Video Concept and Treatment

The above was a letter my Grandma, Isabel, received from Sister Joanna in Metamora Illinois, who received it from another Sister in Joliet, accepting Isabel to a convent for school, with a scholarship.  This is something Isabel saved for 80 years until her death.  It prompts the question, what would have happened if she had gone.  She could have gone, and returned, missing the opportunity to meet my Grandfather, married someone else entirely.  She could have gone and stayed, either way, my grandfather would have either been lonely or found someone else.

I want to focus on what was great about her life, her family, and her home, and what it might have been like had she become a nun. 

To do that, I have decided on a few places I would like to film.  I am going to be using a small room in one of the houses on the quad in order to depict a small dimly lit room that might exist in a convent, and possibly the Bjorklunden Chapel, or another church in order to film a possible “life altering moment scene”. 

Then I want to get images from my family, possibly film if there is any available/arrives in time and use that as an avenue for a walk down memory lane scene.  This would include traveling to a farm.

I want to keep it slightly surreal, as it would be a memory/what if moment, and I’ll need to focus on effects that would best depict that, especially depending on if I don’t get any video and have to preform with just pictures.  With this information my collaborators have already chosen some types of sound they would like to use.  Their ideas include "ambient sound, dream-like, slow/laid back feel, a varying frequency focusing on the mid-range, sound to complement the video and not stand out from it, and emotional"  These of course are mostly ideas and will better emerge when they are able to do more of it.

The working title is: The Letter that Could Have Changed Everything

InDesign Book Bio

Jessica Meismer-Russian Studies Major, 2012. I like apples (not really, I'm going to change this, but please post yours!!!)

Experience it for Yourself

Relational Aesthetics in the context of relational art is a very different concept from what a non-art student perceives as art.  When first given this project, I’ll be the first to admit I thought the concept was very non conventional and I didn’t really understand the point.  I think that is exactly the point.  As a non-art student, I didn’t really realize there was such a thing as relational art, or art where the audience participates, and a lot of that is taking away the stigma of “you can look, but you can’t touch”, of Mom putting my art up on the refrigerator to display, the creation of art that can’t be interacted with.  It took actually doing preformative photography as Iversen describes it in "Auto-maticity: Ruscha and Performative Photography" in order for me to finally get it.  Once out on assignment, I gained a much better understanding of Nicholas Bourriaud’s definition of relational aesthetics in his book Relational Aesthetics (1998). 

Relational art as Bourriaud defines it, is “A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.” (p113)  and relational aesthetics “Aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt.” (p112).  I would never have understood the pressures of the food desert if it weren’t for this assignment and I don’t think I ever really will unless I’m fully put into that situation, but for now I have gained a much better understanding of it.  That is the whole point of relational art, is that you have to experience it, which is why this whole process of documenting it seems a little odd to me.  I have created a video, which you can see in my previous post, but also a page layout for InDesign, as well as adding some of my photographs to my Flickr.  These will only serve as a phenomenal documentation for me of my journey out into the food desert, which in my opinion was an eye-opening journey.  It started with the chore of walking somewhere, anywhere (within the food desert of course), next came the looking and being aware of your surroundings for anything that might help you out, the despair of not really finding anything, and then it ended with having to walk back.  I wanted to document the journey, because it’s where I did most of my thinking.  The journey influenced the way I saw the food desert, which was mostly a lot of closed fast food places, office buildings, and places for rent, literally a desert in terms of resources available.  I was thinking of how obnoxious it was to be out in the cold, and how my head hurt and how I just wanted to go home and sleep, and worrying about price, and panicking when my first total came to $13 and some odd sense, and having to explain it to the cashier. 

You can’t get the point of this assignment, or what I was thinking, or my idea  of the food desert by looking at my pictures, or anyone’s pictures for that matter.  The only way you can do it is if you go out into the food desert (here’s the USDA’s map) with $10 and the objective of finding nutritious food, as much of it as you can find, then doing something with it so it doesn’t go to waste.  Accoring to Bourriard’s definitions, you probably won’t be able to fully understand the concept until you do. 

So all I ask, before you look at my pictures, or my video, if you haven’t already seen it, is that you take the $10 you were going to spend on food anyways, and go into the food desert, on foot.  Go experience the performance I tried and failed to completely capture (because it's a preformance that only happens once) for yourself, then look at my pictures.  Maybe then it will become clearer.  Comments and Discussion (even if it’s not with me) are highly encouraged.

My Flickr Food Desert Set

My Previous Post-with Video

Page 1 of my Indesign Layout in PDF form

$10 In A Food Desert

At first, being asked to wander out into the food desert and find healthy food and a lot of it, for only $10 was an incredibly daunting task.  I originally looked at the USDA's Food Desert Locator for downtown Appleton Wisconsin and felt as if finding healthy food would be an incredibly impossible task.  I volunteered to take the East half of College Avenue and surrounding areas and found very little.  Most of what I did find were big corporate business buildings, their parking spaces, places for rent, and closed restaurants (as we were planning to rendezvous at 11am).  One area where there was a decent amount of food was the city center.  They had a Deli, when at a glance, spending $10 on a pound of pasta salad seemed like a waste.  I later found out they had fresh produce, but it did take some looking in order to locate it.  This made me realize, shopping on a budget in a food desert quite obviously takes quite a bit of work and a willingness to work to find the perfect place.  Then the question you have to ask is, if you are below the poverty line and still have a job, when will you find time to search for budget food while you are probably working most of your day?

Because the Deli seemed to have expensive food, I went to Tropical Smoothie Café, where I knew due to their advertising I would at very least be finding healthy food.  They had a variety of options, all of which seemed incredibly healthy.  I was able to get food that I would have been able to survive on for a day.  I chose to share my food with the students in our class who were hungry after going out on a long search in the food desert as a reward.  Because there was food leftover I chose to share it with other students who mentioned they were hungry before they knew I intended to give people who mentioned they were hungry food.  It was a momentary reward, one that won’t last a while, as it would for anyone in the food desert.

I chose to make this video on the search for food and the reactions of hungry people upon eating it, yet overlay it with a narration, to impress upon viewers the realities of the food desert, without making it too depressing.

Aesthetics of a Book

In my many years of book reading I have become very accustomed to certain aesthetics of books.  I find that books without clutter are the most appealing.  If a page seems too full, it can ruin what is on the page, as well as throw off the tone for the entire book.  Particularly, looking at Deutsche Lichtbild, the 1936 publication, the white space around the text kept the text within the confines of the page, without looking too crowded, and the fact that it was also equivalent to that of the portrait landscaped photographs made it very pleasing to look at the pictures.  The pictures also included the artists name and a title of the photograph if there was one.
     Personally I have never been fond of blank pages at the beginning and end of a book.  This book was rebound, so it had many more blank pages than it should have, however, the original pages had a single blank page at the beginning and not one at the end (as far as I could tell the back end of the book was damaged, so it is possible there were more blank pages at the back).  Because this book was rebound, the cover is a simple blue hardcover, with a tidy arrangement of pages.    This book was written in German, so it was very hard to determine exactly what it was, until I reached the end, which was a written description in English of the book.  It could have been put at the beginning, but it would have thrown off the pleasing aesthetic qualities that the beginning of the book possesses.  Preceding the description was a ton of ads and information about photography, that came after the pictures as it should have. 
    Overall the book had a nice layout and I have found the simpler the better.  There is nothing wrong with a long book as long as it isn't crowded, as it is easier to go through a lot of material when it is simple.

Journey Towards Organization

Cathy Cook
Photo Courtsey of http://www.woodlandpattern.org/niedecker/presenters.shtml#cook

Cathy Cook, a very talented filmmaker took time to visit out class and share with us her experience with creating film.  Her inspirations for each piece she showed us struck me as intriguing.  She started several films off of an idea, from a poem, or visual that intrigued her and found or created the rest of the video to go with it.  Particularly her film Fire, where she took the images of a fire and built from there.  Originally as she was explaining this to us, it struck me as abnormal.  Why would you focus on one little thing to get the ball rolling?  Then I realized that often a small idea is generally what people use to get started, but they just tend to have applicable objects, images, or subjects readily available that they want to use.  This method, for me, often just creates a mass of information that isn’t always clear.  The advice Cook provided us with about using lists really hit me as something I should do in order to become more organized.  It is a technique that can help set out ideas in front of a person, as well as lead to a storyboard. 

Storyboard Template
Courtesy of: http://www.the-flying-animator.com/storyboard-template.html

Although a storyboard seems unneeded for something so small, many commercials use them (just a few are shown on this site Cathy showed us).  Storyboards are good way of showing other collaborators how shots are set up, or even composers what is going on, before you have film, in order to create film or an idea.  This is incredibly efficient and seems as if it can create something a lot more meaningful without the added hassle or chaos.  The tips Cook provided us promise to be very useful in creating a work, but also promise to be helpful for receiving funding for anything (even non art related) that I might choose to pursue in the future.  Thank you Cathy!

Gilardi's Hidden Images

    Deb Brehmer's lecture on Bernard Gilardi's paintings and her experience with them was a very unique experience.  She was able to view all of his works, his notes, and everything, in good condition, and really get the feel for the artists vision from one area without having to search as widely for her resources.  It is wonderful that she was also able to get a lot of the information (practically most of it) that went along with the art. This was an incredibly unique opportunity because it allowed her to influence the way in which Gilardi's work would be shared with the public without any preconceived ideas. Her experience really allowed people to see that anyone can become an artist if they work at it.
    Gilardi had very intriguing aspects to his paintings of a sort of religious fantasy and little things about his life.  It really shows how adding small aspects of your own life or some symbolism can really add meaning to the work of art you are creating and the idea you are trying to get across.  Speaking with Brehmer about this along with a few other artists, we agreed that Gilardi must have been very well versed in many things and that he had done his research on the things he added to his painting.  His addition of some elements show it is possible and perhaps easy to frame elements of the real world, but it seems they all will have bias.  They will be influenced by the way the artist shows them, which seems as if it no longer makes it part of the real world, but part of the artist's world.  One of my favorite examples of hidden "real world" images in art are the "Easter Eggs" hidden in Disney films which seem to be making up for the earlier controversial "inappropriate for children" images that appeared in earlier films.  The "Easter Egg" images have had a lot of thought put into them.  In truth, the art is really shaped by what you see when you observe it.

This is A timed Test

This is A timed Test