Final Project

Museum of the Moving Image

As a lover of all things media, I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to the Museum of the Moving Image located in Astoria.  At the museum, they had many exhibitions including Dolls vs. Dictators, Real Virtuality and City Glow.  Dolls vs. Dictators, created filmmaker and media artist Martha Colburn, was a film featuring many of the classic toys featured in the museum, including but not limited to Power Rangers action figures and Star Wars characters, as well as T.V. personalities like Pee-Wee Herman and Suzanne Somers.  These lighthearted images were juxtaposed with famous dictators like Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and Kim Jong Il of North Korea.  I found this exhibit visually interesting, but like most art pieces, the meaning was ambiguous.
The Real Virtuality exhibit was probably my favorite, as I thoroughly enjoyed the beautiful art installations.  My favorite would have to be Cathedral, by Marco Brambilla.  I loved the colorful kaleidiscope imagery he created.
City Glow was another art installation, though quite different from the others I saw.  The images artist Chiho Aoshima created were very pop culture oriented, with some references to old Japanese culture, but mainly most of the images reminded me of Japanese anime art.
I decided to take part in the film editting demonstration, and thought it was fascinating yet confusing.  I found that their explanation of analog vs. digital technology quite relevant to what we have been learning in our lecture classes.  The switch from analog to digital images has been so beneficial to the media world, with digital technology's two major advantages being sustainability and quality, which analog technology cannot compete with.

"A Trained Perspective" : Storyboard

Here is the (crudely) drawn storyboard for my short film assignment titled, "A Trained Perspective".

Links!

Here are some great "mindful" websites I go to when I get lost in the clutter of the world wide web.

A Simple Guide for a Mindful Digital Life

The Daily Love

Tiny Buddha

Stamp Art Assignment

In this stamp I used a photo I took of the Eiffel Tower at night and played with the contrast and lighting.  For the design on the sky I used a picture I took of the stain glass windows at Notre Dame, cropped and pasted the photo many times over, and lowered the opacity.

Photo Assignment: Hunter College

Artist Statement

As a media artist and activist, I plan on using my blog as a platform for inspiring people to live a happier, more self-aware life.  By integrating video and text from media and various internet outlets, I hope to aggregate motivational content that people will not only learn from, but enjoy reading.  Whether it be a particularly moving song, music video, article, quote, or personal story, I would like to enrich reader's lives in small, but hopefully profound, ways.  In a world where we often get lost in all the noise, I think it is necessary to sometimes be brought back to what is important, and I believe that being in touch with yourself is a good place to start.  The internet can often be a overwhelming place where we get lost in all the information that available, good and bad.  As a student of media and a product of the tech-generation, I often get wrapped up in things like social networking, or spend countless hours reading blogs.  While I absolutely praise the benefits of digital media, I believe that due to it's power it can sometimes have negative effects.  When you are able to get a message across with such ease and efficiency, this can result is a lot of superficial, incorrect, negative etc. information that we must sift through in order to get to the good stuff.  While I am in no means the compass of what is beneficial and what is not, I believe that starting with an uplifting, positive message is key.  By using content that enriches people's minds instead of idling them, digital media can be used in powerful, lasting ways.