though they are as tiny as my pinky nail. I don't know how much time and work the artist spend on each piece. However, my visual perception and previous knowledge of art told me that in order to carve these incredible tiny figures, the artist must have put incredible amount of patient and time.
KQ: To what extent can the previous knowledge or visual perception affect the degree of knowers' interests on learning about new knowledge?
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2010/12/chicago-mirrored-time-lapse-video/
ReplyDeleteThis video, taken from a man's windshield as he drives through Chicago, shows the city with a mirror filter over it. It shows Chicago, a city I generally associate with grit, wind, and theater colleges, as a peaceful place, almost appearing to float. Interestingly, I perceived this to have an almost magical effect: the stop lights seemed to glow, the buildings appeared weightless, and I was drawn to the idea of living in this not-quite-Chicago city. As a lover of any and all big cities, I found this video incredibly appealing. Upon reflection, it occurs to me that my initial "ooh, pretty" reaction may have partially been influenced by prior bias towards cities. I doubt that had the person filming been driving through a desert or Greenfield. Therefore, for me, some emotion was involved in viewing this. In processing the video, one of the other ways of knowing I used was sense-perception, given that the entire thing is primarily based on subverting what a city is meant to look like. Memory was also involved because I was forced to reconcile my previous notions about Chicago with the images I was seeing.
KQ: How can memory and emotion in combination affect one's initial reaction to subversion of previous assumptions about things like cities?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1ZB_rGFyeU
ReplyDeleteThis video, is the OK Go video I shared during class. This video was done in one take, took 22 attempts to get it perfect, and took 2 months of preparation to achieve. It is filmed by a drone and the song was slowed down when they filmed it, which opens the door possibility of very cool shots. When I first saw the video, a little over a month ago, I was surprised that it wasn't digitally edited. In modern days, it is easy to assume that everything is CGI or photos. The use of such bright umbrellas to create cool shapes makes it seem almost fake. The thing that blew my mind was how hard the band worked to create this video. From the use of computer programs, to scaled down paper figures of the space they were working with a lot of effort was put in. In result we get an amazing video that seems unbelievable to be all man made, and not use special affects. I used reason and emotion to figure out how this video was made. A strong emotion I had was hope that this video was actually made without use of special affects. Then using reason I decided to look up information on the bands website and around the web of how this video could be possible.
KQ: How does knowledge of the norm in video making affect us from using new knowledge and technologies recently discovered to create videos that take a lot of work? Can knowledge of the often use of CGI cause our emotions to automatically think negatively and assume that CGI was used prevent us from using reason to figure out how a video could possibly made without CGI?
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/09/rush-hour/
ReplyDeleteThis is the post I paused at as I was scrolling through the video pages, took one look at the .gif of the video, and kept scrolling. Because there was no way I was watching this. This video was edited footage of traffic at a normal intersection to "potentially catastrophic traffic patterns". I was in a horrible and very traumatic car accident this summer at a fairly normal intersection, and now I have been going out of my way to avoid anything that reminds me of it. I kept thinking about this video, however, and finally I went and watched it, against my better judgement, because I was really curious. Before the accident this is the sort of thing that I would love to watch. In it's credit, it is a really cool video. But as I was watching it, I definitely regretted it. The whole thing freaked me out a lot. Even though reason told me that it was all edited and that none of these almost-accidents were happening, that was overruled by emotion (fear), and my memories of my own accident prevented me from appreciating the video the way I hoped to. It actually just resulted in a lot of anxiety. Not exactly the best experience, but I digress.
The KQ I've come up with is: How do our memories of past experiences influence our reaction to similar experiences even when we are not directly involved in them?
Before I even started searching for images or videos that changed the way I think, I had an interesting experience in the art studio with Jessica. As I was getting a portrait mirror out of the closet and walking back to my seat, I realized that looking into the mirror at that 180 degree angle tricks your brain into thinking you're walking on the ceiling. I explored the art studio using this new perspective while Jessica laughed and made fun of me. When walking my legs automatically stepped over the metal beams on the ceiling and when I accidentally shook the mirror I began to feel dizzy and almost fell down. My brain tried to use logical rationalization through this phenomenon and instead rationalized it to "she is walking on that". The problem is that what my senses felt was not what my brain saw, so there was a strange disconnect.
ReplyDeleteTo what extent our we aware of the brain's rationalizations of sensory input? This question also stems from a interesting article my sister told me about in which apparently there are times in which matter acts in an irrational ways but we miss them because our brain rationalizes them.
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/12/mona-carons-murals-of-weeds-slowly-overtake-walls-buildings/
ReplyDeleteI found this video interesting because this woman was using weeds as "a tribute to resilience." Weeds are usually seen as something bad or negative. They are these annoying plants that will not stay gone forever no matter how ward a gardener tries. However the artist takes their resilience and uses it as symbol for the people who society writes away but keep coming back and pushing through. I think that is inspiring and amazing because it challenges our perception of stereotypically negative things. Her murals are beautiful and pleasing to the eye and the short videos make it look like they are actually growing. The video challenges the way we think of other human beings. There is a tendency to write other people off as unimportant or detrimental and then to want to keep them hidden. But the artist, Mona Carson encourages these people to keep pushing back and stand strong and beautiful.
I think the most dominant way of knowing is sense perception. Sense perception because this is the way she chooses to get her point across. Carson paints these grand murals of weeds so that they appear aesthetic and thus challenge the way we consider things. Visual artists have to convey their message and emotions primarily through shapes and colors. Thus through sense perception I see that these weeds are painted in bright clean colors so they should be positive.
KQ: How large can of an impact can knowledge through sense perception have on the stereotypes that society applies (indigenous belief systems)?
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/category/video/
ReplyDeleteThis video struck me within the first 10 seconds of watching it. In this video a man is playing a new acoustic instrumental, unlike anything I've ever heard or seen. It's interesting to note that the sound that this instrument is unlike what I expected, it sounds like there is an electrical source. The sound makes hard for me to believe that it's an acoustic instrument. In this case, my sense perception is contradicting reason, there is a disconnect. The instrument appears to be wooden but sounds like futuristic technology. As I continued to listen to the sounds, my mind carries away and I started to think about sounds that you might hear in space. For me, I was really confused, the sounds were "playing" with my emotions. (Pun intended) I expected, from reading the title of the video, completely different sounds than I actually heard.
KQ: How can the knower's preconceived notions affect their emotional response?
http://sbstok2016.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteThis post really interested me because of how my sense perception led me to think that this video was created in a similar time frame to that of a normal movie. However, knowing how stop-motion animation works, I know that it took alot more time than it appeared to. I thought it was a fun video because it played one of my ways of knowing against the other.
KQ: In what ways do reason and sense perception disprove each other?