Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman is an artist who's work consists of creating new identities and photographing them. She dresses up as different people and each one has a different feel, personality, and look. Through these different personas Sherman can create almost any identity. She creates a fantasy life with them and depicts the characters to have much more interesting lives outside the frame of the photograph.

Cindy Sherman's work fascinates me because she does such an incredible job of really making each character become its own. You would think that an artist that dresses up each time she does a project would always still look somewhat like her. She truly transforms into each character and I think that is what speaks to me as an artist. Besides creating visually interesting images, Sherman makes the viewer want to get to know these people or hear their story. Each character has a unique story waiting to be told and that is what makes her art so compelling.

Ways of Seeing

The Ways of Seeing Documentary is talking about the fact that advertisements make one believe that  buy purchasing something they will become richer. That ads portray people as happier, skinnier, prettier, better, etc. to get you to buy them. They try to make the consumer believe that their products will benefit their life in multiple aspects.

The Ways of Seeing Documentary was interesting to me because it pointed out the skewed perception society has. That people really do think that buying things will create this different image for them. Our society revolves around consumerism and the fact that will feel the need to buy more things to fill voids in our lives.

Ecological Realism

This article describes ecological realism as the belief that our resources on earth are scarce and if we continue the way we are now we will not last another 10 or 20 years. Gorz talks about the crisis of growth in the economy not being the solution to our problem. One economist even says that if we stopped growing, the rate of our consumption of resources will still end in exhausting them completely. The idea ecological realism is seeing the facts for what they are and not ignoring that our resources are finite.

As sad and kind of scary as this article may be, I am glad I read it. It just reinforces the idea that our generation needs to make changes and now. The resources of our world are not infinite and we cannot just do what is easier to survive. What is easier for us now is not creating a better world for us tomorrow. I think that a lot of people are just hoping that we will discover new ways to live and adapt without the resources we use today. I believe that we will always have a problem of our resources running out. We can't just continue to take and not give back anything to the planet. Even trees are becoming scarce. I believe that more people need to be concerned about ecological realism and to stop pretending like it's not happening.

Kuleshov Effect

  The Kuleshov Effect is a film editing technique that Lev Kuleshov used in the 1900s. He created the montage effect. He discovered that pairing an image with another image causes different reactions within the viewers. An example was in the youtube video L'EFFET KULESHOV. This video showed an image of a man with no facial expression. When viewed by itself there was no significant reaction from the viewer. When paired with an image of food, viewers thought he was hungry, with a dead woman, viewers thought he was grieving, and so on. Kuleshov basically discovered that mashing images together can create all sorts of contrast and different reactions.


The youtube video was the most interesting to me. I enjoyed the creativity of the makers of the video by reenacting the Kuleshov effect. I think that reading and watching these videos is a cool way to get us ready for our montage project. It really helped me get ideas of what feelings I want to provoke in my audience. The idea of this montage type of film editing really opened up the film industry to a whole different type of film. I think that learning about where it came from was important to understand this assignment.

declarations

The first article is the Declaration of Sentiments that pretty much mimics the the 1776 Declaration of Independence, but instead is written for the rights of women. It goes through the rights that were put forth in the original Declaration of Independence and then proceeds to talk about the rights that have been taken from women. The Declaration of Independence is remembered for its powerful words in the regards to basic human rights and this new Declaration is reiterating those rights that have already been set down.

What I found most interesting about these two pieces of work is that they are both saying basically the same exact thing, but it took them 72 years to realize that our government was not actually following our country's original beliefs that they set down in 1776. The Declaration of Sentiments is almost exactly the same as our Declaration of Independence except they are asking for women's rights, something that should have been given originally with the first Declaration. It shocks me to see how women had to deal with such absurd circumstances when the men of our country claim to believe that "all men are created equal". Although, it does say men, who is to say that the women of the country are less then any man. I think that the effect of the Declaration of Sentiments being written in the same style as the Declaration of Independence really made their point even more obvious. I enjoyed reading these two declarations and thinking about how far our country really has come.

The Ecstasy Of Influence Response

  This article was titled The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism and was written by Jonathan Lethem. In the article he discusses plagiarism and how it is perceived to be such a bad thing. The points he makes throughout the article is that plagiarism is what almost all art forms consist of. If we didn't get the idea from anywhere then, where did it come from? His opinion is that our culture is built through the copying, cutting, and pasting of ideas to create new things.
  I really enjoyed this article. At the beginning of the article he talks about the story of Lolita being taken from a man who was alive 40 years before the book was written. He speculates on whether the author intentionally took the story or if he had heard it some time ago and did not realize. Today we are overexposed to every little thing in the country. If something happens then we have heard about it. Even if it was on in the background while you were getting your hair done and you didn't realize you were listening. So who is to blame you if you come up with an idea you thought was completely original and turns out it had been on tv while you were getting your hair done. The overload of media today makes it hard to not recycle, or refurbish old ideas into something new. I found this article refreshing because he used such great examples to get his point across.

reviewing an interview with Charles Cohen

     In the interview with Charles Cohen there are quite a few topics that are touched on. Professor Cooley starts out the interview asking Cohen about his use of presence/absence in his work. Cohen explains how he wants the viewer to experience three different effects from the cut outs in his work. He goes on to explain how the cut outs in his different series can give such different feelings even though they both involve the idea of two people in some sort of relationship. Cooley also goes into depth to asking about Cohen's take on technology and wether or not all of these things we use daily are actually isolating us instead of further connecting us. Cohen says that he thinks it does cause a sense of insolation and distancing between people. He also touches on the idea of cut outs being used in commercialism.

     Reading this article was interesting to me because it felt like an overview of class on Monday. I thought that the discussions we had in class were very closely related to this interview so that was interesting for me to see it written down to get a better idea of it. I liked reading about the differences/similarities between Cohen's two series and how even though they may seem very much the same they were still very different. I especially liked how he mentioned that he won't put the two series in the same room or display so that they won't compete with each other. I think that his work is very interesting. I aslo liked his take on technology actually isolating us more than connecting us. Overall, I think this article was most interesting because it recapped our Monday class.