DV tape will be ready for tomorrow's presentation.

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I have few video clips that I can work with.
Notre musique is not here at the library yet hope to watch it within coming week.

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Things to think about:

-is video work the best way to present my idea?

Films to watch:
1) "Notre musique" (reserved it from the library)

2) 8 1/2

3) Woman in the dunes

-the question is how I'm going to communicate with the audience through my art works. how my abstract ideas/images/works convey, pursue, and translate the meaning of life?

INSPIRATION







Book :::



Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag

What is art? What is the role of art?



Sontag talks about wars, hunger, death, brutality, and pain--the pain of others through the photographs. The development of camera and multimedia made world small and allowed man to capture the momentary fullness and intencity that that incite intellect and sensitivity.

If we call this the works of man's longing to express the truth, what are they doing?

What does it mean to produce and view such works of photography and mutimedia?
I see "the pain of others" through media that we can get access to easily nowadays.
According to the author, this privilege (to view and even feel sympathy for self-consolation) is related to the pain of others.
Oversupplying images of pain are everywhere. We, I waste those images with insensibility or compassion.
We understand and sometimes feel the pain we are looking or watching.

But is the cognition enough?

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Excerpt:

In June 1938 Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, her brave, unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war. Written during the preceding two years, while she and most of her intimates and fellow writers were rapt by the advancing fascist insurrection in Spain, the book was couched as the very tardy reply to a letter from an eminent lawyer in London who had asked, "How in your opinion are we to prevent war?" Woolf begins by observing tartly that a truthful dialogue between them may not be possible. For though they belong to the same class, "the educated class, a vast gulf separates them: the lawyer is a man and she is a woman. Men make war. Men (most men) like war, since for men there is "some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting" that women (most women) do not feel or enjoy. What does an educated -- read: privileged, well-off -- woman like her know of war? Can her recoil from its allure be like his?

Let us test this "difficulty of communication," Woolf proposes, by looking together at images of war. The images are some of the photographs the beleaguered Spanish government has been sending out twice a week; she footnotes: "Written in the winter of 1936-37." Let's see, Woolf writes, "whether when we look at the same photographs we feel the same things." She continues:

This morning's collection contains the photograph of what might be a man's body, or a woman's; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those certainly are dead children, and that undoubtedly is the section of a house. A bomb has torn open the side; there is still a bird-cage hanging in what was presumably the sitting room . . .

The quickest, driest way to convey the inner commotion caused by these photographs is by noting that one can't always make out the subject, so thorough is the ruin of flesh and stone they depict. And from there Woolf speeds to her conclusion. We do have the same responses, "however different the education, the traditions behind us," she says to the lawyer. Her evidence: both "we" -- here women are the "we" -- and you might well respond in the same words.

You, Sir, call them "horror and disgust." We also can them horror and disgust . . . War, you say, is an abomination; a barbarity; war must, be stopped at whatever cost. And we echo your words. War is an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped.

Who believes today that war can be abolished? No one, not even pacifists. We hope only (so far in vain) to stop genocide and to bring to justice those who commit gross violations of the laws of war (for there are laws of war, to which combatants should be held), and to be able to stop specific wars by imposing negotiated alternatives to armed conflict. It may be hard to credit the desperate resolve produced by the aftershock of the First World War, when the realization of the ruin Europe had brought on itself took hold. Condemning war as such did not seem so futile or irrelevant in the wake of the paper fantasies of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, in which fifteen leading nations, including the United States, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan, solemnly renounced war as an instrument of national policy; even Freud and Einstein were drawn into the debate with a public exchange of letters in 1932 titled "Why War?" Woolf's Three Guineas, appearing toward the close of nearly two decades of plangent denunciations of war, offered the originality (which made this the least well received of all her books) of focusing on what was regarded as too obvious or inapposite to be mentioned, much less brooded over: that war is a man's game -- that the killing machine has a gender, and it is male. Nevertheless, the temerity of Woolf's version of "Why War?" does not make her revulsion against war any less conventional in its rhetoric, in its summations, rich in repeated phrases. And photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus.

Invoking this hypothetical shared experience ("we are seeing with you the same dead bodies, the same ruined houses"), Woolf professes to believe that the shock of such pictures cannot fail to unite people of good will. Does it? To be sure, Woolf and the unnamed addressee of this book-length letter are not any two people. Although they are separated by the age-old affinities of feeling and practice of their respective sexes, as Woolf has reminded him, the lawyer is hardly a standard-issue bellicose male. His antiwar opinions are no more in doubt than are hers. After all, his question was not, What are your thoughts about preventing war? It was, How in your opinion are we to prevent war?

It is this "we" that Woolf challenges at the start of her book: she refuses to allow her interlocutor to take a "we" for granted. But into this "we," after the pages devoted to the feminist point, she then subsides.

No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

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Work :::

Works by Kathe Kollwitz

Kollwitz works are the portraits of life, death, war, hunger, poverty, struggle, the week and the strong.

I think the quotes from the book "Kathe Kollwitz" by Otto Nagel explains well:


"Kathe Kollwitz drew her inspiration from life itself. This is what gives her work its trememdous power and penetration. She had no need to search for a direction in which to develop her art. She discovered for herself the siimplest from in which she could make a positive statement, and what is more to make it in such a way that it can be understood by everyone form the worker in the slums to the bourgeoisie. This is the great secret of her art: her 'language' is so universally comprehensible and so powerful in expression that it captures the imagination of everyone who is sincere--all those who are young in mind and heart. The things in her work that grip us, shake and shatter us, are human destinies and human emotions. They are war and hatred, struggle and love, poverty and death. Kathe Kollwitz does not portray motives, her figures are not imitations, puppets or phntoms, she depicts life in all its actuality. There is not a line of her work which fails to make its comment, which does not cry aloud and indict, which does not expose the shabbiness of the petty laws of society. Every picture she draws deals with burning issues for you and for me, for us all. Every face she fashions cries aloud to us: 'It will be your turn tomorrow, comrade!' "




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MAIN QUESTION I CAME UP WITH :: WHAT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF LIFE?

"What is life?"
"If we all are dying, what is our responsibilities while we are living?"

* "God could cause us considerable embarrassment by revealing all the secrets of nature to us: we should not know what to do for sheer apathy and boredom."

* "Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action."
* "All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green."
* "I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better than book or orator."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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MY WORK

I plan to shoot a short video using DV camera.
Only abstaract images are going to be what I will originally shoot.
All the clips will be shown on the projected screen.
There will be a mirror (or couple of mirrors representing individual viewers) on the opposite wall. The mirror (I want mirror's' more than a mirror) represents the reflection of viewer's own self while s/he is watching the image.

1) Colored figures that are hard to distinguish/hard to see what the shapes and lines are

*These clips will be projected on computer monitor and I will shoot them:

2) Video clips on marriage (and family--baby--and happy people)

3) Vido clips on war (and pain)

4) Shot that took a short film "Window Water Baby Moving" (1962) by Stan Brakhage --representing the art forms that people (as the audience) watch/view: the presence of art as media in the society (questioning it's role and responsibility)

5) I will shoot the works of Kathe Kollwitz

6) I will shoot the pictures from the book Regarding the Pain of Others

Final video will be a mixture of all six video clips

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Almost every video clips in my work is from plain works of others, depicting what the authors wants to present.
This is to represent the communication between groups, society, and individuals; stages that the ideals pass through (artists to artists to intellectuals to students to work to schools to society, etc. ); loops that are occurring within the history.

-serenity prayer that I read from the internet and a book

God,
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

12.01.06
For some reason, I had so hard time solidifying my ideas for this assignment (#4).
I should just jot some of my ideas down because of the time restraint now.

-dragonfly
Based on someone's story (that I'm sure I had (anyone had) the same experience or an experience something like this

When I was little and was living in Korea, there were lots of dragonfly during summer and autumn.
I would capture a dragonfly sometimes for fun, sometimes for science homework.
And I would put it into the small bug cage that I could easily get from stores around the neighborhood.

When the dragonfly in the cage learnt that the cage door was closed and it could not escape, it settled in the cage.
Even though I opened the cage door it did not move and did not try to fly out--as if it forgot that it could fly but was captured.
It took dragonfly a long time to actually realize that it was free and it could fly out from a cage.

Somebody/something must interact with one to let one to realize what that somebody/something is. Some kind of output must communicate with one; that some output needs to act as a signal that creates powerful motive to move one from one paradigm into another. The output should tell something and create a shock to one so one can break the boundary. One can think that it is comfortable in the cage. There's food and place to sleep. One knows what is around in the cage and one is familiar to it. One should not settle in one's comfort zone cause in reality it is never comfortable there.
For one to see this, one must take some sacrifice of oneself.

In the cage, one is ignorant and senseless. How does one manage oneself to do this on-going activity of breaking out from the cage? Is one afraid to be free? Is one just doesn't care? Is the freedom not appealing and attractive to one? What is freedom? Does one see the cage? Does one see the cage and just choose to settle in the cage because there is food? Is the freedom really going to comfort one? what is a ultimate freedom? to what end does one want to carry oneself out?


installation art_: short video clip projected (3rd person, omniscient, dragonfly point of view) a room decorated like a cage, wing flapping sound trying to escape, dark room at first, when the door (screen) is open ,light turned on.

_(:) wrote on Dec. 1 edited on Dec. 14

"Romanticism and modern art are one and the same thing, in other words: intimacy [and] yearning for the infinite... romanticism is a child of the North... dreams and fairytales are children of the mist...The North, is suffering and anxiety, takes comfort in imagination."

-Baudelaire

For some reason, I had so hard time solidifying my ideas for this assignment (#4).
I should just jot some of my ideas down because of the time restraint now.

-dragonfly

When I was little and was living in Korea, there were lots of dragonfly during summer and autumn.
I would capture a dragonfly sometimes for fun, sometimes for science homework.
And I would put it into the small bug cage that I could easily get from stores around the neighborhood.

When the dragonfly in the cage learn that the cage door is closed and it could not escape, it settles in the cage.
Even though I open the cage door it would not move and would not try to fly out--as if it forgot that it could fly but was captured.
It would take for dragonfly long time to actually realize that it was free and it could fly out from cage.

Somebody/something must interact with one. Some kind of output must communicate with one; that some output needs to act as a signal that creates powerful motive to move one from one paradigm into another. The output should tell something and create a shock to one so one can break the boundary. One should not settle in one's comfort zone cause in reality it is never comfort there.
For one to see this take some sacrifice of oneself.


I want to convey this idea above: the ignorance, empty comfort that somehow sad, feeling of lost in darkness, not knowing what to expect of the future, uncertainty, confusion, and the activity of breaking out from limited cage that is filled with unlimited fear.