all night homework binge

As sad as it is to admit, I am starting my final essay tonight. Ideas have bouncing around in my head for the last 2 weeks of course, but tonight is the night for implementation. My thesis statement involves sexuality and video as related to 3 pieces that we watched this semester: Sadie Benning's "If Every Girl Had a Diary," Lisa Steele's "Birthday Suit: With Scars and Defects," and Jennifer Montgomery's "Age 12:Love With a Little l." All three are in different formats and have different uses and representations of female sexuality. Steele uses sexuality not for what it is, but how it represents a nakedness of consciousness, a vulnerability. Benning uses sexuality, but not explicitly in her video. It's ironic because I felt Benning had the strongest impact in her presentation through direct confrontation and conversation. Other artists like Montgomery use jarring images of sexuality and eroticism, yet fail to impact as much as Benning's stare and earnest speech. Montgomery used shock tactics in attempt to create an emotional disturbance. These variations in approach indicate the powerful presence human sexuality holds, even in the experimental realm. I'm excited to write this paper for fleshing out my opinions and insight on such a provocative subject. I'm not excited to write this paper because I'm not sure I can do such a subject justice. Only time will tell.

information age

Kerri's presentation on internet, film, and media was probably the most applicable class session to my major. As a DIVAS major, interactivity between artist and user, as well as between different artistic mediums, are important topics of discussion. It's exciting to be apart of something so culturally relevant and groundbreaking. Every skill I'm learning right now is going to equip me with endurance and innovation to create the science fiction future we've hoped for all along. Robots, complex databases, and saving the world were only dreams of yesterday, but now we've built our superpowers. We're living science non-fiction.

With final project well underway, I've had to conceptualize many projects, based on the integration of various media forms. Particularly applicable to Monday's lecture is my Web Design final project. I'm using various containers comprised of Iframes in order to create a varying visual representation of something that's important to me--drums. Each container will have photographs that will change when clicked. There will also be audio. Each click will result in a different audio loop, creating a similar effect to the interactive orchestra that was demonstrated in class. Except I'm not capable of such a complex interface yet! I don't know how to use Flash yet, but am excited to take a couple classes in the fall specifically focused on multimedia for the web. I do use After Effects extensively in my coursework and I found its applications to web media very compelling.

What's in the future for web media? Film? Any art form? The digital age has so many exciting and unknown things on the horizon that will seem elementary when we look back 20 years from now. The information age is overwhelming, but I can't help but be a part of it.