Kinetics

Grace Brown and I had a ball with our kinetic project. Focusing on a satirical view of religion, we created a talking Jesus portrait.
We knew we wanted to do something that might make people laugh or feel uncomfortable; I wanted the audience to walk away affected emotionally. Many sketches and meetings with Michelle later, Grace and I headed to Lowe's and bought the necessary supplies. Using plywood as our backing we printed out on photo paper and collaged a traditional Jesus portrait using hot glue to adhere. For the frame we cut down moulding and nailed to into the plywood. We chose to lacquer the pieces of moulding gold for a more Renaissance/Gothic feel-- easily stereotyped as a more Baroque aesthetic, the gold exalts the subject matter, who here happens to be Jesus.
As far as the mechanics went, we cut out a strip from the plywood backing right there Jesus's mouth would be. This served as a track for the dowel that attached to the mouth shaped cut-out we used as the kinetic part of this project. A sanded, oblong piece of plywood was connected to the motor. A vertical dowel (placed to run along the oblong gear) connected to the horizontal one, which caused the mouth to move.
Placed on a table that was draped with white, two church candles flanked the portrait. It ended up being three feet wide by three and a half feet tall. Its size and the presentation made it appear to be on an altar. Darwinism playing in the background provided the comic.. or rather sacrilegious.. aspect we were going for.

Big picture: Jesus sitting on an altar, speaking Darwinism to his beloved congregation.

The collage gave a more modern feel to the portrait-- it wasn't perfectly aligned, and the image was slightly pixellated. This is what we wanted. Printed from technology and rearranged for the twentieth century, a religion after such a long history undergoes slight changes, cracks, falls apart, despite the gold frame and the period style in which it is presented. Where it looks almost perfect and old, juxtaposed with this is the crystal clear voice of Darwinism coming straight from the savior's mouth. The fight between science and religion is an old one.





The video is an informal record of our success at getting the kinetic part of our project to work. It was really exciting at the time, though I wish later we had documented the whole project better. That was something I certainly learned from the Time class experience.

Automata

Coming Out

For my endurance performance piece I wrote on butcher paper on a large table in Powell Campus Center from quarter to nine a.m. to quarter to three p.m. on Wednesday, February 10th. The stories that I wrote were the coming out stories of gay and bisexual people, found on the Human Rights Campaign website (hrc.org). Each story was a little bit different and offered varying perspectives and consequences of coming out to families and friends. At first, transposing the stories proved an easy task. As time went on I became immersed in the lives of the people I was writing about and I found myself wanting to know more; more about their situation, about their experiences, about the after story. Details of the environment in Powell melted away as I found myself trapped in my own head. Alone as I felt, I was reminded that I have friends who are willing to help and listen, friends who showed me what kindness they could by bringing me a sandwich or sitting with me a while over the duration of the project. What I found surprising was that only people who knew me or the project approached the table. To make this project less private and more public (if I wanted to catch public attention) I would have considered perhaps my attire, the location of the paper I was writing on or rather the use a different media than written language. I have an affinity for words, so writing the stories made them more real to me, and I really wanted to focus on the stories rather than draw attention to myself. Given the opportunity to do it again I know I would have done things differently, much differently, but thats what learning is all about.

Thanks to Ethan Martin for photography, and those who came to witness.

Manifesto

I will be writing out a Human Rights Campaign manifesto or the Hate-Crime Legislation recently passed by the Obama Administration (depends which I can get a full copy of) in Powell Campus Center for six hours on butcher paper on Wednesday, February 10th. I understand the project is meant to be difficult and something that requires endurance, something that can be easy at first and difficult later. Physically yes, I will become tired and my arm will start to hurt and it'll take concentration as the performance goes on to not get messy and scrap the whole thing. The real challenge for me in this project is a mental and emotional one, a feat I hope my audience will be able to appreciate.

Group 3

Sonic Postcard

multiplicity

multiplicity from ethan martin on Vimeo.

A Personal Record of Time

It's a common enough wish that a soundtrack accompany life's greatest moments. For our sound project I thought I would take this idea into consideration and put a spin on it by using music to make a record of time. After classes ended for the day (after having charged my iPod fully in anticipation for this homework) I turned on my iPod and started playing every song in my library in alphabetical order. By choosing to play every song rather than every artist the music would continue undisturbed for so long as the iPod was charged. Starting at one o'clock in the afternoon Monday and ending at 8 o'clock Tuesday morning when class began my iPod played a continuous two hundred and seventy two songs. Nearly all of the letter 'E' had played which surprised me. I expected that many more tracks would've been spent ; apparently I underestimated the power of almost three hundred songs that were on average two to four minutes long. Listening to music all day certainly made the time go by more quickly, but having a soundtrack to life when you can't skip songs for the posterity of an assignment isn't as glamorous as one might think. I also spent some time averaging out how many songs were in an hour by organizing twenty one, one hour playlists of songs alphabetically from my iTunes. The average was track list was sixteen. This makes sense, I suppose, as most thirteen track CD's take about forty minutes to play through completely, but still I expected them to be longer. Though I felt time was moving quickly in the moment, the illusion seemed hard to believe once I saw the data on paper.