Amanda Esposito's Response on Vertov/Brakhage

I agree that with Dziga Vertov when he is telling us to use cameras in different ways.  Ever single image is a different perspective on an object. Since the loss of innocence we are taught to view the world in the same way as everyone else. Suppose a class is suppose to take a picture of a chair. Everyone in the class will have similar pictures, because that is how we are taught to look at a chair. A chair is just a chair. We accept this without questions. A chair is just a chair by name and that its use is for sitting. We do not think to ourselves what could that chair could be. We rarely challenge what we are told, but how are to we know what is the truth or not if we have never seen it. Like it would be interesting to see what humans would come up with if we weren’t all taught the same things. This creates a bias vision of the world and we are all taught to look at the world in the same lenses. Like how in the article Brakhage says “How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of “Green”?” I feel like this innocence is rarely or never captured on film. It would be interesting to use cinema to challenge this bias view of the world and to show things in uses that are accepted as. 

Dziga Vertov's "Kino-Eye" gave me flashbacks to the Futurist Manifesto in both its language and its philosophy. I highly doubt that this was unintentional. One particular sentence that struck me as something straight from a futurist writer was "How can one not admire the automobile?" which today also strikes me as an extremely outdated sentiment. Humans have become able to coexist along analog devices for so long that we are no longer fascinated with them and that's honestly sad. We need to keep pushing forward and keep being fascinated. I really liked the idea that Vertov put forth that we are not going far enough with cameras. To attempt to replicate the human eye is stopping ourselves short. We need to figure out what the camera can do that the eye can't and push it beyond what we can even imagine. The camera's function is not to imitate reality but to enhance it.

I enjoyed the Brakhage reading but felt like it went a little bit over my head. It was talking about media and sex and love and I feel like those are very interesting and poignant connections but I wasn't given enough context or detail in the short reading.

Jessica Reply to Vertov

SOOOOO, am I correct in thinking that this article is basically a philosophical comparison of the human eye and the "eye" of a camera? The wording is very visceral, almost to the count of losing context. I've once again missed the purpose of the article. I'm confuse about what the writer is trying to convey.

http://www.elitereaders.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/confused-cat.gif

Raymond's Response (Vertov & Brakhage)

I found Dziga Vertov's article to be quite interesting.  I love how he explained the kino-eye and how sometimes technology is becoming better than our natural senses.  Think about an insect for example.. we cant possible zoom in and look closely at the detail and inspect the life of something so small. However, camera lenses are able to zoom in and see what we are unable to see without disturbing the natural habitat. For that, I can appreciate the technology. The camera also has the ability to show us things from multiple angles, faster than we could naturally.

I liked the article and loved his take on how mankind has essentially perfected God's work.

I also liked Brakhage, I have always been fascinated with how the mind works and the visions we keep in our memory. So even in dreams we see things, though our eyes are closed.

Amanda Esposito's Response to "The Life and Death of Media"

As a student studying creative computation, this article really made me think about how my art will one day be obsolete. As technology progresses, we become accustomed and expect a higher standard that we impose on media and art. For example, many video games back in the day were considered so cutting edge and were great at the time, but they cannot hold up to the current standard of what we expect from video games of today. All the work that went into making those game is no longer valued, because no one plays those games anymore. Some games are still popular today even with the poor graphics, but many of them are lost. New consoles are always coming out whether we like it or not; Technology is moving faster than us.  Even though technology is evolving, many people still appreciate the old. Not everything is "dead" because many people still have old consoles and play the old games, but many are forgotten and left behind. Many of these old games are deemed to be classics and stick out among the endless sea of growing media. 

This can also be applied to films and music as well. When I tried to introduce my little sisters to the original Star Wars trilogy, they talked about how dated it looked. Even when we switched from VHS to DVD, many movies that were on the VHS never made it to DVD. Now as DVDs and CDs die out there is not many forms left of physical media. Some people collect it, but the main market for physical media is dying out. There is more media out there than we can ever process in our lifetime. Some of the media has to die for others to get their time in the spotlight, but that is just the way of life. As these old forms die out they still shape the media today and live on through them. Just like how individuals will die and be forgotten in at most five generations; the same goes for media. These deaths are not in vain; they shape the future. 

Zach Biehl's Vertov/Brakhage response

I found both of these articles interesting, but were just a hair off-target for me. It is not the eye itself that is so biased towards out societal preferences, but the viewer's perspective and preconceptions of what film as a medium can be. Viewers interested in forward-thinking work are not bothered by departures from the depiction of real life as viewed from a single human lens; I for one am eager for any kind of distortion/departure from the norm in terms of the image presented. However, for the time it was published I'm certain this conception was not held by many. Vertov's final assertions to cease psychological/detective drama, theatre productions, Dostoyevsky/Nat Pinkerton, and the concept of the "newsreel" is a bit short sighted as well. Unfortunately, the majority of the film world is concerned with making money, and while people are still so fascinated by these topics/productions, they will be produced forever. A commercial world will always tower over the avant garde. Brakhage seemed to have a more matured grasp on essentially the same concept. His comment that "you are not only influenced by the visual phenomenon which you are focused upon and attempt to sound the depths of all visual influence," really resonated with me, because I've always observed other students' as well as my own choreography being directly influenced by whatever work it is that we're performing at the time. Imitation is not only deliberate but subconscious at its core, as our pattern-centric brains grab onto anything they can categorize.

Ultimately, I enjoyed the thoughts provoked by the articles (Brakhage especially), but Vertov was a bit too literal with his approach to his piece.

A response and a rejection.

I found Vertov's piece particularly interesting. He speaks of how the camera and the human eye tell the same story completely differently. I have often in projects or even in just taking some pictures found it annoying when I cannot get it to look like what I'm seeing with my own eyes. Vertov makes me think about that more. It does not always have o be a hindrance. The fact that we can "endlessly perfect the camera" is an asset, and it can also open our mind to approaching a subject in a new perspective that cannot be captured by live viewing with our own eyes. This ability makes creative filmmakers and photographers "builders," not just recorders or imitators. As with most of these creative quasi-manifestos, I found Vertov arrogant. His claim to "create a man more perfect than Adam" and overall pride in being kino-eye is offputting to me, and like most of these manifestos, it makes me discount it somewhat. But unlike most, I think he has some real substance.
And on the other end of the "BS Spectrum" for me is Stan Brakhage's writing. Filled with convoluted and yet somehow still vague prose, I find it hard to take his idea seriously. I frankly found it needlessly complicated and hard to follow. It reminded me of the video we watched after discussing the futurist manifesto. It was about 10 minutes long and featured the human filled with electronics and the computerized voice. It rejects massive figure and projects some sort of new world society with little more reasoning than someone thinking they know better without any attempt at proof. I find these pieces are overly convoluted and full of jargon just to make them sound smarter than the reader. All it does for me is make me think they don't have an argument whatsoever.

Daniel Shteremberg's Response to Kino-eye and Metaphors

I really enjoyed these readings specifically Kino-eye. I thought it was well written and its arguments were strong, I also heavily agree that we need to use cameras in more creative ways than we normally do. That being said through this article was written in 1923 and we have definitely made improvements on our camera work partly because of new tech like go pros and drones but also because cameras have grown smaller and better thus allowing us to create really cool shots that are vastly different than what Dziga Vertov would've ever seen in his life time. Another thing he mentions is the editing of film together to create something new and that is something we have started to apply as well since the writing of this article going so far as to put characters like Forrest Gump into actual historical events that were filmed. I think he would love the progress that we have made on that front but would still want more to come out in main stream cinema instead of the art house scene that it does now.

Metaphors was an article i didn't really understand but I loved some of the questions he posed like how does a child know what green is without ever learning what it is. With that said however i didn't get a lot of it as i don't really understand the point he is trying to make however I did love the language that he uses to describe this medium.

David Arias Response to Vertog and Brakhage

It was about two years ago that I first saw "Man With A Movie Camera". What Vertog was trying to achieve might not seem like much today but back in the day it was completely revolutionary because it changed the perception of what Cinema could be. For Vertog, truth was in fact stranger and more interesting than fiction. "Cinema Verite" made famous by the Maysles brothers is completely influenced by the work of kinoks.

Brakhage on the other hand is more experimental, at least from the films that I have seen.In  "Mothlight" he showed us insects and plants to create truly mystic imagery. I agree with him in that artists are obsessed with death and the search of God. God being salvation and not a mystical being on itself. The best art, or the one that gets to me the most, is melancholic in nature. Brakhage presents us with this melancholy in his work.

Paige's Response

I found in reading the article by Stan Brakhage that I found myself wishing to have this eye "unruled by man made laws." The thought of having the ability to see things unobjectively and through an untainted vision is something that is actually quite stimulating to think about. Everything we see, we identify right away or search for an answer that can help us identify to the best of our ability. The "Metaphor on Vision" is actually something that I can really relate to and want to learn more about in the sense that from birth we are constantly being told to grow up and to start to drastically remove our creativity and desire to explore, we begin to settle for what we have been told, and as a culture that becomes dangerous for our souls.

In the article by Dziga Vertov I wasn't as emotionally charged when reading it. The idea of a kino-eye or that film has the ability to see things in an unfiltered sense I found to be exciting but also somewhat contradicting. Isn't the filmographer looking through a filtered sense of objectivity? How can it be so pure? I found this article to be intriguing in the sense of learning about something I had no knowledge of in the past but I also felt like it didn't really strike any cords with me in the way that the reading by Stan Brakhage did.

Ken's response on metaphors and kino-eye.

I have no idea what is going in the metaphors on vision article. I thought I did, but I don’t. First paragraph is was easy to understand but then it gets weird. I think I know what its trying to say but then I’m unsure. I understand it would be cool to experience everything visually without the knowledge knowing what the object or light is. But then goes into death and sexual things. Which is like a "wait what" moment. So weird, artists are so weird. 

I did enjoy the kino-eye article. I like how it references camera technology and how we were developing cameras to mimic the eye. It wasn’t until we used the camera as a “superior eye” to create images and ideas of things our eyes normally doesn’t see. The kino-eye can take us to places we would have never imagined of going. It makes me wonder what visual aspect or new emotions I can create with my camera. I’m not very good with montages and think it would be a cool area to explore. With my current project plans, I don’t know how I would be able to explore a montage with what I am trying to achieve. We shall see how it goes.

Overall, pretty cool article, its lit.

Candi's Response to Kino Eye by Dziga Vertov and Stan Brakhage's Metaphors on Vision

I think it was really insightful to see vision as slowly losing innocence in Metaphors on Vision. Visual communication is important and is definitely different than language though it shares some similarities. Sometimes vision does cause people to ignore other realms of perceptions and blind people to the external reality. Motion pictures and the act of showing things through sight creates a new world not just a new language.

In Dziga Vertov’s work I think it was interesting to see the camera as a kino eye. When you watch a film you see the direction and the focus of what the director wants you to see but in reality you can chose what to look at. The shot has a focus but unlike literature you choose how to interpret the image given and what the image exactly is. And unlike theater, the camera choses which part of the scene you must look at. It takes the audience out of the perspective of the spectator and allows the director to make the viewer see the action as a person participating in the action. Since cameras are constantly changing we can portray things better at each point.

When you look at it the great film makers usually are building things with the image and spaces that are shown. I really appreciate the comparison of filmmakers to Creators. When I see something that was made well it is like seeing a newly built world. 

Candi's Response to Death of Media

Bruce Sterling’s ideas at the beginning of Death of Media really connected to me. I believe media helps people define social interactions and connects people with knowledge that people have agreed on. Media evolves with time and even though money can affect which form of media gets endorsed; popularity and user ability is still most important.

If you look at the development of cinema yes, sound was experimented with earlier and failed to be implemented. But it’s because these developments weren’t the best for the direction film wanted to go. With the computers, we don’t just leave and give up on certain computers because the names aren’t as pretty as new ones but because newer computers are more updated and work better. Looking specifically at the iPhone, it’s evident that the iPhone has killed some of its smart phone competitors by better financing despite not having as many abilities as other phones. But the phone did lose customers by refusing to enlarge, not being water proof, and also other technical issues. This didn’t allow people the iPhone to just take over but the competitors to create a type of media that doesn’t have the iPhone’s problems as well as making people have a different choice.

As a communication major, I learned that communication is constantly changing so of course the way that we choose to communicate has to change as well. Media does die and maybe other media helps speed along the death but it may just be the fate of each media source.

Life & Death of Media - Raymond Valencia

The Life & Death of Media by Bruce Sterling got me thinking about just how quickly media evolves and how much some media is taken for granted.  Earlier in the semester we put together contact mics, and as I read this article I remembered how tedious the process was, but had an appreciation that at some point someone out there had to figure all this out in order to have the media we have today.

Though at times it does seem like technology is evolving and media is getting stronger and stronger - as the article says, outliving the creator; I feel like with popularity of vinyl right now - there can be an appreciation for old forms of media.

As an Advertising minor, I know how important it is to stay on top of the upcoming trends in media - but I always feel that because I am older than the traditional college student, that I have an upper hand in appreciating my knowledge of both the old and knowledge of the new types of media.

Paige's Response

I found this reading to be very understandable and somewhat easy to grasp. I have been very interested in the thin line of media in the past and figuring out what makes something promotable and what makes it a dud. The section of this reading where is lists all the lines of what media is was very eye opening for me. It showed how heavily we are impacted by this overarching idea and theme of commercial consciousness.

The idea that Sterling brings up called media forensics was very intriguing to me. I would be very interested in delving deeper into that idea and really figuring out what it entails. Media is such a powerful tool, but it can also be an incredibly destructive tool and I am curious to learn what the separation between those two extremes usually is.

Media and culture have gone hand in hand for centuries. The idea that Sterling brings up about our currency being a medium is something that I have found to be a fabulous idea. Bringing things back to the older days of a barter system in which your skills and your talents become your ability to provide for yourself and thrive. That is what media should be, it shouldn't be a burden or a divider but it should unify and encourage.

Media Eclipse

I know that Intro to Hybrid Media is technically an art class, but Bruce Sterling's The Life and Death of Media resonated with my Creative Computing self. The ideas presented in it were very interesting, but not so much that I would like to apply them to my artwork. I have always thought artwork about technology is a little bit gimmicky; rather, I like to see technology as a medium for furthering other ideas. To me making art about technology is like making art about painting. It's kind of boring.

Now here's where my brain went shortly after reading The Life and Death of Media. Have you ever met someone over 70 who is better with technology than you are? The answer is almost certainly "no." My grandma needs help just sending a text message. But do you think that your grandma was born technologically inept? I think that the biggest lesson I got out of Sterling's essay is that my future Creative Computing BA is kind of useless. Imagine if each generation of humans was ten times more powerful than the last. That's basically how technology evolves. It's ironic how even though we propagate technology it eclipses us so quickly.

Daniel Shteremberg's Reading Response "The Life and Death of Media"

            Bruce Sterling has an interesting concept of what it means to kill a medium. For him killing a medium is a simple as moving on to something better, stronger, faster, and more portable but I believe that this is evolution not death. Evolution is a necessity in the world which without we wouldn’t be here creating art we would most like be outside trying to survive. The reason we can create art is because we have evolved into a species that can spend our days creating and not having to worry about survival as much. The evolution in medium isn’t necessarily about survival but more about helping us get work and art done faster and better. Think about it as the evolution of painting techniques going all the way back to simple cave paintings that tell the stories of the artist to today’s photorealism and abstract drawings which have gotten better as time goes on. Does that mean that cave drawings are a dead medium just because we evolved into something better and more impressive?

            He mentions the evolution of cinema as death vacuum of media specifically calling Edison’s Kinetoscope which didn’t die because of what he says is contingency, it died because it obviously impractical. In order to fill any set Edison’s production company had to move the entire set instead of the camera because it was so massive that it was obvious that a lighter more portable option like the Lumiere brothers would beat it in competition. Another example he gives is the Incan records, which I will admit didn’t die because of it being inferior but instead died because the people using it weren’t as advanced as the invading forces. However, he mentions a lot of examples of what it was used for yet also mentions that no one can read them now, which makes me question how he knows what they were used for. Somehow he plays them as better than books and that might have been the case but it seems as though it is the same just with a different delivery of it, which no longer makes it dead but rather a pre-evolved form.

Lastly he talks about all the dead computers, mainframes, and operating systems that we have created and thusly killed, which again wasn’t death but evolution. In order for evolution to work there must be a lot of failures beforehand but that doesn’t mean it’s dead but just moved on to something better or something we think will be better, like the Apple Lisa which paved the way for the GUI operating systems we have today. Also unlike species evolution with media when it evolves it doesn’t mean its unusable artist go back to the pre-evolved version of media all the time in order to create new pieces and enthusiast love getting those “dead” media.

Jessica"s response to "Life and death of media"

Overall, This reading kept me thinking "tell me something I don't know. Yes, we continue to think we are at the peak of our technological advancement built upon the bones of our predecessors. the only constant is the stream of information that rushes forward into the future for the next generation to devour.

That has always been true about media and information. I think the biggest change is the rate at which it's taking place. But I don't understand the tries the writer tries to make with art. This article seemed to be more of an analysis of history than a commentary on art in the world. It's possible I could have missed something.

The flow and destruction of media did remind me of this video. The theme in this video takes a wider view and take a more philosophical approach but some of the images poignantly show the fleeting mortality of our machines.

https://youtu.be/YMDu3JdQ8Ow

Zach's Response to "The Life and Death of Media"

I found Sterling's article to be interesting, but there were a few things within that bothered me. The writer had a bit of an interesting tone throughout the paper, which, while I'm sure the incentive was to establish suspense in some way, I was ultimately annoyed by it. Sterling takes an overtly tragic tone when discussing the ephemeral nature of technology-driven media - he treats these cast-aside machines as forgotten children rather than examining and appreciating what they were: tools. Every iteration of the typewriter was to ease the recording of text, and since word processors now exist on computers with printers to accompany, their utility is obsolete.

As a dancer/choreographer, I work with a medium that may be the most ephemeral of all: human movement through space. Dance exists in the space it occurs, for the duration it lasts, and ends. While videos and written accounts may exist, they are both sorely lacking in terms of capturing the true kinesthetic value of a live experience. If we are to accord with Sterling, however, dance must too be susceptible to a release from the world of living media. The movement of the body may exist as art and/or entertainment in nearly every society worldwide today, but who's to say we won't one day be immobile creatures with metal carapaces?

The section of the article that gave me a pleasant surprise was the bit about the quipus. The idea of a media that can handle nearly every aspect of life is a entrepreneurial dream. The iPhone is getting there but it isn't nearly as shock-proof. The author also goes on recognizing how short-lived the modern day computer is, but then questions the rush when pushing the media forward. The hurry is directly due to the knowledge and acceptance of its inevitable death.

The article was thought-provoking. However, perhaps due to it being a few years old of just the particular writer's voice, it felt very self-indulgent in many of the assertions. Where the author got to by the end wasn't wrong or radical by any means, just the way he got there was a bit convoluted and felt a tad to much like"reaching" for me.

Ken's response to The Life and Death of Media

The life and death of media was an interesting read but nothing too eye opening for me. It was a bit dramatic for me. Although I can see where this realization would be a new thought at the time it was written. The first page of the article was confusing for me but the more I read on, the more I understood the points. I would have to agree that media is a commodity and so much more. Its something that we interact with every day of our lives. It is also something that will eventually die out. It took a bit of thought, but I have to agree with the point that that media lives and dies and it’s a normal occurrence. Such as the Incan quipus, it was something that was so fundamental at the time but now its something that is completely obsolete. It makes me think about social media and what will eventually die out and be replaced with something new. As in, myspace was something that was huge but its just a memory. Overall, what I got from this read, is that technology changes constantly. Media is a medium that also changes with time, it is a change that we can date back to early civilizations. Media is in a way, interwoven with technology and lives and dies with it. There will always be something new and “better” in technology which drives the life space of media. As artist, we can not invest heavily in one technological medium because it will limit us when the medium dies out. We must be pliable and react to change in media and technology. Which is something I already knew, its something most of us know. Hence why we are in digital hybrid media.