Check out this self-produced mini-doc by writer Matt Zoller Seitz about Peanuts director Bill Melendez — covering his artistic roots, his directorial style, and his influence on the films of Wes Anderson. The juxtaposition of Melendez’s art between Hitchcock’s and Kubrick’s presents a fresh and exciting way of looking at animation in a filmic context. Thanks to AMID @ CartoonBrew.com.
The guest speaker today in class graduated from FSU in 1999 with his BFA... his focus in fantasy-based special effects, costumes, illustration, painting and drawing have taken him a long way from the BFA warehouse...hear about his journey and the artwork he's made along the way....
Students:The Art Department's Visiting Artist this Thursday is Deb Whistler, whose work resides somewhere between cut paper, sculpture and illustration:
My work deals with the fraying of divisions between the interior and the exterior in the current context of globalization. In the current state of world affairs it is difficult to the point of being impossible to separate oneself from the chaos of the world. This however does not stop us from continually seeking to separate and escape from the everyday problems that surround us. This desire to escape and to remain in our “feel good” society has caused us to ignore our effects on the world and has ultimately made us vulnerable to manipulation. My work challenges the false sense of security we have surrounded ourselves with, and I strive through my work to encourage a dissolving of the boundaries between surface and truth. I enjoy that my work wrestles with the notion of existence, questions our purpose in life and the mark we leave behind. I have always been interested in the process of self-evaluation, and self-reflection. To me this process requires a certain objectivity, or out of body experience. It is important that we reflect on our actions and the effects of these actions as part of who we are.
2D Boy co-founder and World of Goo Independent Game Mastermind Kyle Gabler -- an expert on rapid dev, having helped found Carnegie Mellon's Experimental Gameplay project --gives his advise to the participants of this years Global Game Jam.
Skip ahead to about the two minute mark, and hear his tips for 48 hour game designers.
I admire and share many of his attitudes, which apply to all-kind of art and design, like yours.
And if you haven't played World of Goo yet... GO NOW! and play the first chapter for free. I think it clearly points to the future of independent game design from an artists perspective.
Back in 2001, Landy stunned the mainstream press with his performance/installation Break Down. The artist, dressed in blue boiler suit, systematically cataloged and pulverized all his belongings including his birth certificate, all his books and works of art, his car and driving license. Not even the most cherished souvenirs, from a childhood teddy bear to a sheepskin coat that belonged to his father, could escape the grinder.
Michael Landy, Break Down, 2002, still from video documentary, 16.36 min
The video on show at CCCS documents the operation: in a vacant shop space located on the always shopping-busy Oxford Street in London every single item is placed on a conveyor belt and transported to its final destruction in a grinder.
The performance didn't even have any commercial value: Landy refused to have the bags of rubbish left from the process sold or exhibited in any form. He made no money as a direct result of Break Down, and following it had no possessions at all. A BBC documentary followed the artist as he had to rebuild his material life.
The works puts a distressing human element onto the much-criticized but eagerly embraced consumer society. Should the objects ones owns be the sole factor that determine who an individual is? What happens to one's identity when all theses objects have been annihilated?
Image on the homepage: Denis DARZACQ, Hyper n° 8, 2007, serie di 4 fotografie, courtesy the artist; VU'La Galerie, Paris.
Students, I ran across this comment on a blog entry this morning. How might YOU respond to this kind of argument/philosophy?
Is the goal of life not to be happy? If so, then perhaps ignorance _is_ bliss. If a person blindly beliefs in Santa Claus, and this makes them happy, why do you think it is "better" to know the "truth"? What is truth, other than a world view that you agree with?
Why is a factual, scientific explanation for something more "right" than one based on a hunch? If it explains more but fails to bring more happiness, then why is it better?
If someone is controlled by a dictatorship and knowledge is kept from them their whole life, but they live simply and happily, who are you to say that that is wrong? Maybe it's better.
Knowledge is only nirvana to those who seek it. Stop seeing ultimate truth and intellectualism as the only means to happiness. There are other ways. Perhaps being scientifically minded and unable to see the beauty of bliss of unquestioned belief is the true problem. Logical thinking is the disease that prevents happiness.
After all, what will it get us other than more questions? Science will never arrive at a formula for greater happiness or contentment. It will never reveal the ultimate truth and make as all happy. It just explains things in a different way, and if you find happiness in those explanations then it brings you joy. You are in the minority. You have the scientific sickness.
A reasoned argument, sadly, has little effect on unreasonable people.
Scott Brown on Why Hollywood Needs a New Model for Storytelling
By Scott Brown 01.19.09
Hollywood needs a fresh model for storytelling. Behold, the Brown Ziggurat! Illustration: Matias Vigliano
Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here today to mourn the death of Story. As you may have heard, it's kaput—or, at the very least, terminally ill, wracked by videogames, wikis, recaps, talkbacks, YouTube, ADD, and the rise of a multiplatform, multipolar, mashup-media culture. Hollywood, vendor of Story in its most denatured form, is most at risk: The film industry is slowly but steadily being forced to part with quaint artifacts like the "hero's journey," Joseph Campbell's so-called Monomyth. (Which is just so ... well ... mono.) Beginnings, middles, and ends are headed for the attic, next to the box marked VCR Rewinders/Beastmaster Franchise. And Tinseltown can kick this chestnut to the curb. You may remember it from high school English:
Concocted 146 years ago by a German philologist, Freytag's pyramid was long held aloft as the one-size-fits-all narrative template, despite the fact that it describes the tidy Aristotelian side of storytelling (Ben-Hur) far better than its frayed quantum fringes (Memento). Techniques like open-ended conclusion, audience interactivity, and nonlinear chronology "were part of the avant-garde 30 or 40 years ago," says UCLA film school dean Robert Rosen, "but they're taken for granted now."
Fortunately for Western civilization, I've developed a new model. Allow me to introduce Brown's Ziggurat (in 4-D!)tm. It accounts for all the time-shredding, symmetry-defying, viewer-inclusive wackiness of New Story. To stress-test this innovative system, we revisit one of our most basic, most fundamental narratives. A classic hero's journey. The ur-Story. I speak, obviously, of Die Hard.
The Freytag Pyramid
In Freytag-ese, Die Hard unfolds thusly: NYC cop John McClane arrives in LA to reunite with his estranged wife, Holly (exposition), but terrorists raid her office tower, taking everyone hostage except McClane (inciting incident), who escapes unseen and starts picking off the goons (rising action). The terrorists finally realize they're holding McClane's wife and gain the upper hand (climax), but McClane frees the other hostages (falling action), goes toe-to-toe with the terrorist chieftain, and prevails (resolution). He celebrates by making out with his wife in the back of a limo. (Awww! And ... denouement!)
A little square, no? With the snazzy Brown Ziggurat, however, Die Hard will look like this: John McClane, NYC cop, arrives in LA to reconcile with his estranged wife—but we already know all about their failing marriage from the ARG we've been obsessed with for the six months leading up to the movie's release. (McClane's potemkin Tumblr blog was especially illuminating.) With exposition rendered obsolete, we open instead on a Sprite commercial, which transitions seamlessly into furious gunplay. We don't even see McClane in the flesh, but our handsets are buzzing with his real-time thumb-tweets: "in the air duct. smelz like dead trrist in here lol." The film then rewinds to McClane Googling "terrorists" to read up on his adversaries. We then flash-cut to the baddies' POV, which we're familiar with (and sympathetic to) thanks to the addictive Xbox hit Die Hard: Hard Out There for a Terrorist. This is all part of the Action-Happening Plateau, an intensifying mass of things and stuff leading up to the Mymaxtm.
The Mymax is not a lame old Freytag climax but a hot Escher mess of narrative possibilities suggested by you, the audience. With a mere click of your handset (and a charge of 99 cents), you furnish a Youclusiontm to your liking. This is how McClane somehow ends up defeating terrorists—and winning American Idol—with his ultrasonic melisma. McClane and Holly then celebrate by making a sex tape. (Awww!)
Voilà! The future of storytelling. Hollywood, I await my royalty checks. And you, dear reader, can thank me by providing a Youclusion for this column.
Email
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
.
Learning can and should be fun. This is not just a moral position, but a scientific one too.
When you learn a new thing, or get a surprise, there is a shot of a chemical messenger in your brain called dopamine. Dopamine is famous among neuroscientists for its involvement in the reward and motivation systems of the brain.
You won't be surprised to learn that the reason addictive drugs are addictive is that they hack the reward circuitry that dopamine is intimately involved in. Perhaps the most addictive drug, cocaine, directly increases the amount of dopamine at work in your brain.
Learning something new triggers a chemical release of the same kind as cocaine, albeit in a much more subtle manner. As methods of getting your kicks you can perhaps compare it to the difference between walking up a hill yourself or being strapped to a rocket and blasted up --- slower, harder work, but a lot more sustainable and you're in a better state to enjoy the view when you get there!
One of the many negative things about the misconception that education is about transmitting content is the idea that any fun you have is taking time away from proper learning, and that 'proper learning' shouldn't be fun.
Rather than fun being a relief from learning, or a distraction from it, for most of our history, before school, learning had to be its own motivation. Brains that learnt well had more offspring, and so learning evolved to be rewarding.
In lots of teaching situations we focus on the right and wrong answers to things, which is a venerable paradigm for learning, but not the only one. There is a less structured, curiosity-driven, paradigm which focusses not on what is absolutely right or wrong, but instead on what is surprising. A problem with rights and wrongs is that, for some people, the pressure of being correct gets in the way of experiencing what actually is.
You can try this for yourself, either in any teaching you do, or any learning. Often we will get blocked at a particular stage in our learning. A normal response is to try harder, and to focus more on what we're doing right, and what we're doing wrong. Sometimes this helps, but sometimes it just digs us further into our rut. The way out of the rut is to re-focus on experiencing again.
I'll give you an example from one of the two things I know best about teaching --- aikido, the japanese martial art. Aikido involves some quite intricate throws and grappling moves. Often a student is so intent on getting through the move, and on trying hard to get it right, that they become completely stuck, repeatedly doing something that doesn't work, and usually too fast. Even if you say or show explicitly the correct movement, they can't seem to get it. In this situation, one teaching technique I use, inspired by the 'Inner Game' writings of Timothy Gallway, is to tell the student to stop trying to do the move correctly, and instead do it deliberately wrong. “Try pushing over this way to the left”, I'll say, “Now try the opposite over to the right. Now try high, or low. Which is easiest?”. By removing the obligation to get the move correct I hope to give permission to the student to just experience the effect they are having on their partner's balance. Once they can tune into this they can figure out for themselves what the right thing to do is, without me having to tell them.
However you do it, if you can get out of the rut of right and wrong you free up a natural capacity for experience-led, curiosity-driven learning. Soon you'll be flying along again, experiencing the learning equivalent of the jogger's high, and all thanks to that chemical messenger dopamine and a brain that's evolved to find things out for itself, and feel good while doing it.
A new book for digital artists by Lev Manovich, Software takes Command is available as a free download.
”New media calls for a new stage in media theory whose beginnings can be traced back to the revolutionary works of Robert Innis and Marshall McLuhan of the 1950s. To understand the logic of new media we need to turn to computer science. It is there that we may expect to find the new terms, categories and operations that characterize media that became programmable. From media studies, we move to something which can be called software studies; from media theory — to software theory.”
An FSU blog for digital arts students and artists featuring readings, resources and artwork examples. Lively discussion of these topics via threaded commenting is encouraged. No signup required.
