The Affective Topology of New Media Art

I've started reading The Affective Topology of New Media Art and of course I'm hating every minute of it. Over 30 pages is a lot and if I'm not interested it's going to take me a long time to read them. So I decided for now I'm just going to write my notes in a blog post and then hopefully respond once I finish it. It's probably going to make no sense to anyone else but I figure it's better to write it here instead of on a scrap piece of paper that I keep in my purse.

• Robert Lazzarini's "Skulls"
• Sculptures of human skulls, "apparently cast from different points of view." 
• Moving around the sculptures. "You find this experience alternately intolerable and amusing, as you once again move in to focus on still another skull, until finally, having grown impatient or unable to endure the weird sensation produced by this work, you abruptly pass through the door-sized opening cut into one of the room's four walls and seek solace in some less unsettling portal to the digital world."
• Sculptures are created by laser scanned human skull to create a 3D CAD file and then distorted it. They then become the models which are cast in solid bone.
• Anamorphic Distortion- "Lazzarini's skulls cannot be considered anamorphic in any conventional sense of the term, since they do not resolve into a normal image when viewed from an oblique angle, but confront the viewer with the projection of a warped space that refuses to map onto her habitual spatial schematizing, no matter how much effort she"
• "Skulls confronts us, in short, with a spatial problematic we cannot resolve: ..." 
• Analogy: a similarity between like features or two things. Similarity and comparability, 

These are simply notes and quotes from the reading that I thought were significant. So now I have to continue reading and somehow manage to keep my eyes open. 

End of the semester...

So it's getting to that point in the semester, you know that point where you don't want to do anything but you have no time to waste. I've realized that keeping up on the blog has just gone to the back burner and fourth year is stressing me out so thankfully print has been going okay.

Fourth year work is coming along slowly. I've got the wooden panels cut but unfortunately I still need to sand them with the belt sander, which of course is something I need help with. I've got some thinking to do when it comes to installing them in the gallery. Dave asked me during our auxiliary meeting if they were going to be presented in a grid or randomly and why? Of course he asks the question I don't have an answer to. I always thought that they would be arranged in a grid 3 x 3 and close together so that they appear like titles but the why is the problem. I hate that I'm constantly asked why, can't I just do it because I want to? I think this is what happens when you spend four years in art school. You eventually get sick of being asked these questions over and over again.

Remixing

So this whole remixing project isn't really my idea of a fun project. I think thats mainly because I'm constantly confused when working with video and sound.

I basically just worked with the movie Finding Nemo in hopes of creating my own version of a Disney remix. I was looking at videos such as the one below in hopes of getting some inspiration.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVxe5NIABsI&feature=relmfu

I simply edited the movie to narrow it down to approximately 7 mintues and then focused on playing with sound from the soundtrack. It was fun to just play with something that isn't your own but at the same time it's not a project I really enjoyed doing. I find I'm never truely happy when I'm working with time based media.