Manipulating Artistry
Media Editing Final Paper
By Rachel Yaworski
May 7, 2013
The presence of media in our society today can be quite overwhelming. It’s
everywhere you go. Everywhere you look, you will find yourself looking at
television, newspapers, YouTube videos and visual art. It’s very difficult to get
through your day without hearing references to Facebook, tumblr, pinterest, Google,
or twitter. We live in a very connected and creative time in world history, and our
ability to edit media has become in and of itself a form of art. Through my own
experiences in and out of this course, I have found that media editing can be defined
as the manipulation of media in artistic form, and it is also a practice of personal
creative expression.
Media editing has certainly become more evident in today’s world, and is
much easier for the average person to have access to the tools needed to do it. For
example, tools such as Photoshop or iMovie are available to the general public and
can be learned relatively quickly. This was not true fifty years ago. However, that
does not mean that media editing is a new concept. On the contrary, media editing
is a very old concept that has been used throughout history. One only needs to look
back as far as the 1940’s. In World War II, propaganda was one of the most
powerful tools used to manipulate moral. Whether it was to encourage the folks in
the homeland to buy war bonds (http://www.retronaut.com/2013/01/buy-warbonds-posters/), or to encourage the citizens of England who were living through
the blitz to “Keep Calm and Carry On”
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gallery/2009/mar/17/keep-calm-carryon-pictures), governments used posters, commercials and movies to spread their
agenda far and wide. This was not a tactic used solely by the allies either; the Nazi’s
were quite well known for their propaganda as well. If one were to go back even
further in history, media editing can be seen as far back as ancient Greece, Rome and
Egypt. Whether it was paintings, frescos, or ancient statues, these works of art were
forms of expression used to convey messages the same way that a person’s cover
page on their Facebook page does (although it is usually much easier to identify the
embedded message within a cover photo than an ancient statue would).
The most important aspects of artistic creations are the way they are
presented. This is indeed where the ‘editing’ part of ‘media editing’ comes into play.
A statue of a saint, a painting of a soldier, or a mighty Pharaoh’s tomb doesn’t
inherently spread a message of it’s own, but it is the way they are presented and, in
turn, perceived by the public that creates the message an artist is trying to make. A
small statue of a saint in the corner of a room does not make the same statement as
a gleaming white, larger-than-life-size statue placed on the roof of St. Peter’s Basilica
in Vatican City does (see below).
A painting of a soldier can be made ten times more effective in conveying a message
if the soldier is young looking, handsome, and the colors used are patriotic
(http://thenewzealandjournal.blogspot.com/2010/05/salute-soldier-back-attackworld-war-ii.html) An enormous pyramid that houses and immortalizes the remains
of an ancient Pharaoh reminds us of important political leaders of the past.
Alternately, even if there has been no editing done to an image, the way it is
presented can completely change the way it is perceived by someone. For example,
the Kuleshov Effect is a concept based on a video edited by Lev Kuleshov. It is a
simple video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gGl3LJ7vHc) that shows a man’s
face intercut with footage of a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin and a pretty woman
lying on a couch. The footage of the man’s face is the same image repeated through
out the video, yet a number of people whom viewed the video believed that the
man’s expression changed after seeing each of the other images. That is the power
of Media Editing. Nothing had changed except for the way the film was edited, and
therefore the way it was perceived was completely different. A more current
example of media editing in our everyday world could be a look at an issue of Time
magazine. After famous football player O.J Simpson was arrested on the charge of
murdering his ex-wife and her lover, his mug shot appeared on the cover of Time
Magazine with a caption reading “An American Tragedy”
(http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19940627,00.html). The mug shot on
the cover had been altered from the original to make Simpson’s skin look darker and
(one can assume) more intimidating. The media was edited for the personal gain of
the editors of the magazine. Political agendas are easily inserted into the images we
see in our everyday life. These kinds of things are what make media editing such a
powerful tool.
In my own work, I used the assignments given to present my own artistic
creativity and vision, rather than push any political agendas I may or may not have.
For example, I created a video montage based on the word ‘Beauty’
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8Y4tXh2IGs). I used a musical piece that I
love and placed it behind footage of places I have travelled to give my own
interpretation of what I think is beautiful. The footage in the hands of someone else
could have been presented in a much different way; however, this was the way I
chose to artistically express my thoughts and feelings about the subject. Another
example of my own work was the assignment where we had to use two different
songs and create a mash-up (https://soundcloud.com/rippen_rayray/2013spyaworski-mashup). I used two songs by Florence and the Machine. Both songs I
used have personal meaning to me, so I decided to mix them together. The way the
music is then perceived by a listener can be very different from what the original
artist had perhaps intended, but I have taken her work and used it to represent my
own feelings and memories of when and where I was when listening to these songs.
I truly think that the beauty of media editing lies in one’s own creative
expression, and that a person’s work can be observed in many different ways to
many different people. It is a form of artistry and creative expression. It affects the
way we think and feel about things. It can make us laugh, and it can make us cry. It
can stir feelings of patriotism, or feelings of hatred. The way we edit media can
express our political views, or even just state a simple opinion about what we find
beautiful in the world. It connects us all to each other, whether it is through our
edited profiles on our Facebook pages, or simply admiring a work of art made
hundreds of years ago. Media editing is a form of art and expression. It is the way
we tell our stories and can determine how future generations will see how we lived
our lives, and what was important to us. Media editing is how we perceive the
world, and how we would like to share our values and ideals with others. Most
importantly, I find that media editing is more than just manipulation, but the
preservation of our artistry and a way to share our creativity with the world.