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New Media > Aspect - The Chronicle of New Media, Volume VII
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Aspect - The Chronicle of New Media, Volume VII
Personas and Personalities
MC-560, 2006
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No educational pricing available |
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Format: DVD, NTSC, Region 0 (All) |
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This volume of ASPECT features artists working with issues of identity and personality. For some, a constructed identity is an opportunity to explore personal or cultural issues of gender, accountability and culpability. Other artists make their own personality an integral part of their work and process. All the works in this issue examine the role of personal psychology in how we interact with others and our surroundings on an everyday basis. We are thrilled by the quality and diversity of work in this issue, and with the diverse ways in which the artists and commentators interpreted our open call. Enjoy.
Further Information:
Editor: Michael Mittelman
Assistant Editor: Liz Nofziger
Production: Meghan Tomeo
Art Direction: 2Communique
Animation: Jonathon Ouellette
Intern: Keagan Stiles
Sound Design: George Cox
Audio Mastering: Dexter Media
| Catalog Number: MC-560 |
Type: Shorts Compilation |
Genre: New Media |
| Copyright: 2006 |
Length: 74 minutes |
Format:
DVD Region: 0 (All) |
| TV System: NTSC |
ISBN: 0-9749657-4-X |
UPC: 880198056092 |
| Label: Aspect Magazine |
This title is available in Europe for Wholesale - List Prices: £16.99 / 25.00€
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Films In Compilation
Bequeaths, Oaths of Signature directed by
CarianaCarianne
USA,
New Media,
2005,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:00:00
CarianaCarianne are a collaborative which believe in occurrences that cannot readily be seen. Within their work they respond through a conscious duality, embracing a shared body that contains two internal selves. They are specifically interested in how the body and the representation of the body are constructed, viewed and negotiated. Their works question what is real, what is imposed, what is perceived and what is stigmatized as abnormal. Combining installation, performance and video, they develop works that address self and under what circumstances self-invention becomes unbelievable or even illegal.
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Tea Party directed by
Anthony
Goicolea
USA,
New Media,
2004,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:00:00
In Tea Party, Goicolea successfully merges both his interest in adolescent angst and his understanding of the symbolism the forest holds, including what critic Jane Harris described as “…the world outside the rational, the mysterious unknown, the realm of sexual imagination.” For Goicolea, video is a natural extension of his photography, allowing him to put into motion the characters he photographs. The artist elaborates on the benefits of this time-based medium, “I am interested in using this element to chronicle the gestation period of progressive states which ultimately end in destructive or absurd predicaments.”
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Boop-Oop-A-Doop directed by
Sachiko
Hayashi
USA,
New Media,
2004,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:00:00
”boop-oop-a-doop” is an observation and investigation of our daily life and plays with three different elements : creation of identity, media culture, and our desire to be somebody else. By taking up two
prominent figures in mass media culture, namely Marilyn Monroe and
Betty Boop, it focuses on how these three elements intermingle with
each other, re-enforcing each element each time.
As an icon of the 20th century, Marilyn Monroe has come to represent to us what constitutes an ultimate female with all the qualities desirable for a woman. Her sensualism, sweetness and vulnerability are indeed more alive in our eyes today 40 years after her death. Yet her mannerism so heavily appropriated from Max Fleischer's cartoon creation Betty Boop still reveals one of the most inscrutable questions of our time: the complex nature and procedure in creation of identity, especially in a highly developed media society like ours.
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Becoming Roberta directed by
Lynn
Hershman Leeson
USA,
New Media,
1976,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:00:00
ROBERTA BREITMORE was, for 9 years a private performance of a simulated person. In an era or alternatives, she became an objectified alternative personality, reflecting the values of her culture and penetrating trends such as EST, WEIGHTWATCHERS and most significantly, experienced resonant nuances of alienation.
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Day We Met,The directed by
Christian
Jankowski
USA,
New Media,
2003,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:00:00
-Choose a song from the book
-Press the number next to the song into the karaoke machine
-Press enter
-Take the microphone
-Read lyrics from the screen
-Sing
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More Man directed by
Erik
Levine
USA,
New Media,
2005,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:00:00
More Man lays bare the contradictions between adult projections, fears, and fantasies, and children’s realities in the world of youth football. Sports play an influential and clear role in childhood growth and education. In addition to developing physical coordination and a kinesthetic relationship with our environment, they provide arenas for the evolution of self-identity, self-esteem, self-confidence, and our relationship to others. Focusing on adult participation in an organized youth sporting event, More Man reveals inherent behavioral and psychological dynamics: how knowledge, persona, and character are passed down; how men strive to shape and infuse boys with their ideals and beliefs; and, above all, how ideas of masculinity are transmitted from one generation to the next. Looking at adult-child interactions through this competitive and combative prism is a revealing microcosm for life outside the demarcations and boundaries of the playing field.
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Involuntary Reception directed by
Kristin
Lucas
USA,
New Media,
2000,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:00:00
Involuntary Reception is a double-imaged, double-edged report from a young woman contaminated with an EPF (electro-magnetic pulse field) that pegs the needle. Lucas’ character has a story to tell, though paradoxically the conventional tools that she would use to convey her story would be instantaneously canceled by her surging EPF. She is forced to self-broadcast, and fortunately she is so in tune with the medium that she is able to do this without the need for hardware. The full-length 17-minute version of Involuntary Reception is distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix and Postmasters in New York.
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Dow directed by
The Yes Men
USA,
New Media,
2002,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:00:00
In 2001, Dow became the uncontested world leader in industrial accidents with the legacy of the Bhopal catastrophe. Only on the 20th anniversary of the disaster, did Dow finally announced that they were going to compensate the victims and clean up the mess in Bhopal, but still disavowed any liability for the disaster. The Yes Men appeared at a London banking conference as Dow rep "Erastus Hamm," this to explain how Dow considers death acceptable so long as profits still roll in. The Yes Men explained to the bankers that just because something like Bhopal is a "skeleton in the closet," it may be quite lucrative. The bankers applauded and swarmed for licenses for of the Acceptable Risk Calculator.
Finally, on May 12, 2005, at Dow's annual shareholder meeting, "Jude Finisterra" addressed the Dow board to suggest the same thing he had on the BBC. Two minutes later, Mike addressed the board as if he were furious that Dow wasn't clamping down sufficiently on activists - not nuns and victims, maybe, but at least scoundrels like "Jude Finisterra." Asked if Dow would pursue him, Dow Chairman Stavropoulos answered, "If you help me to find him."
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The Veils of Transference directed by
Adrianne
Wortzel
USA,
New Media,
2004,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:00:00
The Veils of Transference is a non-interactive pre-scripted film produced in 2001 at StudioBlue at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, with support from Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, National Science Foundation (Grant No.DUE 9980873), NSF Gateway Engineering Education Coalition at Cooper Union, and PSC-CUNY Research Foundation.
It depicts a 20-minute psychoanalytic session between a robot and a human, during which the robot and human switch back-and-forth between their roles as analyst and analysand. In the end it is the robot, and not the human, which evidences a cathartic "baring of the soul" experience.
The robot's locomotion, movements, text-to-speech, and camera pan and tilt were pre-scripted as "gestures' and operated remotely from a keyboard in the studio. Each keyboard stroke would send the next line of instruction to the robot . A program was written that allowed the robot voice to be imbued with changes in volume, inflection, pace, pitch, etc. The puppeteer at the keyboard could improvise with the human actor only in terms of timing; i.e., it was at the puppeteer's discretion to decide when to execute each keystroke entry.
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2006-10-24 Neural.it
If 'identity' is one of the most important topics concerning the digital possibilities of reality construction, 'personality' is a more general aspect of the core personal traits that let us still recognize an (almost) 'human' (opposed to a 'machine'). In this issue of the valuable Aspect dvd magazine, works focused on artificially constructed or artistically abstracted personalities are included and commented, as usual, by some interested critics. Singular human entities are effectively constructed (or duplicated) upon social conventions, gestures, dresses, expressions, assumed roles and identity crisis. The daily mediated experience made us used to perceive a vast range of entities to naturally interact with. But destructuring pieces of identity and constructing credible personalities is a different process than configuring an attracting avatar. Nevertheless the avatar form is a recognized liquid second skin, that embodies some of the instinctual traits of the owner. And both these methods of representing an apparently independent entity constitute nothing more than an appropriate meaningful conglomerate of data, that can as well represents a completely artificial entity in a crowded mediascape. So the question could be: will persons be recognized as 'human' because of their ability to manage themselves as an information node? In this collection there's a wide investigation, ranging from the seminal work 'Roberta' by Lynn Hershmann made in early seventies, to the Kristin Lucas' 'Involuntary Reception', the Jill Magid's 'Evidence Locker' and The Yes Men's 'WTO', building a seminal selection that represent these topics for future references.
| 2006-09-11 Educational Media Resources Online
By Reviewed by Brian Falato, University of South Florida Tampa Campus Library
Recommended
Aspect is a magazine in DVD format that compiles short experimental videos and other media art. Each volume has its own theme. Volume 7 is called Personas and Personalities. It contains contributions from ten artists and focuses on the construction of identity and role-playing, along with the influence society and the mass media have on this construction.
Each video has a commentary track by a museum curator or art critic that can be played over the original audio of the video. In many of the videos presented in this compilation, this commentary track is needed because it provides background and context. Watching the video without this commentary can leave the viewer less than impressed by the apparent lack of content. The important thing for these pieces is the concept behind the work, rather than the content of the work itself.
For instance, the first video on the disc, Bequeaths, shows two similar-looking women in side-by-side images talking simultaneously as they make their wills on video. The commentary informs us that the two women, called Cariana and Cariane, have created a separate legal identity called CarianaCarianne, two separate shelves in a shared body. Their work focuses on this duality.
Evidence Locker is footage shot on city streets. A woman in a red coat appears in all the shots, sometimes from a distance and sometimes in close-up. It turns out that this material was taken entirely by video surveillance cameras in Liverpool, England. The city has set up 242 cameras and all the footage recorded is retained for thirty days, and then erased, unless needed in a legal proceeding. While this raises obvious civil liberty issues, artist Jill Magid is not overtly concerned with this in her video. She worked closely with the Liverpool police and even had some shots staged for the cameras. At the end of the video, she is seen riding on the back of a motorcycle driven by a Liverpool policeman, as the Georges Delerue composition “Camille’s Theme” from the movie Contempt is heard on the soundtrack. The romantic feel of the ending contrasts with the thorny questions raised about the source of the images.
The most audacious video on the compilation is one that was unknowingly created by the BBC. It’s mislabeled WTO on the DVD container, but it’s a BBC News interview with a Dow chemical company spokesman, or so the BBC thought. Dow purchase Union Carbide Corporation in 2001. Union Carbide became notorious in 1984 when a pesticide plant it operated in Bhopal, India leaked 27 tons of a deadly gas that killed 20,000 and left 120,000 with serious illnesses that will need lifelong care. Union Carbide had denied taking responsibility for the incident, and Dow did likewise after acquiring the company. Then in 2004, the BBC ran an interview with a man identified as a spokesman for Dow who said Dow would liquidate Union Carbide and use the money to compensate victims and fully remediate the damage done at the site. It would also cooperate with all legal investigations into the gas leak. The BBC aired the interview twice before it was discovered the “Dow spokesman” was actually a member of The Yes Men, a group which impersonates business leaders to get media coverage that will provoke discussion about the ethical responsibilities of the business involved.
Not all of the videos require commentary to be appreciated. More Man shows youth football players and the often harsh comments made by their coaches, and Tea Party shows the violence lurking behind social facades. Boop-oop-A-Doop is the most visually compelling selection on the disc. It manipulates documentary film footage of Marilyn Monroe and combines it with images of cartoon character Betty Boop to comment on the construction of feminine identity as represented by these two icons.
The relationship between humans and machines and its effect on human identity are also explored. The Veils of Transference features a psychotherapy session between a human and a robot, with the roles of therapist and patient alternating between the two. The concept of human-robot communication also occurs in Lynn Hershman’s brief video DiNA. The Day We Met views relationships through the prism of karaoke videos, and Kristin Lucas’ Involuntary Reception is an interview with a woman, played by Lucas, who says she has difficulty coping with the modern world because she gives off electromagnetic fields that damage all the machinery and people she comes in contact with.
The disc can be viewed as a whole to get an overview of current work in media art, but individual videos can be used in many classes besides art because of the issues raised. Each artist’s work is presented on a separate chapter, so there is ease of navigation to any individual piece.
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Aspect: The Chronicle of New Media, Volume X
MC-748, 2007
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Exploring the pastoral, ASPECT shifts the concept of urban as center in Volume 10: Rural. Proving that bucolic
concerns are equally vital, this issue features nine artists who challenge and investigate the real, imagined, and
mediated natural... more >
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Tipping Point: Health Narratives from the South End
MC-622, 2006
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Venturing into new ground, ASPECT has created a new DVD documenting The Tipping Point: Health Narratives from the South End. This DVD follows four artists creating an interdisciplinary interactive artwork over two years.
For the first time,... more >
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New Media > Aspect - The Chronicle of New Media, Volume VII
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