Not Another Social Distraction!

So for a new assignment out of my Advanced New Media class I had to obtain a twitter account, either using a preexisting one or to make one. As I lack a twitter account and have never had any interests in one, I had to make an account for the asinment. (which includes righting this blog entry)

Registration…

So I made my way to the site, bumping threw Google for a correct url. (funny I misspelled twitter my first try) and noticed on the very first line for the registration a request for a name, specifically first and last. Unlike most from my generation I entered the net in the days where giving out your real name was considered as bad as inviting a rapist in to your house. Because of this my first instinct was “F**K no I’m not giving you that” and promptly closed the tab. However because this is a mandatory thing I quickly found myself back on the account registration page and staring down the name requirement. This time I defaulted to my primary false identity, which will not be named, and filled out the forum only to be greeted with a “this username is already taken!” message when I entered in what once was my unique gamer handle.

I find it quite depressing the number of people that are now running about the net using my screen name, thanks to them I’ve had to use generalizations for my Minecraft account, several other services, and now possibly twitter. The worst part of all, the handle that I wanted was consumed by an account that has been in active for 3 years… If you can’t tell, I’m not huge on people, especially ones who take what was once my unique usernames. I had an identity behind them, if you saw that name, you knew who to expect. Now it could be any number of bosos on the net.

Ultimately after an elongated period of fiddling with what handles it did permit and how it registered them (caps, no caps) I originally decided to just play it easy and go with my 2^nd most prominent gamer tag (3rd most used username) Aostai. Officially that name has a ser. section, Iwef, however I have been fazing it out as it is both illogical and unnecessary. However I generally shy away from using this one due to its irregularity between spelling and pronunciation due to its origin in Star Wars. (a-stoya) after much thought regarding this I decided to go with the surname of my primary gamer tag Pasow Atheba.

The decision to finally move to something I’ve never used before is twofold. I’ve been looking for a while now for a new online identity as my old ones have gained some unnecessary stigmas while still giving some homage to my past. Atheba has sense its creation become the dominant last name for all new characters I’ve made in games and is one of the more phonetically spelled of them. I really wish I knew where I was going with building an identity, I’m not huge on letting everyone know the one given to me, and I’m not huge on the ones I’ve used thought my life. I was fine with just rolling with old ones till they started vanishing from availability.

After registration…

Why the hell do I have to follow 5 people the moment I make the account?

*enter minor amounts of rage*

Decided to see if I could just get back to regular twitter by loading another page and surly enough I was back to a normal service. What I’ve been questioning the entire time I’ve made this account was what was available to change after creation. I was quite paranoid that I would be locked in to everything once creating the account; however to my delight I can change everything, the Name, the username/handle. While I was there I also uploaded one of the avatars I’ve been using lately around the net. My next step was to disable 90% of its social functions, took out nearly all of its email notifications, shut down its privacy violation system of tailoring twitter based on sites I visit (hoping it turns off the cookie tracking) and forced on a few features that really should be on by default.

Lastly before posting this blog entry, I tweeted that the account had been created, a little tradition of every account I’ve ever made.

@Athebaart

Appropriation Study

Title: Altered States
Year: 2012
Run Time: 5:37
Medium: Digital Video
Original Footage: The Nature of Sound
Description: In Altered States, i look in to what kind of abstracted meanings and imagery can be derived from old black and white footage threw heavy manipulation of the image and audio.

Video:

Stills:

Collage: Digital vs. Traditional

I feel that I create to extremely different ends when collaging digitally verses traditionally. Digitally I’m very heavy on the visual esthetic of the image, normally playing with error and other corruption based manipulation techniques. (I have a little series I keep called degradation) while traditional media I tend to work to some specific end, where there is some story or reason to what is created. Simply put, digitally I’m working towards a more dada and modernism look and feel (its shapes relationships and colors), verses traditional is more story driven, where what it means is more important than what it looks like.

Despite this there are some similarities in how I work. Both digital and traditional means of collaging are products of the process. While I may have an idea of what I want to do, the end result is highly dependent on what unexpected discoveries are made when working towards that desire. (I am a huge fan of glitches in things, they reveal so much about how things work)

Specifically to the appropriation assignment that this entry is a derivative of, I found it rather difficult getting started. I’m used to having a plethora of media sources on hand or easily accessible. With the advent of the internet we have limitless supply of sources, so if we ever ended up wanting a new one or more it was only a click away. However for this assignment the limitation of the singular source video, particularly one that’s as old as my grandparents, was quite limiting. (Copyright law makes it imposable to get stuff that is newer legally I’m assuming) Thankfully I did get some ideas after a bit of time that were all derivations of other collaging techniques I’ve seen across the internet. However, untimely what has resulted in the finale form of the project is far from anything I had originally conceived.

Idris Khan

Born: 1978, Birmingham England
Education: University of Deby and The Royal College of Art
Current Residency: London, England
Medium: everything, mostly digital overlay

Khan works primarily digitally to create anew old subjects threw a layering technique he developed. his techniques creates a surrealistic abstraction of time and space in which things are compressed on top of each other to create an almost ghostly appearance. He achieves this threw both his own personal photography and threw re appropriating others to create his collages. “I used 70 to 100 images for each picture. I wouldn’t necessarily take the whole image, but fragments of images, and bring them together on the computer."

One of his preliminary ideas behind his work is related to the collective photography of monuments. Such as in his work The Houses of Parliament, London, 2012 where he overlaid nearly a hundred found photographs to create an eerie representation of the British capital.

(Some personal thoughts)
WOW, do I LOVE this guy’s work and don’t normally say this about art that I can find in a museum but this stuff is spectacular and oddly emotional. I can’t really place why but they feel charged with some form of depressive notion. I have to say, looking at what I’ve done with the re appropriation assignment I have definitely been influenced.

Re-Appropriation

WOW! We really get to do stuff related to what I’ve always thrown away as not usable? Sweet *smugface*

REFEQQ==.mov

This was produced for the Dada project in AH291. It incorporates several things I’ve learned from previous appropriation projects from various classes along with me desire to play with color recently.

Experimental Animation Final

(Fast forward to 3:41)

This was done as my final for my animation class with Raymond over the summer. Its 100% appropriation, all images are gathered from photographs of things I own personally or from internet searches; even the audio is 100% unoriginal!

Art Pannel At Oakland Univeristy

Once I finally managed to make it out of food-coma from the weekend spent at Lake Michigan, bobbing around the dunes (it’s like a roller-coaster that you direct!) and practicing roasting donuts over an open fire while it hailed. The talks were both interesting and sleep inducing.

Perhaps my state of being, during the earlier point of the panel, was to blame but it felt like they spent far more time on their history than the actual subjects for the panel. However I will say it was pretty cool that they had such a good variety of people to be a part of it; The Dean of UofM’s art department, a gallery curator from NYC (Heather), apparently white head has grown his hair out (explains why I kept on looking at him but couldn’t place a name, I feel like such a creeper), an independently educated artist (the guy that was showing, cool!) and a formally trained one that was showing down in Detroit.

While it really is no surprise to me that education was the main focus of the panel, it did surprise me how much concern people seemed to have over the newly emerging degree level. At first I thought it was an overreaction, as my family history is down the engineering side of college where PHD’s and doctorates are never founded apawn and are actually quite useful. However after hearing the crowds concern it eventually dawned on me that once again art is different in every way and that the artificial ‘tiers’ of skill brought on by extended education in art really isn’t the way it should be allowed to go.

The last thing that I would like to mention is about the hosts well put concern over the direction of Oakland’s art school. His mention of its theory heavy curriculum and wish that it could get more towards the practice was nice to hear. For a while I was thinking that perhaps Oakland wasn’t interested in having its artists prepared physically for what they could mentally envision and express.