Week 7: Time Based Media: Exploring Audio Documentary in Education

Continued Exploration in Sound-Based Art and Audio Documentary

This week is a continuation from last week as we explore deeper into sound-based art and technology.  This area of art and art-making is my weakest art form as I am more movement and visual orientated in my art production.  This two-fold exploration in both podcasting and audio documentary produced some different research and information from last week, most significantly the impact of Synesthesia in sound-based artwork and the artists who use Synesthete to produce amazing sound-based artworks.  After working with sound myself for the first time in our Sound Art Compositions, I feel I now have a deeper appreciation and understanding for using sound in my own artwork and as a educational tool in the classroom.  I originally viewed sound as part of the music department and therefore something only taught be the music teacher but the more read as well as worked on my project, the more I realized the purposes/benefits/outcomes of using sound within art-making and art education.

Synesthesia

I think a great starting place to start exploring sound-based artwork and the conditions that influence and effect it such as Synesthesia is with public radio.  Since public radio has a foundation in a vast array of sound-based communications from talk-radio, news, music, and other more experimental voice/sound recordings it is the perfect institution to introduce Synesthesia. From New York's public radio station WNYC 93.9, the question is posed to the reader, "Does Synesthesia Make You More Creative?"  In order to be able to answer this question further reading and research is needed.  First, what is Synesthesia?  This article defines it as " a condition that causes the senses to blend together  which was first recognized by scientists in the 1880s, synesthesia causes people to see sounds, taste shapes, and hear colors."  This already triggered my interest as it pushes sound into realms of art that I am deeply intersted and entrenched in.  It reveals the versatility of sound by exposing this falsehood', “ that people received wisdom through the senses traveling along five different channels  that have no intercommunication among them.”  But this way of thinking is not correct and Synesthesia was able to prove the falsehood in this claim through, " V.S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UC San Diego, who used imaging scans to see where the brain lights up when synesthetes look at letters and numbers. He found activity in two small areas below the ear, regions responsible for the visual representations of numbers and colors." He suggests a sort of “cross-wiring” allows people “to link seemingly unrelated ideas and concepts, which is the basis for metaphor.” That might explain why synesthesia is eight times more common in artists, writers, and musicians. So the big question then becomes if this brain anomaly is so useful, why doesn’t everyone have it?  Ramachandran breaks it down to simple evolution common sense, “If there’s a neurosurgeon operating on your brain, you don’t want him getting creative on you  and because of that not everyone needs to be creative in that way. 

Artists with Synesthesia

Melissa McCracken

Not realizing that she  saw thing differently then others but soon she realized her ability to experience music not just as a series of sounds, but also as a bath of colors was unique and she soon began painting these experiences. Synesthesia can be experienced  different by different people but McCracken says, "in addition to seeing colors, she also perceives numbers and letters as having colors, but mainly, it’s just music that has vivid colors. Sometimes a sneeze will look light pink, or the beep on my alarm is turquoise, but I don’t pay much attention to those colors. I don’t think much of those until someone asks. Voices have a certain darker or lighter feel and can be more jagged-shaped or more rounded, but thinking of their faces instead usually overpowers the colors."   With color-to-sound synesthesia, Melissa found it especially helpful when she was in any sort of math class because she was able to associate a math formula with certain color and placement and this connection helped to reinforce them.

I absolutely love her artwork as she is able to really convey her connection between color/light with sound/music.  I can see each each of music/artist within her painting as her use of color, lighting, and brush strokes connection to the rhythm and emotion of each piece of music.  I think I can easily make these connections because of my need to associate visuals with movement so I am already doing this "sense integration" on some level just not in the same way.  Yet I can recognize and connection with her link between these different sense in a way that I did not with all the artists who experience synesthesia.  There is something about her artwork that strikes a deep chord (pun intended).

Carol Steen

Carol Steeen is also a synesthete who experiences colors while viewing letters and numbers (grapheme-color synesthesia), music (timbre-color synesthesia), and touch-color synesthesia in response to acupuncture and pain. Her work is unique not only because of this condition expressed through her artwork but also is unique in her presentation of both her condition and her artwork. Her interest in technology allowed her to explore her condition as well as share her artwork through the world's first website about synesthesia created in 1996 and has become a sought-after figure on the topic.  She has written books, presented in exhibitions, and spoken at numerous conferences on the topic of synesthesia. In being one of the fore-most trailblazers in bringing this condition into the mainstream I feel like her focus is just that, bringing awareness to this condition instead of focusing on  creating art based on her experiences with this condition.  I personally did not feel the same connections to her work that I felt for McCracken's paintings.  This may be due to the more simplistic color and line choice in comparison to McCracken or for some reason my own senses do not relate or reflect the similar aspects of her sense-based art.  Just like synesthesia itself, that affected each individual  in a unique way, I also think that viewer's sense also react in individualistic, unique ways.

Sound Collection of SAIC

This SAIC collection of artwork is a selection of artworks that inspires sound in order to create a short interpretive composition on a work of art.  The objective of putting this collection together is to expose students to art from diverse periods and places and introduce sound as a vehicle for storytelling.  It's almost creating a sort of synesthesia experience for its viewer by tying together different senses in order for viewers to discover the process of sensory interpretation from visual language as well as develop creative thinking skills, critical thinking skills, decision-making skills, and design concepts. This is a very unique, modern, and engaging approach to museum curation as well as a sort of challenge to the viewer to take a step beyond their area comfort that usually engages one sense at a time and challenges the viewer to use multiple senses at once in order to create richer, fuller stories around the works of art

Exploring Videos recommended by Jeff Sweeton

While all these short videos were interesting explorations into video and short film, with very different intentions and reasons for their creation, I think there was one that was much stronger then the others and that was The Boy with Chocolate Fingers.  Not only does it seem to be more professional than some of the others, its narrative, story, as well as characters, and acting were visual appealing and engaging for the viewer. Each video presented its owns take on video and how to portray stories, some firsthand some second hand, but all intensely personal and full of individual's world views and observations and experiences within this world

The Boy with Chocolate Fingers: by Caroline Pay

This film was a visual representation of a poem and story that reminded me of Dr. Seuss. It has more professional aspects including the overall presentation and composition of the video as well as its characters, setting, and story development present a deeper understanding of both story-telling and film-making. The fantastical situation of chocolate fingers could be any alignment that makes people feel different or the sense of being the "other". It took an act of boldness and courage that changes the perspective of others as well as himself to how they viewed this difference. This presented an entire story that was complete and wrapped up very nicely. It used a enjoyable narrator as well as visual presentation to present this story of the timeless lesson that differences are meant to be embraced. It would be a great video to show students of younger ages to instill that they should not make fun of differences but embrace them.

Just Went On by Precious Love

Narrator discusses growing up as an army brat and its pros and cons especially as it pertains to moving around, including moving to Germany and having to learn a new language, and then moving to Hawaii where she met her friends and first boyfriend. The video begins here as a reenactment of interactions with her boyfriend but soon cuts to narration from a blurred figures as she discuss then moving to Kansas which she though would be there last move. Instead she had to move one more time about 4/5 months before she was to graduate from school. The next time the video cuts to a reenactment is a scene between the narrator and her mother. Her mother has called her into her bedroom to question her whereabouts. Up until this point the narrator didn't have many friends and thought of her mom as her best friend who she could tell anything. After the second time her mom asked Where she had been and the narrator answer she had been at a friends house, her mom slapped her so hard it knocked her to the ground. After this the narrator comes back to the screen, still blurred, and describes that she became hesitant after this not only around her mother but around everyone and had no social life what-so-ever. The video ends there....leaving me completely hanging, my emotions completely exposed and led me to realize that I was feeling the exactly same way that the narrator is also feeling.

The Cameraman: by This American Life

One day a kids, Michael Williams or Arty Panternel, on whim, creates a fake camera from cardboard materials and painted it with pipe cleaners as an antenna. This kids takes the fake camera and starts making a new report, and the whole playground started to copy him and followed the same process and became a trend that consumed the whole school. If you didn't make a camera then you did another part with the news process, whether being a reporter, writer, etc. There were tons of competing news reporting going on throughout the school and hit its highest-point when a fight broken out and instead of the kids helping to break it up instead stood close to the fight and reported on it. This is when the school new this trend was getting out of control and as a result the school banded the fake cameras. What it made them realize is that having the camera changed the way the students acted, it removed their humanity and they weren't even real camera. Not matter what people act differently behind the camera, and do thing you normally wouldn't

The Devil Computer

Filmed like a live action film, this video is about a student being sucked into a computer. Being a amateur, student film there are lots of issues with production, time, and costumes, but it presents an interesting idea and metaphor of being consumed by technology. There are also fun editing techniques, such as when the student actually gets sucked into the computer that gives added layers and depth to the short video. Without much context, dialogue, or setting, the message is still easily conveyed and presented in a way that viewers of any culture or language could understand. This video could especially portray to those societies and culture just beginning to integrate technology for the first time the feeling or sense of being consumed by technology. As far as using this video in the US, this idea has already been explore, maybe overly so, and is something that isn't new to most viewers So right away the viewer is going to know what is going to happen, and to them it may seem that there isn't a point to the video since they are very familiar with the topic. Viewers that are familiar with technology and it becoming part of every aspect of their lives are familiar with the sense of being consumed by so it isn't surprising and might not seem like something that needs representing in a video such as this.