Video for Assessment Unit 1

Website Demo

There are two pages demo of website, made by Flash.

Paper Spider

I made it by paper for website.

draft of website

I did few draft for website.
The idea is using paper(Zhe Zhi) as an element. Everything made by paper is virtual.

'Zhe Zhi'-- hand working

I was thinking to use it as an element. probably will do an experimental video later.
It related to many memories of my childrenhood.
some photos below,





click to see the movement

Saya Woolfalk: No Place: Wonders from that World

Inspired by a year in Brazil, Saya Woolfalk's new work is a deceptively cute, motley investigation of otherness. The exhibition's title references Renaissance philosopher Sir Thomas More's Utopia, but Woolfalk's interpretation of "no place" is a postcolonial Candy Land populated with fuzzily fleeced and tropical calico-print creatures. Alongside this installation, a single-channel video features two brightly clad dancers in a bizarre, ritualistic duet to what sounds like a bossa nova-spiked Nintendo tune. Her works on paper, particularly the Seven Wonders series, are dreamy, symbol-laden landscapes that imagine an eroticized alternate world of fertility temples and colossal banana-draped monuments, set against backdrops of rainbows and puffy clouds.

[Intro from Saya Woolfalk website]

Ethnography of No Place
A series of short videos by Rachel Lears and Saya Woolfalk

Featuring: Georgette Maniatis, Alicia Ildefonso, Shaun Leonardo, Jean Barberis, Samara Gaev and Elisa Casinader
Narrator: Anaïs Alexandra Tekerian
Technical Support: Audrey K Tran

Ethnography of No Place is a series of collaborative works that document an imaginary world. Constructed from household materials (fabrics, sounds, gestures), the characters and stories evoke travel narratives, science fiction, and academic anthropology to rework tropes of sexuality, gender, and race. The name No Place is derived from the English word, “utopia,” coined by Thomas More from the Greek “no” (ou) and “place” (topos)--literally, no place.

Chapter 1: Self and Landscape. This video re-imagines desire and reproduction through the documentation of an Eden-like environment. The Self and the Landscape collapse into one another and negotiate forms of activity and passivity through their sensual interaction. Self and Landscape premiered at Artists Space Gallery, New York, NY in May 2007.

Chapter 2: Death and Kin. In this video, the Self has aged and reached the end of her life. In gestures evoking the Butoh performance of Kazuo Ohno, she constructs her own tombstone and her relatives mourn her passing. The sentiment of loss breaks down the linearity of time, until finally the body transforms into landscape once again.

Chapter 3: Portal. The beings of No Place use the detritus of our world to construct a portal that would give us access to theirs if only we could imagine how to use it.

Looking for Symbols of Consumer Age in China

I am looking for some consumer symbols which i want to put in my project
Now i got the idea of certification.

More and more people are enage on getting certification(such as certification from famous universiy). The symbol of 'certification' become more important than the real meaning. 'Good Certification'= 'ability of person'. Everyone knows that just is a symbol, however everyone follow the rule of game...

So what comes out,
'dummy certification '&'real certification but only bought by money'

'dummy certification '
The normal person can become really famous only because he/she has 'Good Certification'. Finally, some of them exposed. Then they become to normal person again. Does it make sense?

some people said this social make them become to get "dummy certification".

Does unreal certification mean unreal?
Does real certification which only bought by money mean real?

If you walking on the street in the some city of china, you can see plenty of ad."make certification"(the business of making dummy certification).

There are two different bridges in two city.

It is in everywhere






this one on RMB money





















on the Building of University (for certification of english or education..etc)

















This is in the toliet..

China Tracy-RMB City

It is a project made by Chinese artist. It participated in The 10th Istanbul Biennale 2007.

It talks about virtual and real.Something about second life.

Hiraki Sawa,video works

I like his concept of building normal and real world to the dreaming place.

Hiraki Sawa,Born 1977, Ishikawa, Japan. Basing his artistic production in London, Sawa uses lo-tech video animation to create poetic dreamscapes - ponderings on ideas of time and motion, innocence and alienation, dislocation and displacement.

''Going Places Sitting Down''

The new Chinese brush drawing ''Still Life''

The painting about Cocacola & High-Heel Shoes


















































--By Tingting Li(China)

1w7 unreal reality.... mirror.....

I just thinking a space mix the real and unreal.
Something looks exist but still unreal.

In the morden life, everything goes fast. Many people already chose one kind of heterotopia even they may not realized. Foucault metioned the heterotopia can be a real place. I thought this place maybe a unreal reality place.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

PS.A video project i saw on VideoArt.Net
Made By lar peterson hernandez
(looks unreal/supernatural)



Anther Video
The progress of unreal become to real

1w6 Project Proposal

Eassy Title:
Consumption Utopia in Contemporary Society

Aim:
My aim is to explore what will happen after consumption utopia. Talking about spirit crisis and the bailment of the spirit.Exploring different utopia worlds which from different group of people and find out something in common.

Objectives:
Find out why some people become more indulge in food, interenet,shopping, computer games etn.
Image the how Chinese personal valuation changed after 1990.

Rationale:

On Triton and Other Matters: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany
a major definition of heterotopia; is its medical meaning. It's the removal of one part or organ from the body and affixing it at another place in or on the body. That's called a heterotopia. A skin graft is a heterotopia. But so is a sex change—one of the meanings of the word.

Michel Foucault. Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias.
In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy.

The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.

Mirror stage-Jacques Lacan'sThe
mirror stage describes the formation of the Ego via the process of identification, the Ego being the result of identifying with one's own specular image.
the Mirror Stage introduces the subject into the Imaginary order.


Outcomes:
1.Interactive Website/DVD.
2.Two Video works.


Media:
1.Using Flash and Photoshop to do a interative project.
2.Using Digital Video and software (such as Premiere,AE...) to edit movie.

Methodologies:

Two videos which can communicate together.
Like this project: Doug Aitken: sleepwalkers


Risk assesment:




Timetable:

1w5 Consumption Utopia and New Chinese Literature

In the 1990's, everything in China was changing at such a high speed that young Chinese writers did not have enough time to understand deeply the relationship between Chinese personal valuation and material life.

"Literature can make life better, like the function of art. Both of them save us from boredom and emptiness.

"the challenge of writing is: to find new ways of expressing and describing the relations between people and reality."

The Asian "candy generation" are busy buying apartments and shopping, they enthusiastically respond too installment plans and long for becoming a part of the mainstream of life. The purpose of novels by Hu Fang is not to research them, but to image them. Hu Fang, along with other young Chinese writers, hope to express their own voice. Not to agree with, but think deeply about the transformation of Chinese modern life.

"Utopia" has been a symbol of revolution and idealism in a certain Chinese historical period, but what does it mean now? Just as Zheng Guogu said: "consuming is ideal; consuming is piquant."


　(He Tian)

1w4 Whose Utopia?--chinese artist cao fei

Whose Utopia

Cao Fei: Whose Utopia, the first of these projects, presents the work of Cao, an artist born in Guangzhou, Guangdong, who addresses the complexities of the rapidly shifting contemporary moment. The artist spent six months at the OSRAM China Lighting Ltd., a factory in the Pearl River Delta in China, a major manufacturing base for everyday products for Chinese and foreign markets that has drawn workers from throughout China in search of economic opportunities and a better life. The installation is anchored by a video, Whose Utopia, and includes the everyday personal mementos and metal bunk beds present in the workers dormitories. The video is an eerily beautiful portrait of the factory and of the workers’ daily lives, fantasies, and aspirations. Scenes from the flow of the regular workday are interspersed with performances by a peacock dancer, a ballerina dressed as an angel, an electric guitar player, and a break dancer.

CCA Kitakyushu presents Cao Fei's "Whose Utopia."

"Whose Utopia" is a 20 minutes video work, made during Cao's participation to Siemens arts program. For the project Cao stayed for 6 months at OSRAM China Lighting Ltd., Foshan. The area where the factory is located is called Pearl River Delta Region, and has been drastically changed as one of the strongholds of Chinese economic activities which have shown a remarkable growth. The factory is one of the factors for the growth and change, and the people, especially the young generation, come from many parts of the country to work there for their better life. "Whose Utopia," focusing on the employees who perceive the country's drastic change as their opportunities and involve with the expansion, traces their life and dream they hold. It shows the reality of their workplace and social environment in the country which is more strongly marching than ever towards the modernization, contrasted with the dreamlike poetic scenes that are presented by the employees.

1w4 Eden-- Life and death in the artificial ecosystem

eden is an interactive, self-generating, artificial ecosystem. A cellular world is populated by collections of evolving virtual creatures. Creatures move about the environment, making and listening to sounds, foraging for food, encountering predators and possibly mating with each other. Over time, creatures evolve to fit their landscape. eden has four seasons per year and each year lasts 600 eden days. One eden year passes by in about fifteen minutes of real time. A simple physics dictates only three basic types of matter in the Eden world: rocks, biomass and sonic animals. You can get more details about eden (including photos, sounds and video) in the book Impossible Nature: the art of Jon McCormack. The book also includes a DVD with video documentation of eden exhibited at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in 2004.
eden was inspired by time spent in the wilderness of Litchfield National Park, Northern Territory, Australia.

eden’s creatures begin life with little knowledge. Over time, they change, learning to adapt to their environment. Evolution of behaviour leading to mating usually takes about five eden years to discover. Behaviours that are more complex emerge between seven and seventy-five eden years and beyond. Many creatures die during this time. If a creature can mate before it dies, it passes on its genetic material to its offspring, who inherit the capabilities of their parents (as behaviour learnt during a parent’s lifetime is passed to its offspring: eden uses Lamarckian evolution).

The creatures can see (at short distances) and hear. The sounds you hear while eden is running are the sounds the creatures make. They can recognise the tonal ‘colour’ of the sound they hear and identify its direction. Through evolution, the creatures learn to make sounds and to hear the sounds of others. The work generates a sonic landscape that is experienced by people within the installation space while eden is evolving.

Sound is only made by a creature if it improves survival.

For example, in some evolutions of eden, creatures use sound to help them mate or find food. In other evolutions, they use sound to keep people within the physical space of the installation. This is achieved by placing sensors around the installation that detect human movement. Their movement and presence is mapped to the food supply for the creatures. If there are no people, the food supply dries up and the creatures starve to death. By making ‘interesting’ sounds, the creatures can keep people in the installation space, thereby increasing their food supply. On some occasions the creatures have learnt to use sound to keep people within the space, hence increasing their chances of survival. A symbiotic relationship develops between eden’s audience and its artificial life.

eden could be considered an artificial life world that uses sound, or a generative composing system for experimental sound and image. One of the aims of the work is to exploit the emergent properties that result from the relationship between the people who experience the work and the open-ended nature of artificial evolution.

1w4 The Afterlife Project

offers a technologically mediated service that provides a tangible expression of afterlife for those who have become spiritually disconnected, or require hard evidence in some form of life after death. Hydrochloric (Hcl) acid in our bodies could burn a hole in a carpet. If this acid were extracted and refined it may be converted into electricity when combined with zinc and copper acting as anode and cathode.