Describe one work of art in detail
How it changes the abilities of the body
What does this mean ethically
In this lecture, we have watched four art examples of technologised body, they are from Eric Siu' Touchy, Stelarc, Stahl Stenslie and Kazuhiko Hachiya respectively.
This time, I would like to pick one of the four examples to express my feeling on this topic, the one I picked is from Kazuhiko Hachiya.
The art protect I watched in the lecture is called "Inter Discommunication Machine" which was made in 1993. In that machine, each of two visitors wearing a visor transimitting a real-time image of the other person's visual field. Kazuhiko Hachiuya won the prizes about this artwork at Artec 95,Nagoyia, Japan and Ars Electrionica, Linz, Austria 1996.
The visor is composed of a video camera, transmiters, head mounted displays, batteries, and feather. As mentioned, the machine projects the other vision and sound of the other one's display, it aims to confusing the individual identity of the two "players". Therefore, when the players wearing the helmet, it takes several seconds to let them realize where and who they are, in the process of the " game", they have to find back their body via the vision of another player.
I think the concept of the artwork is bottom-up. On the first level, it is just a game about the exchange of vision and hearing, to the children, it may be just like Hide and Seek. On the second level, it is a game of questioning vision and our individual perception of the world. It is a question of Who am I and how the other see me physically and how you see yourself mentally. As in this fast lane life, it takes no time for people to do self-reflection, and this art work is an alarm calling people to make it,to think about their identities.
Video from Youtube ;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOzVzcmK0VU
Mission to Earth is a new form of filmmaking method which is called digital cinema or database cinema.
One of the difference between digital cinema and traditional filming making is the later one is defined as a fixed and linear narrative structure. However, in the digital cinema, the story is developed by selecting scenes from a software. The software controls the layout,the numbers of window and the content of the film.
For the traditional filming making, the story is clear because it is easy to let the audience know the content of the story. When we talk about Mission to Earth, the story and the images shown on the screen seems have relationship, but it is not. In the story, the voice over is telling a story, but the images shown is another things, therefore, the audience seem watching a liner story.
Thus, a digital cinema is a video about the intersection of software culture, cinema and architecture.
Besides, this film like the early film, it contains short clip of the reality (a recording of the reality);
this film like a digital art, it contains lots of media art, the use of pixels, softwares to create an illusion;
this like a painting, we can the artwork at different angles, and have different kinds of feelings//.
If you ask someone, who has not watched any of database movies, to describe what database cinema is, he may tell you something like the normal cinema movies we watched, however, it is totally another stuff. Only those who experienced that genre of "database movie" could tell what it is!
Lev Manovich- Maker of Mission to Earth From: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3464/3181056839_5f933ed738.jpg
Picture captured from Mission to Earth From http://www.softcinema.net/scrnshts/alpha-1.jpg
Describe in detail the role of Youtube in facilitating one or two recent pro-democracy movements. Drawing on your reading, discuss the ways in which Youtube facilitated to those movements Youtube: YouTube is a video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California. The service was created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005 and has been owned by Google since late 2006. The site allows users to upload, view, and share videos, and it makes use of Adobe Flash Video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media video. Available content includes video clips, TV clips, music videos, and other content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos.
Egyptian Tank Man incident: On a side street leading into
Tahrir Square
Who: Mass civilian movement; strikes by labour unions
Demands: Democratic elections, resignation of
President Hosni Mubarak after 30 years of rule; end
of police brutality, end of state of emergency
Civilian casualties: At least 800 deaths; others suffered
police brutality or torture; some females were
subjected to "virginity tests."
b) A detailed description
of the work
·shows a protester courageously single-handedly standing down Egyptian riot police and water cannons (at approximately 1:25), in a Tiananmen Square-like moment. The video was shot by a balcony overlooking a large street protesters and bystanders are clearly overheard shouting in Egyptian Arabic in the background.
· Many media and people take this video as the moment in Tiananmen Square Beijing. They compared the difference of the society background, the reason for the revolution...The spread of this video provokes much more attention to the Arab Spring/ Egyptian Revolution outside the Arab world.
· We use Facebook to schedule the protest, use Twitter to coordinate and Youtube to tell the truth (Abbassi, Jawad, CEO Arab Advisors Group. “An Overview of the Arab Telecom and Broadband Markets and Broadcast Media Industry.” Georgetown University
for Contemporary Arab Studies Symposium. “Information Evolution in the
Arab World.” 22 March, 2010. Accessed 10 November, 2011.) “The revolution has no leader, I said. It was more like a raging wild horse that would buck anyone who tried to mount it against its will.” ― Wael Ghonim, Revolution 2:0: A Memoir and Call to Action “Ideas spread more rapidly in densely connected social networks. So tools that increase the density of social connection are instrumental to the changes that spread. […] And, more importantly, increased density of information flow (the number of times that people hear things) and of the emotional density (as individuals experience others’ perceptions about events, or ‘social contextualization’) leads to an increased likelihood of radicalization: when people decide to join the revolution instead of watching it." Stowe Boyd
c)An
evaluation of the work in terms of yourspecific research question The Egyptian tank man is just an example of how Youtube as a platform, to facilitate the progress of the Egyptian revolution. For the other pro-democracy movement, there are many different vids on Youtube showing how the citizens there are suffering under the dictatorship and the repression in their life. Reference : Hopkins, Jim (October 11, 2006). "Surprise! There's a third YouTube co-founder". USA Today. Retrieved November 29, 2008. "Egypt activists plan biggest protest yet on Friday". Al Arabiya. 27 January 2011. Archived from the original on 1 February 2011. Retrieved 29 January 2011.
After reading the essay " Will Computer Games Ever Be a Legitimate Art From", I have extract some of the idea from it.
It should not be just a entertainment, digital games surely are used to entertaining the players, however, the entertaining element is not associated with an art. Let's use the example of monopoly, we can be entertain via moving the dice and the little tools to make fun. However, other than the rules of the board game, it does not have other element to classify it as an art.
The arthur Ernest W. Adams has put the digitial games into a grey area which they are one kind of "things" between literary arts and fine arts. And this grey area contains the things of films as well as digital games.
So...To clarify a digital game is an art, it should be have such elements:
It should be an aestheic via cinematography, the editing, the quality of the acting, the quality of the story and it is not barely about the picture quality.
Besides, it should contains idea created by the game makers. The idea is not meaning the interactive element between the game and the player, but the rationale of the whole game- a story. For example, Romance of the Three Kingdom is one of the digital games containing an idea.
Romance of the Three Kingdom based on events that took place in China during the 2nd and 3rd centuries, when the land was divided between the Shu Han, Cao Wei and Eastern Wu kingdoms, as well as various other less-remembered forces. The games draw ideas mainly from the historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the more historical text Records of the Three Kingdoms.
players revolve around managing numerical statistics, each representing an attribute of a city or character. For example, a city will have statistics indicating the amount of food stored within its walls, its vulnerability to disasters such as floods and earthquakes, how content the people are with its ruler or governing officer, etc. Characters have statistics to reflect their fighting prowess, intelligence and loyalty towards their respective lords, among other attributes. Players can spend time increasing these numbers before waging war on neighbouring territories or intending diplomatic efforts.
Thus the idea and the rationale why the game produced and how the messages shown to the players are clear. This is why a digital game is called an art. It is not only entertaining the player, but also giving them something through the games.
The old version of the game
from:http://www.emuparadise.me/GameBase%20Amiga/Screenshots/R/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms_II_2.png
the new version of the game
From:http://s.pro-gmedia.com/videogamer/media/images/ps2/romance_of_the_three_kingdoms_xi/screens/romance_of_the_three_kingdoms_xi_93.jpg
From http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/8/87790/1820038-box_rottk11.jpg
In this blog, I am going to use my experience to express my idea and feeling to the question, first I would try to give the background what it is and how the social media help the process of the movement.
Before the moving to the central content of the blog, it is a need to give the background of the movement. Besides there is a dividing line between the student strike and the Umbrella Revolution when there was a clearance in the Central Government Offices, the student strike becomes a cvil disobedience on 26 September as the Police's act angered the citizens. Started from that day, it has been the 20th day of the movement.
So, the student strike started on 22 September when there were boycotted classes that week to lie on sprawling lawns outside the government headquarters and discuss different topics that leaded by professors from the universities in Hong Kong.
The boycott was in response to the decision by the National People's Congress imposing restrictions on choosing of candidates in the elections for the Chief Executive that will be held in 2017. The authority proposed that the election committee is made up of totally 1200 members who are mostly loyal members to the Chinese Government. And they will choose two or three candidates for the elections. This decision is not the "universal suffrage" that Hong Kong citizen want as it limited the voter's choice towards to the candidates.
therefore, the student strike aims at bargaining the true "universal suffrage" via the method of "cvil nomination" and later the occupying Central( the Umbrella Revolution) aims at the same goal.
During these 20 days, the social media played a crucial role in the movement and I tried to analyzed it by my experience. Before the boycott, there were lots of voice in Facebook, Twitter and even in your Whatsapp groups urged you to stand out, and I did go to Chinese University on the first day of the boycott.
<- Here is a short video clip I recored that day.
Then later the few days I did not go the the government headquarter as I was lazy to take a long bus route to there. However, I kept updating the news via the traditional mass media, and the new social media, like Whatsapp, Youtube and Facebook.
Until, the clearance night, I was watching the live steaming on Youtube on one hand, on the other hand, I was browsing the Forum chat room on the other side. Thus, the actual situation in Admiralty can instantly be seen by me. For example, I can get the information about "Joshua Wong climbed into the Cvil Square and was arrested by the police" within 3 minutes via Facebook.
pic taken on 17/10 by me
Besides, traditional mass media news, like Apple Daily and Now TV are not available live steaming through Internet, therefore, the credibility of the information is well to trust other than that of the Facebook sharing and rumors in the sharing in the Whatsapp.
As more and more news and visual images were instantly showing to the public, and information is much easier to spread instantly without the scanning by the traditional mass media, it attracted people to stand out and voice out their will.
pic taken on 12/10 by me
pic taken on 12/10 by me
Up to now, the movement is processing in a positive way as more and more people are willing to come out to chasing the goal.
From the three games we discussed in the class, they are America's Army/ Under Seige, Doom & Postal and Remission respectively.
They are three different types of game;
America's Army is a kind of first-person shooter war game. Players become a soldier in the game and carrying with a gun to kill the enemies so as to win the games;
Doom & Postal is a first person game too. In such games, player is allowed to move freely in a particular area/ city. And they are allow to break the surrounding objects, kill the people with different weapons and even set fire on cars. This kind of games in some way do not have the rules to win the games;
Remission is a shooting game that players are ask to enter the human body, and remove all the germs and virus so as to cure the patient. It is educational indeed to the kids and players because it's purpose is positive and not bloody.
Therefore, I think the best one is Remission as the player is curing one another rather than killing someone, you can treat the game as a treatment to the patient; while the worst one os Doom & Postal, the main purpose of the game idea is to ask player to kill,to destroy, to ruin the surroundings. The concept of it is awful and disgusting.
About the other question we discussed in the lecture, I would like to repeat Tracy's favorite game. It is the Sims 3! She mentioned that she could build a house by her preference and let her Sims live. It is lovely and fun to her. Besides, the concept of the games is greatly different from other type of games, player can control their Sims liberally, for example, to ask them to get a job, satisfy so as to create a "life" to their Sims.
P.s. the Sims series has launched the Sims 4 this summer, and here is a short clip for it!
