Douglas Kahn

Douglas Kahn is the Technocultural Studies at the University of California. Everything he works with and studies has to do with sounds. Mostly sound of art. His studies has a wide range of historical sounds of art to the Avant Garde to modern works. He delivers general speeches to schools about his sound arts. He has recently has written a book entitled; Noise Water Heat: A History of Sound in the Arts. However, from my research, i believe he focuses mainly on the art of sounds and soundtracks. The point of his practice starts with his point that sound/art has been around and together for ages, and now he would like to see where it is going and take it to a new level.

The Shape Shifter

The film Natural Features screened in class had many subjects that appeared and were heard in the film.To me the film was not only about what was visible but what was seamless. I don't to say that the film was about the color black, but it was about what the color black can do.
We saw paintbrushes come and manipulate what was on screen. We saw credits roll through out the film. We even heard sounds that the visual film could have been about. Men and women screamed on the track of this film at different volumes, and in no particular order.
The style of this film is so arbitrary that the meaning will differ from viewer to viewer. Personally, I feel that this film was about the editing power of black. Black is like the editing form of shape shifting. Shapes and spaces on screen will flip, run, move, bleed, anything that you can imagine, yet when it slides to black anything else can come out of the other side of this edit. You can use black to stop one shot and begin another. The colors of this film were predominantly black. It was in frame at all times surrounding words, and being painted on to the canvas of the screen.
All features of this film help you understand it. i argue that no one will come out of this film thinking the exact same thing. The idea and hypothesis that are in no two persons brain could possibly be the same after seeing such an erratic filmstrip. The diverse qualities of "Natural Features" do help you figure what the film is about, but your perspective of the film will differ from person to person.

Looking Back, Mask of the Mirror (Artist Statement)

Every morning we look into a mirror and see ourselves staring back. We continue on with our daily routine without even thinking about what eyes are staring back at us. In a novel written by Alhrazed called "The Wanderings of Alhrazed" he speaks of how the mirror is an entrapment for millions of souls looking back at you. He does not mention the plain they reside in how in what manner of life or form they take, but how it is just sort of a limbo. In the Divine Comedy written by Dante Alighieri he spoke of what kind of people went to limbo. I used a picture of Buddha just as an example of someone who dwells in the supposed limbo. Surrounding the picture of Buddha is a list of sayings that show how much of a good person he is. However his life lessons according to these classic writers could not even save his soul. You, as the viewer, peer into my mirror. There is no humans there is no presence besides a picture of Buddha and man masked being. In this reverse universe everything is upside down and quite different from the norms that we are related to. The masked one spells out the word Limbo in reverse. So in his dimension that we are peering into reveals this word to us upside down. In my piece what is looking back at you is the raw revealed people of another realm according to classic writings. I merely just lifted the mask of the mirror
These souls look back to us each morning, perhaps they are greeting us or perhaps they howling to us in a manner of torture, confusion, and bitter eternity.
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On a scale from one to ten of the success of piece I give it an eight. It was very fun to get up in front of a camera and in front of people and behave in such a strange way. I had a lot of fun interpreting these two passages from these books for an audience, and after all, for all of my work I believe personal enjoyment it the most important factor. I used up as much space as I could. I knew the camera would be jittery so it would not be similar to others table top assignments. It is very good to stick out. I cheated in a way by using the mirror to direct what the camera saw which basically made my piece, and it really explored the area around me.

Organic Film?

The idea of film occuring without the touch of a human hand is an abstract idea. if you really think about it, nobody can can really make a purely organic film. Film is a product produced by the human mind and the human touch. To see an oraganic film it would be like seeing a ghost. The ghost is a recorded feeling in time and space that occurs over and over.
The film "tree" I feel reached this goal in the most effective manner. The idea of a guy setting up a camera and tying it to tree and pressing record is so simple. He captured the natural process of this moment and space. It was almost as if this camera were an other worldly entity taking a document of this plain in front of it. This is the closest to organic filming because no human decided where the tree branch was going to move. The tree branch blew in the wind and the camera recorded where it moved to.
Other films also demonstrated 'organic filming' as I would like to call it. The film where the two dogs were eating food was quite organic. A human set this up, but the dogs were the interest in this story. The two dogs fell into a pattern of eating. This narrows who the author of this piece is down to two. It could be either the white dog or the black dog. They took turns eating from the food bowl and the water bowl.. We can narrow down who the author was even further. There were two dogs, the white dog and the black dog. The white dog seemed to control the situation. Whenever it was done eating it moved on to the next bowl. This forced the black dog to go the either of the bowls that the white dog was not eating at. This tells the viewer that the author was in fact the white dog. He controlled the story, he controlled what was happening on film, he controlled the other dog. A human did control the story he merely set the object in which recorded this phenomenon.
In the film "Two dogs and a ball" something off screen controlled the viewers opinion. Two dogs were sitting in a fixed position as the viewers watched them jerk their necks following something off screen. For a few moments we watched them follow something as if they were hypnotized. The thing that hypnotized them the object that was narrating this story. The audience saw the dogs moving their heads in almost an identical fashion, and the dogs saw a tennis ball. The tennis ball controlled the subjects in the composition of this film. The tennis ball was the teller of this story. The tennis ball controlled the two animals of film.
Lastly, the film about the parents reading dreams about themselves to the camera. At first you think it is the parents that are authoring this piece, because they reading the dreams to you. Then a hand comes into the screen, handing the parents papers to read. You can then assume that it is the camera man that is controlling what is happening. Then you realize, the entity that is truly controlling what you hear is this mans subconscience. He dreams these words. His parents a simply a translator for the dreams he has.
Organic films are interesting pieces that are controlled but other forces besides a human. The people who recorded these natural phenomenoms had nothing to do with it. They simply set up the camera and nothing more. Something else actually told us the story.

Althea Thauberger

This week when Althea Thauberger came to show us her videos I watched all of them and tried to absorb what we viewed. Alot of her work incorporated mostly singing. Don't get me wrong musicals are a respectable form of storytelling, however usually its not for me. The First work (not afraid to die) seemed like a portrait that moved. Then this voice came in. My first impression was, "come on, I don't have to sit through another laborious musical do I?" Yet the way Althea Thauberger uses music is not quite the format I was used to. After discussion I learned it was her purpose to throw her viewers off. She took conventions and bent them just a little bit. This made everything more interesting. Her work songstress was a music video, but at the same time not a music video. It was film that had sound included, yet it was a long take of the same view. No one could say that this is normal. Now that I look back at my experience with her I realized it was much more enjoyable.

Bas Jan Ader

I was viewing the Bas Jan Ader website and enjoying his silent films when my roommate came in. He sat down silently for a total of maybe ten seconds then asked, "what exactly makes this art?" I ignored it at first then thought to myself that he sort of had me stumped. Anyone could fall off of a roof and film it. I then watched more of his videos and noticed how smooth and fluent they were. The lighting was dark and seamless. I am particularly referring to the work entitled "Nightfall." The composition was even and balanced but these attributes are trivial.
This sort of art is made to make this world a more beautiful place. It reminds me of this Simpsons episode where Homer became an artist through a fad that was passing at the time. This fad eventually died leaving Homer only to go out with a big bang. So as his last act of art he released all of the zoo animals and flooded the town. He did not do it for arts sake he just did it to put a little twist on life. Bas Jan Ader was very the same. His work is just here to make us think. So I told my roommate whom was still skeptical of his work that,"You will never see this exact image ever again, so appreciate it as art now otherwise your just wasting thought."

Freud and the comic view on jokes

Simple jokes such as 'Buster' Keaton being dragged into a lake by a boat that should be afloat is funny on the surface for one reason. It's Wacky! It gets the laughs of everybody who is watching it. But why are we laughing? Sure it is funny, and sure we acknowledge it as so, but there is somewhere in our psyche where our laugh is coming from. This gag of buster being drowned brings a situation to our conscious being. If we were actually there when a man was being dragged into the lake we would probably be horrified. However, from the safe confides of our home viewing experience we laugh at this situation. Frued compares situations like this to words. In the wrong context serious words can be made comical. At first the "joke appears to be wrongly constructed."(28, playful judgements) However the "comic affect is produced by the solution of this bewilderment."(28)