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 seaside
towns
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 Montages
Juxtaposition
Homework for next week:
Reading a Film Sequence
http://web.uvic.ca/geru/439/seq.html
The 'Grammar' of Television and Film
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/gr
amtv.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 selfcontained 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 Computing
The 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 Designer
Information Architects
Artists re-envisage the data
Artist 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 reinvention…. 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.
Readme Festival
Readme Festival
http://readme.runme.org/
Ambulator
http://www.esono.com/boris/projects/ambulator/
The Browser is dead
http://www.mediamatic.nl/magazine/9_4/altena_
browser/altena_2gb.html