Have We No Gatekeepers? By Andy Hare

Loris Gréaud’s Nothing is True Everything is Permitted, Stairway Edit (2007)

The Bridge To Next Semester

Self-evaluation

1) What is it that I am trying to investigate in my practice?  What am I most passionate about?

For me the question revolves around the fundamentals to aesthetics.  I’m fascinated with understanding how aesthetics work and how we can use them to interpret and transform the world.  In the changing media landscape the barriers for entry are being removed on a daily basis.  However, the aesthetic questions are timeless.  What makes good art?  What makes good practice?  I think this is what I’m most passionate in regards to production.  How can my aesthetic enquires lead to developing something I can trust is worthwhile and have enough understanding to know when something isn’t.  Specifically, I’d like to develop interactive design skills to compliment my theory-based academic curriculum.  

2)  What are my strengths and weaknesses?

I tend to put my heart into what I do.  I really want to stand by anything I produce because I don’t see the sense in not giving something my undivided attention.  One thing I’m trying to improve upon is to take more risks and not be afraid if something seems really difficult.  Shooting in New York can be extremely arduous and time consuming but it’s important to not be intimidated.  Really following through on a vision is key, but it’s equally important to allow that vision to get sidetracked.  A point well taken from Lars Van Trier’s “The Five Obstructions.”

3) What are the core elements missing from my practice?  How will I obtain them?

I feel generally comfortable at this point with a number of media making practices (very basic video, audio, photoshop).  I’m now at a critical precipice where I need to push forward and gain an unwavering confidence and understanding in what I do.  I think taking the production design course next term will definitely be a step in the right direction.  

4)  What was my preferred medium before the course?  After the course?

I’ve never fancied myself much of a production person but I would say my preferred medium before the course was likely video production.  Now, I’m less sure but I’m much more intrigued by photoshop and perhaps even audio.

5.  What is the next topic, theme, or question I would like to investigate in my next project?

I hope to do a photo production project this summer.  It would be a photo-documentary of Baptist churches.  I’m interested in really looking at how a place so seemingly ambivalent and aesthetically neutral on the outside can be a gathering place for such heated ritual and controversy inside.  I was inspired when I was just observing some of the Baptist churches in Park Slope.  They seem so calm and elegant on the outside but it’s a mask for so many conflicting meanings that go on inside.  Whether you associate the church with fear and prejudices or spiritual truth and meaning, these are places exploding with conflicting negative and positive energies.  I’m not interested in judging the Baptist church or Christianity per se, I’m more interested in using aesthetics to foreground conflicting, ambiguous or completely dissolved interpretations instead of anything dialectical or didactic.  And then going the extra step and really blatantly asking what do these images mean?  How do they make meaning?  Trying to capture the essence of controversy without judgments and letting it breathe.  Letting it be but also antagonizing.  

6.  What is something I learned in this class that I can teach someone else?

Oh man, so much.  Biggest takeaway has been the photoshop stuff.  I feel like I could give a basic primer on using photoshop now, where before I was pretty in the dark.

7.  What is something I will try to do next semester that I have never done before?

Submit some production work to a festival, conference, gallery, something.  It would be awesome to be a part of an art show.  

8.  What is something I will try to do every day or every week that I did not do before this course?

Be meticulously organized when it comes to production.  It helps so much in the long run.  Source, Development and Output folders!

9.  What is a creative project that I would do with a budget of $150 million?

Hire a real production crew, actors, etc. and shoot my fictional TV series “Truckers.”  I’m thinking 10 episodes, cross-country shoot.  Need a couple of years of heavy research before production would begin though.

10.  How could I do the same project with a budget of $150?

Much more intimate and toned down.  Might actually be better even.  Just shoot interiors and make it more  of a close-up character study.  

Talia Madani “Spraying Stripes,” 2008.

I’m just starting to dive into some interactive Web design stuff at The New School and I’m really excited.  I’ve decided I want to off-set my theory classes with a fair amount of production this time around, specifically interactive design and software coding classes.  They’re great skills to learn, looks great on a resume and more than anything I think it will really give me a better understanding of how the Internet works and where it will be going.

I’ve included a couple great sites to look at on designing the interactive space:

1) http://www.lab404.com/330/ This is an online syllabus/guide for a class called “Internet-Based Art and Design” at The University of North Carolina at Asheville. The site is a rich despository for all things interactive design.  Hyperlinks show examples of the history of networking, differences between types of interactivity as well as a number of art projects currently being undertaken entirely online.  It’s a holistic attempt to investigate the specific capabilities and possibilities of interactive art.  I really suggest taking a look around the site and checking out some links.  A great way to kill some time and you might just find something you never thought about before.

2)  http://www.lasvegassun.com/history/ It’s a shame the newspaper business is going through such a massive contraction right now.  Some have cited the fact that newspapers have contribuited to their own undoing by giving away so much premium content for free.  And some of the content can be quite impressive, especially when a newspaper has some talented interactive people working on the site.  The Las Vegas Sun did an interactive story on the history of the Las Vegas strip and it was done in a way that truly utilizes online design and thinking.  This is a great example of a traditional media company branching out and using all possible media to tell a compelling story.  The evolution of technology will continue to give birth to new ideas and new ways of understanding, the problem so many media companies face is that they act like they are inherently in a diametric opposition to this concept.  Is it a TV station or a news provider?  Is it a newspaper or a content distribuiter?  I think for the Las Vegas Sun, as well as The New York Times, Washington Post and other innovative newspaper Web sites, it’s about giving the consumer the best possible experience across platforms and living their legacy brand online in new ways.  In the past this story would have been a simple text timeline.  This piece is a great example of using the interactive space for visually compelling, more graphically sophisticated ways of understanding the world around us.  Even if that world is Vegas…

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/why-newspapers-cant-be-saved-but-the-news-can/

As newspapers continue to bleed, the question on everyone’s mind turns from how do we save the industry to what’s next for news? 

The Commute

Elizabeth descends into the underground.  The F-train.  Her voyage home, made a thousand times before, begins like any other.  The clattering of the tracks, the emphatic murmur of the crowd.  Surrounded by strangers Elizabeth waits on platform.  The smell, the taste, the sights and sounds.  The crying babies, the destitute elderly, the hungry disabled. The black, the white, the Chinese, the Puerto Rican.   The forgotten beggars, the smug rich, the tragic poor. The people having the best day of their lives and those having the worst. Elizabeth doesn’t notice these things anymore.  She’s been living in Manhattan for years now and the commute had been come to be defined by its repetitive nature not its exciting diversity.   The experience once so visceral has become so banal and dissociative it was almost unreal.  Elizabeth checks her cell phone. 6:40 PM.  Another endless day, not quite over.

Elizabeth is more alert than usual of her surroundings.  The voices in the crowd seem to sweep together like the wind.  Cries and echoes swirl as one.  She senses a stillness that she immediately dismisses as an untimely bout of paranoia.  Leaning against the steel pillar Elizabeth closes her eyes and attempts to decompress.  After a wait that could have been 5 minutes or 5 years, the car plows in from the tunnel.  As she lines up to enter the her paranoia returns.  She can’t pinpoint it but something doesn’t feel quite right.  As she enters the car the intensity of the scene overwhelms her.  Suddenly she becomes  overtaken with what feels like vertigo.  Elizabeth struggles to hold herself up right.  Her center of gravity is completely lost, as she sickly peers into a crowd of unfamiliar faces.

And that sound.  A deafening screeching noise but does anyone else hear it?  It doesn’t appear so.  She realizes she cannot focus.  And the train isn’t stopping.  How long had she been in the car she asks herself?  Where’s 34th St.?  23rd?  No luck.  She checks her cell phone.  It’s dead.  She tries to talk but no sound comes out, either that or the hideous noise is drowning her out even to herself.  She screams into the ether.

Panic comes on quickly in situations like this one and Elizabeth’s heart races faster with each beat.  Just as it seems like full madness is about to come on the train stops.  The windows are completely obscured by the darkness beyond the glass.  The conductor announces the destination: “5 Parks Highway” he says in an unusually calm manner.  What?  “5 Parks Highway,?” she blurts out.  The screeching sound is gone now, replaced by the sound of halogen lights and underwater ambience.  She looks around the train and notices everyone is getting off.  She stumbles forward and tries desperately to ask someone where they are.  She’s regained her balance but not her voice.  The panic returns instantly.  The passengers ignore her politely and walk with heads low out the door and into the darkness.  She scans the car feverishly, hoping to find someone who can help her.  Seeing no other option she walks out the door of the now empty train.