Doug Aitken

Doug Aitken, prominent LA artist, spoke of creating non-linear narratives that discuss the relation of different images in space. The theme in all of his works seem to be “Let’s make it, break it, and make it new again”. Aitken was frusterated with the rigidity of film and wanted to work with different perceptions. With works such as Diamond Sea, set in the diamond mines of Africa, he claimed to first break the linearity of film. He creates a psychological landscape out of physical one by allowing images to expand and become, what he calls, “kaleidoscopic”. Other works, such as Eraser and Monsoon focus on negative space. Other works he discussed included Rise which showed a cityscape from a “God’s eye view”. Next he discussed Into the Sun, which he claimed “expanded the notion of filmmaking through its connection to mythology.” The photograph he showed of the exhibit in London had projections of film on 3 walls and red earth covering the floor. Aitken also talked about Restless Minds, a film showing the beat patterns and linguistics of auctioneers.
Aitken discussed many interesting things in him lecture, however I was most taken with his ideas on the closed door policy of museums. I loved how he projected his work on the outside walls of a museum, in order to escape the constraints of tickets, hours, etc., so that even a person walking by or traveling on a bus could experience his work. I am also intrigued by the dioramas that he creates. For example, Plateau 1 is a large model created almost entirely out of fed-ex boxes. The sheer intricacies and the 6 months that it took to makes is completely fascinating.
I enjoyed the discussion and the work presented was very interesting and stimulating, however Aitken seems to be a slightly pompous, stereotypical artist—mellow, but very full of himself.

Breakdown of Due Dates

4/22 Dance Performance at 2pm

4/23, Due in class: 2-3 page Final Paper Outline
Include the name of what you are working on in the title of the outline. Start with a short paragraph articulating your main argument. (A thesis paragraph.) List a CLAIM for each body paragraph; this is a topic sentence. Indicate the EVIDENCE or sources you will work with to support that claim (text, scene). Paraphrase your ANALYSIS of pertinent details of this evidence. Briefly suggest how your INTERPRETATION will link this analysis to your claim. (see handout) Cite the sources you are using at the end of the outline.

4/23 6pm Screening of your clips
You can show a SHORT clip from the film you are writing on: must be under 5 minutes!! If you are not writing on a film you can use my laptop (or yours) to access a website or show an image of a game or artwork.

4/25 and 4/30 In-Class Presentations
You will have five minutes to present your final project to the class. You will need to explain your argument in a general way; it is a task very similar to that of writing the introduction to your paper. We will be especially interested to hear how you will use Dlz/Vrlio/Sbchk/Hnsen; how the example you are working on relates to things from the class that we have all read or seen; and how its presentation of space and especially time fit in with the larger themes of the course. You will be able to use my laptop or yours to show images or slides but you are not required to do so. (If you want to use my laptop you will need to e-mail me a PowerPoint file titled with your name by 9am the morning of your presentation.) We’ll talk more about the presentations in class on 4/23.

4/30 6-8pm (screening time) ROUGH DRAFT due in two copies, Peer Edit
You will be partnered with another student to do a live peer-edit. You will read and discuss each other’s rough drafts, offering critique and advice. You’ll take home the copy that your partner read and wrote on, and we will keep the other copy. You can choose to show each other edits beyond this session if you find it helpful.

5/7 FINAL PAPER Due by 6pm in hard copy and by e-mail
One hard copy is due to Norman’s box in the Rhetoric office. The other copy is due by e-mail, as a Word.doc attachment, to Brooke at bbelisle@berkeley.edu. Please put “Final Paper” in the subject line of this e-mail so it will land in the right place. You will not get your final papers back, since we find that so many students never come pick them up. We will e-mail, to whatever e-mail address you have listed on BearFacts, your grade on the final paper and your grade for the cours, and probably a sentence of commentary. We will e-mail you more extensive feedback about your final paper only if you ask us to do so; please indicate this on the front of the hard copy you turn in AND in the body of the e-mail you send that has your final paper attached.

Office hours 2/23 - 5/2 (brooke)

4/23 MONDAY in Rhetoric Library
11.15 joanna
11.30 cathy
11.45 chris
12 laura
12.15 olivia
12.30 johnny

4/25 WEDNESDAY in Rhetoric Library
11.15 leesha
11.30 alina
11.45
--
12.15 robin
12.30
12:45

4/30 MONDAY
11.15
11.30
11.15
11.30
--
12
12.15
12.30
12.45

5/2 WEDNESDAY at Cafe Milano on Bancroft between Telegraph and College
11.15
11.30
11.45
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12.30
12.45
1
1.15
1.30
1.45
2
(3pm film at PFA)

Final Paper Rashomon

I'm planning on doing my final paper on the 1950 film Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa and written by Shinobu Hashimoto along with Kurosawa. The film takes place in 12-century Japan and follows three different accounts of the murder of a Samurai, as told to a trial judge. Each account, - the first from the killer, the next from the slain samurai, and the last from a third party - are each completely different from each other. Yet, as Kurosawa presents each story with equal credence, he challenges the viewer to decipher which is true, if any of them are. I'm planning to relate this to Sobchack's idea concerning memory.

Mark Hansen - Seeing With the Body: The Digital Image in Postphotography

1. In Mark Hansen’s article, Seeing With the Body: The Digital Image in Postphotography, he starts by discussing a particular scene in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner. In this particular scene, Rick Deckard places a photograph into a machine and using this machine, is able to explore the space three-dimensionally within this two-dimensional picture. Hansen believes that the digitization of photographs creates a crisis. In one way, digital manipulation of photographs poses a “threat…to traditional indexical notions of photographic realism” (54). This isn’t the first time that this problem is brought up in the movie. At a different point in the film, a replicant named Rachael confronts Rick Deckard after Deckard accuses her of being a replicant. She shows him a picture of herself with her mother. Yet, the audience realizes that the photograph is a fake. In this world of advanced technology, a photograph, something that usually can be counted on to be authentic, can no longer be trusted to be authentic.

2. Another crisis created by the digitization of photographs that Hansen discusses is the “radically new understanding of the photographic image as a three-dimensional “virtual” space” (54). As Deckard uses the machine to move around within the two-dimensional picture, he transforms this two-dimensional space into a three-dimensional space. This machine transforms a photograph from “a physical inscription of light on sensitive paper” into a “data set that can be rendered in various ways and thus viewed from various perspectives” (54). In a sense, this machine that is able to move around inside of a two-dimensional photograph has gained a human-like quality. With commands from a user, the machine is able to move around the photograph, focusing in on particular areas of interest. This is the same as if a human being was suddenly transported to the scene of the original photograph, able to move around and explore as he pleased. This machine is taking the place of human vision, allowing a person to explore the area in a picture without having to actually be there.

3. This visual technology is “relocating vision to a plane severed from a human observer” (58). Suddenly, a person does not need to be present to observe a scene, all he needs is a photograph of the place and the right technology. This technology is taking the place of the human eye. However, this shift from the human eye to technology changes what an image represents. With the use of technology, images suddenly represent “millions of bits of electronic mathematical data” (58).

Philip Schmidt

Kenneth Anger Films

Tonight’s films from Kenneth Anger were confusing in the sense that they had no plot, and Scorpio Rising was especially difficult to view because of the rapid assembling of different scenes flashing before you. It reminded me of a slideshow rather than my traditional idea of a film.

Fireworks had somewhat of a plot and possibly represented a dream. A sailor was holding a man while lightning flashed, then the scene cut to the man sleeping on his bed. I assume that when he “woke up” he was dreaming, and his dream was about a group of sailors beating him up. Although the movie ends with a scene of him sleeping, confirming my idea that it was a dream, there are parts that lead you to believe it wasn’t. For example, the fireplace is now on fire, presumably from the flaming Christmas tree in the dream, and the hand on his desk is now fixed, when it was broken in the “dream”. On another note, something in the film reminded me of the film we saw in class where the dancer danced into different rooms. At one point in Fireworks, the man was talking to a sailor at what looked like a bar, then in his home next to the fireplace. Unlike the film we saw in class, this was much more abrupt and it was difficult to tell if it was meant to be connected to the previous scene.

Rabbit’s Moon wasn’t much easier to understand, but an interesting idea the lecturer brought up was the debate he had when restoring the film: flip the image or don’t flip the image? Apparently the film was accidentally flipped when Anger transferred it, which caused Lipman to wonder whether or not to flip it back. There were two sides to it: 1) the big dipper would appear correctly if it was flipped or 2) not flipping it may keep what was intended. He decided making two versions, one flipped and one not, which I think was a fair decision.

Hansen - Seeing the Body: The Digital Image in Postphotography

1. In Mark Hansen’s article, he starts off with the scene from Bladerunner in which Deckard manipulates a photograph in order to discover evidence leading to the whereabouts of the replicants. In his investigation, he operates a computer and reveals the invisible by walking through the image as if it is a 3d world rather than a flat image. However, this manipulation of photographs and the digital technology comes into question as he brings up William Mitchell. Mitchell grows wary of the present day digital manipulation of images and questions “the status and interpretation of the visual signifier” (57). Hansen proposes Mitchell’s guidelines limits the scope of digital photography and imaging. Instead of digitizing a hardcopy image, one can construct a 3d environment within the computer and take a picture within this environment. Game developers often such virtual worlds and take screenshots of these virtual environments. This may supposedly break Mitchell’s limits, however images within computers still relay the images back to in a 2d format. While Mitchell may worry about the implications of digital, digital photography acts as a quicker, perhaps more efficient tool in traditional photography, bypassing many steps of development.

2. Hansen later raises the question of the human perception versus the machine vision. Several theorists before the digital age criticized the human mind in operating in a camera-like fashion, taking snapshots of reality and missing out on true motion. As the technology evolved to present day digital media, Hansen brings up Florian Rotzer’s belief of “functional isomorphism.” “A person does not see the world out there,” rather “see[ing] the model created by the brain and projected outwards” (65). Hansen suggests that if the computer vision “abandons perspective entirely in favor of a completely realized modelization,” then it is possible to modify what our perspective. This poses the problem that human construction becomes as malleable and controlled like a photographic image. However, Hansen rebuts that the computer vision can only be an instrument or aid of human perspective.

3. The digital technology acts as an extension of our bodies or rather “embodied prosthesis.” Hansen then quotes architect Lars Spuybroek, suggesting that all thoughts and movements belong to the mind and within our body. These thoughts come to fruition when we will our body to move and operate in the “haptic” world. Hansen then interprets the computer to be an extension of our bodies, able to extend as a prosthetic into the virtual world. Suddenly our “body, in short has become crucial mediator between information and form: the supplemental sensorimotor intervention it operates coincidences with the process through which the image is created” (78). Our body acts as an intermediate between the mind and the virtual world full of data.

-Benjamin Louie

PFA: "The Passenger" by Michelangelo Antonioni

Frustrated about his life and his failure to effectively inquire/report about rebels in Africa, David Locke takes the identity of a dead man (Mr. Robinson) in the hotel room adjacent to his by switching rooms and passports. Locke soon realizes that his new persona is a gun dealer for the African rebels that he was attempting to report about. He finds this new lifestyle intriguing and tries to make all of the schedule appointments in Mr. Robinson’s schedule. However, nobody seems to show up at most these appointments but in the process he meets a mysterious lady, known as “The Girl.” Throughout the entire film, he is being pursued by both his wife and a hit squad that was trying to kill Mr. Robinson for supplying the rebels with money. The movie ends in a tragic scene in Africa, where Locke is murdered by the hit squad and his wife sees his dead body.

In one scene of the movie, Locke listens to a tape of a conversation that he and Robinson had in the past. What is particularly interesting about this scene is that the conversation is being acted out on the screen at the same time we see Locke listening to the tape in the future in the same room—merging the two times into one image. So in effect, this scene allows the viewer to experience two moments in time simultaneously. In another scene, Locke’s wife and friend watch video tapes of Locke reporting the news. This allows the wife and audience to look at Locke in a previous time and persona—giving us the ability to juxtapose Locke’s new and old personas.

-Christopher Melgaard.

Final Paper - Donnie Darko

For my final paper, I am writing on Donnie Darko. This movie was directed by Richard Kelly in 2001. It’s about a suburban teenager who comes face-to-face with his destiny. I chose this movie in particular because of the element of time travel involved. Donnie is able to take look into his future and use the future to make a decision about the present. By doing this, he collapses time, taking an interval of time and turning it into an instant. In particular, I am going to focus in on the use of opsigns and sonsigns in the film. My biggest concern so far has been finding an academic outside source that isn’t a film review.

Philip Schmidt