Landscape as a political battleground - web

How can we still be animals when we are so evolved?

38th Parallel: The boundary line between North Korea and South Korea

After the war that started in the late 40s and early 50s between North Korea and South Korea the North stayed communist but the South went back to its natural state meaning democratic, in a way.
In the North Korea, people are thought from a young age that the ruler of the country is always right, no matter what.
North Korea is a country that's closed off from the rest of the world. You might not be able to leave the country without a reason, and if you do you might not be able to come back. People don't even try to escape, they don't even think about that, because most North Koreans are 'brainwashed,' they don't even realize that life may be better in other places.
There's a borderline between North and South Korea. It's about two miles long. That doesn’t sound far, and as a matter of fact it’s not far at all but the borderline is two miles of complete no-man's land. The border is called the Korean Demilitarized Zone, or the DMZ. Barbed wires surround the place so you can’t get it or out.

Escape from North Korea
For those fleeing their brutal homeland, the 2,000 perilous miles across China are just the beginning. Then comes the challenge of making a new life.

This is a photography project made by Chien-Chi Chang. These photos illustrate an escape from North Korea and how hard it is for people to leave their home land just to have a better life, a chance in life. Life that only exist in their dreams, even though it’s just a few miles away.


Borderlands
Barbed wire marks the high-security zone where the frontiers of Russia, China, and North Korea meet at the Tumen River. Elsewhere the border is more porous.



North Korea
“Peering from a bunker on the Tumen River, soldiers have orders to shoot anyone trying to sneak into or out of North Korea. Cross-shaped posts possibly support electrical wires. Many guards take bribes to let defectors cross to China.”


I still can’t believe that war still exists even though we seem so evolved we are animals that fight over land and material things. This fact will never change, we will always fight over our land and over everything that we feel it’s ours. What we seem to understand is that the earth is for everyone, we all have a place on it, our piece of land. But that is just fantasy, in real life there are people that have way much than they disserve and people that have nothing even though they deserve everything.

Copies, Codes, Patterns - E-resources

Can you still tell which one is the real world?

We are now living in a virtual world, in a world of technology, in an “unreal” world. We can create fake identities on the web or be who ever we want to be. We can create what character we want or we can communicate with each other even though one person is here and one on the other side of the earth. We have that power; we have the power to know everything and everything its just one click away.
Copies, codes and patterns are all over the place. Everywhere you look there is a pattern created, from the nature to the ones made by people. We are influenced by all the things around us and other people’s work. When I moved here, in England I realized there is a pattern when it comes to the houses and buildings, and I had my first project “Environment” about that. They all look the same, it depends on the area they are in but they all look the same. You struggle in finding your house at first because of that, but you need to find that one detail that makes it unique.

Thomas Ruff is a German photographer who lives and works in Düsseldorf. All of his portraits are in a pattern, shown with emotionless expressions, sometimes face-on, sometimes in profile, and in front of a plain background.



Thomas Ruff (born 1958)
Blue Eyes M.V./B.E; Blue Eyes M.B./B.E.; Blue Eyes L.C./B.E.; Blue Eyes C.F./B.E.
1991
C-type prints
Museum nos. E.96 to 99-2009
Given from the private collection of Michael and Fiona King, London, in loving memory of Rosina and John Palmer. Images Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York

Photo and description from : http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/5017

Ruff is part of a leading group of contemporary German photographers trained at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. The group is known for a disciplined approach that explores - and questions - the objectivity of photography. The consistent and dispassionate style in this series of portraits resembles that of a mugshot or passport photograph. But Ruff replaced the natural eyes of his sitters with the same set of bright blue irises, thereby undermining the photographs’ truthfulness as records.

We try to discover different shapes in nature like known human faces or interpret them on window stains, hear random voices in sounds generated by electronic devices; we try to find a certain pattern in everything we do.

Contemporary Still Life With Reference To The Traditional

Still Life is everywhere around us, the objects, the rocks, the trees and the flowers. Yes, they are life forms but they don’t move. Always in the same place so that they can delight your eyes.
Not everyone has time to just stop for a second and acknowledge their existence. We don’t have time to admire the shapes or just admire their true beauty.
Every time you put flowers in a vase you create an invisible painting full of colors and beauty. We do this because it’s not enough that we just see them in the fields, we want them in our home, in our life and soul.
I admire the work of Josef Sudek because of the way he plays with the shapes and the light. How he creates something truly beautiful and delicate from different objects or even flowers. He is a great artist , he is one of the most mysterious of all the great photographers. He has a private, almost personal vision. He transforms common materials that might appear in a kitchen or a working space into art.
The key in understanding Sudek’s art lies in the concept of available light. Lighting is very important in still life photography. The most natural form of lighting is daylight; although it gives a softer touch to the images it cannot be controlled.

One of Sudek’s images reminds me of a Van Gogh painting .



Photo from : Josef Sudek 55



Photo from : http://famousartistsbirthdays2.blogspot.com/2011/02/eugene-atget.html

You can see that both of them used the same flower, the flower that lets us know that spring is close, the beginning of a new life after the harsh winter has ended. Both of them give me a warm feeling, the feeling of home,of closure. The apple blossom from Sudek's photograph refers to spring time, and the old apple tree in the background might refer to past, to a life that is close to an end.

Identity

Find yourself a new identity, that's what Nikki S Lee did.

Identity is not defined for me, it's something that it's in you and me and the whole world. From early age we copy the behavior of our parents and we try our best to be like them. As we grow older we put our fingerprint on our identity, which is not defined, it can change out of the bloom or it can change in a period of years.

This subject about Identity reminds me of my last semester project: ‘People’. For this project I took photos of masked individuals. I did this project because I wanted to show that people do have more than one faces. We can’t all act the same in every situation. For every task we need to accomplish we put on a different ‘mask’ or face as you’d like to call it. We don’t have just one identity, we think we are unique but the fact is that there are other people doing the same thing as us. In my opinion the only thing that separates us from one another is our DNA. Yes, maybe we have unique ideas but still, we are inspired by something, it’s not just a pure thought. And this is because it all started to long ago and we can’t really change it no matter how hard we try.

I chose to talk about Nikki S. Lee. In my opinion I think her projects are amazing. She wants to show that the identity of a person shouldn't be produced around other individuals. We should be free to choose who we want to be and if we want to become someone else for a day. At some point we start to run in a circle and so she added something to her life and made it really interesting to watch at.
She was born in 1970 in Korea where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography then moved to New York to complete an undergraduate degree in commercial photography.
Lee began her work by identifying subcultures that interests her, she researched groups and began to dress like them and adopt their customs. Then she approached the groups telling them about the project and asked permission to begin “hanging out” with them for a period of 3 months or more.

“Lee wants viewers of her work to explore new constructs for identity and call into question notions where identity is seen "as a unitary thing, ideally expressed through the manifestation of a single, authentic persona no matter what the context" (Martin, 2001, p. 17). The fact that Lee is able to move fluidly among subcultures and assimilate herself into different ethnic, sexual, socioeconomic, and age groups makes us question the permanency of our identities when viewed in different social and cultural contexts. Lee explains that in Asian culture, identity is determined more by the relationships one has with other people, rather than fixed traits that confine a person to one identity or clique.”
(Source: Art Education; January 2009, Vol. 62 Issue 1, p25-31, 7p)






Source : http://www.tonkonow.com/lee_projects_9.html




Source : http://duanenasis.blogspot.com/2010/07/nikki-s.html





Source : http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/portraiture-examined-at-the-ackland/Content?oid=1804289

Christian Marclay - Web Resource

How much time do you have left?

We always complain about time but we don't realize we use it for stupid things like getting annoyed and being angry on material things. We allow so much time to run past us and still we don't have time for our soul, for the things that make us happy.
Talking about time, the artist Christian Marclay did a fascinating installation art about time called 'The Clock'.

‚The Clock’ is a 24 hour film with different types of movie scenes where the time is present or where people speak about it. Sometimes the time is just showed in the background. It is about people running out of time, or people having plenty of time.
I’ve never seen the installation art but I read about it and I find it interesting.
The way the artist is expressing time and how the film is created so that the time from the scenes coincides with the real time.
I think he wanted to show how quickly all of the things pass from our lives. How all the things can change from one day to the next and how quickly we evolved as a spicy.
A 24-hour montage of film clips showing the measurement of time.

Christian Marclay is a Swiss-American visual artist and composer.
Marclay’s work explores the field of sound, noise, photography, video and film. He uses gramophone records and turntables as musical instruments. His own use of turntables and records, beginning in the late 1970s, was developed independently of but roughly parallel to hip hop’s use of the instrument.
‚The Clock’
„His art work is about time where you sit and forget about time and yet you are reminded about time, all the time.” Will Gompertz BBC NEWS




Photo from :
http://boston.tumblr.com/post/10451155329/at-the-mfa-glimpses-of-the-clock-for-24


Another brilliant installation art similar to ‘The Clock’ is the "The Telephone". The artist makes an interpretation of his own regard human contact and relationships between them in some way that he creates a story line between different characters.
He takes simple scenes from movies and puts them together in some way that makes sense to all of us. He creates art from other people’s work, which I think is another way of seeing their work. He takes it to a whole different level because of his own way of seeing the world.

‘The Telephone’
„Christian Marclay’s “Telephones” (1995), a 7 1/2-minute compilation of brief Hollywood film clips that creates a narrative of its own. These linked-together snippets of scenes involve innumerable well-known actors such as Cary Grant, Tippi Hedren, Ray Milland, Humphrey Bogart and Meg Ryan, who dial, pick up the receiver, converse, react, say good-bye and hang up.”



Photo from : http://nashermuseumblogs.org/?p=3219

Photography and Surveillance - Journals

Every person is a stalker.

If we think about it, we all stalked a person or been intrigued with watching them without their knowing. It's that feeling you get when you played hide and seek as a child, the feeling of not being caught. You only have that feeling in those situations where you have to hide and just hope you won't get caught.

Surveillance sometimes creates positive effect and at other times negative.
Even though the majority of people do not agree with being „watched”, I must say that this is sometimes a good idea. First of all in the event of a criminal behaviour, police can discover the certain person responsible of that act, but it can not stop it from happening and it doesn’t provide the intimacy which an individual may need. Although some persons like being under surveillance, so that their every move can be recorded. For example, in my opinion, on Facebook and YouTube we attach photos and videos which allow people to loon into our lives.
But then again that is something that persons do with their own approval.
Even when you think no one is watching you, there is a probability that someone is.
In this society, we are constantly being watched and being under surveillance but it is said that this is for our own safety.


The Mobilisation of images – Comments on YouTube and Its Consequences

„Lonelygirl15” is the first YouTube star. Under this user name a teenage published short films about herself on the Internet video site, in which she chatted in from of her web cam about her lonely life for months. The blonde girl quickly acquired a huge fan base that would wait eagerly for her latest revelations. For „lonelygirl15” was not only pretty but also mysterious – and became more and more mysterious the longer she continued to stage herself in her short films. Once there was a photo of occulist Aleister Crowley on the wall behin her, which led many people to think that her family belonged to a sect. An assumption backed up by her hints that she was not allowed to leave the house and did not have any friends, which is why she was creating a social life for herself via Youtube.”
„Youtube is a sanctuary for found images, moving images, ranging somewhere between the ultimate archive and an audio-visual rubbish dump. The things you can see there : An American travels around the world and gets himself filmed doing little dances in front of such sights as Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow or the Taj Mahal in India. Two little boys singing the theme tune of the Pokemon TV series. And a never-ending stream of young men playing air guitar.Playground fights. The snow on the roads of Helsinki. The sky over Berlin. A close-up of an eye. Someone’s girlfriend who has fallen asleep in front of the television. That is the >>content<< of a few of now almost thirty million videos currently available through the YouTube website.
The principle behind Youtube is simple. Users can publish videos up to ten minutes long on the website. By means of >>viral marketing<<, in which users themselves take care of promotion through word of mouth or email, YouTube has reached a vast, global audience in no time at all. In April 2006, ore than twelve million surfers are said to have visited www.youtube.com.




So, what is there to say? That people like being watched and that they like to look in other peoples life. Maybe to compare their lives with the lives of some stragers.
„Lonelygirl15” was discovered not to be real. It was created by Miles Becker (former student of medicine and university dropout), Ramesh Flinders (screenwriter) and Greg Goodfriend (lawyer) , the three of them met at a party and cooked up their prank over a few beers.
The character named Bree was played by a New Zealand actress studying at the New York film academy.



They have created a new art form via video blogs, well that is what they thought.
There are millions of people who are letting stragers to look into their lives and get paid for it. TV shows with celebrities or even regular people. We all are desperate to look in someone else's life and criticize it.

„On the other hand, they can produce such social dynamics as that of >>lonelygirl15<<. Or they can offer a vast archive for individual tournaments amateur video or someone’s girlfriend doing a strip-tease, or all manner of film classics. All images are here now, it seems; available at all times and everywhere for consumption or further processing.”


This subject, reminds me of a movie called „The Truman Show” (1998). Truman is a man whose life is a fake one. The place he lives is in fact a big studio with hidden cameras everywhere, and all his friends and people around him, are actors who play their roles in the most popular TV-series in the world : The Truman Show. Truman thinks that he is an ordinary man with an ordinary life and has no idea about how he is exploited. With the beginning of his birth, the show commenced.


Every move was being recorded, every one in his life was an actor, everything was fake. I’m sure if people would be allowed to do that in real life, they would. And I’m sure they would have a really big audience. Sometime I wonder if they are not doing this already.



Anita Witek


These are some paragraphs from an interview with Anita Witek with Barbara Clausen.

„The man Hughes, was accused and found guilty of murdering the woman next to him, Rachel, on the strength of this video surveillance footage. With the aid of these pictures which offered much scope for interpretation, the press and the prosecution succeeded in linking a specific site and a crime and thus in (re)construction a sequence of events. The visual effect of the time-code at the bottom edge of the pictures constituted a certificate of total authenticity. What interested me was that they are constructed images that stir up public opinion.”

„Above all, >>The innocent people have nothing to hide<< remains the argument that comes up in this context. The interesting thing, in contrast, is that people fail to see that even a thousand cameras will not prevent crime and just how unwavering our naive faith in media images remains.Which is why these two CCTV frames still have the potential to raise questions even seven years after they were recorded and published.”









Photos from : http://sunandtan.blogspot.com/2007/08/lonely_08.html
http://www.filmous.com/the_truman_show/
http://www.transmediale.de/optical-vacuum-artwork
http://opencity.iabr.nl/EN/open_city/_calendar/14oct_idfa_film.php
http://www.1in12.com/publications/cctv/rachel/rachel.htm

Reference : Camera Austria International

THE BODY AS AESTHETIC

For me, aesthetic is something that pleases my eyes, something that make them smile and warm up my soul.It doesn't have to be beautiful, because it doesn't have anything to do with that word.It's what you feel, what I feel, what every single person feels when they look at something or when they touch something.It's desire, it's love ,it's nothing to do with thinking or logic, it's just feelings all over the place.

Beauty doesn't exist because it's not real, it's just a word, what really is important is the aesthetic, that thing or that person you see and feel in love with immediately.


Robert Mapplethorpe captures the beauty as an abstract form of symmetry in the photograph called „Milton Moore” .When you first take a look at this photograph you might not understand the true meaning, but if you look long enough you will see the perfect symmetry of the body as a shape.




That is what you will find in Edward Weston’s photographs although slightly different.
In the photograph „Nudes,Charis, Arms and Legs” (1934) he transforms the human body into an aesthetic and symmetric shape which I find beautiful and very nice to look at.



And again in „Nude” (1936), he captures the body in an unusual position which makes it again, symmetrical and aesthetic.



And to come back on what I was saying earlier, the photographer Joel-Peter Witkin who for many might not ring a bell when you talk about aesthetics, for me it does.
In his photographs he captures people with disabilities or even dead.
Though that sounds unaesthetic, I think that he transforms the bodies of those people into something beautiful.
In „La Serpentine, Marseilles” (1992), by positioning the woman in that posture he creates something different, something asymmetrical.
If the woman were to stand straight, the photograph would have become something completely different.






These photographers, just like John Lamprey in the 1850s, transform the human bodies into objects.


But it is differently because in the 1850s, some people like Mayans or Pilgrims were treated as objects, because of their race and religion. They were researched and photographed as experiments.
Now we don’t do that technically, but we transform human bodies into something differently, into art.