Smashed Cars and Chinese chewing article response

As I continue my studies into forms of video art, I recently came across an article titled Smashed cars and Chinese chewing: the five masterpieces of video art and I found one of the pieces it discusses to be very interesting. The piece is called He Weeps for You by Bill Viola. This piece has the viewer enter a circular room in which a video camera is trained on a copper pipe that leads from the ceiling and ends at exactly eye level. From the end of the pipe, a drop of water emerges. The camera, with its extreme close up perspective, sees a fish eye effect from the water droplet. Then, the droplet falls onto an amplified drum resulting in a startling boom, leading the cycle to repeat itself.

This piece struck with me because of its repetitiveness. Viola's works often tend to focus on the human condition. This piece is almost screaming about how humans tend to follow the same path over and over, even though that, with the sound of the drum, they can realize it each time. This repetition is something that I find myself doing in my daily life. This is a very interesting observation about the human condition and it makes me want to look into more works by Viola to maybe learn a bit more about myself.

Comments

The Art of Game Design: Chapters 6 and 7

The Art of Game Design continues to be an intriguing read that surprises me in new ways with each chapter. Chapter 6 focuses on the importance that theme has on games and how theme should be treated in a game's design. Theme isn't just something that the player learns from the game, it is the thought or idea that the game should try to represent in every possible way it can. This chapter covers two forms of themes, experienced and resonant themes. Experienced themes are just that, the themes that are experienced by the player through the game's story and setting, however resonant themes are a bit different. Resonant themes are the ones that are below the surface and aren't really experienced but have some deep truth that parallels those truths that the player holds. These are the themes that resonate deeply with players and make a story truly meaningful to a player's core. To people who do not really play video games, they can be easily seen as a...

Magazine Columns - Backbone of Every Good Layout Response

There are many aspects that must be considered when designing a magazine. The content is very important, but one aspect of the design that no one really thinks about is the layout of the magazine. The grid is how images and text are placed around the page. It can determine the size of objects and how much white space is between each element on the page. Most text in magazines appears to be set out into 3 columns. However, one of the most common layouts utilizes 12 columns in order to appear to have 3 columns. This gives much more layout control over what is shown and how it is shown. Its very surprising that a 12 column layout results in 3 columns of main text. However, the goal of this is so that it is modular. In computer science, one of the most important things that you consider when coding is to try and make your code modular. When you can use the same layout on every page, it means that it is dynamic and interesting since each page will feel like it follows the same rules. T...

The Art of Game Design: Chapter 8 and 9

Chapter 8 in the book The Art of Game Design is all about the actual production process that is followed after brainstorming is complete and a team has an idea for what game they will be developing. One of the topics that this chapter focuses on are the ideas of software development, waterfall and a more circular idea designed by Barry Boehm. As a computer science major, I have encountered both of these ideas through my time in college and in the busniss world. Both theories have their positives and negatives, but the idea of "waterfall development" is a much stricter way of approaching software development when compared to Boehm's approach. With a waterfall approach, this does not leave any room to go back and revisit the original idea and add or remove core features. This approach was used in the development of many old forms of windows, which also coincided with how the software was sold. For example, Microsoft's windows operating systems. Win...

Into Digital Arts

Search This Blog