Technology + Performance: Nam June Peik

Nam June Peik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with an early usage of the term “electronic super highway” in application to telecommunications. Naim June Peik was influenced by John Cage, Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Arnold Schoenberg.  In this post I would like to further express Peik’s interest in John Cage by giving you an overview of one of his works that was based upon Cage. Naim June Peik’s film, “Tribute to John Cage: Film by Naim June Peik” was a hybrid, consisting of technological art and performance art.

 

The film starts by displaying an early version of a robot outside walking  between cars. The film then flips to the next scene where the same robot is walking down a street sidewalk  (a mechanics guy quickly tweaks some things on the robot and then moves out of scene). Now the robot is ready to begin presentation, music loudly sounds from the robot’s speakers, calling undivided attention to be geared towards it. The speaker then projects the voice of a woman (I suppose) singing for a few moments and then transitions to a bold sounding male voice. The male voice goes on to tell who John Cage was, and then goes on to further express the relationship between Naim June Peik and John Cage. The segment mentioned how Peik and Cage were good friends, meeting in the late 1950s and having a friendship for almost twenty years. Now the thing that made their friendship so strong was a deep mutual concern that a modern cybernated society might turn mankind into mindless robots (hence the robot).

After a little more eloboration on some facts, the film moves on to what I like to call a psychedelic segment. This scene is a hallucination inspired/glitch-type video that features human faces, one at a time, making extreme facial expressions while music plays in the background. The scene is edited to give that glitch-type footage “adding sprinkles to the cake” by over-casting it with a bright color film.

The next and the last scene is of an interviewer and an interviewee. The interviewer asks the interviewer “who is John Cage?”. As the interviewer attempts to explain, it is a true struggle as he repeatly stutters throughout the explaination; even-still he presses on, very determined to get his point across.The segment ends with the interview footage going on as it flickers between additional footage of John Cage performing experiments.

The film then ends with a hybrid collage of moving stills of people celebrating and relaxing in the outdoors as music plays over it.

 

Illegal Arts

Illegal art in my opinion, is one of the coolest forms of art there is. Illegal art is obviously art that breaks legal boundaries but at the same time speaks volumes about who the artists are, their beliefs, opinions, stands, interests, self-assurance and creativity. It tells the world that they are not limited by boundaries, or afraid of what society may think or do because of their need to express themselves artistically, in ways that are not necessarily honorable.

 

Different forms of illegal art consists of street art and graffiti art. Street art is visual art created in public locations, usually unsanctioned artwork executed outside of the context of traditional art venues. Street and graffiti art became big and well-known in the early 1980’s, and even though it has been illegal since its start, graffiti artists continue to grow; graffiti art has remained a constant form of expression in the art world for decades. Street and graffiti art are one in the same in most instances referred to in the art world, when in actuality are quite different. Graffiti limits an individual to what he or she can do with a spray can, on the spot. Street art, on the other hand, while employing some of the application techniques of graffiti, often involves a finished product that is ready-made and brought to the location -think stickers, wheat paste prints, and stencils. Street art can also be sculptures displayed on the street; an example of this is Banksy’s phone booth.

The most well-known graffiti artist is none other than Banksy. Banksy also incorporates street art in his work as well. Banksy is an England-based graffiti artist, political activist and film director of unverified identity. His art combines dark humor with graffiti executed in a distinctive stenciling technique. Personally, I enjoy Banksy’s work and believe that he is an art genius, and his way about going with his career is very intriguing and interesting. I bet whatever his reasons are for masking his identity are very intuitive and intellectual, justifying it in a very valuable light. Here are some examples of the art legend’s work. You can also take a look at this video giving you more of a scoop on exactly who he is.

Even-though I would never participant in street art or graffiti art, or become a street artist or graffiti artist, I can see why people and/or artists do it. It can be very liberating and the adrenaline from executing the task without getting caught can cause quite a bit of excitement.

 

Approaches to Sound and Noise

The development and the production of sound through media can be done in a variety of creative ways. Many experts in sound use things such as glass, water, sand, instruments, hands, the human vocals, metal and many other things to create the sounds that they desire to create or to manipulate. When these sounds are paired with software such as Audacity, we can edit, transform, extent, merge, sharpen, and soften sound in order for the sound to depict the sound effect of our choice. Rather it be electric, acoustic, vocal-based or a noise sound effect, it can all be produced through media software.

Check out this link to listen to some cool sound effects! : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhqIgVY9XuA.

As a multimedia student, I have had the pleasure of discovering and working with many different and creativity enhancing software. I am new to Audacity but I have been using Soundtrack Pro for a little while and I have grown fond of it. Similar to Audacity, you can create and manipulate certain sounds to produce the desired dynamic sound. Here’s a couple of videos on how to use Soundtrack Pro and Audacity:

 

 

While exploring this topic, most likely you are reminded of the many films that have realistic sound effects. The sound effects that are used within movies are known as foley sound, or sound that has been made during production and in the studios behind the scenes. They are usually done after filming. As mentioned above, the sound experts get creative and use a variety of different objects to create the desired sound. The material is either used by itself or combined with other materials; for example, shattering glass or knocking two bricks together. The experts, in this case known as foley artists, perform this action near a microphone to be captured and recorded. The sound (or noise) is made to reflect the sound the image on screen should portray during a movie scene. Here’s a link to behind the scenes footage of creating foley sound! :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OONaPcZ4EAs.

Multimedia Objects as Database/Interface

With the world at its highest peak in the interest and involvement of multimedia, our lives are consumed with videos, video games, social networks, blogs, and websites. Due to the human attention span being so small, over the many years of technology’s development, it has embraced the use of multimedia objects. You may be thinking to yourself (if you are not already aware),’ what is a multimedia object?’ Well to be simply put, multimedia objects are what I like to call ‘media monsters’, files that contain loads of mixed media. For example, Facebook is a website that contains links to other websites, audio and video, images, and text; now that’s the definition of a media monster! The use of multimedia objects in such a way is called using multimedia objects as a database/interface.

Even though computers seem so intelligent to be able to put such things together to produce such amazing results, computers aren’t quite able to do it all just yet, and is still constantly evolving with the help of scholars and students around the world. Check out this video!

 

 

Modern day society simply cannot get enough of this media craze. Lots of us partake in the use of media, especially multimedia objects, and haven’t got a clue of the complexity of what produces these things and how it all works. Well I’ll give you some insight. All of these nice videos, images, and websites would not stand to exists without its foundation and its most important component, algorithms. An algorithm is a hidden logic; any process or task is reduced to an algorithm. An algorithm is also defined as a final sequence of simple operations which a computer can execute to accomplish a given task. Data and algorithms go hand-in-hand; these two things operate together as a complete package. The operations of algorithms is what help databases to organize data, which is a databases’ job. A database organizes data in a particular way for efficient search and retrieval; it is a structured collection of data. Explore this link to better understand what a database is all about: http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/z8yk87h. Databases to be direct, is what helps us human be organized in keeping track of things like records or even passwords. In order to retrieve these important forms of information, we have to use an interface. Now an interface is a device or program that enables a user to communicate with a computer. Here’s more info on interface explained in more depth: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/concepts/interface.html.

As a student, learning about multimedia objects, databases, algorithms, and interfaces is quite intriguing to me. As one of the human-being in this fast-paced multimedia driven world, I think that it is very cool to learn about the ‘behind the scenes’ of what we interact with on a daily basis. Additionally, as a multimedia studies major, it is all the more important to me to be as solidly informed as possible of such terminology so that I can be all the more prepared.

Click this link to read an article listing and explaining the multimedia items listed in this post! -> http://smallbusiness.chron.com/5-components-multimedia-28279.html