Grid Art

Here is my piece of grid art. It is an embroidery that took 25 hours, 23,000 stitches and a lot of yards of string. Although it took me much longer than expected, I am happy with the results. This is the original image that inspired me.

Dada Manifesto

Dada was an art movement in response to World War I that begun in Zurich, Switzerland in 1916. Dada was anti-bourgeous in addition to anti-war and was the beginning of the abstract art movements in the 1900s.

Dada was an informal movement, but at it's roots believed that the bourgeous attitude of Europe was what brought on the war. According to Hans Richter, dada was anti-art . Dada represented everything art was not. Dadaists hoped to destroy culture and aesthetics. 

Some of the techniques that were developed through the dada movement are collage, photomontage, assemblage, and readymades. 

While art historians look on dadaism with criticism, there is no doubt that this movement contributed a lot to the art of the 20th century and beyond

Here's a short video I found on the history of dada

Violence in Video Games

This video explains the way that I feel about video games and their potential affect on future violence in children. Violent and action video games have been around for almost 20 years now. So if these games directly cause the player to become a sociopath and a killer, wouldn't we half of the nation be killing other people? 

Media in general has desensitized the general population to violence and death, but desensitization is not enough to make people start being violent. Humans in their nature are constantly at a war with themselves. We have a strong desire to create and build, but at the same time, we are very destructive in nature. To say that we are more violent now than we ever have been just doesn't make any sense. The only reason why our destruction may seem greater is because we have created more advanced weapons to do the destruction for us.

While I don't think that 8-year-old kids should be playing a bunch of shootem-up games, I think that it is the parents responsibility to educate their kids about the differences in fantasy and reality. 

Ray Kurzweil and Futurism

Ray Kurzweil has a long list of titles that goes along with his name. But the one that he is most known for is being a futurist. But what is a futurist? Futurologists are scientists that attempt to systematically predict the future. So what is it that a futurist does? I imagine this guy sitting in a dark room pondering with a pipe and pulling random ideas out of a hat. Well I guess a futurist does a lot more than that.

Futurists consult with different companies and public organizations about upcoming global trends, plausible scenarios, emerging marketing opportunities, and risk management. Futurists are basically practicing probability. 

Ray Kurzweil is most known as his position as a futurist, but he also has done a lot of studies in transhumanism. This new trend in futurism looks into the ways that humans will extend their intelligence through the use of technology. 

Kurzweil has written many books on the future of humanity and some of his predictions have come true. In the 1980's he published a book called "The Age of Intelligent Machines" in which he predicted that by the end of the 1990's most of our documents would exist solely on computers and the internet. 

While Kurzweil has received criticism for some of his ideas, I believe that humans really are curious about the future of humanity and love looking to smart people such as Kurzweil for answers. 

War of the Worlds

When War of the Worlds first aired on October 30, 1938, panic ensued in much of North America and parts of Canada. Looking back, it seems silly to us that people would believe that aliens were actually invading. The circumstances that lead radio listeners to believe that the world was coming to an end was a part of a perfect storm of state of mind, format, and and a more trustworthy view of the medium. 

When War of the Worlds aired, the general public were in a state of heightened security awareness from the climate of the world scene. The second world war was causing tension and panic world wide already. America was also coming out of the great depression which was a time where the radio became a staple in every American household. The radio had become a source of entertainment and a way to get information about what was happening  in the world. 

Every radio program had a certain format that the public had grown accustomed to. So when Orson Welles wrote War of the Worlds in a  news format, people believed it. I've heard people today shake their heads and say that the only reason why people panicked with War of the Worlds was because people used to be much more naive than we are today. I just don't think that's true. Instead, I think that people today are just more cynical towards media. We are used to having information instantly and know that many times this information could be false or exaggerated. But even though we know that the information may be assumed, the majority of the public still believes what we are told anyways. 

So maybe we are naive too. 

Grid Art

For my grid art, I chose to cross stitch a poster that I found online on a 10.5 X 13 sheet of gridded plastic. In hindsight I should have chosen a much smaller grid seeing as this one was composed of over  13,000 squares. It took me 20 hours to complete it. I used different color yarns but kept the stitch the same over the entire project to give it the look of little tiny pixels lighting up on a tv. So here it is. Unfortunately its too big to scan the entire thing so I had to scan it in chunks. You'll get the overall feeling of the piece when I bring it to class on wednesday

My Flipbook

Here is my flipbook! The beginning is a little choppy and I'm going to add some more pages in, but overall I'm happy with the way it turned out. I'm calling it "Heartbreak." So, let me know what you think!

Wendy Carlos

Walter Carlos was born in 1939 in Rhode Island. Carlos was a musical prodigy and also a technical genius. Before the age of fifteen, Carlos had composed “A Trio for Clarinet, Accordion, and Piano” and had built a computer (even though this was before the word computer was a household term) From an early age however, Walter Carlos was aware of her gender dysphoria. In 1962, during her time at Columbia University, Carlos learned about transgenderism and in the fall of 1967 began hormone treatments. At this time she changed her name to Wendy and began living life as a full-time woman. In 1972, Carlos underwent a sexual reassignment surgery.

Wendy Carlos is known for electronic music and being the first to draw attention to synthesizers as musical instruments. Switched-On-Bach was Carlos’ break-through album that was created using multi-track recording and performing pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach on the Moog synthesizer. It was the first classical album to sell over 500,000 copies and even entered Billboard’s pop Top 40. The creation of this album was tedious and required numerous takes and overdubs to create. The two sequels to this album are The Well-Tempered Synthesizer and Switched on Bach II.

In 1971, Wendy Carlos worked with Stanley Kubrick to create the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange. Not all of the music she created was used in the movie, so Carlos released Wendy Carlos’ Clockwork Orange with all of the additional music. Carlos continued scoring soundtracks for movies through her work in The Shining and Tron.

Wendy Carlos is a pioneer in electronic music, but also had many personal problems due to her sex change. In 1979, she decided to announce her change in Playboy because this magazine was so concerned with liberation. She later regretted this decision calling the editors “arrogant selfish prig[s].”

Here are some examples to the contributions Wendy made to the electronic world.

To find out more about the life and music of Wendy Carlos, here is a link to her webpage.

A Clockwork Orange

Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is a movie that you will never forget. Now whether or not that is a bad thing is up to the viewer. For me, I watched this movie a couple years ago because I had always heard of it and had recently taken a film history class and was adamant to watch as many “important” movies as possible. So, I rented A Clockwork Orange, not knowing what to expect, and ended watching it feeling confused, uncomfortable, and a little disheartened. What a sad world this movie depicts. I understand the importance of this movie and other dismal futuristic tales. Many would argue that the culture of our youth today is much more aggressive, sexualized, and desensitized. This movie, adapted from a book by Anthony Burgess, sees a future world where ultra-violence becomes the norm and turmoil and anarchy reigns supreme.

One of the most unsettling scenes in this movie is where Alex and his gang beat up an elderly author and rape his wife while signing the song Singing in the Rain. I was researching online the reason behind choosing this specific song for this scene. I found out that actor Malcolm McDowell started singing this song spontaneously during rehearsals. Warner Bros. immediately secured the rights to this song to be used in this production after hearing McDowell sing.

Even though McDowell singing this particular song was spontaneous, the choice for the director and producers to include this song was a real choice. I believe this song was used to connect to the audience. This movie was made in 1961 only 9 years after Singing in the Rain was released. So almost everyone who went to see this movie in the theater had probably seen Singing in the Rain. Suddenly this movie becomes a possible reality rather than a depressing unrealistic piece of fiction.

Earthquake Reaction

I asked my Mom and Dad about the movie Earthquake. They both remember this movie being released, but neither of them went to see it in the theaters. I asked if they remember people passing out or getting scared in the theater for that movie and they both said that they don’t remember any controversy over this film. But, my parents lived in Chicago at the time, so there aren’t a lot of earthquakes there. So perhaps, people in California were more frightened of this film because it was a reality to them. But where earthquakes aren’t common, there wasn’t really any reason for audiences to be frightened.