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.