Scary Hall Complete!

Finally done with my scary hall.

"Medvetslosa Atanke"

This piece is a collage of some of my drawings in many of the notebooks I used for the last few years. They represent my dreams, nightmares, and oddities of my imagination. There are a few even that I don't recall drawing, as if my subconscious dictated what was being depicted. The piece is called "Medvetslosa Atanke" which is Swedish for "Unconscious Mind". I will be displaying this in my Senior Showcase.

Bauhaus

Bauhaus was both a movement in art history and a school, which taught this movement. The movement was the venture in crafting art, literally and contextually. The school with the same name was founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 and was closed in 1933 when pressure from the Nazis forced them to change their ideals. Bauhaus in general was a major step forward in modern art, expanding the horizons on what objects and buildings were considered to be usable in normal society and art of the same nature. The movement had a major impact of typography, building design, and other forms of creativity throughout industrial life. One aspect of this movement that was essential was the notion that everything built here was to benefit what was to come.

McCarthyism

McCarthyism is a practice of making wild assumptions and accusations of disloyalty, treason, and espionage. This term was used during the Second Red Scare in the 1950's, where people were constantly accused of being Communist spies. REPUBLICAN Senator Joseph McCarthy started this movement. This is no surprise that the Republicans were this nutty. If anything, what we see today with the war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Republicans stereotyping Islamic people, echos what happened during the 1950's, even though back then the Red Scare was a significantly larger issue.

Have the Lambs Stopped Screaming?

My grid art project, Dr. Hannibal Lector.

I used different colored pictures of a lamb to create it.

 

The original photo is below.

 

Dada Manifesto

     Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it. Dada comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple. In French it means "hobby horse". In German it means "good-bye", "Get off my back", "Be seeing you sometime". In Romanian: "Yes, indeed, you are right, that's it. But of course, yes, definitely, right". And so forth.
     An International word. Just a word, and the word a movement. Very easy to understand. Quite terribly simple. To make of it an artistic tendency must mean that one is anticipating complications. Dada psychology, dada Germany cum indigestion and fog paroxysm, dada literature, dada bourgeoisie, and yourselves, honoured poets, who are always writing with words but never writing the word itself, who are always writing around the actual point. Dada world war without end, dada revolution without beginning, dada, you friends and also-poets, esteemed sirs, manufacturers, and evangelists. Dada Tzara, dada Huelsenbeck, dada m'dada, dada m'dada dada mhm, dada dera dada, dada Hue, dada Tza.
      How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul, dada is the pawnshop. Dada is the world's best lily-milk soap. Dada Mr Rubiner, dada Mr Korrodi. Dada Mr Anastasius Lilienstein. In plain language: the hospitality of the Swiss is something to be profoundly appreciated. And in questions of aesthetics the key is quality.
       I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it. Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzsche. Dada m'dada. Dada mhm dada da. It's a question of connections, and of loosening them up a bit to start with. I don't want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people's inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words for it that are seven yards long. Mr Schulz's words are only two and a half centimetres long.
       It will serve to show how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat meows . . . Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn't let too many words out. A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers' hands, hands worn smooth by coins. I want the word where it ends and begins. Dada is the heart of words.
       Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn't I find it? Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.

Video Games and Bullying

Most parents feel that bullying has a direct tie to video games (mostly violent ones). this is iffy in my opinion. Yes, some video games contain violence that the player has total control over, but whether kids use their virtual experience as a stepping stone for real life violence and bullying is debatable. According to Harvard Health Publications, "Most youths are not effected by violent video games." As a gamer myself, who plays most of the violent gun games out on the market, I naturally know what is reality and fantasy. This is the case with 95% of the gamers out there. Bullying seems to have a more direct connection to the person's inner conflicts at home, whether it's an abusive family or just lacking something that makes them feel inferior. Video games might slightly elevate these inner conflicts, but are not the direct and only cause for bullying and real life violence.

More 3D Work

This is something I'm working on. I'm in the Halloween spirit. =]

Adobe

Adobe originally started off by creating fonts and software that could be compatible with it. Before their relationship with the Apple company, they were rivals in the font race. Eventually with the creation of graphic computers, Adobe made a program called Adobe Illustrator, which used vector shapes to create higher quality objects and pictures. This program was later used on the Apple computer, which they agreed on. A milestone occurred for both companies with the creation of Adobe Photoshop. This pioneered the evolution of graphic arts, and gave Adobe an upswing in the computer business. Eventually Adobe created a long line of software that make it one of the top companies today.

Why Apple?

The main reason behind the company name was because of an experience Steve Jobs had when he worked on an apple farm before opening the computer company. He wanted to name it something simple that everyone can identify with. Something that I knew before making this blog, was that the original logo for the company was to be an apple falling from a tree onto Issac Newton's head.

3D Cartoon Character in Progress.

What I am working on for Senior Showcase.

Raymond Kurzweil

  Raymond is an author, inventor and futurist. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition, text to speech innovation, speech recognition inventions, and development of electronic keyboard instruments. He is also a big fan of life extension theories, so big that when he dies, he wants his body to be chemically preserved (frozen in liquid nitrogen) so that one day in the future, the technology could revive him. There are a lot of theories of his that are quite interesting, and then there are some which are a little too outside the box. He believes that one day in the future all humans will be able to live forever, using a ton of technology to do so.

War Of The Worlds/Listening to the Broadcast

Orson Welles broadcasted the story of War Of The Worlds as an experiment on the radio. No one truly realized the impact that this would have on the people, and the panic that it sent everywhere. Some people believed that aliens were attacking them, some believe that they saw spaceships in the sky. When asked why the broadcast was sent, Orson Welles apologised and said that it all was a joke. He realized that more people actually believed everything this "magic box" spoke, and wanted to see if people would believe that an alien attack was occurring if spoken from the magic box. It turned out sour for those who believed. Even weeks after the initial broadcast, firefighters and police officers were heading into the woods and mountains to tell the hiding people that there was no attack. This is what power the radio had during that time period.

After listening to the entire broadcast myself, I can fully understand why people would panic the way they did when it first aired. The first half an hour was a non stop commercial free intro for the story. It made it seem realistic, thus creating the illusion of a realistic alien attack. It reminded me of the broadcasts I heard on 9/11. I remember being picked up early from school, because I live on Long Island, and we had no idea what was going on. On the way home I heard the live coverage in the city via radio, and I could hear the screams and fire/police trucks in the background. It scared the crap out of me, and that's what I felt when I heard War Of The Worlds.

Artist Takes Every Drug Known to Man, Draws Self Portraits After Each Use

Absolutely brilliant!

http://cultso.com/artist-takes-every-drug-known-to-man-draws-self-portraits-after-each-use/

Earthquake

I asked my parents if they ever seen this movie, and both of them did. My father along with his four older sisters and younger brother went to see it together. My dad and uncle loved it, and my aunts were freaked out by the big booming sounds. My mother saw it with some of her friends, and they all freaked out. My mom claims this movie is the reason she doesn't like action/violent movies today. My dad says the movie is the reason he loves action/violent movies today. So as you can see, there was a big impact towards society back then when this movie first came out.

Wendy Carlos

 Wendy (Walter) was one of the first people to create music purely from converted synthesized sounds. She is famous for producing the music for Stanley Kubrik's films. She created the Moog Synthesizer, which was used to re-create an eerie version of the Ninth Symphony in A Clockwork Orange as well as the obscure music for The Shining. She also used a device called the spectrum follower, which recreated the sounds of musical instruments as artificial voice waves. I believe that her music influenced the dark tone of both Kubrick movies, and gave them both a unique sense of style during the 70's.

Singin' in the Rain

In the movie, A Clockwork Orange, the main character Alex sings Singin' in the Rain during a vicious rape scene near the beginning of the movie. The reason behind this usage of a cheerful song in contrast to the ultra-violence depicted was left unclear throughout the movie. Some speculated that it was used last minute to heighten the drama during the scene. It did prove to be useful however when Alex returned to the same house after his rehabilitation. He started whistling the tune while taking a bath, and the man who lives there suddenly remembered the attack. Some also believed it to be a metaphor for Alex's state of mind when committing ultra-violence. I don't agree with that, because I believe Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was the metaphor for Alex, not Singin'. Either way, using such a mood lifting tune for this violent movie was nothing short of genius. Whenever I hear that song, I immediately think of this movie. That is what I think they were aiming for.

Technicolor

    

    The history behind the revolutionary technicolor motion pictures was nothing short of astonishing. When it first began, the movie industry filmed a shot twice simultaneously using red and green filters. Then, they would take the colored strips and burn them into black and white film, overlapping each other. This was called the additive process. Eventually, the industry realized that there was a limitation using the additive process, and thus explored into the subtractive process using red, green and blue filters. This ended up producing a wider range of colors and did not require special color reels or processing equipment, and thus became the movie industry standard.
    One problem with technicolor was that it was expensive to produce, thus only large companies at the time had the money and resources to produce it. Also, it required a ton more lighting in order to catch images, so the sets were always very hot, and the electric bills were very expensive. The Walt Disney Company became one of the firsts to use technicolor, evident in their first animated movie, Snow White. Eventually, other movie studios were able to afford technicolor, and movies such as The Wizard of Oz and Singin' in the Rain were created.  It was definitely a stepping stone in the movie industry, and paved the way towards digital movie productions later in the future.