Monday, December 8, 2014

Art 343 Final



For this final project I got inspiration from In Defense of the Poor Image by Hito Steyerl . I find it very interesting how she uses the poor image to her advantage. “The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.” Throughout the paper, Steyerl is defending the poor image. She wants it to be recognized as something that people don’t really pay attention to. I watched some of her other videos and got inspiration from those as well. She uses some dry humor in some. I wanted to incorporate all of these things as well as putting my own twist to it. I chose to make a short video uses appropriated images from popular advertisements. I chose each ad from Googling popular advertisements throughout the last ten years. I chose to put the Old Spice man as the main voice behind the project. The commercial is about how if you use this old spice cologne everyone will love you and you will be the best man around. I decided to end the video with the McDonald’s theme slogan, “I’m lovin’ it.” I made the voices lower than they were originally. I wanted everything I put into this video to be different than what I originally grabbed from the Internet. Each picture I chose, I edited it some different way. I almost randomly put different filters and edits on each picture. On some ads I made have movement in them. I tried to use some humor in the video as well. I put the chocolate man at the very end with no sound because I wanted him to look scary and like he was put of place.
Steyerl talks about how a poor image is passed around, edited, given to someone else, and changed. I wanted my video to be like that. I wanted to change the pixilation of them, the colors, and just change them to give them a different look. When photos and other media are passed around like this, the piece is given a different meaning and most likely less of a meaning. Popular advertisements are all over the Internet. You cannot get away from them. Whatever website that a person goes on, it is likely that there is an ad somewhere on the page. This is a problem in today’s society. Seeing bill boards or different posters everywhere give the product or what they are selling a different meaning. In today’s society photographs are also perceived differently than they use to be. Pictures were taken with a digital camera or a disposable camera and you had them printed. My parents have boxes and boxes of photographs where as I only have digital files that I have taken with my phone mostly.

All together I think that my video could be more expanded. There were some good suggestions brought up when doing a critique. I could make the video longer and keep repeating the short video over and over but making more edits. I think that would have given the piece more of a meaning. Also I would have used more commercial voices instead of just the two that I used. I needed to layer more and more. When looking at my video if you were an outside viewer, I think that it would be difficult to pick up a meaning from it. I definitely want to expand more on this to prove my point that I am trying to get across.
Steyerl, Hito. "In Defense of the Poor Image." (n.d.): n. pag. E-flux. E-flux, Nov. 2009. Web. 10 Dec. 2014.

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