“Webcam”
Liv Garber, Yubin Lee, Anabelle Malamug
Our response to Jordan Wolfson’s piece is “Webcam”. “Webcam” is ideally an animation that replicates reality TV star Kylie Jenner with a dark twist. Her voice is distorted and masculine, and she follows a strict script of a few of the most ridiculous quotes from her family’s TV show “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”.
Female Figure by Jordan Wolfson is a piece that reflects ideas of conformity and it’s destructive nature within pop culture. In his piece he clearly identifies these themes using methods of animatronics, done by Spectral Motion. His piece is centered around, quite literally, a female figure with a mask resembling a witch-like character. There is audio that goes along with the piece, confessions, spoken by the figure. These confessions are blunt and seem like they would be those that society is afraid to interact with.
Diving into Jordan Wolfon’s previous works, it is clear that his themes revolve heavily around the ideas of pop culture, viewership, interaction, and the exploitation of those viewed and viewing. The idea for this concept was based off his Cool World and Animations animated videos, where pop culture references and repetition is used as a device to entice the viewer into its looping hypnotism and strange contact. The idea that pop culture is inherently violent by nature of its one sided viewership and it’s human disconnect is something that Wolfson shatters via the use of basic contact (verbal, visual). This contact exposes the consummation of a human body via media, and how it’s destruction can be normalized very quickly and seem alien and uncomfortable when dissected.
My experience doing the research was quite an adventure. At first, Jordan Wolfson’s “Female Figure” terrified me, which was a reaction he was looking for in his viewers. However, it was frustrating to read in one article that Wolfson had no message behind this work but instead he made something that “interested him”. Whether Wolfson realized it or not, there was a message behind this piece: the exploitation of women and pop culture. The symbolism of the green mask, the sharp shark teeth, the intense eye contact, and the dirt on the figure were what made Wolfson’s piece so successful. The fictional story of Female Figure was also interesting, and the fact that he chose a masculine voice over a feminine voice was astonishing.
Working in a group is not something I would do often, but Liv and Yubin were cooperative and equally as hardworking. Our first idea was to buy three dolls (one for each of us), rip the limbs apart, and configure all parts of the body into one piece. Then we decided that we didn’t want to spend money and ultimately went for the digital approach. I think that the video was successful because it replicated Wolfson’s earlier animation works. It did not elicit the same response as “Female Figure”, but viewers were still a little horrified.
Someone in class made a suggestion to be mindful of the white borders, and to maybe extend the white to the edge of the frame of the video so that the computer activity would be more of a surprise. Another suggestion was to show the figure’s full body instead of just the head. I felt that those comments would definitely improve the piece, if my group and I decided to take the project further.