Thursday, September 8, 2011

Quiz about Wednesday's class and lecture by Professor Stephanie Rowden.

Select one of the artists which were presented yesterday. (As a comment to this posting) Write a short description of what the artist created and how it uses sound as an artform. In what ways does it engage the listener, how are these works different from a film, a painting or a sculpture.

17 comments:

  1. Laurie Anderson uses sound in a musical way, however she is not making music. She uses melodic sounds and steady percussion beats, but it does not have a solid melody, tempo, or time signature. She tells deliberately written and spoken stories, and uses the instruments and noises to emphasize or enhance the story for the viewer or listener. For example, she talked about her supposedly quiet apartment being located above a Hawaiian drum and hula school, and a thumping, representing the drums, begins.

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  2. Janet Cardiff created an audio art piece where she guides the listener with photos throughout Central Park. As the listener is lead through the park they take out various pictures and the women speaks to them. The pictures reflect on events that happen in the past but also follow a woman with dark hair. This audio piece is interesting because she mentions people reading newspapers and talking on cellphones and although they are experienced at different times, the listeners may actually see these people. It play a sort of mind trick on you because you hear the sounds footsteps as if someone was actually walking with you and that you are actually hearing and experiencing these things.


    --Tarah Douglas

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  3. Shawn Decker "Green"
    Shawn Decker is a sound artist that uses electronics to replicate sounds and patterns which are heard in nature. He had a row of speakers and little electronics that made tapping sounds which were similar to raindrops. This as an art form sculpted in a way that mimics a sequence which we are familiar with in life, which allowed the listener to imagine a visual which would go along with sound piece.

    Leah Whiteman

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  4. Lori Anderson. Lori told a story with both narrative voice and music/sound effects. The sounds used draw you into the story, allowing you to picture the events as they unfold in your own way. Thus the sound creates a picture, a movie in your head. In contrast to a painting or a movie, however, the voices and sound give your imagination a gentle nudge in the direction so it may supply its own images. Sound compels to create your own visuals to go along with it.

    Chloe Hill

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  5. Luigi Russolo was a futurist artist who dealt mainly with paint. However, he is known as one of the founding fathers of sound art. He created "noise machines" that all had unique sounds. He would set up the machines and record the sound. His sounds were different from other medias because rather than seeing an actual screen or canvas, his sounds allowed the mind to imagine what this sound is coming from or what it might mean.

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  6. Laurie Anderson:
    Her particular project was a narrative of her use of a ouija board. It used sound as an art form due to the way she juxtaposed her voice with various sounds to create somewhat of a artistic vocal performance. She overlapped sounds that made the story come to life in a sense because the noises were some how relevant to what she was talking about in the story. It engages the listener because the story is a curious one dealing with the supernatural and this inevitably draws peoples' attention. This work is entirely different from film, painting, or sculpture because it is entirely based on sound and hearing as opposed to any type of visual art.

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  7. I enjoyed Janet Cardiff's "Her Long Black Hair" because you truly felt like you were a part of her sound recording. As you walked around central park, Janet would make note of the occurrences going on around her and comment on them, unlike many who would just walk by and make no mention of the events going on. She would comment on things such as a woman on her cell phone which is something we take for granted because of the technology we now have. Her soft tone and pictures that came along with the recording were beneficial to her recording because I felt i was listening to a peaceful noise, in a note so peaceful environment, such as central park.

    -Shelby Danow

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  8. Janet Cardiff created a guided audio walk-through of Central Park. The use of sound in Janet's piece engages the subject with his or her surroundings, Janet's voice and direction, as well as the past through photographs. While most visual art forms can simply be observed, the subject of Janet's work is forced to experience and be a part of the piece.

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  9. Shawn Decker created a piece called Green which involved several sound devices he created that were hung along two walls in a gallery as they projected clicking sounds that mimicked the sound of insects in a field. This piece engages the listener by bringing them to another place, a field that is like the ones they been in and yet different. There's a subtle difference between the real thing and the piece that Decker has created. Decker's piece sounds more mechanic but eventually--just like the insects in a field--his piece becomes white noise. Eventually the listener loses the initial response of trying to sort out the difference between reality and the manufactured noise. Perhaps Decker is trying to comment on this difference and how the lines can be blurs or even forgotten. This would be hard to achieve with a film, paining, or sculpture because the piece would always be visible and present while the sounds can become distant to the listener. This makes sound a better medium for Decker's message because the listener will be more aware once the sounds stop or fade into the background.

    Emily Morley

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  10. Ben Rubin used a computer program to capture, display, and read posts people's posts from around the internet. I "I Am" it used a number of phrases that began with (or related to) the words "I Am". this engages the listener by employing basic human statements in a context that many of us are probably familiar with in their relation to internet culture, for example "I am 18M" is sort of funny to anyone who has used a chat server. There were a number of other funny ones, as well as some that were just declarations of a persons identity, and there by relatable. This work is closer to a found poem than a film, painting, or sculpture. it required the tact and precision of these art forms, but deals almost entirely in the realm of messages, and is interpreted more linearly.

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  11. Janet Cardiff created a wonderful piece of sound art that took you through Central Park following the voice of the "blacked haired women". It uses sound to take the listener to another time, and lets them think about their surroundings and what is going on around them. She engaged the listener by telling short stories and describing what you were looking at. It is different from a film or another form of visual art, in that the visual aspect of the piece somewhat up to you, she guided you to your destination, but you could look where you wanted when you wanted.

    -Rachel Dethloff

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  12. Janet Cardiff created a sound walk installation in central park. It engaged the listener because it forced them to listen and follow her voice while also thinking about the photographs included in the sound walk. Her sound walk challenged the listener's reality by placing ideas of set circumstances/places/people in their minds. This work was different from experiencing a film, painting or sculpture because the viewer was not stationary while watching but was layering the experience with real life.

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  13. Laurie Anderson really stood out to me. She is very narrative in her work, but also VERY stylized. In her piece "The Ouija Board" she speaks about an actual event in her life, but as she progresses through the narrative rhythmic sounds are added to the background. They build and layer upon one another until a very complex, almost instrumental song. The complexity yet simplicity of how it was created was fascinating for me.
    She draws the listeners in because she uses everyday noises to get her point across, ones that each of us hear everyday (like the sound of running upstairs in the dark and thinking there's one more step than there is, giving that last step a louder and more sustained sound). The familiarity of the sounds, as well as her engaging, dramatic narrative allows the listener to feel surrounded by the piece. This is even more engaging than films for me because there is no visual cue to tell me that it is not real, or is not familiar. With just sound my mind is able to make it more real.

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  14. Ben Reuben's installation gathered pieces of real-time conversations from chatrooms and a computerized voice dictates these pieces of conversation, while sentences appear, disappear, and reappear in different parts of the screen. It is a response to the immediacy and magnitude of modern communication technology. This piece connects to the audience easier than the other pieces we heard in the lecture because chatrooms and technologies alike are so ingrained into our lifestyle but we don't often have the opportunity to sit back and marvel at the immensity of the idea that we can communicate with people across the globe almost instantly. The computerized voice is crucial to the piece because it stripped away barriers posed by language differences and accents. The audience can slowly begin to realize that everyone with access to the internet are really speaking in the same language. This is starkly different than a film, painting or sculpture because it is real-time. People are connecting around the globe as the audience experience this sound piece in a gallery.

    Betsy Lee

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  15. Janet Cardiff created a sound piece which guides the audience through her journey in new york city. She engages the audience with the sound of every little footstep and also with her images throughout the film. Rather than just creating sounds, she narrates her walk which makes us feel as if we are really by her side. I felt that I was more immersed in this type of film rather than a regular film as I had to pay careful attention to every little details of the sounds and her voice.

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  16. Janet cardiff created an audio based walking piece. When listening to her audio piece, I felt that I was there with her walking around the central park. In her audio piece, I could hear every foot steps of her and the others who walks across her. At the middle, when she inserted a sound noise of people talking, I could imagine a crowed central park. As she walks, she introduces few pictures. The pictures helped me to imagine her surrounding but at the same time it somehow become a barrier of my imagination. Through her voice, I was at the central park. I felt that I was around the nature. I felt peace. Her narrative voice gave me calm and I enjoyed listening to her audio piece.

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  17. I found Janet Cardiff's work the most interesting. She creates audio soundtracks that reference specific people and places and talks with the listener about her own memories and experiences. The listener is also given photographs to look at when prompted by the recording, and Janet will usually talk about the relationship of the photograph to the area where the listener is standing. What strikes me as most unique about her work, and what I think differentiates it from paintings and sculptures is its ability to constantly change. If one person were to take the same walk several times, the experience would be different each time, due to the fact that the places and people referenced in the audio recording are constantly changing in real time.

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