Homework

Turner Prize – What did you think ?

Did you find any themes in the artist’s work?

What is a theme?Ideas and concepts that keep being used by artists. Some obvious ones might be:

Tracey Emin – Childhood experiences, Gritty seasidetowns

Damien Hirst – Death, Intimacy, Celebrity

One way to ‘read’ art

Analysing an artwork often involves noticing a combination of themes as well as technical ‘devices’.

You can then try to make sense of a piece of art by looking at how the ‘devices’ support or clash with the theme.

Filmic Devices

Selection of shots,Different types of editing Spatial + Temporal MontagesJuxtaposition

Homework for next week:

Reading a Film Sequence http://web.uvic.ca/geru/439/seq.html

The 'Grammar' of Television and Filmhttp://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/gramtv.html

Steenbeck

3 Machine video editing 70’s – 90s

Battleship Potempkin

The Odessa Steps sequence is the most famous clip from any film.

Why?

0.47:30

Sequence of shots …

Shot of hands holding rifles. Shot of a woman with a baby carriage. Shot of men holding rifles. Close-up of the woman's face. Close-up of the baby's face. Medium shot of the woman. Close-up of the woman. Shot of men aiming rifles. Close-up of the woman's face (in agony). Shot of baby carriage's wheels (next to steps). Close-up of woman's face (in more agony). Close-up of hands around a belt buckle. Long shot of soldiers on horses approaching huge group of people as they flee up steps. Close-up of hands covering belt buckle. Medium shot of hands covering belt buckle. Close-up of woman (confused). Medium shot of woman with baby in carriage behind and to the left of her. Medium shot of baby carriage's wheels beginning to go down steps. Medium shot of boots marching. Medium shot of rifles being raised. Medium shot of woman grasping her belt. Medium shot of woman collapsing. Medium shot of baby carriage's wheels (still going down stairs). Long shot of people running in disordered panic down steps, in foreground, away from orderly troops in background Medium-long shot of troops on horses in forground, people running down steps, towards them. Medium shot of man in white attending to dead man with another dead man lying beside him. Medium shot of the woman falling to ground. Medium shot of baby's face (carriage going down steps). Medium shot of woman on ground next to back wheels of baby carriage.

Sequence of shots continued

Medium shot of old man in glasses (screaming). Overhead shot of baby carriage going down steps with baby's face in focus. Long shot of baby carriage reaching first landing on steps. Long shot of people running (panicked) and collapsing (shot). Long shot of horses in foreground, people running up steps, away from them.Close-up of baby's face. Medium shot of carriage's wheels still descending steps. Close-up of baby's face (crying). Close-up of young man in glasses (looking at baby). Medium shot of carriage's wheels going down stairs. Overhead shot of baby carriage. Close-up of baby's face. Medium-long shot of man in white collapsing over dead man. Overhead shot of baby carriage (on left half of frame) going down steps. Close-up of young man in glasses (on right half of frame) examining. Medium shot of carriage going down steps. Close-up of young man in glasses (on right half of frame) yelling. Medium overhead shot of baby carriage going down steps. Close-up of old man in glasses yelling. Medium shot behind carriage, which is still descending steps. Long shot of people running up steps, soldiers on horses in foreground at bottom of steps. Medium close-up of woman (dead) blood coming out of head. Medium shot of carriage wheels descending stairs (upper half of frame). Medium shot of boots walking among dead bodies. Overhead shot of baby in carriage still descending stairs. Close-up of young man with glasses (in middle of frame) looking up and screaming. Nearly identical overhead shot of baby. Medium close-up of man, from point of view of young man with glasses, with sword ready to strike. Close-up of man with sword, clenching teeth, swinging sword downwards. Close-up of old man in glasses, blood gushing out of right eye. Medium shot of baby carriage flipping over.

Kuleshov Effect - 1923

Russian director Lev Kuleshov, the Godfather, if you will, of thematic editing, tried to manifest Pavlov's psychological theories on the association of ideas into the editing of a film. His conceit was to link a series of images together. Alone these images may appear unrelated, but seen together, juxtaposed one against the other, Kuleshov hypothesized, they would form a link to the viewer, creating a unified action out of fragmented details. This theory is known as the Kuleshov effect.

Kuleshov's best-known experiment with image association was a series of six shots. The first was a close-up of an actor with a neutral facial expression. The next was a shot of a bowl of soup. Then back to the actor. Then a shot of a coffin with a female corpse. Then back to the actor. Then, finally, a shot of a girl playing. Kuleshov's notion here is that the meaning in this series of shots comes not from the actor, but rather from the juxtaposition of his face with the three other shots. In the first two shots (man and soup), it appears the man must be hungry. In the second two (man and corpse) it appears the man is grieving. In the last two (man and little girl), it appears the man is portraying paternal pride (Giannetti, 136).

Kuleshov believed that each shot in a sequence should be incomplete, and that the meaning should come from the composite of the shots, rather than from one self-contained shot. The transitions between shots should be simultaneously shocking, simultaneously jolting, simultaneously confusing. They should be like pieces of a puzzle: only with the last puzzle piece in place can the complete picture be seen. So is the case with the Odessa Steps. Without having seen the rest of the movie, without knowing the context, we can find meaning in the sequence. As the shots mount up, the intensity increases, the complexity increases, the tragedy increases, the character development increases.

Man with the Movie Camera

Identify 10 elements from the film.

These can be about the theme/plot/storyline or technical elements/techniques.

A History of ComputingThe Universal Machine

Imagine

You are a farmer living a few hundred years ago.

What might you want or need to calculate?

Slide rule

First built in England in 1632 and still in use in the 1960's by the NASA engineers of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs which landed men on the moon.

Pascaline

In 1642 Blaise Pascal, at age 19, invented the Pascaline as an aid for his father who was a tax collector

Jacquard Loom - 1805

Joseph Marie Jacquard (7 July 1752–7 August 1834) was a French silk weaver and inventor, who improved on the original punched card design of Jacques de Vaucanson's loom of 1745, to invent the Jacquard loom in 1804-1805. Jacquard's loom is controlled by recorded patterns of holes in a string of cards.

Difference Engine 1822

Charles Babbage

The design of this machine possesses all the essential logical features of the modern general purpose computer. However, there is no direct line of descent from Babbage’s work to the modern electronic computer invented by the pioneers of the electronic age in the late 1930s and early 1940s largely in ignorance of the detail of Babbage's work.

ENIAC - 1943

1962 – Four comp tech generations

1978

1978

Amiga 500 – released in 1987

Internet

What is it ?Who uses it ?What do other people do with it ?Why is there such a lot of fuss about it ?> 5 min

Sketch me a picture of the internet > 5min

Connections = Communication!

The Atlantic cable of 1858 was established to carry instantaneous communications across the ocean for the first time. Although the laying of this first cable was seen as a landmark event in society, it was a technical failure. It only remained in service a few days.

Used by telegraph for morse code …---…---…-…--.---

in 1876 for telephone conversations

ARPANET - 1969

Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which initially connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah)

The Internet was designed in part to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the sites were destroyed by nuclear attack. If the most direct route was not available, routers would direct traffic around the network via alternate routes.

Kleinrock, a pioneering computer science professor at UCLA, and his small group of graduate students hoped to log onto the Stanford computer and try to send it some data.They would start by typing "login," and seeing if the letters appeared on the far-off monitor.

 "We set up a telephone connection between us and the guys at SRI...," Kleinrock ... said in an interview: "We typed the L and we asked on the phone,

"Do you see the L?" "Yes, we see the L," came the response. "We typed the O, and we asked, "Do you see the O." "Yes, we see the O." "Then we typed the G, and the system crashed"...

Yet a revolution had begun"...

Protocols

http - Internet

ftp

telnet

- Jargon for different ways that computers are connect to each other.

What is this?

<a href="http://www.lovely.com">click</a>

HTML Image link

<a href=" http://www.lovely.com"><img src=“house.jpg"></a>

Hypertext

An element in an electronic document that links to another place in the same document or to an entirely different document. Typically, you click on the hyperlink to follow the link. Hyperlinks are the most essential ingredient of all hypertext systems, including the World Wide Web

Hyperlink

Here is some string.

Try making some physical hyperlinks > 5min

How are these physical hyperlinks similar and different to internet hyperlinks ?

What can you connect and what can’t you ?

Data Visualisations

Information DesignerInformation Architects

Artists re-envisage the dataArtist Software

WebStalker - I/O/D - 1997

In 1997 the British group I/O/D (Matthew Fuller, Simon Pope, Colin Green) designed a very unusual Web browser called «WebStalker.» «WebStalker» is an alternative Web browser that does not display Web pages as commonly expected. It visualizes the underlying HTML code in a highly aesthetic manner, in which delicate lines erupt from central points on a map to form stars or connected nodes in a Web. Its appearance is almost dreamlike compared to commercial browsers such as Netscape and Explorer. «WebStalker» reveals the way a browser works, rather than actually working as a browser is supposed to (that is, visualize images and text from code). «It's designed to be predatory and boredom-intolerant,» says Matthew Fuller in an interview with Geert Lovink. «At the same time though, we hope that as a piece of speculative software it just encourages people to treat the Net as a space for re-invention…. The ‹WebStalker› establishes that there are other potential cultures of use for the Web.»

Such as other cultures of use than those designed for us by industry, cultures that give us the opportunity to create, exchange and interact freely with the machine, with other people and with other cultures online. In other words, cultures that would like to see the Internet be more of a public space. Fuller has continued his experiments with software cultures in other collaborations. He has, among other things, worked as a writer and theorist for Mongrel, and his work has been very influential in the development and recognition of software art. He is also involved as a critic and juror in «ReadMe» and «RunMe.»

On connecting to a URL, HTML appears to the user's computer as a stream of data. This data could be formatted for use in any of a wide variety of configurations. As a current, given mediation by some interpretative device, it could even be used as a flowing pattern to determine the behaviour of a device completely unrelated to its purpose.(1)

- Mathew Fuller

Lynx – Early Text only browser

Ambulator - Boris Müller - 1999

A web site and a page in a magazine may look pretty much the same, but they are not. The structure behind them is different. Form and content of a magazine are glued together through the process of printing. But on the web, form and content can easily be separated. Images can be detached from the text, text can be isolated from the layout.

Ambulator is an internet agent that makes use of these possibilities. It collects text and images from different web sites and creates a fluid, dynamic collage out of this web material.

After the user has specified a keyword, the ambulator searches the internet for web pages that are related to the keyword. It then takes a chunk of text from one page, an image from another and displays text and images on screen. So the ambulator creates a new context by bringing together text and images from different web sites. After a while, the screen is filled up with words and pictures.

Readme Festival

Readme Festivalhttp://readme.runme.org/

Ambulatorhttp://www.esono.com/boris/projects/ambulator/

The Browser is deadhttp://www.mediamatic.nl/magazine/9_4/altena_browser/altena_2gb.html