Week Seven (Monday 3-10-08)

"AIR ACOUSTICS"

In the beginning, I really had no idea what kind of work I wanted to do. However, I knew that I wanted it to involve sound or music somehow. So that is really what led me to my final idea. I play both the guitar and the piano and I wanted to implement one or the other. The guitar ended up being easier for me to demonstrate seeing as I could physically bring it into the video. My intention was threefold. Firstly, I wanted give a decent range of acoustic sounds emitted from a guitar. Secondly, I wanted to have sound pre-recorded so that I could essentially pick and strum the air. Thirdly, I periodically wanted my strumming to not always line up with what the sound was producing - this was supposed to represent the discord between playing the air and playing the actual guitar. The distance (or air) between the pick and the strings was supposed to prevent the two from lining up. I wanted to break some expectations about what one sees and what one hears. It was basically a demonstration about how one can't always predict or know what he or she will hear based on what he or she is seeing.


FOR CONSIDERATION
(regarding the performance)

Overall, the performance mostly went the way I had hoped it would. There were a couple problems that I didn't anticipate. The first one was that the guitar kept sliding around under my arm. This took away from my concentration on the performance. I was trying to steady the guitar and keep it upright occasionally instead of focusing on the performance. I think this took away from it at times. Also, I did intend for my picking and strumming to not match up with the sound periodically, but I think that happened too often. I wanted to keep them matched for the majority of the video and then not matched from time to time. I don't know if this affected the video in a largely negative way - I would have to see it to know for sure. But I definitely think that the non-sync was more than I wanted it to be. I did, however, think the ending of the video worked really well. Right when the time ran out, I was able to finish exactly how I wanted to.

Week Six (Monday 3-3-08)

Follow the link to see the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJWIONTiiYA

I think that this video, titled "The Identity Monologue", echoes Alex Bag's work in more than one way. Regarding Bag's portrayal of the student telling her story through her four years in art school is similar to this video in the sense than it has a narrative of sorts. In "The Identity Monologue" the performer tells his story of struggling with identity in a very loose narrative, but still a narrative regardless. The performer in this video using the form of eight different characters with different accents and ethnicities to get his point across. This is also similar to Bag in the sense that we don't know exactly which character is the real artist, if any at all. In Bag's work as the student, it was very well acted to the point that I couldn't really know for sure if she was purely acting or if she was reliving her own experiences at school. Also, Bag's character struggles with figuring out who she is and how she fits into her world. In "The Identity Monologue" the perfomer is also telling how he stuggled with identity for a period of his life. So the concept of knowing and accepting oneself is a major theme in both pieces. Bag uses costumes and wigs to disguise herself throughout her performance while the performer in "The Identity Monologue" uses different voices and characters to do the same thing. Also, a very obvious comparison and similarity is that both videos are set up in the form of a personal confession. Both performers are addressing the audience directly.