Open House Project: Work-in-progress Pictures

open house materials

I can bring a staple gun and staples, and fishing line( i have a ton of it):)

Open House Idea-iMovie

Hello Class,

What do you all think about using iMovie instead of Final Cut Pro to do the animations?

iMovie works similarly (drag and drop the images, then export as a Quicktime movie). It is also something that most people will have access to on their home computers, so if teaching visitors/participants how to do this is part of our mission, then teaching through iMovie allows people to apply their new animation skills to a program they are more likely to have access to.

Also, I checked with Andy Evans, our super computer tech for the building, and he said we could wheel out the jumbo tv/computer from the printmaking department-- so, we could do the editing on this computer and then project through a laptop connected to a projector.

We can talk more about it in class!

See you Thursday!

Open House Items

Hey Class!
Here is a list of supplies we will be needing for the Open House. When you have one of the items please post which item you have to the blog so everyone can get an idea of the supplies that are still needed. Thanks!
1. a lot of cardboard
2. duck tape/ staple gun (if have one)
3. Spray paint/ or other paint
4. Fishing line/ or types of string
5. Blue tarp for back drop
6. long rods
7. box cutter knife
8. Pictures of favorite Mario scenes
9. anything else people can think of!!

Intermedia Open House

As a class, we first discussed creating miniature 3D models for an audience-interactive stop animation (Gumby style), but then decided to do a life-size set. Suggestions included creating a cheesy set out of cardboard in which the participants could act out their stop animation. Plans also included setting up a station where a few of us from class help upload photos and put them into Final Cut. The rough stop animations will then be projected for the participants to see. For this project we still need to figure out some specifics: ideas for the set, props, the title of the project, the number of cameras (at least three) and the layout/functionality of the "workshop" room. It might also help to create more interesting stop animations if we look up stop animation techniques.

(YouTube has some cool examples tambien http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJzU3NjDikY)

Project #3 (finally)

For this project I chose to hang a variety of newspapers on the walls and allow viewers to paint yellow over anything they considered negative. I wanted the viewer to think critically about the stories that are published in daily newspapers. Specifically: why do you think this article was published? And why are the majority of headline news stories negative?

How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect

How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect [not that I endorse needing a reason to be absurd]

By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: October 6, 2009. NYT.
When things don’t add up, the mind goes into high gear.

In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.

An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/health/06mind.html

Project #4- SOUND

Each student (or pair of students) is to make, create, and or perform a project inspired, influenced by SOUND.

The piece can be in a variety of styles or any combination of them: ambient (no beginning or end), documentary, narrative, radio essay, musical, experimental, etc.

The sound can also be in any style or combination: found sound (recorded from different environments), recorded instruments, voice and song, voice-over, noise music, etc. You may work collaboratively with one other person on this assignment, if you like. If you elect to do a piece of sound art as described above, it should be between 3-5 minutes long.

In addition to the above, you must include a 200-250-word statement (typed) about the piece. If this were exhibited in a gallery, this would function as wall text. The written component should be a well thought out and cover the thoughts that inform your piece. Projects without text will not be accepted. Projects can be posted to the Blog or dropped in my "Public" folder on the Intermedia Server.

Something out of nothing

I Didn't Think Dead Animals Could Fly! (New Artist)

Hey everyone!

I was going through the wonderful website of stumbleupon.com and came across the work by Claire Morgan and thought I would share. She is an artist that uses materials that many probably would think of using such as, fishing to hang fruit flies, or taxidermied animals, and even strawberries. Her installations are beautiful and you all should CHECK IT OUT!

here's the website:

http://www.claire-morgan.co.uk/index.htm

Project 3

Verlyn Klinkenborg on Silence...

From the New York Times

September 21, 2008

EDITORIAL NOTEBOOK

Two Silences

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

For the past week, I’ve been staying in northern Finland, just south of the Arctic Circle and a few kilometers shy of the restricted zone that marks the Russian border. This is the boreal forest, a place of almost surreal silence this time of year, when most of the birds have already migrated.

The first night I was here I stood in the middle of a bridge over a broad, slow-moving river that flows into Russia. It was dusk, a clear night, and I had come out to listen to nothing. There was no wind in the trees, not even the slightest breeze. The river below me was silent, and for the half-hour I stood there I heard not a sound.

I found myself checking, again and again, to see whether I had gone deaf. I popped my ears. I scuffed a shoe. I tossed a rock into an eddy along the river’s edge. I tapped the guard-rail with a knuckle. There was nothing wrong with my hearing. The human ear is not really meant for straining, and yet I was straining to hear. The silence felt more like an unnatural muffling of my senses than the porous stillness of the natural world, of which I was a part.

The next week I spent in and out of the forest, listening with my eyes, so to speak, and not my ears. It has been a cold, wet summer in Finland, a season filled with the sound of rain falling through the spruces and pines. All of the Finns I met grimaced when they talked about it, as if the summer had tasted like cold, weak coffee. But the past week has been dry, and every night there has been frost. The leaves are turning fast. A fog hangs above the river in the mornings, which only deepens the illusion of silence.

I say illusion because on my last night here, I went back to the bridge, again under a clear sky. There are long shadows even at midday this time of year, and dusk is still reluctant to give way to real darkness. As I stood there, I heard the faint, but quite audible roar of the rapids a half-mile downstream and around a great bend. Why had I not heard it that first night? The answer, I suppose, is that I was too busy not hearing the things I’m used to hearing, including the great roar that underlies the city’s quietest moments. It had taken a week to empty my ears, to expect to hear nothing and to find in that nothing something to hear after all.