Goldfish Wishes

Final Project

             

    Throughout the trip each member of the group worked on a  personal project exploring some aspect of our program whether it was a certain technology or software or an aspect of the cities that we visited.  For my project I observed and documented blue, green, yellow and red as a way of engaging the cities.   I made 16 one minute movies out of both moving and still images centered around each color individually. In each of the four cities, there is a movie for each of the four colors, adding up to 16 movies total.  The display format for the movies is on the project website, in a four by four grid.  The grid is arranged vertically from left to right with the sequence of columns being from New York, London, Amsterdam and Berin in that order.  You can watch them one at a time or sixteen at once.  You can watch all the blue ones or all the Berlin ones.  Whatever you want.  It’s up to you.

    

Here are the movies.  They take a minute to load so open the page in a new window, get yourself a snack, continue your internet escapades and come back to the window in a couple of minutes.

    In case you’d like any more explanation of the project, here’s what is written on the project website:

    “I spent nine weeks touring through New York, London, Amsterdam and Berlin, observing and documenting four basic colors: blue, red, yellow and green.  In my mind, this project deals with the ways in which we process cities or any kind of foreign environment.  I chose these four particular colors because they are the four most essential colors that you would find in a crayon box.  Focusing on these particular colors is very child-like and causes you to step backwards and really see the environment in a very simple way.  Details of places that would otherwise go unnoticed come to the front of your consciousness.   The idea behind the project is that when you come into a foreign environment, there’s an overwhelming amount of information to process.  Tourists frequently implicitly choose certain kinds of information to pay attention to and other kinds of information to ignore.  For example, “tourist attractions” as such are often the lens that people use to navigate a foreign city.  In New York you might visit the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, the Empire State Building and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Choosing instead to focus on colors gives a very different impression of a city.  It focuses the viewer on many more diverse aspects of the city, both mundane and extraordinary. 
    Additionally, I am attempting to explore associations that we have with colors.  Certain colors have certain cultural cues (yellow is cheerful, blue is calm, red is angry, etc.).  Through exploring the objects that we encounter, I am attempting to examine the reasons for those associations.  There are also very small cultural associations with certain colors that became apparent through observation.  For example. in New York mailboxes are blue, in London they are red, in Amsterdam they are red and in Berlin they are yellow.  Although this may seem trivial, it certainly must affect our cultural associations when certain symbols are associated with specific colors.”

Film at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum

    On Monday we went to the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum to see an exhibition entitled, "Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection Film, Videos and Installations From 1963 to 2005."  This was a really great example of a really well done exhibition.  They were showing a little bit of almost everykind of film/video art that you could imagine.  Because the museum is housed in a former train station, the ceilings are extremely high and  it seems that the curators had a lot of freedom as to how they set up the walls to create individual rooms for presentation.

    Two of the more engaging works which I had never seen before were Monica Bonvicini's Destroy She Said and John Massey's As the Hammer Strikes (A Partial Illustration). Bonvicini's piece is set up in a large, warehouse-like room with two roughly made movie screens and the projectors visible.  Around the room there is miscellaneous debris from the construction of the screens and the installation of the piece.  Although Destroy She Said was made in 1998, the film consists of clips of famous female characters from European films from around the 1950s and 60s.  The common thread between each of the characters is that the woman is always extremely vulnerable and at the edge of breaking down.  For example, Bonvicini employs footage of Anna Karina's character, Nina, from Vivre Sa Vie as she contemplates the direction her life is taking.  The way that Bonvicini has edited the films together also shows certain conventions about filming these female characters.  There seem to be a large number of beautiful dark-haired women standing in front of white walls.  The juxtaposition of these fragile, beautiful women who are always very physically put together, with the rough, homemade-looking movie screens is a very interesting one.  We are generally presented films in an enviroment which keeps us immersed and which causes us to all but completely ignore the apparatus showing us the images.  However, making us aware of the screens as human constructions and showing so many examples of these women in a row, causes us to examine these female personalities as "human constructions" as well.

    Massey's film is also shown on multiple screens, but engages the viewer in a completely different way.  As the Hammer Strikes is a three screen recreation of a recorded conversation that Massey had with a hitchhiker.  The different images illustrate the conversation and, specifically, the misunderstandings between Massey and his passenger.  These range form things as simple as mishearings to misunderstandings due to homophones.  At 33 minutes, As the Hammer Strikes is significantly longer than many of the films in the exhibition.  However, the mundane conversation is surprisingly interesting.  The presentation of the conversation also raises issues of the gap between what we say and what we mean, as well as ideas of differing associations with certain words.

Urban Cityscapes

Since we got to Berlin we’ve had a couple of very good lectures involving changing urban cityscapes.  The first one was from Jan Elder of the architectural firm, Realities: United.  Elder spoke with us about innovative building facades and ideas about architecture and spaces as ways to communicate.  While traditional architecture employs its own language and gives signals as to what the building’s function is, Realities: United takes advantage of somewhat basic technologies to communicate in innovative ways.  They frequently use lights and simple programs to create basic moving images and patterns on a particular side of a building.  One of the more interesting examples of their work, in my mind, is a building in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin.

Image copyright by Bernd Hiepe. 

They invite different artists to create pieces for the wall involving simple images.  Elder explained that the building had formerly had 6 million square meters of empty office space and that they hired his firm to give the building a bit of publicity as well as a selling point to potential renters. 

We see vaguely similar facades constantly, such as the screens at Times Square.  However, the screens that we often see are much more high-tech than what Elder works with.  The advantages of Elder’s screens, aside from their slightly less slick look, are that because they are less expensive to install, Elder’s clients are less dependent on advertising revenue to recoup the cost of the screen.  Consequently, the buildings, like the one at Potsdamer Platz, are able to curate public artworks using the wall. 

In Berlin/Final Projects

We just got into Berlin yesterday and, once again, there's way too much that I want to do in the next two weeks.  One of the main things that I'll be doing is working on my personal project and setting up the website for that.  For my project I've been taking photos and filming in each city centering blue, green, red, and yellow.  I've been editing the photos and video into little one minute movies.  When I'm done there should be 16, one for each color in each city.  I'm not sure if the file's too large to download now, but with quicktime and a lot of patience, you might be able to download the rough version of my green movie from New York.

Download color_project_clips_new_york_green.mov

Mis-Steps Psychogeographic Walk

Concept:
    Rachel and I did a psychogeographic walk centered around chance and the “shuffle” feature on an iPod.  We set up a couple of guidelines:  1) When a happy or uptempo song came on, we would make a right turn; 2) When a sad or slow song came on, we would make a left turn; 3) If there was a reference in a song to something visible on the street, that reference would trump the aforementioned directional rules (e.g., if a song mentions a hotel and we see a hotel to our left, we must turn left); 4)  If we hit a dead end and there were no cues in the lyrics, we had to skip to another song.  We did not make a specific playlist for our walk, so it was possible to get any combination of the 7000+ songs that I have stored in my iTunes.  We decided to begin in the late afternoon/early evening because it seems that is an especially interesting time to investigate a city with which we’re not terribly familiar.  Most of the tourist destinations
(e.g. museums, markets, etc.) close around that time and the evening is a particularly interesting time to see the people who are out in the city.  The evening also adds another layer of unfamiliarity to the city since everything looks different after dark.

Execution:
    There are several things that I learned on the walk.  One of them is has to do with the way that I personally remember routes.  There were several places that we passed that I remembered, but was totally unable to place.  There was a statue that I had seen before when I had been looking for the tram station, for example, and a street that I had walked down when I was trying to find my way back to the hotel.  Because of Amsterdam’s layout of canals in concentric circles, I find it very easy to get lost or to take multiple routes to the same destination.  Although the path of our walk was dictated by chance, it ended up that I had walked down many of the same streets before simply because of wrong turns when I was looking for specific destinations.  However, the mood I was in when walking down the same streets was very different.  When I’m lost I try to rationally figure out the best way to go, but I generally feel very nervous.  Although I did not really have a good sense of where I was on our walk, I felt very relaxed and was able to enjoy the scenery because I did not expect to know where I was going.
    I also think our walk was an interesting study on how music influences mood and how mood influences perception.  Mood so often dictates where you go and how you get there.  If you’re feeling sad you might walk someplace in order to be alone or if you’re in a good mood you might find yourself at a park.  Walking along a canal while listening to a sad song gives a very different impression than walking down the same canal listening to an optimistic song. 
    The third most important thing that I experienced on our walk was seeing Amsterdam from a non-tourist point of view.  While the stereotypical image of American tourists on a Saturday night involves a specific set of locations in which Dutch residents do not really spend time, our route led us through sections of town that we would not have seen if we had tourist destinations.  That is not to say that we completely avoided tourist territory, but the way that we ended up at Dam Square, for example, led us down streets we would not have seen otherwise.  We encountered a bike with a wagon of puppies attached, a group of women in silver hats, and many hand-holding couples.  Additionally, because we went down many dimly lit streets, we were treated to fantastic reflections on the canals.

 

The Songs Shuffle Picked:
“Hard Times Are Over” by Yoko Ono and John Lennon. We began at Leidseplein, which is a fairly typical tourist destination.  The song has fairly happy lyrics, so we turned right down a main street.

“Love Minus Zero” by Bob Dylan.  The song is bouncy so we turned right down a canal.

“Lucky Number Nine” by the Moldy Peaches.  When the previous song ended, we found ourselves with buildings to our left and the canal to our right and no place to turn.  We turned and faced the water and then “Lucky Number Nine” came on and we turned toward the direction from which we had come.

“Hey Sister” by Luna.  We coincidentally hit the same main street that we had walked up before and “Hey Sister” is sad and thus dictated that we had to turn left.  This meant that we were headed directly back toward Leidseplein. 

“Saturday Night” by Eve 6.  This sent us to the right (west) down a side street.

“Satisfied Mind” by Jeff Buckley.  This sad song sent us to the left down another canal.  However, we hit a dead end and had to skip to the next song to decide whether to head left or right.

“Chords of Fame” by Phil Ochs.  The bouncy pace of this song had us choose a right turn.

“Pacific Theme” by Broken Social Scene.  Because the song is both mellow and reminded us of the Pacific Ocean, we headed left along the water.

“I’ll Do Anything” by Courtney Love.  The song led us to the right over a bridge because it’s uptempo.

“Thunder Peel” by Beck.  This song was a little problematic to decide what to do with.  It sounds kind of slow, but then there is also a steady drumbeat that makes it feel a little bouncier than it should.  Consequently, we decided to split the difference and keep going straight.

“On Language” by Julie Ruin.  This song feels like a really fast cha-cha so we made a right turn.

“Oh Boy [Instrumental] by Cheap Trick.  This song also feels pretty happy so we turned right again,

“Reoccurring Dreams” by Hüsker Dü.  Fourteen minutes of more or less guitar craziness steered us to the right for quite a while.

“(Forgive Me) My Little Flower Princess” by John Lennon.  This song contains fairly sad lyrics, but it’s uptempo so we went to the right.

“Girlfriend” by the Modern Lovers.  Right after the previous song ended and this song was just beginning, we found ourselves in front of an ice cream store.  Because there were essentially too sad, lonely songs in a row and we were coincidentally in front of the quintessential wallowing food, we stopped to buy ice cream.  We then took our ice cream cones and turned left

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” by Ella Fitzgerald with Louis Jordan.  We decided to turn right towards lights and an advertisement for French fries since we felt that this was the “warmer” direction.

“Beautiful Boys” by CocoRosie.  This caused us to make another left turn for a sad song.

“Have You Ever Been (To Electric  Ladyand)” The Jimi Hendrix Experience.  We arrived with an alley to our left and the beginnings of the Red Light district to our right.  When this song came on we had no choice but to turn to the right towards the neon red lights and the women in the windows.

“Soap Star Joe” by Liz Phair.  We were in a small plaza and there were several options in front of us.  The male protagonist in “Soap Star Joe” led us to head down a little street that seemed to have “manlier” things, such as a steakhouse.  During the song we hit another dead end, but the lyrics mention “green and white” and there was a sign on the right which had exactly those two colors so we headed towards it.

“Tax Dollar” by Erase Errata.  The song is fairly fast, so we went to the right.

“My Back Pages” by Bob Dylan.  Once again, we weren’t very close to any intersections when the songs changed.  This song is pretty soft and slow so we went back in the direction that we had come from.

“Tightly” by Neko Case.  We arrived back at almost the exact same place that we had entered the square with the Liz Phair song.  “Tightly” is a slow song, so we took a left turn.

“The Chariot” by Aaron Copeland.  Just as this song began a tram passed us and we decided to follow it because of “The Chariot.”

“El Sol” by Zwan.  This song also left us at a place where there wasn’t any clear way to turn.  Consequently, we chose a direction with very bright lights, vaguely reminiscent of the sun.

“Sister, I Need Wine” by Guided By Voices.  For our final song, we chose to head off to our left in the direction where there seemed to be more bars based on the lyrical cue of “wine.”  The song ended with the two of us in Dam Square with all of the carnival rides  and quite an interesting cross-section of people.

Download walk_21.mov

Netherlands Media Art Institute

We also visited the Netherlands Media Art Institute on Monday.  There we were shown some of the more prominent works of contemporary video art from the Netherlands and Belgium.  One of the pieces that I found really interesting was Anouk de Clercq’s Building.  The video is 12 minutes long and in black and white.  The screen is essentially black with white shapes coming into and out of existence suggesting the form of a building from different angles.  The piece is very simple and beautiful.  I’m not overly interested in architecture, but the way in which the video moves makes exploring space seem extremely interesting and meditative. 

The Institute seems to be doing really good work and reminded me a lot of the Anthology Film Archives, which we visited earlier in New York.  The Netherlands Media Art Institute, however, works not only in preservation, but it also encourages artists’ work by providing space to work.  The Institute is open to the public to come in and watch videos in their collection.

It also felt really good to learn that there was such a thriving video art community in the Netherlands.  I think that, as an American, most of the video art and film that I come across or that I'm shown is American or maybe British.  It was very nice to be exposed to the kind of stuff that is happening in Europe and to learn that there are such a vast number of video artists working and thriving.  One possible explanation that we discussed is the extent of government funding available to Dutch artists.  While the arts are woefully under-funded in the US, it's nice that the Dutch seem keep them a priority.

And Now For Some Decidedly Old Media…

On Monday the Roadtrippers dealt with trying to learn a strange foreign language.  And no, I’m not talking about Dutch.  I’m talking about the symbols in 17th Century Dutch painting.  The group attended a lecture with Marietta de Bruine entitled, “Dutch Painting of the Golden Age.”  De Bruine took us through Dutch painting, decoding the symbols and the hidden meanings behind subtle gestures.  These symbols ranged from the seemingly bizarre (such as cats symbolizing fickleness) to the somber (such as lit candles reminding the viewer that all of life will come to an end).

She explained that the 17th Century in particular had many important cultural factors which greatly influenced Dutch painters of the time.  For example, the Protestant Reformation meant that Dutch artists would no longer have large commissions from the Church because of the Protestants’ beliefs against “idol worship” and the immodesty of ornate decorations.  The rising merchant shipping class created a new market for paintings as wall decorations in middle class homes.  Consequently, art dealers came into existence and painters began to specialize in certain genres, such as landscape or still life, and they would create paintings without  being commissioned to do so.  A book was even published in the Netherlands as a “How To” guide to painting landscapes, causing many Dutch landscapes to have similar characteristics.

De Bruine also explained how many of the paintings carried messages about the character of the Dutch people.  For example, a painting of a marine landscape with large ships would be a way of showing off Dutch naval capabilities and the grandness of Dutch boats, thereby celebrating Dutch merchants and merchandise.  In addition, paintings including windmills were seen as a way of celebrating the ingenuity of the Dutch people.

While the trip back through the centuries might seem to be a digression from New Media work, it would be difficult to understand contemporary art in any meaningful way without knowing what came before.  The seminar also served as a way to remind us to take a very close look at contemporary cultural influences on the aesthetics of art pieces.  And, as de Bruine said, “Great works of art can still have a meaning for us, which, although it might not have been the intended message, is still important.”

[Thanks to Andrea for the photos.  This post can also be read on the group blog.]

Go Van Gogh

The last couple of days in Amsterdam have been extremely busy.  Saturday I headed over to the Van Gogh Museum for what was one of the most intense museum going experiences that I have ever had.  I kid you not.  It is really one of the finest examples of museum exhibition layout that I have ever seen.  The special exhibition is centered around Japan and is housed in a separate building than the permanent collection.   It's arranged in a really sophisticated manner. 

On the first floor they had all kinds of artifacts that Japan would have been exporting to the west around Van Gogh’s time and a little earlier (1870-1890).  They had a number of impressive vases and cabinets and tapestries.  All of the pieces were extremely detailed and really beautiful.  There were about two rooms of this kind of stuff before Van Gogh came into the picture at all.  Consequently, the audience gets a chance to look at Japanese art in much the same way that European artists of the time must have looked at it.  It comes across as very impressive and even exotic, although by now we’ve all seen this stuff a million times.  When they finally showed Van Gogh’s work, the connection between the Japanese art that had just become available to him.  In particular, they have Van Gogh’s Almond Blossom from 1890.  The subject matter as well as the stylized outlines and large planes of color seem to come directly from Japan.  However, the thick, noticeable brushstrokes keep the painting from looking too similar to contemporary Japanese work. 

It became even more apparent how completely Van Gogh must have been taken with Japan when the show a Hiroshige print and Van Gogh’s interpretation of the print. He imitates the basic composition almost perfectly except for his large, brushstrokes and his much brighter palette.  He also adds a boarder with Japanese characters which, I was amused to have found out, are completely nonsensical.  Van Gogh had simply copied characters from books that he had found aesthetically pleasing without really having them mean anything. 

The second floor of the Japanese exhibition more or less left Van Gogh completely behind and instead centered around Japanese and Parisian women in the 1890s.  It was arranged so that the room was more or less split in half with  one half showing Parisian women’s coats, books, combs, musical instruments, parasols, etc. and drawings depicting Parisian women while the other half shows all of the same artifacts from Japanese women.  I think the message of the room was supposed to be something along the lines of showing the all of the aesthetic differences in the objects and places and made up the two groups’ lives but also showing that, ultimately, they were overwhelmingly similar.  Especially in terms of the roles in society and the dynamic between been and women in 1890. 

The permanent collection was equally impressive.  Although I’ve always liked certain Van Gogh paintings, I’ve never been a huge fan of his as a whole.  I think this is mostly due to the fact that his personal life and psychology seem to overshadow his work.  However, I was really pleasantly surprised to discover the range of styles and experiments that Van Gogh undertook during his life.  In 1887 alone he painted works that ranged from fairly conventional still lifes to pointillist landscapes and impressionistic portraits and bright Japanese scenes. 

The museum also did a fantastic job of highlighting Van Gogh’s experimentation with color.  There was a fairly scientific display about color theory and it showed how even the scenes of peasant life that he painted in the Netherlands before he went to France are extremely rich in colors, although they appear to be mostly shades of brown.

Amsterdam

We arrived in Amsterdam yesterday and we went to the Maritime Museum this afternoon.  The museum was actually a lot more interesting than I would have thought.  Amsterdam, being a port city, has so much of its history tied up with sea voyages and navigation and trade.  It's pretty obvious when you think about it, but every city's culture is inextricably linked with its natural geographic features.  New York kind  of has a simliar situation to Amsterdam's with its oceanic location.  And, of course, New York used to be New Amsterdam. 

In terms of intial impressions of Amsterdam and the Netherlands, I'm just really excited to have some time to explore.  I feel much more like I'm really in Europe than I did in England.  Part of that is the language difference, but I think a lot of that is the architecture, the canals, and the fact that the Dutch don't seem to borrow nearly as much from American pop culture. 

Tonight we're headed to the Muziektheater to see a ballet version of Carmen and I'm looking forward to wandering the city a little bit.

Artforum's take on the Frieze

I found this Artforum article that gives a pretty good idea of what the Frieze Art Fair felt like.