New job, Coldplay, London, Cambridge and Reiters Syndrome
Actually after trying to think up that title I feel too drained to actually type anything.
December 15th, 2008
Posts filed under 'Art'
The Wire
I watched the final season of The Wire a few weeks ago and I really wish I hadn’t. I keep hunting down youtube videos and listening to the OST a lot to try and get over it but I just can’t.
I think my favourite characters were Omar and Bubbles oh and Stringer Bell. I also started really liking Snoop in season 5 and Frank Sobotka was amazing too. McNulty was awesome, and Bunk. And Kima and Namond and Prez. If I continue I’m just going to list the whole cast actually, so I guess… The only character I really disliked was Ziggy, even Scott Templeton didn’t come close to him and boy was he ever a dick. Omar broke my heart into a million little pieces and whenever I think of Bubbles I can’t help but smile. I’m fascinated by Stringer and his complexities… Even when I was kind of annoyed with him and railing against him his faults rubbed me raw so when something flipped and I loved him again it was so painful and sweet. I got very attached to him I suppose. Oh the characters. The themes and ideas the show explores are great and stuff, the plots are wonderful don’t get me wrong, but it’s the characters that made this show for me. And I have to stop typing now because I want to hand my 3d in tomorrow.
Actually I take it back, even though I personally didn’t like Ziggy, I still think his character was really interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody with that kind of detachment from the world and complete lack of responsibility but I suppose they must exist.
April 16th, 2008
Descriptive stumbling blocks
I don’t know why I dislike analysing texts (Shakespeare especially for some reason!) and paintings so much. I started loathing it when I was doing my art A-Level, and one of the reasons I like the Impressionists so much is that their art is straightforward and about beauty and colour and joy. Painting’s like Renoir’s The Jardin d’Essai just leave me breathless. I’ve got to the stage in my documentation where I have to start putting down on paper exactly why I love the particular paintings I chose and why they influenced me so much and I’m having such a hard time doing it.
I do love the contrast of the aquamarine + teal and burned gold, I love how the flashes of silvery white add such liveliness and character; it makes the piece seem perfect. I think the buildup of textures and strokes is masterfully executed, but even writing it down in this blog in the most informal way possible makes me cringe a little. It seems to cheapen the art and make it less, discussing it. I do wish I could work out why I think it’s so, because intellectually I know that a group of people discussing what they love most about a piece of art means everybody gets more out of it; some people might spot bits other people haven’t noticed and so on.
I enjoy discussing The Wire and certain books and so on, it just seems to be visual/aesthetic things like artwork or video that I have a bit of a block with (and Shakespeare and a lot of the classics). This next lot of documentation is going to be painful.
This is dent to my determination to get it done is not helped by my evil evil housemate introducing me to Professor Layton and the Curious Village which is seriously quite scarily addictive. I have a terrible weakness for puzzles and this fulfils that weakness in a very big way. The art is really cute and the dialogue is either terrible on purpose or written by somebody with a very dry sense of humour, either way it makes me laugh a lot. I do like it.
February 28th, 2008
Planescape Torment
Planescape Torment is the best RPG I’ve ever played. The combat system sucks and it seems to be as buggy as hell but oh the story more than makes up for it. You start off waking up in a mortuary, with no idea of who you are or how you got there. Slowly you start to uncover your past and the past of your companions (who you pick up along the way with the exception of a floating talking skull called Morte who’s turns out to be there with you in the mortuary). I wasn’t completely sold on it until the first sign you get of something being not quite right - more than waking up clueless I mean. But then betrayals, treachery, double crossing, love and hate and insanity galore - the plots are layered and woven with such depth I couldn’t stop playing for about 2 days solid.
Why do so few game companies realise the importance of hiring proper writers? Is it really the case, that linear half hearted/2 dimensional stories are the ones people prefer? I don’t really know, I mean I suppose going by what’s on TV that’s the case… The Wire for example has some really amazing writing in it but it doesn’t seem to be aired anywhere in the UK and I think up until recently even to get the DVDs you had to order from amazon america. My friend assures me that what sells are the tired old rehashes of previous titles, and that’s why there’s such a lack of innovation in the game industry. I’m not entirely convinced though. I recently (well, not actually recently, but since I last posted) played Portal and the dialogue in it was outstanding, and I’m pretty sure that’s a big hit. Apparently the only reason Valve can spend so much time and money hiring really good writers is that they have steam and were started by private funds or something?
And it’s funny, writers seem to really want to write compelling and absorbing plots rather than your standard trash, and all the gamers I know seem to want to play them (maybe I just move in very elite circles or something!). We even, you know, buy them! I just don’t understand how the best selling games of last year were all sequels to one game or another as far as I know (fifa, need for speed, pro evolution, the sims).
Add comment February 6th, 2008
3rd year project/dissertation
These are disjointed thoughts I’m just keeping for myself, so I can remember what I’ve been thinking (because I seem to be going round in circles
So, I have this idea that when it comes to new media - not much of it is art. I mean it’s got a commercial basis. Which isn’t to say that art can’t have a commercial basis, but it gives it purity if it’s about conveying the artist’s social/political commentary, or his/her ideals or emotions, or, you know, just pure aestheticism.
There’s a lot more opportunity to give a lot more impact to whatever it is the artist wants to achieve with the new technology we’re starting to see more readily available. There’s more scope to get the audience even more involved.
I think looking at a straight kind of ‘port’ from traditional art to digital art is far too naive a way of looking at this kind of thing. Okay so, it’s a new media and it needs to have a wild kind of approach, but there’s no reason why I can’t take the fundamental principles from a movement of art like say, expressionism (or impressionism, these are the two I think would be really interesting) and look at them in a digital context. In fact, why not both of them?
Impressionism - from what I remember a lot of it’s all about the movement that goes on around us in the world, and the quality of light and so on.
Expressionism is all about manipulating reality to get certain emotional effects.
So, I could look at combining those two schools of thought and creating a digital [b]interactive [/b]piece of art.
Is it a really bad sign that part of me is going : What is the point?
Add comment October 9th, 2007
Connections (James Burke)
So, we watched a very interesting video in a lecture for emergent technologies today. It was called ‘Connections’, and it consisted of this remarkably 70s looking man named James Burke, complete in a kind of elvis-like white suit, giving a very structured insight into the future (of science) and exactly how it progresses (by looking at the past). Among other things.
Continue Reading October 4th, 2007
Women in art
500 years of female portraits in the west
Absolutely beautiful and fascinating and incredibly memorising. There’s something so intimate about the way their eyes move and catch the viewer’s gaze. Reading the youtube comments was slightly depressing ( this xkcd comic captures it perfectly) but hey that’s the internet for you. Full of awesome stuff, but also full of depressingly unsophisticated ingenues who do things like leap onto the “OMG THIS PROVES MODERN ART IS BS” bandwagon.
June 12th, 2007
Birds and videos
This deeply unnerved me on many different levels. Damn freaky things.
Oh yeah, and I was really obsessed with this for absolutely ages. It’s charming and also quite cool if you are willing to completely suspend your knowledge of how video works. And I am a total whore for suspending my knowledge of reality in general so this entrances me.
May 9th, 2007
And faster than a New York minute, digg redeems itself
So, after dissing digg in my last post, I found something which made me remember why it’s still worthwhile to go over all the interesting looking links on there anyway.
Rob Gonsalves‘ art is awesomely cool. The style reminds me of Magritte’s, but the pictures themselves are very Escher-like. Critically, I’d say they were lacking the palpable air of menace or tension that the surrealists have, but his technique is beautiful and the ideas he comes up with are very creative. They’re well worth a look at if you like Escher’s eye-watering artistic concoctions, at any rate.
March 19th, 2007
poisoninjest
Best Renaissance stage direction that doesn’t involve bears and exiting pursued by them?
It’s just GOT to be “He gets into a large tortoise-shell.”. Buahaha.
In slightly related news, I have stopped trying to read old english in the office when I am in a giggly mood (The canterbury tales [God bless the Gutenberg Project!], my brother and I used to listen to it as we went to sleep off a vinyl we got from the library - RETRO COOL GUYS, RETRO). It’s so immature, but when you feel like laughing already and you read:
“Of fustian he weared a gipon*,
Alle *besmotter’d with his habergeon,* ”
You just can’t help burst out laughing.
Oh, and while I’m at it, why don’t more text/code editors have split-screen options like jEdit? SciTE has a weird kind of thing a bit like it I guess, but it would make lots of sense for dreamweaver and other programs to have it as a function. I’ve needed to compare things loads of times.
4 comments March 6th, 2007