Integrative Studio 1

I think this class Integrative Studio: Memory really pushed me out of my comfort zone, not only was I encouraged to make three dimensional projects but I was also encouraged to think more conceptually throughout the semester. I realized its more than just creating an aesthetically pleasing piece of art. There should be a reason behind every visual aspect of the piece. I realized that a lot of people in the class weren’t big fans of group projects, but this class helped me realize that I actually work quite well in a team. I thought my Audio and my Stop Motion project were quite successful. Speaking of those projects, this class also helped me expand my knowledge on certain programs like Audacity which I had little prior experience with and animation on Photoshop which I also had little prior experience with. So I not only get to leave this class with a lot more technical skills I get to leave with a slightly different perspective on my approach to art.

 

 

 

 

 

Going into the 9/11 museum was a real eye opener for me. I’ve known about this event for as long as I could remember, but I never really knew everything about it. Two of the exhibitions that stood out to me were the Timeline one and the People who passed away one. The Timeline exhibition just helped give me a better understanding of exactly what was happening, they show everything from all the flight tracking to the communication through the radio going back and forth. It just brings the whole event to life in the sense that it almost feels like you’re there. It was so informative, it gave exact time details and specified exactly what was going on in regards to security of the president and of the people and how everyone was reacting. The information was just so interesting to look at, all the videos and the artifacts, all of it just helped me learn more and just understand more.

The second exhibition that stood out to me, that probably stands out to everyone is the room of all the pictures of the people who passed away. It just helped me realize just how many people, of course everyone knew a lot of people were affected, I mean it is one of the most tragic events in history but just going into that room puts names and faces to what before was just a statistic.

1) Why did you choose to create a main character/protagonist Evelyn that only becomes likeable during the last few pages?

2) The battle of “old money” versus “new money,” can one be better than another isn’t it all just money in the end?

3) Are you writing from personal experience, or did you have to do a lot of research to figure out the language and the ways of the Upper East Siders?

4) Were your characters purely fictional or did you base some characteristics off real people?

5) From your research or personal experience, would you say people actually behave like Evelyn or has it just been exaggerated for story purposes?

And if those don’t work, click here, here and here.

I’m in a group with Alicia and Mychael and we’ve decided to focus our final project on a classic brownstone house on 14 W 10th Street, also referred to as the “House of Death” built during the Civil War. The name comes because there has been a lot of paranormal activity that has happened in that house. Apparently 22 spirits haunt the house or haunted, the house is now split into 4 floors and 2 apartments on each side.

Jan Bryant Bartell wrote a book about her experience in the house, Spindrift: Spray from a Psychic Sea. She suffered through a psychological and physical torment living in the house, in order to help her she called a medium to get rid of the spirits. However, the medium got possessed by the spirit of Reenie Mallison, yelling that she will never leave because its her house. Another strange occurrence that happens with the book is that it keeps disappearing; Dennis a resident that lived in House 16, said that he bought the book about 10 times in Strands. In fact, even we had trouble getting our hands on this book. It wasn’t in Bobst or Strands and finding an online version was difficult, however we found it in the New York Public Library even if we couldn’t take it out. The book, just in a literary perspective is known for not being strong, it doesn’t capture the audience because its written well or have a good hook. What captures people is that she wrote it based off real-life experience. Even Dennis, says he can corroborate with the stories Jan Bryant Bartell says in her book.

Another famous incident that happened in the “cursed” house,  is the Joel Steinberg case. Joel Steinberg was a crime defense lawyer, who moved into the house with his girlfriend, and two adopted children Lisa and Michael. Joel and his girlfriend were under the influence of cocaine, he beat his daughter Lisa and his son was found tied up to a playpen soaked in his own urine. His girlfriend opened the door for the authorities with a black eye and bruises the next day, and Lisa passed away the next day. Till this day Joel claims that he is innocent and claims that he was possessed and that he didn’t commit those crimes.

Lastly, the House of Death is famously known to be the home of Mark Twain. His spirit has been seen in a white suit descending the staircase, even the tour guide mentioned how once she had a medium on her tour and the medium sensed a man in a white suit even before the guide started to explain the story. Mark Twain never died in the building but legend says he had unfinished business in there.

I have attached my essay here, a lot of my information is already repeated but I talked a little bit more about the whole process in general. And the poem I wrote for this project is here.

Stopmotionfinal from Anisha Subberwal on Vimeo.

Our assignment was to re create a memory in a dream-like way, the original goal was to find a “bad” memory. One bad memory everyone has is food poisoning, I thought I could create that in a very interesting way and “dream like” or “magical” way. I wanted to show the food go inside someones body and make it comical by showing the person go to the bathroom. Just to make the whole story more interesting, at least visually I chose to show the food going down someones stomach a very eccentric one. There’s this low-key almost hole in the wall place in Hong Kong where they give you a very weird looking egg waffle. The shop is called “Oddies” which also adds to the strangeness of this video.

In a lot of my artwork, I love the use of color and so I wanted this video to be no different. I incorporated my color scheme and my swirly doodles through the backgrounds of each scene. And because it was a collaboration Stephanie incorporated her Anime like style. It was a successful collaboration in my opinion, we managed to work very well together, we took turns when it came to using the drawing tablet. We started out with sketching the ideas on paper and then transferring it onto the computer. I had a little bit of prior knowledge with the animating on Adobe Photoshop, but its safe to say a lot of what we were doing was experimentation. After successfully animating the first few scenes, it started to become a whole lot easier, it was just a time-consuming process. On the plus side, we didn’t have to animate the background for every frame in the scene. After animating 8 scenes on separate Photoshop files, we transferred the videos on to Adobe Premiere and started to assemble the whole video. We gathered sounds from free-sound.org and recorded a few and transferred them on to Premiere.

Overall, I would say that Stephanie and I successfully collaborated on this project. We both had the initial idea to do our animation digitally which is why we decided to partner up, because if we were do our projects alone it would be a lot of work, and this way we not only got to divide the workload but it was a successful merge of our artistic styles.

 

• What memory are you manipulating?

I’m going to manipulate a memory of when I got food poisoning from this egg waffle thats a Hong Kong delicacy.

• What is your concept? Is there a linear story? Non-linear?

It’s going to be a linear story.

• What is the goal or intended purpose(s) of the project?

I want to be able to show it go through my stomach in very weird/abstract way.

• What is your intended length?

My intended length is going to be 1 minute.

• Tell us WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN and HOW you plan to shoot. Be very explicit about each of these 5 elements. What materials will you need to make it? Where do you plan to shoot it? Will you shoot from one camera or two (One angle? Two? More?)? — These can refer to the Storyboards/Shot Plan and Materials List. You don’t need to write them twice. Just link from the proposal to both.

I plan to make this whole stop motion using photoshop, draw each frame on there and put it together in Adobe Premiere. I will plan to have different angles. I also plan to work with Stephanie, because it is a lot of work for one person.

• Has any media work already been produced on this subject? Show us examples of these references and explain what is new, different, interesting, engaging about your approach?
  Style? (Any key stylistic elements in shooting, audio, editing, etc.). Show two examples (these can, of course, be from the list I showed you in class).

I’ve seen all the examples on this website. I like the sound used here, Im probably going to use some kind of background music instead of having voice overs. I also watched this one and I really liked the editing in the beginning when I don’t see the hand in the frame.

• Will you have sound in it? Music? Narration? If narration, who? what? Would you like to edit to the beat, or simply have it play at the same speed throughout? Why?

I will have background music in it but no narration. I haven’t chosen the music yet but I think the I will have a beat that changes depending on whats going on.

• Who is working on the project and what will the role of each person be?

I am working on this project by myself.

 

Material List:

– My laptop (Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere)

– Drawing Utensils (Paper, Pens, Pencils)

– My Drawing Tablet

 

My partner Rachel and I initially planned to go to a drag show in class, however due to some age restrictions we had to come up with a plan B for this project. So we decided to go to Central Park Zoo. I honestly didn’t think the zoo was going to be as small as it was, I barely saw any animals; the most exciting animal I saw was a bear. We had some technical issues towards the beginning, we didn’t realize that the Sony recorder required a different type of memory card, so I waited inside the zoo with all the equipment and Rachel left to go to the nearest shop because we thought we would have to pay for two more tickets.

While I was waiting, I took out my journal that I started making for my Time class. A journal to document ideas, drawings, memories and honestly whatever came to mind. I had been feeling really homesick that weekend so I was pouring my feelings out through overlapped handwriting, which is a very nice way to release any kind of frustration or sadness. I overlap the handwriting so no one else can read it. Which is what I represented in my art piece. I chose to illustrate dippin dots because that was the most exciting part of this trip to the zoo. I absolutely love dippin dots and they just make everyone feel so happy because they are so colorful. In a way one would think its ironic that I chose to “pour out” my feelings through dippin dots but it was more like a relief to get some time to reflect and release some tension.

I not only took my journal but I took my camera as well and I managed a lot of photos.

 

I did like most of the stories, I think it was not only the content but the way they narrated the story that made it interesting. The fluctuations in tones keeps the audience interested and helps them follow along feeling the mood of the stories and how the characters are experiencing it. They weren’t as short as I expected them to be, but I think the story telling was done so well that one hour per episode seemed to go by pretty fast. Sometimes they used different sounds to make the story come to life. Most of the stories are told in a very structured way, the beginning then the climax and then the falling action. We can story-tell by structuring our tale in a similar format with a good hook to keep readers or listeners in this case, interested. The memories are recounted by the story tellers exploring their stories that happened in the past. They’ve had time to reflect on it, so they add present tense commentary. Its not in the moment which is why it can be told in a structured way with a beginning, middle and end.

I think This American Life had better narrations in comparison to Radiolab, but the difference isn’t that great, they are both very well done. It might have been because The American Life had longer narrations so they could go more into detail because they had more time. They also added more background music that went with the mood of the story. Especially in Obsession. Not only that, but the story was told through poetry which added to this eerie feel.  Perhaps it was also because Memory and Forgetting wasn’t really focused on narratives but more on the psychology and science behind the concept of Memory. In Remember Me, there is also background music but the voices of the characters really help evoke the mood, it makes the story more personal and it feels as though the character is telling us about their experiences one on one. The American Life podcasts just seemed a little more personal, perhaps it was due to the podcasts I chose.

Memory and Forgetting

Notes

Historical Amnesia

Add a memory back into the brain (implant a false memory)

Elizabeth Loftus (Plant entirely false memories into people: when you were 5 or 6 years old you lost your mom in a shopping mall and you were rescued by an elderly person and given back to your parents.) (Interviewed about the past, talked to the parents, tell people the truth about their past and slip in the lie/suggestion and adopted it as their own memory)

People take an image of an actual shopping center and images of their family members and construct these completely new memories, making them believe it happened to them.

Kremnater (suppose you witness a crime, and a police asks “did you see a red camiro leave the scene,” “are you sure?” The red camiro that is now in your head feels real. Back in the 80’s people started showing their repressed memories and Elizabeth Loftus questioned it which got her into a lot of trouble.

Memory is malleable

Story

Joe – painter

He used to get high in the evening

Trip and contemplate the universe

Joe drifted backwards into his adolescence

He had one show and then another one

Painted deserted landscapes

He started painting girls coming out of dark spaces

Reflecting that the girl looks the same in all paintings

16 year old in 1972 (Kay, first love, oval face, almond eyes)

He cheated on her, in front of somebody she knew

She moved away to Minnesota

She called him one day and they went out dancing and drank beer

She invited him and he said he had to see another girl

She lit a cigerrette and slammed the door

She died in a fire that night

Post traumatic pleasure syndrome

That story is self sustaining and whole

Story

Klive Wearin

Written by Oliver Sacks (Musicophilia)

Pioneer of music

Deborah is his wife

Music the gift of God

Suddenly March 1985, he became ill

Started off with headaches that never went away

Doctors said it was a very bad flu bug

5th day of the headache he became out of it

He couldn’t remember his wife’s name

Most severe amnesia ever documented

He would forget something at the blink of an eye

He couldn’t retain anything before a blink

Every blink was a new waking moment

Encouraged Klive to write a journal

Put the time from his watch (10:06 awake first time, 10:07 truly awake first time)

Line by line succession of astonished awakening

No difference between day and night

Survived total amnesia for 20 years long (Just like death)

Somehow he has sustained his love for Deborah (Can’t remember his children’s names, but he gasps with relief and excitement, hugs and kisses her with a lot of passion)

He could still read music and sing

Music is so richly organized, you can feel whats been and whats supposed to be

When the music stops, he falls out of time. Music gives him a time to exist.

Who Am I

Notes

Measuring adrenaline (flat line interrupted by 6 spikes when he made jokes)

Jolt of adrenaline when he made a joke

He wrote a book about the brain

Where is the inner real me?

Everything about a normal healthy person is flux

However theres still this one constant

Right hemisphere you see yourself in the morph of you and Bill Clinton

Story

Hannah Palins mom brain “explosion” aneurism

Headaches went away when she went to aerobics class

After being taken to the hospital

That was the last thing she remembered in 4 months

She was hooked up to a lot of machines

She squeezed her daughters hand realizing that her only daughter was in the room

She died that night

She was a shell of a person

Couldn’t walk/ go to the bathroom/

Slowly, very slowly a different person started to emerge

She never used to sing and she starts to belt out now all the time

She got a tattoo and loved wendy burgers from being a proper woman

Time stops and normal disappears

Story

We are just a car crash away from being a different person

Extended self is a story of whats happened to your body over time

When we fall asleep we lose grip of our brains

The dream (hoards of little people, come up and just keep looking at me, they were aware of me)

Stevenson (19th century, saw the little people who manage a persons theatre/always refers to himself as third person)

Where do dreams come from?

He started training his little people, pre bed ritual, wanting them to tell him a story.

 Obsession

Notes

Rituals that get out of control

These people are imprisoned by certain actions

Story

Jillian – obsessive over the number 2

If she dropped the key once, she would drop it again and then pick it up.

Becomes an obligation,

Says something and then repeats it to herself

Assigned numbers to colors/days of the weeks/

As powerful as a physical condition that doesn’t bother her, gives her order in her life.

Obsessions can take the place of religion. Things will be orderly if you follow those rules.

Story

Black Swans – Lauren

Starts off with superstitious beliefs

Lots of poetry

Prozac stops working for Lauren

Didn’t believe in prayers; simplistic chemical cause

Remember Me

Notes

Benjamin Franklin – cheerful disregard for the truth

“prettied things up” so they can be remembered

Not so easy to control how people will see you in a couple of years

Story

In a lot of the club pictures for Yearbook there was one kid that appeared over and over again.

It wasn’t a big deal for that to happen^ has a story/adds character

Story

Hotel ghosts

The ghosts are connected to how they died

Walter the ghost, doesn’t even have a motive

^Nobody knows why he stuck around

What could he have done that was so bad which caused him to stay around.

Fate is out of your hands

If you’re lucky your legacy will be remembered

Walter got blamed wrongly. The real Walter is being remembered and forgotten at the same time.

Please write on your blog (1-2 paragraphs) about how what you saw today in the three exhibits relates to your memory work this semester thus far and also, more specifically, to your “Memory Reconstructed” project this week. How did the work resonate with you? How will it inform your work this week? How does it relate to what you’ve studied thus far about memory?

The work that inspired me when I went to the MoMA was this piece in the Picasso Sculpture exhibit.

 

Picasso was never known to be a sculptor, he is more famous for his drawings and paintings which is similar to my situation. I’m not very comfortable with three dimensional work, and looking at this piece it resembled what I wanted to do with my project. I wanted to illustrate it black and white and in order to experiment with more hands-on work, I wanted to make it into a “pop-up” effect. Just the whole idea of bringing this two dimensional illustration and making it three-dimensional really resonated with what my original plan for this project was. The main material in this work is also paper which is how I planned to make my work as well.

 

Similar reason to the first one, however this is executed in a different way; again, I like the fusion of two dimensional work and three dimensional work. It’s just a very impressive piece in general and I love the use of the multi-media background to compliment the giant bird. I also love the subtle color scheme, its completely opposite of what I usually go for because I tend to work with bold colors and patterns but I have a real appreciation for this subtlety.

 

My Shrine Elegy:

Beautifully constructed temples,

Adorned with ornaments and statues dating back generations,

Intertwined with mythology so detailed and timeless.

A culture so dense and immaculate

 

An exquisitely designed box

made of glass,

so one can look inside

to appreciate its beauty.

Creating a disconnect.

 

Identity is embodied

within a person.

 

Mine is a fusion of

every culture

It’s confusing.

It’s globalized.

It’s different,

from my parents

from my relatives.

 

And I’m okay with that.

Like a lotus that finds beauty

in muddy waters,

I find beauty

in my loss.

 

My Artist Statement

I decided to make my shrine memorializing my loss of culture. In order to represent that I had to make a “beautifully constructed temple” which embodies just the overall beauty of my culture and religion. I used colorful patterns which are iconic to the Hinduism tradition and art, it’s all collaged to show a “packed” feeling because the religion itself is packed with mythology and tradition dating back to 500 BC; I used aluminum foil to provide a more “reflective” feeling to make it more personal.

The whole temple represents the “exquisitely designed box” that I talk about in my elegy. How if you look at the whole religion from an outside perspective its just this beautiful artifact, just like a lot of other old traditional customs. A “traditional” way of thinking doesn’t necessarily have to have a positive connotation, in fact most of the time we associate it with negativity. I’ve left that part of me behind, I no longer have that old traditional mentality, I don’t believe fairness is associated with beauty, I don’t have to marry another Indian man in my caste through an arranged marriage, I don’t have to be a housewife and I don’t have to be constantly repressed by either my parents or another male dominant figure in my life.

Another important symbol in my temple is the lotus, which essentially sums up my entire thought process perfectly. A lotus itself is symbolic to how good things can result from bad situations because they grow in muddy water. I folded my baby photos where I am celebrating festivals when I lived in India into a lotus flower and placed it at the bottom of this in-scent holder, also in the shape of lotus to represent the burning away of the tradition.