I LOVE NEW YORK (final edition) from cindy wong on Vimeo.
I Love New York from cindy wong on Vimeo.
A short 40-second animation clip produced in After Effects. Artwork, design by Cindy Wong. Music by Art Tatum.
The Delivery from cindy wong on Vimeo.
What happens when you give 5 ITP students a camera to shoot in New York City? A complete mashup involving slasher horror, ninjas, film noir, and a giant Japanese TV mascot. Purely an exercise for our own enjoyment, I don’t expect Hollywood to come knocking anytime soon. 
Equipment: with a Panasonic HD camera, edited in Final Cut Pro. Domo-kun costume made by Mindy Tchieu.
In a team of 5 people, create a 2-minute movie that is planned with a storyboard. Deciding we wanted a rich, narrative perspective sequence, my team divided the movie into 4 distinct chapters that delve into different movie genres. The movie, itself? Let’s say, it’s a tale of a serial killer and the hunt to find him…
Chinatown. Herald Square. George Washington Square Park. NYU.
Here’s a compilation of different sounds of New York City melded together. Created in Audacity, recorded with M-Audio recorder.
“The medium is the message” – Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media:
In reading recent news articles about artists, their appropriation of Internet photos, and lawsuits filed against them by their original owners, I find McLuhan’s words to ring true. What does it say about our culture when content is no longer considered valuable or attributed to its original creators? Everything is seemingly free on the Internet — photos, music, video, et.c. — and all a user has to do is hit right-click, “Save Target As”, and possess a copy for themselves.
When is the issue about Fair Use and when is it a case of piracy? Fair Use, is the legal framework, that allows use of copyright work within a certain framework such as criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research.
According to Cornell law, the factors to be considered shall include:
“The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors”
Reading Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” was a murky affair for me. Filled with comparisons of different time periods and art mediums, Benjamin’s essay touched on changing perspectives of art as exposed to technology. What defines art? What is the value of art and how has that shifted over time? At its heart, Benjamin’s essay questions how technology, mass production, and mainstream accessibility have transformed the art world. I question Walter Benjamin’s positioning of art values in his approach. Why can’t accessible technology, artistic expression, and commercialism coincide together? Why do they have to stay in separate camps if they don’t have to? It’s a very narrow world if works of art can only exist in one realm.
What makes a work of art unique? Does universal access to artwork (in reproduction mode or exhibit-readiness) devalue the artwork’s existence? Benjamin admits that outside factors – from the opinion of the masses to socioeconomic access – can affect the perception of art and it’s value, all of which are factors outside of an artist’s control. A better question to ask is whether an artist a sell-out for mass-producing their artwork?
In his essay, Benjamin cites photography and motion film as mediums that merited artistic expression after it gained popularity from the masses. However, what about present-day artwork like interactive media, graffiti, and graphic design, which can tiptoe the line between commercialism, art, and possess a zero transaction cost in their digital reproduction? What comes to my mind? Present day, influential artists like Shepherd Fairey and Takashi Murakami. Shepherd Fairey is an American street artist who became world-renown for his iconic “Hope” poster of Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. The poster has been replicated many times over and was distributed to the public to disseminate. Has this lessened his appeal to art critics and the public? Hardly. Takashi Murakami is a Japanese artist who is well known for his high and lowbrow art in mediums from fine-art (paintings) to digital (animations) and commercial artwork (illustrated handbags for Louis Vuitton). These are just a few examples of contemporary artists who straddle multiple arenas in creating and distributing their artwork to a global audience.
While visiting the Bronx’s Tree Museum, I came across the conundrums that must plague an exhibit designer: how do you pay tribute to a local landscape and make it accessible to people? Artist Katie Holten makes a valiant attempt to document the memories of residents’ and their connections to the trees residing along the historical Grand Concourse boulevard in the Bronx. One hundred trees are marked with small plaques indicating visitors to call a number, punch an extension, and listen to audio narratives of people reminiscing about the local tree they were standing in front of. Was it effective? I believe her design implementations fell short of her goal for: poor visibility, sound quality, and lack of effective storytelling.
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
That classic question can apply to Katie Holten’s Tree Museum exhibit. The Tree Museum has no definitive, more importantly, visible start point that was seen along the Grand Concourse. From the 161st/Yankee Stadium subway stop to the Bronx Museum itself, I encountered one lonely tree marked by the Tree Museum plaque. The outdoor exhibit signage is hidden inside Joyce Kilmer Park. While standing in front of the sign, I overheard a Bronx resident on her cellphone, muttering, “What’s this Tree Museum? I’ve lived here all my life and never heard of it.” Perhaps, a better way to direct folks would have been to include the Bronx Art Museum logo with the Tree Museum plaque so folks could visit the Bronx Art Museum or a website address for more information (including finding maps, brochures).
In E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” the author delivers a subversive vision of a mechanized utopia, where mankind has been provided a constant life of comfort and pleasure by machinery. It seems like a good bargain – until the reader discovers how these future citizens live and what they’ve been deprived of. Here, Forster makes a bold statement in implying technology – used to it’s fullest, maximum potential – would be an opiate for the masses. If technology is invented to make life easier for humans, what happens if humans become completely dependent on these machines? As good science fiction should, Forster’s short story forces me to criticize the society depicted – not technology – to blame.
In Forster’s world, a series of unexplained events led this future mankind to choose a life ruled by technology. The machines aren’t the ones subjecting mankind to live indoors, eat pills for food, or become agoraphobic – it is the central government, Big Brother, who dictates how people should live their stifled lives. Through indoctrination, the humans depicted in Forster’s world have become so conditioned that to imagine a world of the unknown (nature) is more terrifying then the known (mechanized). Over generations of time, this utopian society never questions the government’s decision to permanently live underground and not attempt to restore the Earth’s surface by using technology.
The only challenger to this notion is Kuno, the son of Vashti, a scholar who is content with her lifestyle. Kuno, himself, is a dissatisfied citizen. Through her eyes, we witness Kuno’s defiance against his society’s conventional norms, his tale of escaping to the Earth’s surface, and his punishment when he is returned forcibly back underground. Despite hearing his story, Vashti is unmoved. She is a symbolic lemming in a society where nobody questions authority because they prefer the comfort that it doles out. To question otherwise is to face death by homelessness (i.e., being ejected to the Earth’s surface to suffocate in it’s poisoned atmosphere).
Vashti and Kuno are victims of a society where technology has been used to control and deny people the chance to move freely and make decisions independent of what their government allows. The machines are depicted as automatons that provide these humans everything – transportation, housing, entertainment, etc. How the humans choose to conduct themselves is left to them. In this case, people only interact over screens, they do not engage in bodily contact, and sex only comes as a result of perfunctory reproduction for the benefit of the human race. The machinery, itself, is in the background. Ultimately, while the failure of the machinery led to the demise of this human colony, it was really their government’s decisions that led them to that path of destruction in the first place.
In Orality & Literacy, Walter Ong examines the history of oral culture, the evolution of literate societies, and how understanding both cultural backgrounds shows the influence of how they shaped human consciousness and comprehension throughout time. As a reader, this was especially interesting in how previous age-old arguments – is one form of communication more artistic then the other? What is the best way to learn? – is revisited over and over. In reading Ong’s analysis, a reader can apply these thought processes to technology and culture. For example, a modern day question that plagues scholars about the increasing tide of technology used in our everyday lives: Does technology degrade our interpersonal communication?
The differences in learning between oral culture and literate cultures were quite vast. Words equal power in oral cultures. Interaction among a community fostered a collective bond that helped keep knowledge alive and passed on word-by-word to the next generation. As a result, spoken language blossomed and in some cases, produced classic stories that are still told today; for example, Homer’s Odyssey and the Illiad are now acknowledged by academics to originate from Greece’s period of oral culture. Oral culture measured memory recall through endless repetition, formulaic phrases/expressions that allowed individuals to retain complex information. Stories were recalled through a person’s association with events, actions, and involvement with their communities rather then in literate cultures where an individual recalls knowledge from a text source.
In some ways, the advent of writing provoked anxiety among ancient traditionalists who preferred oral culture and its spoken word traditions. Socrates argued that the act of writing removed the individual from their actions and denied the audience from reacting to their statements in person. However, while Ong stated in 1982 that people applied that same argument against computers – let’s face it, the advent of the Internet and social networking have transformed that one-way relationship. Now, whether on blogs, social networking sites like Facebook, or in online news-voting portals like Digg, people can interact, comment, and provide nearly instant feedback to each other’s commentary. The Internet provides multiple channels of dialogue – whether you choose to leave a note on a blog, create a podcast, or tweet your reaction on Twitter. On YouTube, people are providing video comments and teaching each other with video tutorials that touch on Ong’s feedback about learning in oral cultures.
On a multicultural perspective, I found Ong’s summary of the academic study development of oral culture, how scholars overcame cultural/racial biases with new discoveries, and the global commonalities of oral culture to be fascinating. For example, cultures that are still rooted and influenced by oral learning exist in the Middle East, parts of Africa, and in North America’s indigenous tribes.
In the end, Ong’s distinction is that writing cannot exist without oral speech whereas the long-term preservation of oral culture cannot exist without written documentation by scholars and archivists. Technology can be a bridge to help preserve that. Not only that but intuitive technology (like the iPhone interface, touch-screen gaming, Nintendo Wii) is reactionary to wordy, overly technical interfaces that required a textbook to read in order to operate. In some ways, technology designers are open to elements of oral culture that make learning more accessible to individuals wanting more active engagement with technology. Just as an example, play Wii Fit. You will interact with a virtual avatar to learn new skills and fitness techniques.