DONALD TRUMP VIRAL

In investigating ideas for my virals to take them forward i was looking for excellent examples. This one is excellent it manages to lampoon Trump by using nothing more than an accordian and undercuts any presidential qualities he may feel he has. This went viral and it is easy to see why. It is simple, fun works with or without sound and the production values are cheesy enough to show it for what it is. 

SOUND DESIGN RESEARCH: DESCRIBING SOUND

As mentioned previously sound is really hard to describe. I use sound regularly in my work without thinking too much so I decided to do a refresher of the key terms to be made aware of and to cement them in my mind moving forward. These also raise ideas and concepts that I can utilize in my own work. I also read around the subject a little from the excellent  book that Simon Keep recommended. It is called Audio Vision: Sound on Screen by Michael Chion with a foreword from a hero of mine the editors and man who coined the term sound designer Walter Murch. Chion described sound design brilliantly like this. The visuals to the far left of a scale, music to the far right and sound design operates within a window where the two overlap.

TYPES AND USES OF SOUND
The following all describe how sound can be used in film and TV.

• DIEGETIC sound is audio that could be originating from the action happening on screen. A radio in shot or dialogue from the characters on-screen.
• NON-DIEGETIC sound is audio that is NOT originating from the action happening on screen. For instance the score or a soundtrack.
• MUSIC is used to create mood. The score is written to accompany the film by a composer. The Soundtrack is songs that are used in the film.
• SOUND FX added to enhance scenes. FOLEY gunshots, footsteps etc recreated afterwards.
• AMBIENT sound can added to create atmosphere. In a studio shoot city noises add a city atmosphere.
• VOICE OVERS allow us into character thoughts.
• PARELLEL sound/music reflects the screen action.
• CONTRAPUNTAL sound opposite to screen action.
• PLEONASTICS sound is enhanced OTT sound. Often used in fight scenes and in horror films.
• CHARACTER THEMES are related to characters.
• SOUND BRIDGES flow from one scene to the next

TALKING ABOUT SOUND WHEN ANALYSING
The following are terms that can be used to try and analyse and describe t sound in film & TV.

• DURATION: How long it lasts.
• DYNAMICS: Energetic, tense, soothing.
• GENRE: Type of music hip hop, jazz, rock etc
• MELODY: A distinctive tune “Mission Impossible”
• PITCH: High, low.
• RHYTHM: Pattern of the beat.
• TEXTURE: Heavy, light.
• TONE: (timbre) tense, aggressive, mellow, cheerful.
• VOLUME: loud, quiet, soft etc.

TALKING ABOUT SOUND MUSIC
The following are all terms that can be used to try and analyse and describe music in film and TV.

• SYMPHONIC: Performed by an orchestra.
• MELODY: A distinctive tune.
• ATONAL: Music with no established key.
• DISCORDANT: Dissonant non-harmonious sounds.
• RHYTHMIC: Percussive sounds forming a beat.

SIMON KEEP & SOUND DESIGN

Simon Keep a sound designer and musician for commercials, film, installations and collaborative works with other artists gave a presentation today. A lecture about sound and how it surrounds us raised lots of interesting ideas to pursue and research further.

Here are some of the concepts that really interested me that Simon presented in his lecture. I aim to consider all of these when thinking about sound and to try and embrace them moving forward in my own work. They are not all going to be applicable but thinking more about sound not just to serve the image as I sometimes do and to think of it as it's own entity sometimes to work in tandem with picture and sometimes to possibly subvert and sometimes to create a higher meaning by working intrinsically with the pictures are all food for thought,

• Sound design being where visual and music meet and sound used to create meaning and give information.
• Phonography which means "sound writing" in Greek is the practice of field recording of sound in locations.
• Sound as an energy that creates vibrations, is projected and then disappears. Unlike film where you can pause on a still to capture the moment with sound you cannot. Sound is a moment and ethereal.
• Sound is hugely influenced by environment. Acoustics, surfaces, space, distance, tone, pitch, melody and beat.
• Importance of sound to create emotion. Music and sound effects be they recorded, library or foley can all be used to create soundscapes. Often the sounds need to be created to exaggerate or enhance "real" sounds.
• How hard it is to describe sound using words. Simon pointed us towards sound designer and film editor Walter Murch and sound theorist Michel Chion for further reading and exploration of ways to approach this.
• The brain processes sound cleverly. For instance the cocktail party effect where you are in a busy cocktail party chatting and listening to those around you but if your voice is mentioned in a far off corner you can pick it out and divert your attention to this. It has been described as latent processing as you are always listening out for sound in the background unaware you are doing it but it can instantly click into action.
• Is sound physical. It can change and define and determine sound, space and place, but is a physical entity?
• Sound affects us psychologically. In a noisy environment it can make us feel both anonymous, claustrophobic or comforted. In a quiet environment it can make us feel exposed, focussed on the sound we emit or even small and overwhelmed with nowhere to hide.
• You can be ambushed by sound. An example being the famous "ear cutting" scene in Reservoir Dogs. The Stealers Wheel "stuck in the middle" track is upbeat, fun and a light-hearted toe tapper. So the music almost aurally ambushes you when you watch the scene heightening the severity of the action.
• Where sound is foreground, background and how it moves from one to the other and the effects this has on the audience.

What was also really interesting however was the "sound walk" we did which really got us thinking about sound and soundscapes around us. It is easy to think of the film and TV work of my practice as primarily visual and "visual arts" but sound plays a huge role in creating mood, tone, atmosphere, creating narratives and character, orientating, creating location soundscapes and working hand in hand (or possibly subverting) to create meaning to audiences.

The use of a hydrophone used for listening to sound under water was also really fascinating when we tried it out at the quay. The sounds listened to are almost other-worldly but what was interesting was that in order to make sense of them you try to apply and pigeon hole them to sound you are familiar with. For instance a scratching sound was probably a creature but did sound like nails on wood and some of the background sound were like rain on windows, a bath running and even machinery working. Sound also travels further underwater so some of the sounds we were listening to may have come from large distances.

SITUATIONISTS: SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL

Situationist International (SI), a neo-Marxist group formed at a conference in 1957 who were highly influential in 1960s and '70s Europe. They developed a critque of capitalism based on a mixture of Marxism and surrealism. The leading figure of the movement Guy Debord identified consumer society as the Society of the Spectacle his highly influential book of that name from 1967. Their view was the dissolution of the division between artists art and the diffusion of art from consumers and to make art a part of everyday life. They also promoted a profound skepticism about the idea of originality and a commitment to attack and provoke.

The influence of Situationism on popular culture, particularly on the punk music of the mid to late 1970’s, is undeniable. Managers such as Bernie Rhodes and Malcolm McLaren were committed, consummate Situationists (the latters bands the Sex Pistols and Bow Wow Wow, were initially based around its principles). Some people even used Situationism as a bridge to punk, such as Brigadange vocalist Michelle Brigadange, who says, “I was really interested in the whole punk thing from the Situationists onwards. Guy Debord’s theory of the Spectacle is the resonant one. Simply put, the world we see is not the real world but the world we are conditioned to see, and the Situationist agenda is to explain how the nightmare works so that everyone can wake up.”

Situationist International fulfilled its true place in history in the famous events of May 1968, their ideas helping to provide the foundation for the uprisings in Paris. In an aftermath speech of June 7th, Charles De Galle said that “this explosion was provoked by groups in revolt against modern consumer and technical society, whether it be the communism of the East or the capitalism of the West.”

The Situationist International brought together currents of experimental poetry, avant-garde art, and radical social criticism to explore new techniques of engagement in cultural protest and revolutionary praxis. Although the organisation itself remained small and disbanded in 1972, the SI shaped the interaction of art and politics at crucial moments in the evolution of postwar culture, including the transnational uprisings of 1968 and 1977. Its influence continues to be felt today.

I really like the philosophy of the Situationist International movement. From their wanting to dissolve art and make it more accessible to the general public the DIY aesthetics and challenging of originality and the powers that be. They challenged the sleepwalking around in what is created by the media as "the real world" and challenged this but actively encouraging people to look deeper and challenge what has been set out to us by the media as "the norm". These are all themes that reverberate around my work. I will look to apply these even more as I move forward in my global warming piece. By using the medias own messages through images and news clips to create and often subvert their meanings and morality to create my own ideologies.

NEW GENERATION OF MEDIA SAVVY ACTIVISTS: CULTURE JAMMERS

My knowledge and understanding of the media is integral to all of my work. As a media lecturer I have a acute awareness of how the media operate to create messages, values and ideologies in the texts that they produce. Using the key media concepts representation, audience, ideology, language, institution, narrative and genre (RAILING) it allows the unpicking and analysis of these messages.

In his book Sign Wars: The Culture Jammers Strike Back, David Cox states "Global media power is linked to global political power. Media magnates today can actually partly advise government, or at least negotiate at election time with heads of state for positive press coverage for politicians and other officials during elections."

These themes really interest me and whilst it is something I was obviously aware of this I can now see how it directly relates to the area I am operating in with my Global Warming pieces. What is exciting is to discover that my work is part of a movement of media savvy activists. to quote Cox again "Media activism borrows heavily from from the legacies of the beat movement, the punk scene and other bohemias, which privilege self expression as a form of social and political empowerment. Culture Jamming, like media activism, stems also directly from the DIY sensibility and owes much to DIT's sense of immediacy, intimacy and personal empowerment. To publish ideas yourself is to be empowered with the ability to communicate in the sphere of media, the philosophical air we breathe in the early 21st century."

Culture jamming (sometimes guerrilla communication) is a tactic used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert media culture and mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. It attempts to "expose the methods of domination" of a mass society to foster progressive change. Culture Jammer filmmakers include Craig baldwin, Micheal Moore and Morgan Spurlock all people whose work I admire.

I see myself as being part of this tradition and will be happy to wear the badge "Culture Jammer". With the ability to use software, the internet to publish to a huge audience user generated media content is quickly catching up and will soon overtaking that of industry media content.The audience are there, i have the technology and skill to create the content. However as always content is king and it has to be engaging to an audience and it is here that the hard part of my work lies.

SARA ART WALKS VIDEO PROJECT

I have decided to get involved with Saras "Janes Walk" project to help her document the event. The eventual aim is that the film we make of the walk can be entered into a film festival which is for specific films about art walks such as this.

The walk is to be around Colchester and Sara has got me some details which at the moment are still a little unclear to me. I need to undertake more research to clear up a lot of the issues. However from the details that I have been given the project sounds interesting and could be quite creative and stretch me. It would be good to see if the boundaries can be pushed a little though. I really want to not to simply document the walk as it happens and then cut the footage but put an interesting spin on it. 

Research to follow up on.

• What exactly is an art walk. 
• Who is/was Jane Jacobs Into the film competition and the specifics of his. 
• Location of the walk. 
• Theme of the walk. 
• What is it covering. 
• How to film and cover the walk. Straight doco and more creative options. 
• Potential ideas to make the film interesting. 
• Access to Sara during the event and also afterwards for extras.
• Look at existing films covering art walks.
• Look into the competition and the criteria.

CRAIG BALDWIN: MEDIA ARCHEOLOGIST

Craig Baldwin (born 1952) is an American experimental filmmaker. He uses “found” footage from the fringes of popular consciousness as well as images from the mass media to undermine and transform the traditional documentary. In his own words "In a lot of ways I think the language of history is internalised. Appropriation is just a way of talking back to what you have internalised. His work infuses his "findings" with the high-speed montage to give it an energy. His work is often political and provides a provocative commentary on issues as diverse as intellectual property rights to rampant consumerism.

The less formal summing up of Baldwin I prefer though was by Joan DArc for  Paranoia magazine describing him as is he "a foraging film-maker of the new recyclable generation, master of plastic pastiche, art brute and jujitsu maximalism. He is an obsessive collector of old "found footage" an allegorical revisionist, a semiotic guttersnipe with a mean coffee habit".

University educated it was during his M.A. at San Francisco State University in 1986, that he first became interested in collage film. During his studies he worked under Bruce Conner a filmmaker famous for his artwork of scraps, which extend beyond film into traditional collage, sculpture, and photography. Baldwin was influenced by lots of other factors too. These included the Situationist International (SI), a neo-Marxist group influential in 1960s and '70s Europe. Their view was the dissolution of catagory art and the diffusion of art into everyday life, and a profound skepticism about the idea of originality and a commitment to attack and provoke. Baldwin also explored DIY art operating on the fringes of society and was occurring outside of the traditional and more socially acceptable forms of high art, such as zines, mail art and altered billboards. He is a real magpie in terms of his interests as well as materials for his films.

He is quite radical and his piece Stolen Movie is an excellent example of this. It was a mix of performance art or guerilla theatre created by sneaking into cinemas filming the images off the screen, and then quickly ran out the back with his footage to use it in his work. Stolen Movie.

I really empathise with Baldwins ethos trying to knock down the borderlines between fine and popular art, public and private imagery, the political and the purely aesthetic in his film and photo-essay projects.  It reflects my interest in appropriated art on my Amen Brother piece and also working with news clips and footage for my Global Warming pieces I am developing. It is like a form of AV sampling and creating a message out of found footage perhaps the ultimate in Eisensteins montage theory of the collision of images to create anew meaning.

I particularly like his technique of utilising of clips from the mainstream media to reveal the truth behind their cultivated spectacle using their own footage to parody the implicit message, unseating the common notions associated with the imagery. This could easily be applied to my own work and is certainly worth experimenting with.

Baldwin called this way of working with found footage often thrown out and discarded films and material as"cinema pauvere" (the cinema of poverty). In an interview entitled Craig Baldwin: Sonic Outlaws (1995) for the book A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers he elaborates. "I think a lot of material from pop culture is archival material: it represents a certain sensibility characteristic of the middle part of the century. I do collect stuff but my "archive comes mostly from dumpsters. Refuse is the archive of our times and  the resource for what I call cinema pauvere, those people who are impoverished but still want to make films. I think we live in a post Hollywood, post industrial society. There is so much material there in the trash and it is a test of our ingenuity to take that material and redeem it, so to speak: to project new meanings into it."

However the footage used must not be mistaken as being random. In his book "The Culture Jammers Strike Back" David Cox gives an overview of the working methods of cut up film-making.  He states "The footage is painstakingly watched and material is taken based on its a) Visual Strength, b) narrative context and c) its potential part of a mosaic. Few shots taken from an old reel of film can find their way into the montage unless they in some way bolster the argument of the filmmaker".

This could also be working with small projects with tiny budgets and crews and having to beg, borrow and steal and utilize and adapt whatever happens to create his work. He sums the philosophy up as This method of working began with his teacher, Conner, and continues with him and others, including Bill Daniel, Greta Snider, Eric Saks and Lori Surfer.  It is not all that far removed from some of the pieces I have been woking on shooting on a shoestring budget, often with borrowed kit, friends as actors and re-appropriating existing footage to use within my work. I also love the idea of being greener and promoting ways to prevent global warming the use of recycled footage seems a great fit.

Baldwin calls his working methods now "surfing the wave of obsolescence" with film disappearing due to a format changes to digital so he is collecting and recycling physical 35mm films that would otherwise be disposed of and using them in his work. He also practices what he preaches and supports his craft and those working in it. He helped found Other Cinema, a film program series that promotes the work of both emerging and established artists working in the style of cinema povera. Other Cinema Digital was established in 2003 to provide distribution for films by independent, underground and experimental filmmakers.

Baldwin has continually been an activist for the re-evaluation of copyright and intellectual property laws. He said that: "Collage is the contemporary art. It is the most definitive. Yet it runs absolutely against copyright laws. There are certain assumptions about the usage of other people’s material in order to make money from it. Collage artists take a tiny bit of something from your piece and put it together with a lot of other pieces too and make a distinct whole. We’re not trying to steal your audience. The copyright laws need to be updated in order to deal with this art form."

KEY SELECTED WORKS

Flick Skin (1977).
This was a really early  Super-8 film that Baldwin made while living in the projectionist booth at a porn theater. It is the forerunner to his style and working methods made from pieced together from the scraps of film that were left lying around the theatre. It was with this film that Baldwin began to really develop his style of rebranding, re-using, re-interpreting and subverting messages from other sources to create his own messages and ideologies images.

Wild Gunman (1978)
The youtube details describe it excellently as "The mythic nature of cowboy masculinity is deconstructed in this scathing montage of re-contextualized sounds and images culled from advertising, television, arcade game footage and other pop culture iconography." The images are played, repeated the sound almost creating a rhythmn, they are super imposed over one another and at times jarring at others flow seamlessly from one to the next. It is the ultimate AV sampling and his use of sources whilst appearing random do build in mood and tone and make a comment on the American dream, Mythology of the cowboy and wild west, consumerism and media messages all at the same time. For all its randomness it is amazingly coherent as a body of work and I can certainly learn from it. in my own work.




Tribulation 99 (1992)
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America,Baldwin weaves together another collection of found footage to critique American attitudes and foreign policy. Keith McCrea describes it like this "a riot of conspiracy theories to build the ultimate right-wing nightmare: an evil alliance of communists, aliens, and various non-white folks committed to destroying Norteamérica. By using stock footage, In Search of… b-roll, and creepy theremin sounds, Baldwin evokes a familiar and spooky world of ‘70s paranormality, ‘50s anti-communist loopiness, and ‘80s reactionary politics. It is dizzying, fascinating, and sometimes hilarious as it critiques the US’ often absurd colonial depredations in Central and South America."

The film is a layer upon layer and a crazy, stew of ideas, clips and off kilter storytelling. As usual the images are exceptionally well chosen but unlike his earlier work there is more storytelling happening and less of a collision of images as they often harmoniously work together in something less frenetic. I like the progression of this work from his earlier pieces and the stronger narrative feel which it more in tune with the way I like to work. There is still the multitude of images but a stronger narrative thread running through them. I will look to develop my work this way and look to source and even greater variety of clips and sources to build the awareness of climate change to my audience.


Communique for the Cube
This piece is really interesting for me as it is set up as a kind of secret experiment that has been stolen.  The piece is a warning about some government (CIA) stereoscopic mind control tests that have been going on . The narrator alludes that he has stolen the tests and is bringing it to the public notice and he went into hiding. The visuals are very un-Baldwin although I assume he may have found these somewhere and is actually re-purposing them but it is very simple with a VO and old stereoscopic images on the screen far removed from his collage work.

I really like the idea of the piece and I have been toying with developing a narrative piece of work in my body of Global Warming projects and this has inspired me. Perhaps I could develop a conspiracy theory narrative and characters around the global warming theme. Stolen documents that the powers that be do not want us to see or something like that. The simplicity of the piece running at only just over one minute is also really interesting and shows that snippets of narrative from a bigger story can work and that stories can be told quickly and effectively.




Sonic Outlaws 1995

Sonic Outlaws is a documentary and certainly not a typical example of Baldwins work stylistically as it is a doco but it does draw on lots of archive footage re-appropriating it to his arguments. However thematically and ideologically it deals with his themes of appropriation that are embedded into his work. It deals with a USA Bay Area recording and performance group Negativland who got themselves into trouble by by using a pirated audiotape of Casey Kasem, DJ and radio personality, as he cursed a blue streak while trying to record a spot about the band U2. Negativland then appropriated these mutterings and combined them with samples from a U2 song, then put out a 1991 single on the SST label with a picture of the U-2 spy plane on its cover. Sonic Outlaws covers the legal nightmare that ensued from Negativland's little joke. U2's label Island records then sues them for the use of the letetr U and the number 2 which crazily the band had approprated from the CIA.
The film is not just about this case though but expands to the bigger discussion about copyright and appropriation themes that Baldwin knows only too well.

I really enjoyed The Other Cinemas review of the film which captures it perfectly" "What Sonic Outlaws makes intriguingly clear is that it's a free-for-all out there on the airwaves, as piracy becomes increasingly easy and the law remains vague. Ranging from a discussion of the Fair Use concept to illicily monitoring a gay lovers' quarrel conducted by cellular phone, the film presents a provocative range of image-tampering possibilities. And it makes clear that Negativland is hardly alone in wanting to exploit those possibilities in both reckless and esthetically daring ways. Baldwin deftly cannibalizes anything that'll help get his point across, whether it's a caveman pic, the Lone Ranger, Gulliver's Travels, or Corman's The Pit and the Pendulum. In addition, to being a sly commentary on bone-dry educational films, Craig also makes it all relevant to current day events by comparing Coronado's bloodthirsty legacy to today's nuclear waste industry and its similar disregard for those very same lands. But don't get the wrong idea about this bleak look at man's arrogance and lust for conquest--believe it or not, it's also funny as hell!"

The film is really interesting and a great example of right story finding the right director as it is ideally suited to Baldwins philosophy and ideology regarding copyright. I liked the very rough and ready nature of the film and as usual Baldwin really nails the archive footage managing to extend the argument, highlight it and poke fun at it all at the same time with his wry subversive sense of humour. This is what I will take from the piece a montage of clips can build an argument really well and the humour is all important for sometimes highlighting the idiocracy of corporations, copyrights and who actually owns an idea.




Craig Baldwin In Interview talking about his work, ethos, ideologies and techniques.

MEDIA STORM: MULTIMEDIA STORYTELLING

Media Storm are an agency that specialise in multimedia forms of storytelling, marketing and advertising. Their work is interesting but more conventional than I expected it to be as they are really multi approach to tackle their work not multiple threaded approach. They produce online news stories using high-quality, photography, audio, interactivity, and video, and consults on interactive web projects.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer said that "telling powerful stories through powerful images, MediaStorm has earned a reputation for engaging multimedia news." The company aims to give voice and meaning to pressing issues of our time, using their projects to “demystify complex issues, humanize statistics, and inspire audiences to take action on issues that matter.”

They do deal with issue led topics BUT they are not the multiple platform approach I am looking to use but a multi disciple company using largely one approach to create work.

http://cpn.canon-europe.com/content/interviews/brian_storm_on_multimedia.do

https://mediastorm.com/

I am beginning to wonder if multi-media is the right word to the storytelling type piece I am trying to do. This is really a very computer based term of using different media and not necessarily to build a story. More research needed.

LARS JAN: HOLOSCENES

Holoscenes by Lars Jan is an aquarium-like sculpture in which performers execute everyday activities such as reading a newspaper while having to adapt to the tank filling and draining repeatedly. Lars Jan was inspired by a photo made by the photojournalist Daniel Berehulak during the widespread flooding in Pakistan in 2010. Lars Jan is the Artistic Director of the performance and art lab Early Morning Opera. With his performance art installation he wants to raise awareness about the dangers of climate change. Holoscenes premiered during the Nuit Blanche Festival in Toronto in October 2014.

The final US presentation before Holoscenes heads abroad was hosted by MDC Live Arts at the Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus during Art Basel in Miami Beach from December 2nd to 5th. This video is an excerpt, complete video is available on our website: Holoscenes by Lars Jan / Early Morning Opera, hosted by MDC Live Arts at the Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus, Miami, Florida, USA. December 4, 2015.

https://vimeo.com/110664139

HOLOSCENES is a suite of multi-format artworks that manifest states of drowning — both in water and the larger systems of our own devising — in order to directly connect the short-term, everyday behaviors of individuals to the long-term patterns driving global climate change. Holoscenes re-imagines historical antecedents of public spectacle and gathering, and simultaneously translates related streams of scientific investigation into a visual, visceral, and public address in urban communal space that challenges our personal and collective capacities for long-term thinking and empathy.

GLOBAL WARMNING: CUT OUT ANIMATION VIRALS

I want to build upon the audiences responses to Donald trumps outlandish sound-bites on global warming. From screenings, discussions and inspiration from Paul Kindersley and critiques I am aiming for a multi pronged approach to the global warmining piece. This will involve experimenting with installations, mini docos, kinetic typography and animation. I aim to use the latter (animation and kinetic typography) to create some online viral type content that is an innovative approach to this using the sound-bites funny, quirky, pacey and memorable way.

One way I am considering doing this is using cut-out animation techniques and the handmade quality, clash of source images and craft feel of it which I feel will work well with the content and with the target online audience. Below are some examples of the films I researched for ideas and inspiration. I will show these to my client to give them an idea of the mood, tone and feel I am going for.

This animation below simply entitled "Collage - Cut Out Animation" demonstrates one of the techniques I am considering applying. The techniques is a very old one and involves cut outs being animated moving around the frame. Today it is easy to recreate and be more innovative with it using Adobe After Effects and rather than simply playing around with the animation on a flat plane use the foreground and middle ground as well as the flat background. The interplay and variety of sources of image and juxtaposition of these can be really interesting. the use of photographs gives the impression of realism but the juxtaposition gives the animation a surreal and fantastical quality.









Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame was also a pioneer of the cut-out animation technique combining fun visuals with a real sense of humour. The "Miracle of Flight" and "Monty Python Versus Animation" both below illustrate this excellently. Gilliam used lots of found images to construct his early animations that were made actually sing cut-out images placed under glass and then filmed one fame at a time. Adobe After Effects will stop the need for this process but what I love are Gilliam's use of humour which is often surreal, slapstick and nonsensical as well as the fantastic to create a message. Also his use of sound is inspirational and minimalist and I think that Trumps sound-bites will work well with this style. The use of photographed real looking images with cartoonesque ones is a also a style I enjoyed and feel *I could apply to my piece.

"To Thee Moon" is another excellent example of this technique but with a highly stylised overall quality, mood and tone. Again the juxtaposition of images and basic nature and "handmade quality" will work well with the content and sound-bites.. The film also has a darker feel that I may able to draw upon for elements of my idea.

SITE SPECIFIC ARTWORK: CINEMATIQUE

I want to develop a site specific art piece that is a documentary of sorts. The aim is to capture peoples love of the cinema as a talking head IN a cinema and to do this in multiple interviews  These will then all form a mini documentary about one person. The aim s to repeat this so that there are a great many responses and then to put all of these on ipads or similar in the cinema auditorium. the audience will then be able to create their own documentary by walking around and interacting with the screens to get the thoughts of every screen or the screens of their choosing.

On the screen behind them i may well put a live feed of them interacting with the audience by turning the camera on them. It is all about the notion of looking, cinema, the watched and the watchers. It is currently just an idea but i created a rough visual of how it might look and I will continue to develop it in the background.

Site-specific art is artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork. The actual term was promoted and refined by Californian artist Robert Irwin, but it was actually first used in the mid-1970s by young sculptors, such as Patricia Johanson, Dennis Oppenheim, and Athena Tacha, who had started executing public commissions for large urban sites. Site specific environmental art was first described as a movement by architectural critic Catherine Howett and art critic Lucy Lippard.

GLOBAL WARMNING: RAFT OF WORK

Following on from being inspired by Paul Kindersley's work ethic and repurposing assets to create a multitude of content I may take this forward into my Global Warmning work. Rather than doing just one viral OR an installation there are a variety of pieces I could possibly do around the topic. The research is being done anyway and this will allow for me to re-use this research and the assets I have collected and will collect. There are many other interesting bonus's of this approach too.

• It will allow me to cut down on research time and finding assets and material but creating multiple pieces inspired by it not only one.
• It will allow me to work in a variety of different mediums, technologies and materials.
• It will enable me to communicate with and to address lots of different audiences types and demographics.
• It opens itself up to many different ways of distributing the content for dissemination and exhibition such as gallery, TV, Online etc.

The work will as I have mentioned take on a variety of different forms to be used and shown on a variety of platforms and initial ideas include.

• Online virals.
• Gallery installations.
• TV adverts.
• Micro documentaries.
• Information (advertorial pieces) to act as a call to arms as to how to help prevent GW.
• Projections and visuals.
• A short film dealing with the topic.

PAUL KINDERSLEY

Paul Kindersley came in to give a guest lecture and tutorials which was really enlightening in terms of a practicing artists and someone who is working in some areas that I am toying with in my practice. To be perfectly honest I struggle with a lot of his work in terms of aesthetics, and some of his themes. However he was highly engaging and  hugely inspiring and his philosophy towards his work and in searching for new audiences, exhibition and dissemination were really enlightening.

Paul was identified by the guardian newspaper as one of 20 talents across the arts to watch for in 2017. Encompassing film, TV, literature, comedy, dance, theatre, art, entertainment, and music the list highlighted those pioneering these areas.

To quote the guardian article which sums him and his work up excellently.
“Artist, stalker, drawer, makeup enthusiast, pervert and video broadcaster,” reads Paul Kindersley’s online profile. His preferred medium is his own body, having posted hundreds of images of himself in innumerable poses, guises and situations (most of which he concocts at home) on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Using paint, make-up and costumes Kindersley’s work is a kind of free-access public sketchbook. His Youtube channel is also full of alarming and often hilarious and impromptu videos. He is the son of a family of traditional and much respected stone-carvers, but his work is an irreverent queering of British modernist tradition. Whenever he deals with reclining figures, he finds it hard not to think of Henry Moore. Moore in drag, now there’s a thought."

Paul showed us the huge variety of the prolific body of work he has created. This covers online pieces on Youtube, twitter, instagram and facebook as well as gallery installations, site specific events and performance art. His philosophy is the sharing of art and he is equally happy with his work being disseminated to an audience with all of these platforms. The blurring of these too interests him and where artwork exists, begins and ends and different interpretations of it depending on its dissemination. However it was obvious he derives the most pleasure from the immediacy and the "immediate response" of his online pieces.

His style and aesthetics are born out of necessity. Armed with little in the way of technology but an iphone, basic computer software and the internet he creates his work. Due to living in a small flat in London he uses flat objects, begged borrowed and found materials, costumes paint and largely his own body and performance to create his work

His themes are broad ranging drawing on his own sexuality, the human form and nudity in life and art, popular culture, TV, politics, notions of fame and celebrity, trashy 70's horror, and Andy Warhol and his factory to name but a few.

It was interesting when he talked about  the internet providing worldwide distribution through platforms such as facebook and Youtube. He loves the fact his work could be an intimate experience for the audience challenging the very notion of audience actually existing. and art or media texts being often a 1-1 experience. He used the example of the "make up" tutorials that inundate youtube. They are created by one person often in their bedroom and generally consumed by another person (the audience) in their bedroom so are very personal and intimate from conception to consumption even though they may get millions of views.



The above clip aptly demonstrates this with one of Pauls make-up "tutorials". They are an un-nerving and uncomfortable  watch which works the hinterland between truth, parody, realism, art and you are never quite sure exactly what you are watching. The production values are pretty low with the crashy music at the start and basic titles through to the one average/poor quality locked off video shot and dubious sound quality. They have an authenticity in the quality of them but do not come across as authentic in terms of content. This is a mix of Pauls DIY attitude and lack of technical ability and training working hand in hand with a lack of concern about it. He mentioned after his presentation he is not trained in video and quality and production values was never a huge concern often recording his work from screen to play around with the quality. His make-up tutorials also allow other issues to be discussed by his alter-ego during the make-over. Another plus of the tutorials is the fact that his "art" pops up randomly in searches for make-up tutorials due to his tagging of them as such like a Trojan Horse. Therefore if you are searching for make-up tutorials Pauls subversive work may show up in your hits and therefore potentially reach a potentially huge unassuming audience. The other factor that this allows Paul is feedback and comments from viewers. Other mimicking and parodys of online phenomenon work include his subversion and re-interpretation of beauty pageants and adults dressed as babies. All awkward and uncomfortable content taken to the next level with Pauls interpretations of them.


paul is a keen art historian and regularly uses or draws inspiration from the great masters in his own work. Colour, composition, modern staging of or interpretations of these from art, sculpture, film and dance populate his work. He also works for another artist as a "performance artist" and argues that performance art has been around for years and is not that new. Playing roles characters to an audience and performing is just a mutation of acting. He also argues that the human form is perhaps more relevant in art and the media today than ever. Selfies on instagram with people creating representations of themselves and personas online and even creating photo-shopped images to mimic those the media continually expose them to being examples. Often pusing the boundaries of nudity, exhibitionism and what is acceptable. Some of his work has explored this with his "look books" blurring and creating cross over fashion/advertising images.


He calls this way of finding audience for his work  "images that disrupt the flow of normality" and loves the idea of  shocking audience out of their online zombie state. He aims to disrupt space and the norm and to make audiences think twice by challenging them and their behaviour and expectations. In his own words he "loves to frustrate people" and to explore the "uneasy area and territories between what is real and what is not" arguing that it does not really matter. he regularly treads a thin line on what is acceptable in galleries with his sexualised imagery and nudity. More especially he does this also online and almost taunts the policing of this and it's gatekeepers. His work is generally un-exploitative of the human form but does raise interesting questions as to when does nudity in online art start to become pornography? The issues of what a piece of art is, what it is about and when does it end are all areas he loves to explore and question.

Paul was the first recipient of The Transition Gallery Prize is a contemporary art award that was set up in 2009 with a solo exhibition being awarded to a Chelsea BA graduate for outstanding work. Paul's work was described by the gallery as the following. "Kindersley's multifaceted work is situated in the cultural interface between viewer and film moment. Drawing on camp, nostalgia and the extremities of exploitation movies of the 60s and 70s, his starting references explore the exaggerated filmic concepts and emotions of tragedy, eroticism, melodrama, violence and the tacky. His installations or 'sets' include constellations of found objects and images, arranged and filtered through convoluted and esoteric amalgams of histories and personal experiences. Large-scale photocopies and immediate environments of available objects act as clues in an unknowable hyper-drama. The objects function as 'props', which Kindersley also describes as 'gifts to the filmic moment'. She wanted his soul, but he could only give her his blood is a new work specially made for Transition. It references sexy 70s vampire movies in a form of shrine to stolen film memories and real life encounters with the cult Germen actor Udo Kier. In a charged environment formed from sounds, looks and props from Kier's films the viewer becomes the vampire with the film as the ultimately doomed, but struggling to stay alive, victim. With his mise-en-scene facades into which the viewer is physically invited to enter, Kindersley strives to own and thereby validate the ethereal film experience, offering the viewer a degree of ownership of the romanticised glamour of cinema."

The work brought together as mentioned above many of Pauls regular themes and ideas. He described the installation work as being like a film set mise-en-scene with the audience the actors and inhabitants of this performing in the space he created. The straw in the middle created an object for the audience to have to navigate around the other elements as well as providing smells to invoke response in them. The oversized prop like elements from a film set, with their bright colours and benday dot huge image of a face throwing back to pop art. These were combined with sounds to complete the atmosphere. I never got to see the installation but as an early Kindersley the themes that continue to inform his work are present. the blurring of then real, fantasy, performance, interaction with the audience are all here and plain to see. The DIY nature of the work and the created elements alongside the found and borrowed that create his familiar aesthetic style are also apparent.

Pauls philosophy towards his work is simply to create it with what he has around him. His body, paint, costumes, props, backdrops, material even work created by collecting everything from his flat that is the same colour and them composing them.

He also is very happy re-purposing, re-cycling, re-inventing and re-creating his content, props, sets and work. The same images and props crop up again and again born partly out of necessity and budget constraints but also due to them being images, themes and ideology he appreciates. In terms of his work one idea can create a body of different work exploring this for multiple platforms exhibition and dissemination by audiences. One idea was first created then filmed in a gallery space, but eventually shown as a gallery installation/performance piece. This was then streamed online, stills were taken from the stream and shared online and as static images and eventually comments from viewers of the stream were added to these still images. So one idea created a body of work spanning 6 different strands of work encompassing stills, video, gallery installation and streamed!

He is uninhibited by waiting for "perfection" and this he said is very freeing. Rather then spending a huge amount of time crafting something that is perfect he would rather spend his time creating 9-10 pieces that are close and learning as he goes along. This attitude has allowed him to create a large body of work rather than a focussed small body. Another example is that he just shot

After his presentation Paul was available for tutorials and we both had a great discussion and sharing of skills and knowledge as well as me getting some great advice from him.What to take forward from Pauls work and the discussion is listed below..

• Recycling, repurposing and re-inventing works and content. Same content recreated for different platforms and audiences.
• Using of many different platforms for dissemination to try and find multiple audiences.
• Trojan horse online works to find new audiences. tagging work up so surprises audiences and finds new viewers. Also piggy backs on existing genres of content masquerading as them but "art". Challenge audiences.
• Not to get too caught up in aesthetics or production values and create MORE work rather than aiming for the "perfect" piece every time.
• However use my film knowledge, skill, technical and ability as a strength as high production values is one of the USP's of my work.
• Do not be afraid of collaboration or improvisation. Paul said a lot of his best work came from this and creating an environment, spine and mise-en-scene for it to happen. Does need to be c"controlled" by me though.
• Blurring of boundaries, art, factual, parody, real, fake etc really interesting and worth some exploration.
• Using what is around me more to create my work. Can I be more central to it? Will this open up potential for making video work and subjects easier?

http://www.transitiongallery.co.uk/htmlpages/paul_k.htm



http://www.belmacz.com/artists/kindersley_paul



https://vimeo.com/user8092710



https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/jan/07/new-talents-2017-stage-film-books-art-design-music-tv



https://twitter.com/PaulKindersley



https://www.youtube.com/user/thebritisharecumming