Saturday, March 14, 2015

I But That Which in the Jug's Nature - Heidegger Project 1



I can easily say that this project has been one of the most difficult that I've had to tackle in my collegiate career. Creating a work of art that relates back to someone else's words are hard enough, but unfortunately for me, I had the hardest time truly relating to and understanding Heidegger. With this being said, I also had a difficult time truly pushing my piece harder to really drive my point across so it's easy to see that this may not have been one of my strongest pieces, but even though it's not the best, I'm still proud of it. In the piece, I am continually writing and repeating the quote "But that which in the Jug's Nature is its own is never brought about by it's making". This quote specifically, was something that I could latch onto because it was easily understandable and gave me a better overall feel for what Heidegger was trying to explain. I chose to use a video because I wanted to experiment with being able to edit it. My use of pencil, paper, and a wood table are all important to the piece because these are all instruments and tools that we use that have originated from another product as the quote suggest. These pieces exist in their own nature, but a pencil, nor paper, nor table exist in the wild untouched by man. The editing is where I had the most fun with this project because I was able to experiment with colors and the exposure in ways that I had never tried in the past. My first draft of this video was drawn out with color and you were unable to see the writing even a little, but with the new editing, I was able to really bring out the writing and kill some of the light that was making the writing so bright. The cuts are where the real magic happened though, as it was all randomized. I used a random number generator to determine how long each cut would be. I made the generator select a number from 1-60. Each number representing a second. Then, I randomly selected these cuts to put them in a non-sensical order with the intention that the audience would enter at any point in the "narrative" and each experience would be in a different time. Looking at the piece, I think I could have pushed the exposure and colors harder to really bring out the writing, and I could have given the piece a better composition. Overall, I wanted this piece to be about the use of tools and technology that does not exist in nature and give the audience a feel of change in the "narrative" of the piece.