Youtube Video Mixer

French & English Scramble

This is a mix of stories told in french and english. The first two clips are exerpts from two of my favorite books, Le Petit Prince and Mother Night. On the bottom are videos of French and American children telling stories. Play all of the videos at once for a fun garble of languages!

H^2O

For this project I emulated Ralph Steiner's video H^2O (http://www.ubu.com/film/steiner.html). This video was produced in 1929, and was a study of the motion of water as well as how light plays on it. I filmed various spots along the Truckee river, as well as a fountain on the UNR campus and water dripping off of a table in my backyard. Water, although commonly conceived as gentle and be a very powerful force, one that has helped shape the surface of the earth to be what it is now. When examined closely it can make beautiful abstract works of art. For these reasons it has always intrigued me, and was really fun to make a project out of. (Not to mention that I got to play in the river for a couple hours).

Questions for Ch. 2 Video Art

1. Can different forms of video be clearly distinguished as video art and commercial video? What would be the most important factors in distinguishing between the two; intended audience and funding, or things such as challenging the viewer or levels of aesthetic value?

2. Max Almy is said to have visualized a post modern society "dehumanized by technology". His video  Leaving the 20th Century Almy "creates a society in which human relations and attempts at communication completely fail." This video was created in 1982, before social media and before cellphones and laptops were the norm. Has his prediction come true? These are certainly issues that "our generation" is accused of propagating through the constant use of our smartphones. Can this addiction to technology be traced back to the original fascination with television and video?

Project II

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9ofJe0skFU
My animation is a moving version of the first panel in my tryptych. It shows the worker bees rallying around their queen bee, showing that they're ready to fight back against the injustice imposed on them.

Hey guys! Since this relates to my project I figured it would be appropriate to post on here. There's a bill in congress that, if passed, will suspend use of the pesticide that's playing a large role in the massive bee kill-off. This website makes it really easy to encourage your representative to back it!

http://salsa3.salsalabs.com/o/1881/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=11547

Walter Benjamin discussion

1.  In the 5th section of Benjamin's piece he juxtaposes the easily reproducible medium of photography with highly coveted sculptures of Madonnas and various gods that are not only unique, but are hidden from view to the general public and for large parts of the year. Does the easy accessibility to works produced in mass quantity cheapen those works of art? Should they be considered more or less important than the statues that are so coveted?

2. In the 11th section a metaphor is posed where the filmmaker is to a painter what a doctor is to a magician. Benjamin argues that they are polar opposites,  that filmmakers and doctors are deeply involved in their process and are more attuned to reality while a painter (and thus also magicians) "maintains in his work a natural distance from reality". Do you feel that this is a strong, accurate metaphor? Are films always more in tune with reality than paintings?

Mr. Buzz Kill (project I)

My piece "Mr. Buzz Kill" is a commentary on the growing genocide of bees from large agricultural industries and their monoculture farms. Monocultures are farms that grow only one crop (i.e. soy beans, cotton, corn)  and span many miles without variety. While an efficient way to grow a lot of one thing, these farms have a high liability for pest infestations. They end up using mass quantities of pesticides and fertilizers to compensate for their poor farming techniques. These pesticides have ended up playing a large part in the recent epidemic of Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, that is causing commercial farmers to loose up to 1/3 of their bees every year (on an average year they would normally loose 1/10 of their bees to environmental conditions). The irony of the situation is that without bees many of these plants won't be able to produce their crops, and bees are accountable for $200 billion in crops every year in the Unites States alone.

Things to Know About Me (no narcissism intended)

The majority of my life (up until 23 days ago) I've taken residence in 70808 Baton Rouge, LA.
A variety of forces have brought me to UNR this summer, including my parents uprooting to come here for work, my appartment lease not starting till august, and a desire for new soil carrying new adventures. I am about to start my second year at LSU, continuing progress on a major in anthropology and a minor in French.

I've experimented in many fields of art (some more successfully than others) including watercolor and acrylic painting, film and digital photography, knitting, quilting, and stained glass. The majority of my art pieces lay undocumented in a storage unit in Baton Rouge, but I've scrounged a few examples to show you. 

My freshman year of high school I did this pencil rendering of the famous National Geographic photograph, as seen below.  

This is a watercolor piece I did my senior year from a photo I took on the coast of Nova Scotia.

This is an example of my digital photography, a dragonfly caught up close. 

And finally, some examples from my film photography (I've been using my mom's 1978 Konica 35mm)