Nagy vs. Me vs. Cunningham

Jenene Nagy's work here at the fine arts building. 

Merce Cunningham's perspective, with interest on the viewer/audience

The way I looked at the art work. My interest on size and depth.

Not on task but at least I'm productive

So while sitting class listening to an art lecture, I got a little distracted and started looking at people's artwork on several of my favorite image dump sites. I ended up jumping from site to site and eventually stumbled on Los Angelos's Museum of  Contemporary art website (URL: http://www.moca.org/). Being a begginer web designer I couldn't help but take some time to look at the nice layout of the web page. It is so simple and clean, the strong header/navigator bar that makes navigating the page very easy. The content is broken down into three columns that break up pictures of current artwork being displayed, a middle passage, and outside links.

What really struck me was its simple and effective color scheme. It uses dramatic darks and lights to keep a clean look but draws the viewers eyes to links by giving them bright colors. A very sensible and well utilized color scheme.  I personally have trouble coming up with cohesive color schemes so I thought as a practice I could literally draw out the exact colors that the MOCA site uses.
To accomplish this I took a quick screen shot of my browser while navigating the home page, I then opened the image with Adobe Photoshop and pulled the exact colors from the sight. I used these colors to recreated the colors in a square to build a miniature color scheme block that have the same proportions to one another of use as the site. This lets me get a obvious feel for how each vector of color interacts with one another. I feel like if I use this same technique to develop color schemes for my future sites It might make my sites more cohesive.

Practice Jam Session

The set up for the performance

Our band Pine Box Derby is preforming September 16th in the fine arts building at 2:07pm. Yesterday we had, what I would like to call a rough draft/practice/jam session. In a two and a half hour period we figured out the arrangement of our noise machines and also all the noises we plan on making for the performance. We laid out the map of what noises we will make on a large sheet of music, almost like a sheet music of sorts. The sheet music will be what we use to know what noise we will be making and after what noise or action we are supposed to do it after.

Working on the sheet music

Since there is no real set way to arrange the order of the sounds. We decided to do our own choreographed way of getting started. To begin, we wanted to hear exactly what noises each of our machines, we wrote down what we thought it sounded like; ex: WAAAAHWAAAAAAHH, or Scraaaaaaaaaa. The more sounds we listened to the harder it was to describe the sound, our way of describing the noise slowly evolved into a description of what we thought the noise sounded like; ex: stacking bricks, or coin slots. After all the noises were recorded onto our sheet music we listed out the noises in a order that we thought flowed. We played through the "sheet music" a couple times making minor tweeks to the original plan.

Merce Cunningham's choreography rough draft

After I stepped back and looked at our work with the sheet music I couldn't help but notice its chaotic-ness. Anyone outside of my our class might look at this and think nothing of it, but to us, we see our detailed plan for our performance. I also can't help but draw parallels to Merce Cunningham's choreography rough drafts for his Ocean performance. To most people outside of Cunningham's school and close friends might not even know what to make of the chicken scratch on the paper. I really feel like I was able to experience, at least some what, of his process of choreographing a dance.

working on my sample site

worked on a sample website this weekend it was a little frustrating working out the kinks but I feel it made a decent sample page.

I do doggy hair cuts too

Before

After

Lifes a dance

Little fish reminds us that we can all dance to our own beat.

Hair cutting

Today was hair cut day for my house. Luckily, I recently started cutting hair and have developed par level cutting skills. I'm not a super skilled hair stylist but I will say I can cut a mean fade. It's been a hard to get good but its a nice way to express a bit of creativity in some ways. I know that fiscally it has been a good call, I imagine it's also been a nice skill to have for all my roommates.
I feel that cutting hair reflects the type of art that I like to make as, which might explain what I enjoy it so much. When looking at the final product of some of my art I really enjoy when its nice and clean looks, similar to a fresh hair cut.  

what is dance?

I was thinking about Merce Cunningham today. I was mostly thinking about what exactly "dance" is. When I google searched it, I got a definition of "an artistic form of nonverbal communication". That is incredibly vague. Much like the term art, it can be extremely difficult to define. In a sense we could say that the simple act of walking. When I try to picture how Cunningham looks at dance, I imagine he might look at it as if it is a form of representing the world around him. Many of his dances that I have seen do this for example beach birds and ocean both portray the way mother nature acts.
The way I look at dancing as movement but always in effect with gravity. We make movements in respects to gravity, we jump and come back down due to gravity. We go on the point of our toe against gravity. We are constantly struggling with gravity and dance is a somewhat more graceful way of doing so.  Partly because I am in a astronomy class this semester, I have been interested in dancing in space with zero gravity, how would that effect the movements and performances. The lack of gravity would change the whole way we look at dancing and would create a whole new styles and forms of dancing.

Long days

Today has been one of those days. Having a large block of classes then work just wears me out and I get home and want to sleep. In my few moments that I dozed off into a day dream I was able to think of some cool potential digital graphic projects.
The main reason I have been thinking so much about digital graphics is because I really need to strengthen my portfolio so I can actually acquire a internship for my Digital Technology and Culture major. It's not that I don't have the skills to get into a marketing/advertisement, it is mostly the fact that when I show them the work I have created they aren't impressed because it's not the right type of art. Instead of having a lot of font/text based art I have a lot of pure images that advertisers may not find interesting. What I am trying to say is that I need to strengthen my portfolio.
My ideas were to continue with a theme of creating a hand drawn image like this project I did for DTC 354 HERE, but to take more of a advertisement approach with it by making a mock NIKE advertisement with text reading something to the extent of: "setting a trends since (what ever date)".
I also want to make a few mock event posters, such that would most likely be seen at the cub advertising an upcoming event. This could be any event really; a dance, dinner, a fight night, a movie, or anything what so ever.

How to choreograph

I took these screen shots from a interview with Cunningham and slightly sparked my interest on how you would go about creating a dance. Also is Cunningham's methods different from every other choreographer. Another interesting thing that the video brought up was the fact that Cunningham enjoyed using technology. I want to dive a bit deeper into his notes and the process of making a performance.

Ocean

Oceans, 2008 Minnesota

In Cunningham's later years he wanted to create a dynamic experience for the viewer. Hoping to collaborate on a piece with John cage that would really bring the audience into a whole new experience. The idea was proposed by John Cage years before the actual piece was created, unfortunately Cage passed away and hope was some what lost for the event. Luckily one of Cage's assistants stored all of the plans and scores that he had intended on using for the event. I find this aspect of this dance piece to be interesting because in a sense they were preforming a similar project to what I am doing in my FA 350 class by doing a imaginary collaboration with a artist.
The really defining aspect to this dance is the set up. Cunningham's and Cage's vision was to give the viewer an amazing experience by placing a circular stage, surrounding it with the audience, and then placing musicians around the audience.
This idea seems so complex and shows me the true genius of his work. Cunningham accomplishes two things:
1.Give the audience a show 360 degrees around the stage. On traditional stages there is always a front, back, left, and right. Creating a 90 minute dance routine with these settings is simply amazing, having to think of what his choreography will look like from each perspective.
2.Allows the viewer to have a full experience. I imagine being at this event would be similar to watching a basketball game from on the court; you can hear it all around you, you can also see from different angles.

I noticed while watching the beach birds dance video that the black portions of the leotards make interesting shapes. I layered a few of the images and came up with this cool shape. Maybe I could use this formation in the future

Noise Maker

 

We have been working on a machine that makes noise. Most of the parts came from a old dismantlemed display box that my instructor found in the Fine Arts building.

I know it's not very ascetically appealing,  but it makes some interesting noise. I like to think it's a type of drum/piano hybrid. Although very primitive, it has hammers that strike cord like objects causing them to vibrate, similar to a piano. Each of the three notes can be hit separately or all at the same time. The percussion aspect, as you can see, is simply me striking different areas of the machine. 

We have got a few more days to complete the project so I won't be making very many changes before we have our performance