The Lawrence Confessional

For my final project in my very last Digital Processes class everrrrrr, I decided to expand on my interest in breaking social barriers. However, this one was a little different due to the Michel de Certeau reading we have been engaging with all term.

I already explained the premise in a previous blog, but I had the intention to make every single confession false from the very start. This was based off of de Certeau's theory that belief is contingent upon many variables. He asserts that something is true if you believe it to be. So it is really up to the individual to decide if something is true or not -- there is no set in stone rule that determines whether something is believable.

Going off of this idea, I knew that I wanted my video to break the taboo of talking about hook-up culture on the Lawrence University campus but I also wanted to bring in this idea that something is true if you believe it to be true. Thus was the birth of the false sexual confessions.
I wanted the viewers to actually believe that each confession was true, and for that reason I tried to choose outrageous stories that still stayed within the believable realm. However, whether or not people believed the stories to be true is ultimately up to them... and that is the whole point.

(I will be adding the video to this blog post once it finishes uploading to YouTube.)

Stroszek: WTF?

I honestly had no idea what to expect before watching "Stroszek." The beginning was very slow and I found myself trying to figure out what the essential point or message of the film was, but that came later. It comes off as a film about domestic violence, and that is definitely a huge part of the film. However, I found some very deep underlying themes going on as well. Family was a theme that stuck out to me. In the beginning of the movie, Bruno starts out as a loner. He is a total underdog. He is portrayed as the loser with no friends, he is called "creepy" by the two douchebags of the film, his house is a complete mess, and he himself is scrubby as f#*$. The most important factor in my opinion is that he does not have a family. But throughout the film, he gradually expands his friend group by being himself. He befriends Eva who is being pimped out by the two douchebags. He also forms friends with an older gentleman. The three of them form a life for themselves, and even though it seems to be a poor lifestyle... they make it work. I think that is the ultimate story of the film. Finding your place with the people that care about you and the people you care about. No matter the circumstances, if you are with the people you love then it does not matter.
But then again... he dies in the end. So take that as you will.

Hannah Wilke

I chose to do my presentation on Hannah Wilke for obvious reasons (last name, duh), but she proved to be a pretty interesting artist to research. She was a female conceptual artist that focused on female sexuality and the preconceptions that society has put on it. Through her art, she aimed to turn female sexuality into a commodity in order to get rid of the stigmas attached to it. By taking it out of a taboo context, she reclaims her sexuality as a female and makes it more relatable in a sense.

Hannah Wilke used vaginal imagery in the bulk of her artwork, creating vulvic (is that a word?) images out of materials such as clay, ceramic, lint, latex, chewing gum, chocolate, and her own body. A lot of her artwork is sculpture but she also did performance pieces where she photographed the performance.

Gestures is a popular piece of hers from 1974 where she faces the camera in extreme close-up and performs repetitive physical actions, kneading her face and pulling her skin as if it were sculptural material. Her gestures - rubbing her hands over her face and smiling so hard that she appears to be grimacing - can take on a loaded significance when seen in the context of gender performance.

Lawton Hall

Although I was regretfully unable to attend Lawton Hall's visit to our class last week, I did take the time to research him and his work. I have got to say that I appreciate his approach to art in that it is very nontraditional. He does mainly mixed media artwork as well as audio and film work. I am the type of person that when interacting with an art piece, I want all of my senses to be stimulated. And his do that. Especially his "All Your Thens for Now." When listening and watching the video performed by Katelyn King, I am intrigued. Confused, but intrigued. I will admit that I do not entirely understand the point of the piece and Lawton's intention behind it, but I can appreciate the fact that he goes outside of the box by incorporating unconventional methods to create artwork. In this one in particular, Katelyn is playing the xylohone while monologuing (is that even a word?) a musical commentary on Tim Davis' essay The Ladies' Tee. Again, I totally do not understand it and I don't even like it to be honest. But that does not mean that I cannot appreciate it.





I can tell that Lawton is an intelligent person because his artwork seems to always be a creative response to intellectual things such as the essay mentioned above, or science terminology such as in his musical piece "Geodesy." I mainly find my inspiration from visual things whereas it seem Lawton finds his from text, and that just goes to show how what inspires other people to create is very personal and can serve as an outlet for very different types of artwork.

IG: picoverlayz

Michel de Certeau makes reference to the differences and interactions between "place" and "space." According to him, "a place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence...[while] a space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. "

My space: Instagram
My place: Whatever I choose to make it

I had a lot of fun with this project. It was fun to find the "inbetweens" of typical landscape/scenery photography. Instead of taking a picture of a building, I took a picture of a parking sign on the building. Instead of taking a picture of a fraternity house, I took a picture of the garbage can in front of it. I then took images of these spaces (or places) and combined them to create a new place. A new image.

I thought that people on instagram would find these pictures to be hella laaammeeee since they aren't grand landscape picture overlays, but more so overlapping pictures of specific and kind of random things. And I found that my followers, or whoever found my pictures via hashtags, really liked the pictures that I didn't like as much. I was putting a decent amount of effort into how I edited them and which two images I decided to overlap, but it really didn't matter. They liked ones that I didn't put too much thought into. I found that to be interesting. If I knew that earlier, I probably could have done even more.

Check it out: PICOVERLAYZ

!'M $0 H!P$T3R

I was inspired by Ridley's use of instagram as a medium to display his photo experiment and now it's my turn. Social media is arguably the most common source of digital media nowadays and so it only makes sense.

I am going to be drawing on a recently popular phenomenom of picture overlays aka taking two or more pictures and overlapping them to create something so0o0o0o hipster. Disclaimer: I have been a victim of doing this. There are tons of apps that you can download on your mobile device that will do the overlapping for you. You can even go as far as choosing the position of the pictures, the filter, if one picture is more transparent than the other, adding text, etc. I find that most commonly people use pictures of landscapes and overlap them with images of people. Again, guilty. So that is what I am going to do. However, I am going to focus on the "nothingness" in these landscapes. Instead of taking a general plane picture of the landscape, I will focus on individual parts... the in-between. Honing in on seemingly random parts of the overall picture, and overlaying them with selfies by using an app.
I am going to see if I can use this as some sort of social experiment too. So I will go HAM with the hashtags and see how many people dig my super sweet shots.

Let's see how this goes.

The Mundane

In Michel de Certeau's book, The Practice of Everyday Life, he states that "'stories' provide the decorative container of a narrativity for everyday practices. To be sure, they describe only fragments of these practices. They are no more than its metaphors" (71).

The premise of my short video responds to this statement, and relies on the mundane activities that I do each and every day. I tell my story in order to provide a narratively of my everyday practices. I take you through my day from start to finish in just a few minutes, emphasizing the things that I do without even thinking (i.e. swallowing, blinking, cracking my knuckles, clicking a pen, etc.) The film is cyclical in the sense where I start by waking up to my alarm clock, opening the blinds, getting ready for the day, etc. and I also end the film with setting my alarm and turning out the lights. However, by the middle of the short video it just becomes a repetition of various tedious and uninteresting things that I do throughout the day.

The viewer is meant to feel bored by the video. In order to accomplish this, I chose to give the clips a cool-toned, almost sickly filter thus sucking the life out of them. I also added a droning room sound that is played consistently throughout the short video. I repeated some clips too such as me itching myself, blinking, putting on mascara with the aim of the viewer becoming bored by watching clips that are not only monotonous but repetitive.

There are so many things that people do every day without thinking, and my video is meant to draw attention to those things. We often times neglect to remember bits and pieces of our day, but if we choose to be intentional about our actions and conscious of what we are doing, we might find that we not only remember most of our day but also live each day with more purpose.