Slingshot Out the Valley

My goal with my Honors Art History Senior Thesis was to put a little more local relevance and vitality into my academic pursuits. The end result is a split piece, a 20 minute art journalism video that profiles 3 local artists and contextualizes Salt Lake through the 337 Project. I showcased the work of Margaret Willis, Cein Watson, and Jann Haworth. Each of these artists does amazing work and has a complex relationship to Salt Lake City, together they create a snapshot of a corner of the city's creative field. The project could never be a whole portrait of all the amazing things going on in this city, rather I wanted to get a little more familiar with specific artists than we were able to in Afterimage: The Art of 337.



This video portion is the more consumable side of the thesis. It is expanded upon by the written portion, which delves into the roles of these artists in establishing local identity, the ideas of habitus and global art, and the role of technology in the aforementioned concepts. The paper posits that our interconnectivity is key to pushing great creative endeavors into the cultural limelight, which is mutually beneficial for the artists involved and art consumers both on a local and global level. It warns participants in this hybrid culture against becoming too homogenized in the expansive reach of the internet, and discusses methods artists can employ to maintain individuality while still enjoying the benefits of convergence culture.

Music by Casey Blandford and Alex Haworth

I'll soon have links up to the individual interviews, enjoy! Read More......

Visual Thesaurus

This little guy is a map of a speech I've been working on re: the state of the world and our role in it.
Read More......

Kutiman cuttin up the Tubes!

The internet's been humming today with the music mashups of Kutiman, an Israeli artist who's been using Youtube to the fullest breadth the website has to offer. It's pretty cool stuff:



He's a mashup artists along the lineage of Too Many DJ's and more recently the bombastic dancehaller Girl Talk, but the samples Kutiman uses all come specifically from Youtube and incorporate the video portion as well. This tiny distinction makes Kutiman's songs that much greater, because the humble bedrooms, basements, and streetcorners that youtubers broadcast from, complete with crappy lighting and personal sillinesses, become a cohesive song that maintains the tie to its composite parts. Like Daft Punk's Around The World we get a visual for every sound, but in this case the visual was born with the sample. So we get a backstory to every note, scratch, and vocal, an insight into how it was manipulated for the final song. In his amazingly simple way, Kutiman taps into the layering and wealth of information on Youtube and repurposes it into an anthemic readers digest of DIY creativity.

This is what I love about Youtube: It is a constant stream of lo-grade creativity, which cumulatively adds up to something exciting and fresh about the 21st century. Anyone with a cameraphone and a personality (or lack thereof) can be a player. And though Kutiman purposed this creative energy towards music, the possibilities are pretty much limitless. Imagine a screenplay written out of youtube confessional 1-liners with some kind of connecting theme, or a choose-your-own-adventure style argument that links contrasting views of different videos in a continuous point-counterpoint.

The infinite beauty on the net is sometimes buried under ceaseless comments and driveling myspace profiles, but jesus it's a powerful source. Omniscience via the terminal makes us quiet individual gods. Let us create.

I think my favorites are Babylon Band and I'm New. The Vocoder bit in Wait for Me is pretty good too. Screw it, I like them all. I love the interface too, literally cutting up youtube for a new kind of art. Cheers.

Thanks to Luke for throwin' down the gauntlet. Read More......