Friday, February 2, 2007
River of Shadows - Christina Norbygaard
2. People also began to see the extent of time with the findings of geologists, which comes as a surprising side note in Solnit’s reading. Through dating of the Earth, geologists concluded that Earth was much older than the Bible depicted, although the exact dates were still unknown (53). So while the telegraph and railroads quickened the pace of human life, geology made the appearance of life even shorter. Now that they knew how long geological processes took, it made human existance seem so short and unimportant. The Bible on the other hand had made human life the center and importance of the Earth’s life, which is how people still think today. Rarely does anyone want to consider the slower processes, since we as humans simply cannot see it.
3. Another interesting idea that Solnit mentioned was the fact that the camera could now capture “what had always been present but never seen” (59). Cameras are capable of capturing a moment in time, but not an entire motion. This would seem like something new and “exotic” as Solnit describes it, allowing people to get a different view on the world. Muybridge’s sequence of photos also were able to capture a movement, not just a moment, making it seem like technology could out perform the human mind.
4. Overall, Solnit describes the advancements in science and film as progress, but her tone suggests that she is hesitant to let go of the human side to interpretating life at a different speed. Or perhaps, the things she states simply makes the reader realize what our minds have been subconsciously thinking. The way she describes how the railroad made the landscape become a blur had a dissappointed tone. With our new technology, are we forgetting to slow down and see the world for all that it is?
Thursday, February 1, 2007
River of Shadows - Anthony Castanos
River of Shadows
- In River of Shadows, Rebecca Solnit describes how “photography was faster than painting, but it could only portray the slow world or the still world . . . The bustling nineteenth century had to come to a halt for the camera, until Muybridge and his motion studies” (55). While Muybridge’s camera could catch an inconceivably small moment for its time, technology has and will continue to advance and cameras will continue to snap faster and faster. However, when time is broken down into Zeno’s theory of infinitesimal increments, it suggests that cameras will never stop advancing because they will never reach an infinitesimally small increment of time. Because reaching infinity is impossible, no camera could possibly epitomize Zeno’s divided stream of time. This is “the difference between the time that the camera sees and the eye sees,” in that the speed of the camera can always be improved to capture a smaller frame of time while the eye can see whatever increment of time it imagines (48). Eyes see what they want to see, while cameras see what they’re told to see. Cameras are restricted from capturing an infinitesimal moment in time because there is always something moving in the picture, no matter how small.
- The progress of the industrial revolution led to the idea that “if distance was measured in time, then the world had suddenly begun to shrink” (51). Solnit describes the annihilation of time and space as capitalist intentions to advance and make profit, and while the saying “time is money” is a common theme in the reading, the idea that “space is money” seems to be just as common (62). Once goods could be shipped across the continent in a week, the removal of past space barriers spurred more trade and more profits. So if getting a job done quicker means time equals money, then shouldn’t getting a job done with less distance make space equal money? Whether it’s something literal like selling land space or something more abstract like capturing a landscape and selling it on a 3 by 5 postcard, the idea of controlling space, in turn, makes money.
- The overall tone of Solnit’s “Time and Space” chapter, even while talking about the advancement of camera speed, still conveyed a dark, gloomy look at capitalism, technology, and the future. Her repetitive use of the term “annihilation” gave an almost apocalyptic view of the world as we know it. At first, the use of the term innocently described a figurative shrinking of the world to visually illustrate the industrial revolution, but then Solnit goes on to describe Marxist views of capitalism and the insatiable desire for better and better technology. But these technologies were literally a part of our being as a form of evolution, “the art of the hand had been replaced by the machinery of the camera; the travel of the foot, human or equine, had been replaced by the pistons of the locomotive; bodies themselves were becoming insulated from nature by machinery” (56). Suddenly people are becoming robots by literally becoming their own technological advancements. So then what’s left in evolution? Darth Vader? Sulnit closes the chapter with the thought that “the age of the computer is an increasing abstraction” (58). Acting as if a warning to the future, Sulnit describes the past of the industrial revolution to convey a foreshadowing of the future. Much like the development of trains and cameras annihilated time and space, computers continue this mechanical evolution until the next technological advancement.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
The Present Reading Response by Cathy Hwang
1. In the beginning of The Present, Kern uses the example of the Titanic to introduce the “magical powers” of wireless technology. Even though it is ironic that the wreckage of the grandest invention built by man around the turn of the century glorified the advent of wireless age, Kern nonetheless succeeds in transitioning his discussion to wireless technology and its implications. He believes that this new tool can overcome the shortcomings of human senses: “what the eyes and ears of man could not perceive the wireless could receive over vast distance and through darkness and fog” (35). But more importantly, wireless transmissions bring people of remote distances together to share the tragic news of the Titanic. Kern seems to be fascinated with this aspect of expanded range of experience, or what he later calls the simultaneity of distant events, that is made possible by wireless technology. The awareness of the simultaneity is treated as universal by Kern when he said, “this rescue effort was particularly highlighted because so many were aware of the tragedy” (35). However, the perception of the present varies greatly among the people who are informed of the accident. Survivors watching the ship from life boats would surely have a different observation of the present than people who read about the incident from the newspaper. Even though both parties receive the simultaneity of the distant event, in this case the sinking of the boat, Kern’s treatment of these two perceptions as if they were equal is inadequate. Even among different sources of wireless means, the experience of the present would be distinct. A person who receives a telephone call regarding a death in the family would perceive the “present” very differently than radio listeners learning about the “present”. Differentiation among the perceptions of simultaneous distant events is an element that Kern fails to address throughout the passage.
2. In order to expand the concept of simultaneity, Kern presents many artistic expressions that utilize different techniques to achieve the simultaneous present. Films can further the sense of present by showing “several noncontiguous events” or “showing one event from a variety of perspectives.” Through the uses of double exposure, the montage balloon, and parallel editing, filmmakers are able to pioneer the expansion of the present: “cinema could appear to take the viewer from one place to another instantly and achieve the effect of his being ‘simultaneously here and there’” (37). Audiences are trained to adapt the continuity between lapsed sequences as simultaneously occurring events, in order to experience the tension and suspense of the climax that followed. Contrary to the direct attempts of representing simultaneity by film directors, poets are more subtle in this endeavor. Kern points out that, “past poets expressed the voices of a successive universe; the contemporary poet ought to express them all at once as they are perceived by senses and magnified by technology” (38). Verbal montages are ultimately used to achieve the same effect in film but to a lesser extent, as temporal and spatial simultaneity could be represented more readily through film than through words. Kern considers music as “the model for simultaneous art and poetry” (39). The sense of intensity and urgency can be achieved by having two or more voices “sing different words at the same time” (39). Kern elaborates on each artistic form: film, poetry, and music, in great detail to show that viewers, readers, and audiences can be trained to perceive simultaneity when events are only seemingly occurring concurrently. Even though Kern later on presents scientific argument to refute this representation of simultaneity, Kern seems to identify with the artistic interpretation of simultaneity through his extended analyses of these mediums.
3. In the last portion of the passage, Kern discusses the concept of simultaneity and thickened present. Although both terms have relevance to the perception of the present, Kern distinguishes the two by stating, “simultaneity was the more directly influenced by technology, because electronic communication made it possible for the first time to be in a sense in two places at once, while temporal thickening derived from a theory of experience that could have been articulated in any age’ (46). These two disparate views are then put into the same context through the discussion of cinema. Using different cinematic technique, simultaneity could be represented by “bringing together an unprecedented variety of visual images and arrange them coherently in a unified whole” (46); thickened present could be achieved by splicing during the editing process of the film. Kern concludes the paragraph without a clear implication of which concept is more relevant since the nascence of wireless transmissions; however, the last paragraph states, “the new technology changed the dimensions of experience so rapidly that the future seemed to rush toward the present” (46). The association of technology and simultaneity mentioned earlier in this context seems to imply human’s inquisitive nature of looking into the future, and looking at “present” elsewhere as the main motivator for technological advances. I wonder if Kern overlooked the human desire to seize the present that could also contribute to the science of time travel.
Walter Kern, The Present--Chloe Kloezeman
2. Kern quotes Henri-Martin Barzun’s poetry to further describe our present world as a “simultaneous reality” (38). Barzun’s quotation “aviation has transformed distant…multiplicity of modern life” is a complex synopsis of our world today. The ways in which we have defined the world in the past have changed as much as the world itself. No longer can song use its “monodic” character in an effort to encapsulate the true nature of our world’s tone. But rather, we must look at the world through a “polyphonic lends”. Things as drastic as airplanes and the Internet have brought our world together as one. This is a time where no one can stand-alone but yet everyone has been forced together to operate as a democratic society. Simply put, the innovations of the democracies in control have forced all the others to play its game their way.
3. Einstein argued that there could be “no such thing as a universe with moving parts” (80). Meaning that the present is a series of local events. That one can only define what is going on around them as the present, not events that are happening across the world. But the counterargument to this claim is that on the eve of the war, one historian was able to conclude that the present now had the capability of tying together events taking place around the globe, happening in simultaneous fashion. Previously, our society as a whole, was incapable of drawing these connections due to a lack of technology. As mentioned before, technology has created an “information highway” that no longer allows us to deal only with ourselves, but has forced us to consider what is happening “now” in the rest of the world. While Einstein’s idea made sense during a time when one could only encapsulate the events in its own arena, our world has made massive strides in connecting simultaneously.
Chloe Kloezeman
Friday, January 26, 2007
Walter Kern-Joanna Bennett
Science, film and art all contribute to the argument for the atomistic nature of time. Newton’s calculus envisions time as a, “sum of infinitesimally small but discrete units” (26). In film, chronophotography is used to piece together pictures taken simultaneously to create a finished product of, for example, a horse galloping. Also photodynamist is used in film by leaving the lens open longer to capture the blurred vision of the in-between movements. Both these forms of film support time as having an atomistic nature. Many use art as an argument for atomistic time, saying that in art, “everything was fixed in a single moment” (27). Artists such as Paul Cezanne, Juan Gris and Salvador Dali painted obscured and sometimes defaced clocks to acknowledge their inability to depict an image over time. Opposing atomistic nature, the theory that time is flux is inspired by the theory that human consciousness is a stream. William James describing the mind as “pailfuls” of rain first suggested the theory in an essay. He argues that, “each mental event is linked with those before and after it” (28). Henri Bergson attempts to compare movement with time stating both are an indivisible flux. He believes atomism opposes time’s true nature saying, “we cannot consider movement as a sum of stoppages nor time as a sum of temporal atoms without distorting their essentially fluid nature” (29). Edouard Dujardin’s novel addresses temporal fluidity with a monologue displaying the, “mixture of thought and perception, and its unpredictable jumps in space and time” (30). The monologue depicts a moment of thought flowing from one subject to another free of breaks or pauses. This monologue exemplifies the reality of thoughts in time, showing the fluent nature these thoughts entail.
The forward movement of time, clocks and days tell us by instinct that time is irreversible. New technologies such as electric lights and cinemas sparked a dispute on the reversible nature of time. The ability to run film backwards was introduced by Louis Lumiere, and caused many to question their certainty about the irreversibility of time. Novelist such as James Joyce have experimented with time in their novels by using, for example, forty pages to describe a few seconds of thought. Psychologists and sociologists use dreams, psychoses and magic to argue for the reversibility of time, saying they neglect chronological relations. Freud relates his theories on the reversibility of time by arguing that, “unconscious mental processes are ‘timeless,’ for the passage of time does not change them in any way and the idea of time cannot be applied to them” (31). All arguments presented in Walter Kern’s debate over time are compelling and display strong opinions in regards to the controversy of time.
Kern concludes his work on time by distinguishing between the reality of private time as opposed to that of public time. He pronounces public time as human interrelated, and distinguishes this time by its homogeneity and irreversible nature. In opposition to public time, Kern describes private time as subject to solely the individual who is consumed by it.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Reading Response Assignments
Reading Response Assignments
The due dates below mean posted on the blog by 5pm that day.
You only need to do a reading response once.
You will need to post comments to someone else’s reading response at least two different times over the semester. But, posting quality comments more than twice will give you extra points for participation.
Kern: Nature of Time
Joanna B. and Tessa B.
Date Discussed in Class: 1/29
Response Due by: 1/26
Kern: The Present
Chloe K. and Cathy H.
Date Discussed in Class: 1/ 31
Response Due by: 1/30
Solnit: River of Shadows
Date Discussed in Class: 2/5
Response Due by: 2/2
Braun: Marey, Art, and Modernism
Date Discussed in Class: 2/7
Response Due by: 2/6
Bergson: Creative Evolution
Date Discussed in Class: 2/12
Response Due by: 2/9
Bergson: Creative Evolution
Date Discussed in Class: 2/14
Response Due by: 2/13
Bragaglia: Futurist Photodynamism
Date Discussed in Class: 2/21
Response Due by: 2/19
Doanne: Emergence of Cinematic Time
Date Discussed in Class: 2/28
Response Due by: 2/26
Videos: Boomerang and Centers
Date Discussed in Class: 3/7
Response Due by: 3/6
Deleuze
Date Discussed in Class: 3/14
Response Due by: 3/13
Deleuze
Date Discussed in Class: 3/19
Response Due by: 3/16
Virilio: The Perspective of Real Time
Date Discussed in Class: 4/2
Response Due by: 3/30
Sobchack: Carnal Thoughts
Date Discussed in Class: 4/9
Response Due by: 4/6
TBA on Digital Media
Date Discussed in Class: 4/16
Response Due by: 4/13
TALKS, FILMS & EVENTS
More events may be added to this list as they are announced. You may attend up to three extra events for extra credit (extra events 10pts each, required events 25 each except April 22 event counts double for 50).
I've put stars ** by the events I particularly recommend.
Websites for More info about locations, tickets, etc:
Yerba Buena http://www.ybca.org/
Berkeley Art, Technology, Culture Colloquium http://atc.berkeley.edu/
Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/
California College for the Arts http://www.cca.edu/calendar/
**Tuesday February 27 PFA
7:30 Pine Flat
Sharon Lockhart (U.S., 2005, 138 mins)
[guest icon] Sharon Lockhart in Person
The long static shot has been used to beautiful, often demanding, ends by filmmakers as diverse as the Lumière Brothers, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Andy Warhol, and James Benning. For Pine Flat, Sharon Lockhart, who is also a photographer, collaborated with a group of youths living in a small town in the Sierra foothills. As they worked together over three years, an intimacy developed, and the kids shared the places they valued and the rhythms of their everyday life. Slowly a film emerged: a girl reading alone, a boy asleep outside, some kids playing in the river, others traipsing among the trees are depicted in twelve ten-minute shots. While Pine Flat provides a portrait of rural life and landscape, the pregnant shots also contain the promise of narrative. Tender and endearing, the film gives the young people unusually extended time on the screen, and allows us to contemplate how we experience the passing of time.
Sunday, March 4 at 8:30pm
Film Art Phenomena: Works by Nicky Hamlyn, Nicky Hamlyn In Person.
701 Mission Street (corner of Third) Tickets: 415-978-ARTS
Composing his work “in camera,” the films of Nicky Hamlyn incorporate each shooting’s unique character, producing open-ended outcomes while questioning matter and perception. Quoting from his Film Art Phenomena (published 2003): “I see my films as arising out of an encounter between a situation or location or subject, and a camera/production strategy. I have been inspired partly by Robert Morris’ reading of Jackson Pollock’s paintings as resulting from the interactions of horizontal canvas, paint viscosity, stick, gravity, arm mechanics. Morris’ behavioristic take on Pollock redeems it from an expressionistic reading.” Screening: Minutiae, Hole, Not Resting, Pistrino, Water, Matrix, Penumbra, Object Studies, and Transit of Venus, which records two consecutive passes of Venus across the sun. (Caroline Savage)
**Monday March 12 7:30 Kaja Silverman (lecture)
Art Technology Culture Colloquium, on campus (see website for location)
Berkeley Rhetoric and Film professor Kaja Silverman delivers a lecture on the time-based art of James Coleman, particularly a digital video installation he made based on da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper.
Wednesday, March 14 at 8:30pm
Live Cinema Lab: viDEO savant, viDEO sAVant and Friends In Person
California College of the Arts: 1111 Eighth Street (near Sixteenth)
“What happens when you take cinema out of the movie theater, wrench the reel off the projector and start editing the images and sound live, in front of the audience? LIVE CINEMA!” (Holly Willis, New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image) The mysterious multi-media ensemble viDEO sAVant has travelled the world presenting its own brand of live improvisational cinema since 1990. This will be their first Bay Area appearance. This dynamic performance will feature a synthesis of sound and moving images with elements produced and mixed on the spot in a process of live interaction between projectionist and musician, yielding fluid results, shifting and varied, never the same twice. Participants include Charles Woodman on images, Margaret Schedel on cello and electronics, and Yoni Wolf (of Anticon’s Why?) on vocals, samples and assorted sound makers. (Steve Polta)
Thursday March 15 PFA
7:30 L’avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy, 1960, 140 mins)
While exploring a volcanic island on a yachting expedition, a troubled young woman named Anna disappears, leaving her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and close friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) to search in vain, and fall in love. L’avventura unfolds against Anna’s very palpable absence, a love story in a void. As always, landscape is the screen onto which Antonioni projects human emotions. Anna’s pain is articulated in the parched suburb from which she came, and in the rocky island on which her cohorts wander, not realizing it is they who are lost. (Anna may have escaped.) Stunning love scenes prepare us for those in The Passenger fifteen years later: love as a standoff, a sizing-up as in a bullfight, played out-of-doors. L’avventura is rich in Antonioni’s visual architecture, wicked humor, and, finally, youth: a shot of Vitti, hair blowing in the wind while village bells answer one another, may be unmatched in these films for its spirit of hope.
Thursday March 22 PFA
7:30 The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Mamoru Hosoda (Japan, 2006)
(Toki wo kakeru shoujo). One of the most acclaimed anime features in recent years, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is the first animated adaptation of a famous 1965 young adult novel that has spawned countless films and television programs through the years. Makoto is a vivacious—if klutzy—seventeen-year-old tomboy whose carefree summer days are literally thrown for a loop when she discovers a mysterious ability to leap back through time. Her trivial temporal maneuvers, like undoing little blunders or finding out exam questions in advance, soon lead to complicated wrinkles that have an inevitable impact on those around her, especially when her best friend confesses his love for her. Hosoda is a remarkable new talent who, together with art director Nizou Yamamoto (Princess Mononoke) and character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto (Neon Genesis Evangelion), has crafted a magical, affecting film full of humor, warmth, and the bittersweet pangs of first love.
Tuesday, March 27
7pm CCA, SF Rebecca Solnit (author of the Muybridge reading)
Graduate Studies Lecture Series
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus Info: 415.703.9505
Rebecca Solnit is a writer, art critic, curator, political activist, and educator. She won wide acclaim for her 1994 book Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West.
Another work, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (2000), combines text by Solnit with photo essays by Susan Schwartzenberg and traces the devastation attending San Francisco's dot-com-fueled gentrification: skyrocketing residential and commercial rents that have driven out artists, activists, and the poor; the homogenization of the city's appearance, industries, and population; and the decay of public life and erasure of sites of civic memory. Solnit is also the author of River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003).
**Friday March 30 PFA
7:00 Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni (U.K., 1966, 110 mins)
For his first English-language film, Antonioni set a metaphysical mystery in the world of fashion, at a time when the director’s metaphysics had itself become a fad; the movie and its meaning were the talk of the swingingest parties of 1966. Photographer David Hemmings snaps images of Vanessa Redgrave and an older man apparently trysting in a London park; later, analyzing the eyelines, scrutinizing the grain, he believes he sees evidence of murder, but finds that the harder you look, the less you know. The same interpretive limits apply to the viewing of Blow-Up: is this portrayal of youth culture, with its pot parties and Yardbirds shows, its rehearsed rebellion and limitless cool, affectionate—perhaps parodic—or a lament over the inscrutable emptiness of hip? Is it really about philosophical depths, or fascinating surfaces? Like its closing game of mime-tennis, the film may be daring us to focus on something that doesn’t exist. Keep your eye on the ball.—Juliet Clark
**Wednesday April 4
7:30 The Medium Is, works by Lynda Benglis, Peter Campus, Hermine Freed, Dan Graham, Richard Serra
With its instantaneous feedback and image manipulation, video technology creates a nowness of perception along with the distraction offered by any good spectacle. In Now, Lynda Benglis’s first color tape, the eponymous word is repeated, questioning the currency and the command. Then, over-driving the color image, Benglis collapses the notion of the medium as neutral. Wearing headphones in Richard Serra’s Boomerang, Nancy Holt repeats phrases that are heard, then heard again in delay. The effect is of feedback effectively devouring its own message. Using a split screen in Two Faces, Hermine Freed faces herself, caressing her mirrored image. Suspended between images, Freed exists as a doubled person, alienated and adrift. Recorded in San Francisco, Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror is a study of mediated relations, a mirror standing in for the TV as the artist describes the audience before him. The circularity of the exchange captures the phenomenology of feedback. In Peter Campus’s seminal tape Three Transitions, inherent properties of the medium become potent metaphors for the depiction of internal states and the breach between reality and illusion.—Steve Seid
Now (Lynda Benglis, 1973, 12 mins, Color, Mini-DV, From VDB). Boomerang (Richard Serra, 1974, 10.5 mins, B&W, DVD, From The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Two Faces (Hermine Freed, 1972, 8 mins, B&W, Mini-DV, From VDB). Performer/Audience/Mirror (Dan Graham, 1975, 23 mins, B&W, DVD, From EAI). Three Transitions (Peter Campus, 1973, 5 mins, Color, Mini-DV, From EAI).
• (Total running time: 59 mins, U.S.)
Thursday April 5, Friday April 6 PFA (counts as one event)
Thurs April 5 7:30 Tropical Malady, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand/France, 2004, 118 mins)
Fri April 6 7:00 Tropical Malady: Shot-by-Shot, Discussion with Apichatpong Weerasethakul
(Sud pralad). The agreeably irrational Tropical Malady melds folk fable with euphoric modern moviemaking, effortlessly traversing the mundane and the miraculous. In this pastoral with a dark pulse, two beguiling stories unfold: the first a playful romance between a handsome soldier, Keng, and Tong, a country boy; the second, a nocturnal journey into a realm of shape-shifting creatures. While Keng and Tong’s blissful courtship is told through moody, tender tableaux, the seeds of a lurking apprehension are being quietly sown—a dead body is found at the edge of the jungle, cows are found slaughtered in the fields. The villagers tell of a spirit that inhabits the body of a wandering tiger. As the second story emerges, Tropical Malady leaves behind the matter-of-fact for the mystical, a lush jungle peopled by talking monkeys and tricksters in human form. And who is that stalking the dread tiger? Is it soldier Keng? In this numinous tropic, we relish the malady of not necessarily knowing. Winner, Prix du Jury, Cannes 2004.
Friday April 13 PFA
8:50 The Passenger
Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy/France/Spain, 1975, 123 mins)
A penetrating political thriller, The Passenger, set in the Sahara, is also a desert film, and it resembles the much earlier L’avventura—a desert island film—with its horizontal vistas and its theme of absence. Jack Nicholson portrays a London journalist named Locke who, sent to cover a rebellion in North Africa, assumes the identity of a man, Robertson, who has died in the next hotel room. Locke is running away from being a journalist—from the codes that replace knowing, the images that replace seeing. He’s much like Monica Vitti’s Vittoria in L’eclisse in his desire for escape, for a mask. But, embracing Robertson’s globetrotting, increasingly mysterious persona, he finds himself pursuing not the man’s life, but his death. Even the camera seems to have a will toward another world: it distractedly tracks a passing camel in the desert, an anachronistic horse-drawn carriage in Munich. The film’s famous final seven-minute zoom literally draws out the pain of seeing in focus.
(REQUIRED) Sunday April 22, 2pm Zellerbach theater, Berkeley Dance Project
Directed by Lisa Wymore
Featuring The Reception, a cross-disciplinary performance piece utilizing dance choreography and tele-immersion technology to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence. Also featuring new choreographic works by Tammy Cheney, Robert Moses, Carol Murota, and Ellis Wood. The Reception: Co-directed by Lisa Wymore (TDPS) and Ruzena Bajcsy (CITRIS). *The April 22 performance will be followed by a post-performance discussion: Being Here: Presence/Remote Presence within Live and Media Based Performance by N. Katherine Hayles.
The Resonance Project is a team of choreographers, dancers, computer engineers, and visual and sound artists who are investigating concepts of presence/remote presence and corporeal and code interactivity within live and media based performance. Unique to the project is the use of a "performance as research" model, within which scientists and artists collaborate to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence.
You do not need to buy a ticket for this performance, meet in front of the theater before the show.
**Monday April 23 Doug Aitken 7:30
Art Technology Culture Colloquia, on campus (see website for location)
Internationally known Video and Digital artist Doug Aitken talks about his work
Wednesday May 2
3:00 Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan, 2003, 82 mins)
Lecture by Marilyn Fabe
(Bu jian bu san). In Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Tsai Ming-liang, director of Vive l'Amour (1994) and What Time Is It There? (2001), created the sharpest combination yet of his major themes—rain, missed connections, and the poetry of loneliness—juxtaposed this time against something completely unexpected: a martial arts film. It's a rainy night in Taipei, and the crumbling neighborhood kino-barn is showing King Hu's swordplay classic Dragon Inn. Most of the audience appears to be elsewhere, offscreen dreamers haltingly putting their thoughts of love into very slow motion while the onscreen kinetic frenzies keep blazing on like helpful cues. Visualizing the fantasies of anyone who's ever worked in a movie theater, or just adored being in one, Goodbye, Dragon Inn underscores the essence of why people watch films: to be reminded of what it is to live, and what it means to dream.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
(Sample) Reading Response for Lessing, Laocoon
"You will be required, one time over the course, to post a reading response to the blog. This should consist of three or four numbered paragraphs which each reference a specific passage in the text and focus on that passage in order to make an argument or offer an insightful interpretation. You will also be required, at least twice, to respond to other students’ posts on the blog. Append your comments to their reading response; refer to the numbered paragraph you are commenting on and the relevant passage in the text; go back to the text yourself and offer an elaboration or counterargument. Your comments should not be as much about ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’ the student’s response but either lending further support for their argument or offering an alternative reading of the same material. Always sign your full name to your blog posts since your login may not be recognizable."
Each numbered paragraph of your reading response should offer an interpretation of or argument about something specific in the text. You do not need to summarize the reading or cover all the reading in your response. Your responses should be about your own ideas rather than outlining the material.
(Sample) Reading Response by Brooke Belisle
on Lessing, selections from Laocoon (p.3 in reader)
1. Lessing differentiates poetry and painting based on an assumption that each medium is best at representing whatever corresponds to its specific mode of presentation. Since poems are constituted by “sounds in time” and paintings are constituted by figures in space, Lessing claims that “succession in time is the province of the poet, co-existence in space that of the artist.” (3) As his argument develops, however, he seems to describe a kind of “succession in time” that belongs to painting. In the section labeled “2”, he claims that when we perceive an object in space, “first we observe its separate parts, then the union of these parts, and finally the whole.” (3) If painting presents objects in space, then this argument introduces a kind of time into painting: ‘wholes’ are not instantaneously perceived but built-up from a process of perceiving parts and relationships between parts. In the first paragraph of section 2 he refers to “parts” but in the second paragraph he switches to the word “details” as if it is interchangeable with “parts.” If details are also considered “parts” then even the most simple, singular, or undifferentiated object—one which seemed not to have ‘parts’—would be multiple just in the sense of having details. I wonder if the way the whole painting works as a ‘pregnant moment’ could also be a way of thinking about how each detail in a painting works like a mini pregnant-moment, offering potential connections with everything else in the painting.
(I only wrote one numbered paragraph, but you will need to write three or four--though they don't have to be quite as long as mine. The Lessing reading was only one page (page 3), but for other readings you need to include page numbers. To avoid confusion, refer to the page number in the READER rather than the page of the photocopied text.)
Monday, January 22, 2007
Assignment for 1/24: Analysis of description
Analysis of Description
In the Stella responses blog entry (see list on the left of all entries), find the blog comment posted below your own and paste this paragraph description of Battle of Lights along with the author’s name, at the top of a document. Below, write your own paragraph or two (at least 8 sentences) about the description. In the top right corner of the page be sure to put your own name.
Don’t argue about how ‘good’ or effective the description is, analyze exactly how it works. Point out specific details in the description and show how they create specific kinds of effects or produce meaning in specific ways. For example, if you noticed your author used the words “blending” and “oozing” you might point out some of the implications or effects of those words:
The author describes the colors as “blending” and “oozing,” suggesting that the colors intersect in fluid ways rather than defining clear boundaries. The gerund form of these verbs imagines the paint as still moving on the canvas, as if the paint is still wet and the painting is still in-process.
Remember you are writing about the description not about the painting, so, maybe you notice the author says “I noticed tons of lines.” You could point out the use of the first person, the fact that it is in the past tense, the unusual pairing of “tons” and “lines” (a ton is a unit of weight; so is he suggesting that the lines in the painting look heavy or is this a translation of number into weight, an exaggeration used to express being overwhelmed?). You might notice the author writes that “shadows are cast by a building” and notice that instead of describing how black paint angles from a rectangular patch of white paint, taking up the perspective of someone looking at a painting, the author imagines the paint as what it may represent, taking up a perspective that is projected into the ‘world’ the painting seems to represent.
Below are some things to think about as you read and begin to think about the paragraph you are analyzing. Don’t answer these questions directly, like a list, in your response. Use them to help you pick up on details, but then structure your analysis around what you discover. You might choose to move through the description following the order of its sentences. Or you might choose to group certain patterns you notice. Or, you might start with surface observations that you then develop into insightful interpretations. Don’t judge the description or suggest what the author could have done better; don’t talk about how their words affect you personally as a reader or how their experience of the painting compares to your experience or description—write impersonally and analytically.
++++++What words stand out in this description? What patterns of language do you notice, and how do these patterns correspond with what they describe? Does the author make judgments or offer interpretations, or does she simply describe? Where might you find implicit judgments and interpretations in what looks like pure description? How does the author convey his point of view (not in the sense of opinion, but in the literary sense) and what effect does this create? Pay attention to the verbs in every sentence. Who or what ‘acts’ in the description; does the author describe her own actions, the actions of the artist, the ‘actions’ of the artwork? Is the action literal or figural; if it is figural what might it actually correspond to or attempt to express? Where are passive constructions used and why; what ‘actors’ are being obscured or avoided? What is the tense or temporality of the action? How does time work in the description: what is described as in the past and what is described as in the present? Does the author describe the experience of the painting as if it is happening right then, at the time of the description—or does he describe the experience as if he is reflecting back on it? Do you as a reader have the sense of being shown or made to share the author’s experience, as if you were looking at what she looks at in the order she looks at things—does this bring you as a reader into the imagined ‘present’ moment of the description? Do you have the sense that the author is sharing his reflections about a past experience, allowing you to participate or share in the moment of his description as you read and consider it in your own moment of reflection? Where are there shifts in time and why do you think they happen; what effects do these shifts have?
Event Reviews for 1/22
Please post here if you attended either the Geoffrey Batchen talk at Bekeley on Camera Lucida, or the Pierre Huyghe talk in San Francisco on Monday night. Try to give us the general topic, recount the major argument or point you took away, tell us what if any images or examples were used, and let us know what you thought about it all. It would be especially helpful if you could say something about how you think the talk might be relevant to the themes that are emerging in the course.
(to the left is an image of an artwork Pierre Huyghe spoke about in his lecture at CCA)
Measure of Time Exhibit: Descriptions of Artworks
Hours and Location
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Welcome, and Stella responses
Please write about the description that is posted after your own in the comments below. Except: The last person to post by 9:30 Monday (Ed Park) will write about the first post (Alina's). Leesha and Kirsten please write about each other's posts.
If you wrote about the wrong painting (you didn't go to the museum) please go see the Measure of Time exhbit and post a description of a different work of art in that show as a comment to the new post on that topic. You do not have to 're-do' your Stella description.
Welcome to our blog...
The syllabus and course policies are posted (you can see them by clicking on the menu to the left). We'll update the syllabus here if anything changes so you can refer to it here as the semester goes on.
Please post your paragraph describing Battle of Lights, Coney Island as a COMMENT to this post. (Click on "___ Comments" below this post, paste your paragraph into the window on the right, and then "Publish" your comment). Check your post for errors and typos and try to edit it before logging off. Be sure to sign your post with your first and last name.
Also, read the selections I handed out from Lessing carefully and bring this with you on Monday. I should have warned you, these selections are from a text written in 1766. Lessing was writing about classical (greek and roman) art and poetry. Photography and film had of course not yet been invented...
Course Policies - updated 2/16
You will be required, one time over the course, to post a reading response to the blog. This should consist of three or four numbered paragraphs which each reference a specific passage in the text and focus on that passage in order to make an argument or offer an insightful interpretation. You will also be required, at least twice, to respond to other students’ posts on the blog. Append your comments to their reading response; refer to the numbered paragraph you are commenting on and the relevant passage in the text; go back to the text yourself and offer an elaboration or counterargument. Your comments should not be as much about ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’ the student’s response but either lending further support for their argument or offering an alternative reading of the same material. Always sign your full name to your blog posts since your login may not be recognizable.
Unless otherwise specified, all non-digital assignments must be handed in typed, printed, and stapled, and must include your name, the date, the course title, and an assignment title on the cover page. Papers must be formatted in black Times 12 font, double spaced, one-sided, with 1” top and bottom margins and 1.25” left and right margins. Please use a header or footer with page numbers and your last name since sometimes pages become detached. I know this seems nitpicky but please don’t use paperclips; in piles of papers they tend to slide off or attach to other people’s pages and ‘steal’ them.
Please help up create a productive academic environment by acting professionally and respectfully. If you have special needs or concerns please let us know as soon as possible and we will try to accommodate them. Academic dishonesty will not be tolerated, and any form of plagiarism will be grounds for failure of the course. If you are unsure about standard academic guidelines and campus policies please consult the following:
http://students.berkeley.edu/osl/sja.asp?id=983&rcol=1202 (academic dishonesty)
http://students.berkeley.edu/uga/conduct.asp (undergraduate code of conduct)
http://dsp.berkeley.edu (accommodating disabilities)
Point Breakdown (so far)
Ongoing Assignments
20 (once)- Reading Response
5 (twice)- Comments on someone’s reading response
Assignments/Quizzes
10 - 1/22 description of Stella painting
20 - 1/24 analysis of painting descriptions
5 - 1/29 reading quiz
5 - 2/11 reading quiz
Midterm
20 - 2/21 10-on-1 on photograph
30 - 2/26 passages with paraphrases
100 - 3/5 paper
150 - 3/21 revised paper
(200 total)
Events
25 - film review
25 - film or event review
50 - 4/22 performance
Attendance/participation
2 x (number of meetings)
Optional Bonuses
10 (up to three times) - extra event reviews
2 (up to 5 times) - extra comments on blog
SYLLABUS - updated 4/2
M/W 9:30-11am 188 Dwinelle
M 6-8pm screening 188 Dwinelle
Brooke Belisle bbelisle@berkeley.edu
Norman Gendelman mnorm65@earthlink.net
Arts of Time:
Counting Machines and Human Measures
Focusing on the ‘technological’ arts of photography, film, and digital media, this course will explore how particular media represent time or create temporal experiences. We will consider how technologically mediated works of art present time as either linear, mechanical, and objective or as heterogeneous, affective, and subjective. We will locate our exploration between the implementation of standardized ‘clock-time’ around the turn of the twentieth century, and the globalization of digital technology and ‘real time’ around the turn of the twenty-first century. We will compare the philosophies, technologies, and material realities of time at these two transitional moments and ask what difference it makes how we imagine, experience, and represent temporality.
Schedule
1/17 Intro
+ go to Measure of Time
Week 1: Time and the Arts--Representing Simultaneity and Succession
1/22 Lessing’s Laocoon
*Written description of Battle of Lights, Coney Island due on Blog before class
1/24 +writing workshop: description, crafting your prose+
*Analysis of description Due in Class, hard copy
Week 2: Turn of the 20th Century
1/29 Walter Kern The Culture of Time & Space, The Nature of Time
1/31 Walter Kern The Culture of Time & Space, The Present
Week 3: Photographing Time and Movement
2/5 ***No class this morning, class will be held during screening time, 6pm
River of Shadows on Muybridge
Images from Muybridge and Marey
2/7 Bergson Creative Evolution p.99-108 of reader (p.298-316 of text)
Week 4: Thinking Like a Camera
2/12 Bergson Creative Evolution p.109-120 of reader (p.329-370 of text)
2/14 Bragaglia "Futurist Photodynamism"
Midterm paper Assignment Given
2/14 PFA screening 7:30pm Together Again
Week 5: Cinematic Time
2/19 Holiday
2/21 in-class screening and discussion of 'actualities'
(if you missed this class or want to revisit the films, many are on the DVD in Media Resources titled Landmarks of Early FIlm, DVD 277. They also have a collection of all the early Edison films; most of the ones we saw are from the first DVD in the series.)
**10-on-1 Due
Week 6: Cinematic Time
2/26 Doane, Mary Ann The Emergence of Cinematic Time “Zeno’s Paradox”
**Passages and Paraphrases Due
2/26 screen The Adventurer (Chaplin, 1917), Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potempkin (Eisenstein, 1925 ), opening sequence from Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936), Choreography for Camera (Deren, 1945)
(2/27 7:30 screening of Pine Flat at PFA)
2/28 discuss selections from Bela Balazs "Theory of the Film" and from Marilyn Fabe "Closely Watched Films" and the films screened 2/26 at screening time
Week 7: 'Live' time
3/5 **MIDTERM DUE**
Intro to Video Art (in-class screenings, no reading due this week)
3/7 Video Art (in-class screenings)
Week 8: Film – Movement Image
3/12 Intro to Deleuze
3/12 screen Without Limits
3/14 Deleuze
Week 9: Film –Time Image
3/19 Deleuze
3/19 Screen Fallen Angels
3/21 Deleuze
*Revised Midterm Paper Due
Week 10 spring break 3/26 & 3/28
Week 11: Real Time
4/2 Virilio “The Perspective of Real Time” Open Sky
4/2 screen Minority Report
4/4 Virilio "Optics on a Grand Scale" and Minority Report
Week 12: The ‘Electronic’
4/9 Vivian Sobchack Carnal Thoughts “The Scene of the Screen”
4/9 Screen tba
4/11 discuss Sobchack and screening
discussion of finding and using sources
* (by 10pm) Proposed Topic for Final Paper Due on Blog
Week 13: "Body Times" of the Digital/Virtual
4/16 Mark Hansen "Embodying Virtual Reality"
Presentation and Discusion of Osmose, Ephemere
4/16 Screen The Gleaners and I
4/18 discuss The Gleaners and I
* One paragraph scene analysis due
Weeks 14 & 15: Presentations and Final Paper
4/22 Required Attendance at Berkeley Theater's 2007 Dance Project
4/23 Discussion of performance, in-class paper workshop
*Final Paper Outlines Due
4/23 Screening of your clips
4/25 Presentations
4/30 Presentations
4/30 +Peer Edit (in lieu of screening)+
*Rough Draft Due (6-8 pages)
5/2 Conclusion
5/7*Final Papers Due (8-10 pages)