Below is a list of the needed marials that we will need for our exhibition space at the control room. The visual blue prints will be up by 3 pm this afternoon. I have placed an “x” character by the items I already got my hands on. please let me know if you guys can get any of this stuff for our practice/rehearsal sessions.
ARCHITECTURAL
bare white wall
EQUIPMENT
digital slr camera x
ink jet printer x
macbook computer
projector
wii mote x
USB cable x
extension cords x
PROPS
hree white bed sheets
foamboard x
photo paper x
podeum or pedastul
mesh
tape
white spray paint
SOFTWARE
adobe photoshop
wiimote whiteboard x
The PowerPoint presentation file can be found here.
Authors;
Ralph Guerrero
Kevin Cheng
Cliff Simmons
The video that is in the post below this one contains Anthony Fontano of The Needle Drop. The Needle Drop is a web-based vlog where Fontano discusses, critiques, and explores contemporary music releases and events. In this video, he describes his experience at a concert performance by the band Sunn-O))) (pronounced “sun”).
What captivates me about this video is not necessarily about the band Sunn-O)) but rather how Fantano describes his experience at the event.
“…their music really is an experience as opposed to notes…”
-Fontano
I hope that the interactive performance piece that Ralph, Kevin and I orchestrate will have a similar effect on our audience; an effect in which the audience’s presence in the space alone, induces deep physical and emotional responses within them.
In doing this, we do not aim to achieve brainwash, but rather vast extra-intellectual reflection on ideas of perception of human identity.
Am I a human being in this space?
Was I a human being before entering this space?
What is a human being?
Is there more to existence than just being human?
Did I have the choice to exist as a human?
Why was I born as a human?
Who am I?
Who was I before entering this space?
[video]
research title: AN EXPLORATION OF HUMAN EXISTENCE AND UNFOUNDED PROJECTION OF IDENTIFICATION
authors: KEVIN CHENG, RALPH GUERRERO, CLIFF SIMMONS
part: 1
There Are Two Kinds of People In The World: Those Who Think There Are Two Kinds of People In The World and Those Who Don’t
–Robert Benchley’s Law of Distinction
The excerpt above comes from an early 20th Century humorist. Though the distance of time between the date of the present and the date of when that law was written is quite vast, we (Kevin Cheng, Ralph Guerrero and Cliff Simmons) believe that this Law of Distinction holds true so long as humans continue to live. Living in a city like Los Angeles, it isn’t to hard to come accross a conversation in which someone uses a vast array of typifications to describe a human being: “..some old asian lady…”, “…that black bald guy…”, “the fat one…”. How do we get from just two types of human beings (those who believe that there are two types, and those who don’t) to an overwelming list of types of human beings (Jewish, Arab, Gypsie,..). Well, we argue that these types arise out of a culture in which projecting identities onto others is something important. Despite the importance however, we also believe that projecting identities onto someone else is not only unfounded and severely misleading, but that projecting identities is practiced uniquely in different parts of the world and is not universal.
So what do we mean by this? What we mean is that we have two hypotheses. The first is that one cannot know a person’s geographical origin, religious alignment, moral compass, or etc simply by looking at them. The second hypothesis is that such ideas of geographical origin, religious alignment, moral compass, and etc are only meaningful among certain cultures and do not have the same significance to all human beings. So, how will we go about proving such an hypothesis? We could go about writing a dissertation about it, however it has been done before, especially in the field of anthropology. So instead, we will make an interactive performance piece about it in which we will create a work about the creation of work. In this process, we will be taking relics of audience members’ identity and appropriating them in the art piece. If this work of work is done correctly, then we will be successful in conveying to the audience that face and appearance shows little to nothing about a persons inner values, beliefs, and motivations. We also hope to reveal/prove that such perceived relics are locally meaningful, and have no significance outside the boundary of the preceptor’s culture.
No human being had the choice to be born. Moreover, no human being had the choice of where or when to be born. And because human beings are social creatures, many who were born into cultural circumstances, did not question such spheres of experience. That being said, to look upon someone and assume ideas about them, is misleading due to the fact that said person has the ability to choose their musical preferences, moral alignment, political beliefs etc, but they did not have the ability choose their face.
The photo below this post is of the interior of room 5240 in the UCLA Broad Arts Center. If one were to traverse the 4th and 5th floors of Broad, she may notice subtle differences. On the 4th floor, the walls are homogeneously white, and each room has computers and wires everywhere. On the 5th floor, the walls and floor have subtle remnants of spray paint that missed the stencil and each room is equipped with a sink, cabinets, and necessary tools for analog image making.
Again what I noted above are just subtle differences and aren’t enough to imply a characterisation of the people who use those spaces; i.e. I still believe the manifestos, faculties, and students of both schools are relatively the same. What struck me though in particular was this chair in the photo below. This chair had the same shape and color as the other chairs. But for somereason someone felt the need to actually label the chair “Design 5209”.
After seeing this I thought to myself why was this necessary? All the chairs look the same, could we not just exchange chairs between rooms democratically as needed? Is (or was) the divide between the FA (fine arts) and DMA (design media arts) so solid that the faculty actually needed to label homogenous chairs so that they cannot flow between FA and DMA classes?
UCLA Broad Arts Building
Room 5240
For this week, we read Marshal McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message and Howard Singerman’s Art Subjects.
Starting on The Medium is the Message, I really enjoyed the empowerment I recieved from it. What I mean by this is that this reading for me seemed to reveal some connections that justify the importance of human beings in a technological world where machines are getting more complex, and more human labor tasks are being passed down machines.
all media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical
–McLuhan, 26
I also very much enjoyed the way McLuhan spoke of time and of the trends of humanity that roll along with time; such as the increasing awareness of children, the increasing number of jobs that are being employed by machines, and the inherent anthropocentric constructions of media, and technology (the extension of the central nervous system). Lastly on McLuhan, I enjoyed the discussion of the human “sensoreum” when it comes to technological media. As a person interested in communication, one of my biggest issued is towards information devices such as the ipad, pigeon-holing the human sensorium to strictly vision and hearing. I would like to propose that we human beings push for information devises that all people can enjoy. I would like to see tablet devices that can not only manipulate light and sound, but that can manipulate form to produce dynamic tactile information; this way, the blind can too be apart of the dynamic information world and will not have to resort to reading static braille that cannot change (information wise) as fast as a monitor displaying text can.
When it came to my personal interest of communication, McLuhan was an illuminating read. On the other hand, when it comes to the topic of the distinction between art in academia, and design in academia, I think Singerman is a great source of historical information to start researching from. Ranging over not only a timeline of art coming into academia, but also ranging over the discourses in the arts’ existence and place very stimulating. Alas in uncovering such information, yes I have more knowledge, but I am not entirely sure of why there is a divide between the school of fine art and design at ucla. Of course I understand why Bauhaus would be a separate institution from a painter’s guild so to speak. But in the case of UCLA’s School of Arts and Architecture in particular, the only difference that I can recognize on the surface between the fine arts major and the design media arts major is that in instruction more software is used and taught in the design media arts curriculum. Other than the disproportion between how much software is incorporated into the student’s curriculum, I believe (from shallow observation) that both majors are interested in relatively the same ideas; of which mainly, how can we ensure that these students leave hear equipped with the optimal means of communicating an idea through various forms of representation. From here on, I guess my job in this course is to discontinue the shallow observation, and begin to swim into the depths of the majors’ divide. Hello DMA 199. =)
Instructions:
+Right-Click to go to next slide.
+Backspace to go to previouse slide.
+Spacebar to toggle interactive work.
+Move Mouse to toggle interactive work.
Other Notes:
My presentation material can be found on the class’ server space:
http://classes.dma.ucla.edu/Spring11/199/ » projects » Group 3 | Ralph Cliff » CliffsPresentation