Performance Art Final

Student Art Show

While I have never been a huge fan of art shows, I liked a lot of what I saw in the Student Art Show in the Scarfone/Hartley gallery. Most of the pieces that I liked were painted or mixed media, but used paint in them. Painting has always been my favorite medium and I like the modernity of these pieces as compared to my favorite artist, Van Gogh.
One of the pieces that I liked the best at this show was one that was done to look like graffiti. I didn't take a picture of the namecard so I don't remember what the name, artist, or media was, but it looks like it was done mostly in spray paint. Graffiti was always one of my favorite parts of going into the city and seeing freight trains ride by. I saw the beauty in it that others didn't when all they believed it to be was vandalism. To see graffiti, or a semblance of graffiti, on the wall of an art gallery made me really happy to see others appreciating it in the same way that I do.
Another one of my favorites was the portrait of a girl, overlooking a city skyline. The piece itself was absolutely stunning. I like realism in art. I don't understand most abstractions. I can draw different colored squares on a piece of paper and call it art but I can't draw myself in anything more than a cartoon. The mixed media in the piece also gave it texture and color, and that made it more interesting than a plain 2-D charcoal drawing.
My favorite piece in the whole show was the Tim Burton one. When I walked past it at first, the first thing I saw was the striped snake coming out of the top of his head and my first thought was that it looked like the snake in Nightmare Before Christmas, my favorite movie. I almost walked past it without looking back when I realized that it was Tim Burton. Though they did not create anything new, and they really just redrew some of his designs, I still think that the idea of the piece is cool because the snake, bats, and hill from Nightmare Before Christmas, are all growing out of his hair and his head, showing that they are coming out of his brain and I've always thought that showing people's ideas this way was a cool representation of ideas spawning.

Performance Art

The idea behind this piece worked much better in my head than it was executed. The idea was to tear down the beauty standards that other put on us. This is why my friend is the one putting all of the makeup on me and I am the one to smear it all over my face. Obviously, if this were done again, I would have to frame it better, speed it up, cut audio, and overlay music. If I had done this well, I think that it would have been a performance art piece that more people my generation would have appreciated. A lot of performance art that we talk about today is old and outdated. It doesn't make sense and it usually just people hurting themselves or putting themselves in uncomfortable situations. I don't see the point in any of that. You can make beautiful art without being ridiculous.

Flipbook

There's An App for That!

A while back I saw a Tweet by some milennial that said something along the lines of "I wish there was an app like texting but that you could just talk instead." It was girls like her that give the rest of us milennials on social media a bad name but I always thought, what if someone did make that app? They'd make so much money because people wouldn't even think twice about their phone being a phone- used to make calls. Thus, my ridiculous product is born.

Introducing "Talxting"! All the impersonality of texting with the immediacy of talking! For just $3.99/month you get a subscription to the great app that lets you communicate with your loved ones over your phones, without tap-tap-tapping away at your phone screen! And you'll finally have a use for that hashtag that isn't a hashtag! Maybe now you'll know why it exists on old phones even though Twitter wasn't invented until 2006. Could old people see into the future? Maybe! Text "TALXT" to 33606 now to start your subscription!

Or... just click this on your phone:     

Llllllllet's Play!

Since senior year of high school, I have watched a YouTube channel called RoosterTeeth and I have been completely obsessed with them. Their subcompany called Achievement Hunter has a series of Minecraft Let's Plays that I thought were stupid at first, but have since become my favorite videos to watch on YouTube. The game Minecraft is extremely popular and over spring break, I started playing it with some of my friends from home. The dirt block is one of the most abundant and easiest blocks to use making it a very big symbol of the game. 

Since the entire game is made up of blocks and is basically a whole grid, it seemed like a great idea for the grid project. The basic idea was to make each face of the block 16x16 but once I started gluing the beads on, it was apparent that I did not have the space for that, so I couldn't follow the real dirt blocks anymore. Nonetheless, I'm pretty happy with how this turned out, even if it's only two faces covered.

Little Bunny FooFoo

     When I was younger, before I went to sleep, my mom would tuck me in and then have shadow puppet shows on the wall. Little Bunny FooFoo was my favorite which is probably the reason I named one of my pet rabbits FooFoo. These shadow puppets were never great- just holding up a peace sign and bouncing it across the wall- but I still loved them and hope that my children will too. Even though I grew up watching movies in live-action and animation, making shadow puppets was my first experience with making moving pictures on a screen. I knew that the bunny was just my mom's hand and a light source behind it, but it was still so much fun to watch.

      Since those days, I have gotten into photography and filmmaking, and I have a large appreciation for animation. The way that these media have evolved from shadows and storytelling blows my mind when I really stop to think about it and it makes me wonder how much of the science fiction that we read will be real in the next few years. I wonder what my kids will be using on a daily basis and how obsolete shadow puppets will be. Photography- real photography- has pretty much phased out completely by now, so they may not even learn about my favorite medium. Hopefully they'd still like to learn from me though.

Vesti La Giubba

       My idea for this game was a simple horror game, much like Slender or Among the Sleep. The gameplay is mostly wandering and interacting with your surroundings until you reach a cutscene/important scene that progresses the story. The plot line closely follows that of the opera but can have a different ending depending on what you do during the first time you have to make a choice- how much you have to drink at the tavern. From there, the game will still have a tragic ending and Canio will still lose his love, but in two different ways. The above drawing is a minimalist doodle for the game and what I imagine would be the main game poster, with text on it as far as the name of the game and some reviews or other things along those lines. 

     The driving force for this idea was the idea that the poster is basically what Pagliaccio looks like, which the player will only see once he sees his reflection at the end of the game. It is what Pagliaccio looks like in the opera, but is a bit sharper and darker, reflecting the Batman villain, the Joker, whom is based heavily on Pagliaccio and whom is one of my favorite villains. Canio does not exactly go insane as the Joker has, but instead goes through an alcohol-induced insanity. 

Broadway, Vaudeville, and other Stage Shows

I've been a fan of Broadway and musicals since I was young. I loved Disney movies and pretending to be the princesses. I watched Roger's and Hammerstein's Cinderella with Brandy and Paolo Montalban every night and I acted out the movie. My mom has home videos of me singing to myself in the mirror and then turning to look at the camera, and continuing to sing. It was my dream to be in theater when I was young. Since then, I've become more awkward and abandoned that dream, but I still love watching the live shows. The only Broadway show I have seen so far is Wicked, but I absolutely loved it. I love seeing all other live shows too however. Live concerts are one of my favorite things to see as well as just amateur open mic nights. And though vaudeville, burlesque, and cabaret are quite outdated now, I'd love to find a good club to go to that puts on these shows in the way that they were meant to be. Nowadays they can be a bit raunchier than they used to be, but I think there is a great art quality to the old shows.

Ridi, Pagliaccio. Sul Tuo Amore Infranto.

The opera that I am basing my video game off of is Pagliacci. Pagliacci is a drama about a traveling comedy troupe and the actors in the troupe. Canio, the main character, is married to Nedda. Tonio wants Nedda and gets rejected but when he finds out that Silvio is having an affair with Nedda, tells Canio. The real life of the characters is reflected in the play that they perform for the townspeople and leads to the tragic ending. I chose this because I saw Pagliacci live in the 8th grade and I think that a video game about a crazed clown is perfect.

Madama Butterfly

Before watching the short animation in class, I knew nothing about this opera. I had heard of it but knew nothing past the title. After class, I looked up a synopsis on wikipedia and when I found that what happened in the animation was basically the plot of the whole opera, I was surprised. The plot of the animation didn't seem so far fetched, but I just thought that the opera was about something else entirely. The opera is extremely sad and I don't know that I'd be able to really watch the whole thing.

"She's making a spectacle of herself..."

We hear this phrase and we immediately know what it means. She's causing a scene, making a fool of herself. We know that the root, spec-, has to do with sight, or vision, but we never really think about what the word itself actually means. I think that Barthes' take on wrestling is very interesting and very valid. It is the same way that we view reality TV now. Not many of us watch WWE anymore, but so many of us will turn on TLC or MTV and, though we know that so much of what is happening was scripted, we love to watch it because everything gets thrown so far out of proportion. I personally don't watch a lot of reality TV because of that fact, but I completely understand the phenomenon.

#EAlive8

I have not spent a lot of time in the art gallery. Art galleries were just never my thing. I never understood people standing around, staring at a canvas on the wall with random lines and colors painted on. It never made sense to me. The current exhibit however, is completely fascinating and has caught my attention completely.

I think growing up and living in the digital age has a lot to do with my stronger interest in this exhibit than others. My life revolves around the computer and the internet so anything digital is going to catch my eye over something static.

The first piece that really caught my eye was the fluids piece. I've always loved the way fluids looked moving through each other, much like a lava lamp. I used to sit at home watching my lava lamp for periods of time, just seeing the thicker liquid move through the thinner one. It's always been mesmerizing to me so being able to see that on a digital screen on a constant loop is something that could hold my attention for hours.

Another piece that really intrigued me was the iron kinetic sculpture. In my previous science classes, we had played with magnets and magnetic powders and fluids but I'd never seen them through a magnifying glass and in motion without my hand moving the magnet. The coolest part about this one was that, when looking through the magnifying glass, the iron looked like the surface of the moon. What was freaky about that was that it looked like there were moon rocks moving on their own.

Lastly, I have always loved animation over live-action in films. I absolutely loved seeing the animations that we displayed, mainly Elephant Dreams. It had a very Tim Burton-esque feel to it which definitely drew me in because of my love for Tim Burton films. That being said, I also loved Ray and Clovis because it seemed like a very fun and cute cartoon for a kid to watch on a Saturday morning. Animation always fascinated me simply because of the things that you could accomplish in it that you could not with real people.
That thought brings me to a part of my journal that has nothing to do with class, but is relevant to my life right now and if you don't wish to read about it, stop here.

Early in my senior year of high school, my friend told me about a company called Roosterteeth. With a name like that, I didn't have high hopes for what their content would be, but they put out videos on YouTube that somehow related to video games and my friend was pretty crazy about them so I gave them a watch, specifically the Achievement Hunters. Three years later and I watch more of their videos than any other creator I am subscribed to and my biggest dream for my life is to get to work with them. Their most famous creation, Red vs. Blue, is all Halo based animation and recently, they started a project called RWBY that was more like an anime. The leading force behind RWBY was a man named Monty who, sadly, passed away yesterday at the age of 33. Before RWBY, I'd never given anything even remotely close to anime a second look and I'd never had the appreciation for animation as I have now, but Monty was just that cool. It just didn't feel right to talk about digital art and animation without mentioning what an impact he'd made on my and other RT Community members' lives.

Art v. Design and Creativity

When you think about art and design you usually think about them together but you never really think about the differences between the two; they are nearly synonymous. According to Elimeliah in "Art vs. Design," art is the innovation and creation of new chaotic pieces while design is more of an engineering of repeated creations. Cuero shares this idea in saying that creativity is based on innovation and the unknown, not what is obvious. He says however, that it has nothing to do with art or technological advancements. 

I agree and disagree with Cuero. I think that he and Elimeliah are right in saying that creativity and art are based in what is new and innovative. Cuero says that people don't enjoy the process anymore and I think that this relates to Elimeliah's definition of design because in design, you only copy others' processes and get the same end result. There is no time taken in the middle to enjoy what it is you are doing. 

I will admit to the fact that, though I call myself an artist, I usually fall more into the designer category because I usually just want to get to the end of the product and don't care much about how I got there. This is because, especially when it comes to school work, there is a very large fear of failure so when I know that there is a surefire way to get a good grade or good end result, I will use it and not think twice. I'd like to work on this more, but in the near future I don't see it happening. 

Intro and First Impressions

Hello class! My name is Lex and I'm probably a lot more awkward than I seem. Or maybe that has been coming across in which case, I am exactly as awkward as I seem. I'm really geeky and weird and spend most of my time perusing the internet and wasting away on my computer so this class is pretty much perfect.

My very first impression of the class was that it was gonna be pretty cool and, even after finding out how much reading there is going to be, I still think that and hope that I'm right. I've always been an art oriented kid so I'm looking forward to extending my knowledge in the field that I have grown to love.