At eight days until this project goes up, I keep trying to find ways to keep my motivation high...
At times I feel so excited about it, things make sense, ideas fit together, images do too...but I worry of how people will respond to it. It's not a flashy, come-look-at-me-piece. Will they see it as a history lesson that will make them wanna go to sleep, or will they stay within it for some time, listening to these voices?

Sometimes I'm happy that I'm working in this way, using images that blend into each other along with strangers' narratives of what Tampa was like.
Something I wrote one day:
I've been working on a project for the senior thesis show, a sound and video installation. My subject matter is place/history, focusing on Tampa. I'm using oral history interview excerpts in which people discuss Tampa and Ybor city's history, small art community, historic buildings, etc. mixed with my own sounds recorded in different cities around the world. I feel like the project itself is somewhat simple, but it's led me to do some great research. I've been reading a little bit of Paul Virilio, Michel Foucault's "Of other spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias", and I'm HAPPY that I get to work with these sort of ideas while making art!!!!!

I think starting with ideas that concern me, such as the conservation of these places that have witnessed many things through the years, helps me understand that its not just about the finished product on display, but about learning to manifest those thoughts in the physical world.

Sometimes the positive feeling is overshadowed by the fact that it hasn't yet reached the state of completion it needs to have at the show...


Recently watched film: W.

A return to the old blog...
I heard an intelligent speaker on the radio today as I was driving to lunch. Benjamin Barber. I kept silently nodding with every statement. He spoke about people as consumers, and the prevailing conditions in our lives (built environment, etc) which help perpetrate this role in our society. He spoke of how, throughout history, town halls, squares, markets, etc. -tracing back to the ancient greek agora- were not only places where citizens would exchange goods and services, but they were the epicenters of culture, and often politics. Comparing this to our world today, I think about how consumer/pop culture is so distanced from politics AND culture. In fact, in order for politicians/parties to appeal to the average consumer, they must define themselves as a brand, market their product strategically, advertise, poll.
I remember a quote from Paul Virilio, whose texts I started reading this summer: "the opinion poll is the election of tomorrow, it is the virtual democracy of the virtual city."
These are all random thoughts that somehow make sense to me, but for now, this is it.

Recently watched film: Vicky Christina Barcelona...thanks Woody!

Summer Art???
I was driving home the other night, feeling the urge to do something. I remembered a set of watercolors I had bought a while back, and that it was still practically new...one of those things I keep putting off until I never do.

This morning I woke up with the feeling that I have been working on the same image all semester. Yesterday I was putting them up in the case outside the photo classroom, and they started to all look alike.

The audio tracks of the different characters are really interesting to me. I think that those could act in the way that some photographs do, as traces of a person that has been there, so in that way I think the images can connect to each other through the audio.
I think that this summer I really want to work on the blog that I have been making from the text I have compiled, and see where that takes me.
I want to try to do a variety of projects not only involving photography or video, but don't know yet what form these will take.

text to audio, first try
http://say.expressivo.com/nOy9G6Lq

Todd Hido
On monday we began discussing our impressions of Todd Hido's visit.
I believe one of the reasons I cannot really relate to his photographs of the houses is because I do not share the experience of growing up in the suburbs. I like that his work is an expression of the seriality of these places that have been fabricated, but at the same time this characteristic is disturbing to me as a person interested in urbanism. I look at these photographs and think of the places they depict as an example of a way in which the interaction among people has been affected by their built environment...This reminded me of a reading we did for Lou's class, Marina LaPalma's Situationism: A Primer, and the response I wrote for it. (I don't know if I'm going off on a tangent, but this is the way in which I look at these images. We bring our culture and personal positions into both, the way we make, and the way we look at images.)
This is what I wrote:
One sphere of our world where everyday the Spectacle lives, without it being questioned, is in the “factory towns” that LaPalma mentions. We continue building places for a population disregarding how they will or should be used. As a person interested in Architecture and Urbanism, I believe this is the most serious form the Spectacle takes, because it enables other segments of the Spectacle to subsist. We live in places where communities are invisible, and our housing and planning problems are only addressed at surface level by the controlling powers.
We are content with having a roof and four walls for a person, but this does not constitute a home. We present a “glossy façade” of beautifully gardened lawns, but do not care for establishing a community that helps the individual advance, thus giving the Spectacle greater force, allowing it to rule over a fragmented people. Places around the world are beginning to all look the same, because the individual’s identity and culture (not mass culture) have been lost.
In regards to the nude portraits, I think that I felt uneasy looking at them, because I imagined myself as these women, and thought that I was left powerless when confronting the lens. The way in which some of the women looked at the camera, the way some of them are against a wall or a corner are what caused me to react this way.



To end on a lighter note:
Recently watched film: Horton Hears a Who!

French architect Nouvel wins Pritzker

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/arts/design/31prit.html
I was in a few of his buildings when I went to Europe, my favorite was the Institute of the Arab World in Paris, above. With some of his projects, though, I think he lost sight of the people that would use the spaces...his fame may have got to him...I read somewhere he's still paying off debts caused by some of his failures, ouch.
the Pritzker jury said in its citation. “His inquisitive and agile mind propels him to take risks in each of his projects, which, regardless of varying degrees of success, have greatly expanded the vocabulary of contemporary architecture.”

Interactive Art
so I became temporarily obsessed with finding out who had done the interactive art installation in the streets of Tokyo, it was SEMITRANSPARENT DESIGN (founded in 2003 by Ryoji Tanaka, Toshiyuki Sugai, Yusuke Shibata and Hiroshi Sato (who joined in a little later). Their main focus lies on exploring different types of networks and interactive projects as well as dealing with traditional media).
see article here: http://www.pingmag.jp/2006/02/20/semitransparent-design/

video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxrVwvFLokI

Here's an image of a project I did last semester.

another one:

I compiled some videos, short extracts from movies, grouped together by color, mood, pattern, etc...I made DVDs with one video as a background and created a menu at the bottom,

so the viewer would choose one video and this would start a progression of videos and eventually bring them back to the beginning...(and their choices were projected on different walls, one with each DVD) I didn't have all the technical expertise to make it really work, I still don't, but I hope in the future I'll have more time to investigate this, look for software that allows me to work like this, etc....
When Julie came to our class, she said that she could identify three elements that were present in my work: 1.they were inside, 2.it was a woman, 3.they were at night, like these three parameters the project seemed to her to revolve around, and that's sort of how I composed the strings of videos for the installation project...grouping images of things that went together, and then I set them along each other... so now I'm wondering how this idea of a new blog, one that's compiled from the blogs I've been reading can be like this...am I the only person interacting here, as an editor of the other writers? what parameters do I define for this editing process? is it open to other posters? but then how would it remain cohesive??? or maybe it has nothing to do with interactivity, it's just about a thing that generates, develops from multiple things that are similar...but then how does this blog relate to the images, does this new blog then generate new images, does it bring distortions to existing images? is it important that I continue to create images, or does it become about collecting, selecting others' images... if i'm creating a fictitious character, how do these start to speak of this person...
the blogs started reading as if they were from the same person, with slight differences, and the images I've made so far share these things in common, but do they necessarily have to have this relationship?

melodrama may be the least interesting aspect of set-up photography past and present

I just finished reading the article Mike posted a little while ago Wandering in a Forest of Poses...I kept thinking of parallels between my work this semester, and that which Smith wrote about.

Last critique I kept thinking about how uncomfortable I was getting with my being in those pictures, and how if I looked at them from the outside, if I hadn't produced them, I would think they had been made by some girl playing dress-up and not an artist doing serious work...I don't know that removing myself from the images will help much, or if its best that I rethink my entire approach...

At SPE I also questioned what importance the images I make can have when there are photographs out there that speak of real issues that do interest me, but that currently make no appearance in my work...

SPE...

Walking around the tables at the curator review, the work of the two following women artists caugh my eye:

Toni Pepe, an MFA student from Rochester Institue of Technology, and Jane Tam, a BFA student from Syracuse.

Pepe's work interested me because of her setups of space, using wallpaper and dramatic light...they do seem a little too much inclined towards fashion (I saw her Angle of Repose series), but I could use some help with the setup of the space in my own images.
http://www.tonipepe.com/

Tam's work seemed to me to have lot in common with the work I was doing last semester, with old family photographs. I spoke to her briefly as I looked through her project Can I Come Home With You? and she said she was using photographs of her "Family" series, and adding her own drawings of old family photos...this is something I briefly tried but abandoned, I wasn't happy with my results, but hers look ok .
http://janetam.com/index.html

I'm nervous yet anxious about showing work to the visiting artists tomorrow. Here's what I've
been working on lately...

I was reminded today that if a people remain silent about injustice, they are only helping to propagate it.

Here are a couple of frustrated attempts:

Tomorrow you'll tell me if the ones I present are any better...

Recently watched film: Weekend (Godard, 1967)

So you can see how diligent I've been with the blog, which I wanted to use as a way to make more work...
This is the book that I have been reading about Sophie Calle

I also found at the library one about her project Suite Venitienne , which includes an essay by Jean Baudrillard, Please Follow Me.

recently watched films: Be with Me, The Bad Sleep Well, La Vie en Rose