Meeting Review

Hey,

Great meeting today. We heard some really great Ideas for our Environmental Design Proposal and the Interview assignment. Below you will find a list of the things we were brainstorming about. If you feel like you still want to contribute, please feel free to add something to either list.

BRAINSTORMING ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGNS:

· A walkway that's decorated in some way
· Mazes on the lawn near the ARC Center
· Stick Graffiti
· Clusters of trees and making them not look like trees
· Spider webs strung between trees, possibly above passer-by's heads. We could do this near the bridge by Hahn Student Services, at the tall tree near the music center, there are many places. Things could be "caught" in the webs (ie: books, bugs with writing on the wings, bugs crawling out of books, our manifesto.) We could also place cocoons on or near the webs. This idea was favored, so far.
· In the little ravines we could put Arabian Tents and/or Forts. We could do this in the ravine behind the quarry; behind the amphitheater.
· Inside the tunnel in College Ten we could build a forest
· A shelter in the forest, a fort

If you have any more suggestions or are passionate about one of them, let us know. A few questions we need to answer for this proposal are:

· What?
· How?
· Where?
· When?
· Why?

Some ideas on Interviews:

· Tandy Beal (modern dance teacher)
· Don Williams (theater director)
· New and/or Small Business Owners (we could ask about certain ads they use, how they got started, some of the struggles of being a small business owner, and how design contributes fits in to their business)
· Art Gallery Owners
· DANM (Digital Arts & New Media) Building Designers
· Students at UCSC who juggle kids and school work
· Dr. Seth Shostak (Radio Astronomer at the SETI Institute. SETI's main goal is to be the first to detect a radio signal from an extraterrestrial world. Dr. Shostak also hosts his own radio show and we might be able to do the interview as a radio program.)
· Seth Hodge (a stage manager, also he host Comedy Sports in San Jose.)

If you have any more suggestions or are passionate about one of them, let us know as well.

We will meet again at then end of Tuesday's class to decide on our environmental design, and who our pick is for an interview.

See you Tuesday,
Brian

"Can Theater and Media Speak the Same Language" (Keith's Reading Notes)

Reading notes for Aronson's article on Theater and Media

Aristotle's Warning: "spectacle is 'the least artistic' aspect of theater"
Past method: minimize the appearance of human agency

Thesis:
projected scenery, an especially film and video, does not work -does not function- on the stage!

Why projections do not work well onstage:
1. Product of a capitalist society (subjected to political, social and economic influences)
2. Theater is the only art form to use what is signified as the signifier of that object (ie chair signifies a chair)
-dealing with real surfaces and volumes (wood floor treated to look like tile still functions as a floor)
-we sense the spaciality of the stage
-actor exists in real time
KEY ELEMENT: a) space and b) volume, which imply c) time

When scenography includes a projected image...
-the audience experiences the disjunction of perceiving a different world
3. With projected imagery: no spacial continuity between stage and auditorium and, consequently, no ability to comprehend time
4. Pictoral space, while possibly mimicking the exterior world, remains self-contained and self-referential
-sets create an illusion of continuing the space of the auditorium onto the stage
-we experience the stage in the here and now
5. Photographs: Time has transformed the subject while preserving the object
-turns them into fetish objects (ie family portraits: look back on)
~"The eye has lost its historically privileged place as a processor of information. On a stage that combines live images observed through normal visual processes and photographic images in which an eye observes mechanically reproduced images, the two systems inevitably clash"
EXCEPTION- live video feed

KEY TO OUR COMPREHENSION= the FRAME
-frames create self-contained space carefully delineated from the world around it
-Theater: the action that unfolds before our eyes is framed by the stage
-Internal logic: a world on a different scale that obeys different rules

~"individual spectators are obliterated in the darkened auditorium and become a communal audience" similar to Feminist Spectator (oh fuck... thats TA61. not this class...)

Movies
-present us with an infinite world (no FRAME)
-documentary capturing reality> believing that what is on the screen must in some way be true
vs Theater
-composed of real objects
-transforms a concrete reality into a kind of fantasy> everything on the stage becomes a sign
=TENSION is created between the unlimited bounds of the projected image and the architechtural realities of the stage

Movies
-the movement is specifically enhanced by the subjective intentions of the director or camera operator
-experienced as subjected and intentional, as presenting representation of the objective world

Stage set= permanent and unchanging (set is replaced but remains)
Projection= nothing but light/shadow> no corporeality
~"the very idea that one image, the projection, is created by light, and the other, the stage set, is created by objects that are made visible by their ability to reflect light, creates two perceptual orders, two kinds of reality"

My Question
1. Theater=present/Film=past(preserved): What about a period piece playing video clips (news, etc) that would be contemporary to the plays setting? No contrasting time periods...?
-Keith

Reading Notes- "The World on Stage" -Keith

Like the title says... some reading notes. For States' "The World on Stage".

Different perspectives-
1. approach theater semioticically
Definition: semiotics-study of signs/symbols as elements of communicative behavior
-"all that is on the stage is a sign" -Prague linguists
-things "conceptually referring to" the greater "world" outside of the performance
-bridge between the stage and its fictional analogue of the world
2. approach theater phenomenologically
Definition: phenomena- circumstance/fact observed (ie 'the phenomena of nature')
-signs "achieve their vitality... not by signifying the world but by being part of it"
-not what it represents, but why its there?
-"pursuit of the essence of things"

Author (States)'s perspective
3. defined by VICTOR SHKLOVSKY
-"Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things"
-things important "as they are percieved and not as they are known"
-"the object is not important" just associations to the object
-similar to PHENOMENOLOGICAL views
-DE FAMILIARIZATION- "removing things from a world in which they have become inconspicuous and seeing them anew"

SIGN vs IMAGE
1. Sign
-Correlative terms: signifier and signified
-of no value unless it repeats itself
-the material of the sign is totally indifferent to the object it signifies
2. Image
-Any likeness, or representation, made out of materials of the medium (gesture, language, decor, sound, light)
-emphasis on empathetic response
-unique and unreproducible
-the physical image and its object... resemble each other

NEITHER SIGN or IMAGE
-"things that resist being either sign or image"
-"stage images do not always or entirely surrender their objective nature to the sign/image function"
1. working Clock
-astronomical time would clash with theatrical time
-awareness that theatrical time is being measured by a real clock
-SELF-GIVENNESS onstage>obeying its own laws of nature
2. Fire/Running water
-mildly distracting in the sense of being interesting
-retains a certain primal strangeness>something indisputably real leaks out of the illusion
3. Child actor
-"how well he acts, for a child!" / "Do they understand the play?"
-success depended heavily on the audience's "double vision" (seeing both child and character?)
-DOUBLE VISION- disparity between the actors and their roles" -Shapiro
-innocent child vs characters that "flirt with the audience"
-Kids did comedy/satire (genre's most closely linked to the audience's immediate world) instead of tragedies/serious plays (depended on a suspension of disbelief)
4. Stage animals
-trained or tranquilized, but cannot be depended upon
-No good behavior, only behavior
-BISOCIATION- intersection between two independent and self-contained phenomenal chains- natural animal behavior and culturally programmed human behavior
-can claim dog as the likeness of a dog (acts well by acting as it normally does)

Other
-Moliere playing Moliere (an exception to the aesthetic rule that the image is not the thing)
-Zoos> dingo- dog playing a dog from Australia

LAW OF COMPLEMENTARITY:
to the extent that something on stage arouses awareness of its external (or workday) significance, its internal (or illusionary) significance is reduced

Melanie's Exhibit!

So a couple weekends ago, Konstantin, Edgar and I (to name a few) all helped out to (help) set up Melanie (our TA)'s art exhibit downtown at the Museum of Art and History (MAH). Thought I'd share some fun pics (I'm taking most the pics, which is why you might not see me that often...)

(Above) Getting started. Lots of work to do.

(Above Right/Left) Lots of work on lighting the exhibit. Working with gels and whatnot.

The Lighting Result:

You can see (Above) the mood for one of the sections was kind of psychedelic. Hence the colors. I liked the picture. With the headphones it kind of looked like one of those trippy ipod commercials.
And the artwork!

(Left) Spiking where Melanie's images are going to hang. With nice lighting. And (Right) the wall of boxes with fun (or not so fun) facts about the effects of technology on humans.

And finally...

Me. Doing some hard labor. Eh... For more on the exhibit ask Melanie or... VISIT it. Downtown. Museum of Art and History. 705 Front Street • Santa Cruz • CA. DO IT.
-Keith

Collage

So here's my collage. After I cut out all the pieces I noticed there was a difference between the two themes of life and death. So, I arranged in a way that sorta revolves around that.

-Angus

Theatre and Media

Theatre and Media by Aronson
It’s a reality that many and most things cannot be translated on to the stage, a lot of media and projections don’t look the same, don’t have the same effect on stage than on film or otherwise.
Aronson says that this is because of the signified and the signifier. We are constantly decoding image and text with our eyes and our ideologies. Some people don’t have the vast knowledge of socio-cultural decoding abilities that other do. Other may be more adaptable to more naturalistic viewings. The stage is the only place where this can be totally engaged, where an illusion can be portrayed as just that, where the words can be portrayed through image. The narrative comes alive into an image, and without complications we see the story. So why do we need complicated media and projections?
Like theatre, we are a product of our environment and our time and space. We see the actors in that space, and we too become involved. We notice the scale of the environment to our own; the theatre is now a basis for scale of its own environment, a type of architecture. Architecture of illusion. But the projection is an illusion too, so when we see that it interrupts the environment of the stage and the actors. Media challenges the “special reality” of the stage. He says that they “clash” with the set and the time in which the projections come in.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think abstract work on stage with projections that have been thought out and done carefully with purpose can work on stage, but otherwise, I think doesn’t work well. I think the place for multimedia is film. Film allows the framework to be manipulated and the spectator eyes to follow wherever the action takes place. Theatre is more like a painting, as Aronson says, our eyes follows patterns and colors in side the frame, in film we are taken outside of that. Film allow actions to take place outside of the frame, actors to leave and come back, change place faster that on stage. With mass reproduction and representation lots more can be made from film, but the authenticity is lost, that is grounded in the theatre and the environment in which it is based.


See ya next time!

Kira Shaw

COLLAGE time!

Well, I'll start things off with a pic of my (Keith) collage.


And I was... for some reason... really into this assignment, so I thought I'd tell a little bit about my... thought process. My collage centered on the innature(?) of animals to go with the flock and the idea that humans, as mammals, are also subjected to this manmade desire to fit in. It was sort of a motivational piece about rejecting the pressures of the majority to abandon the individual. So I first included a couple of examples of animals migrating or being herded together and contrasted that with an image of an animal "breaking off" from the rest of the group (Examples A and B).

So here are two of the examples of herding: the cattle and then the pigs. You'll note that for each, there is then an example of an animal who decided not to go with the flow. Its small, but in the cattle one, there's a pic of a cow running off alone into a church (symbolic, yes?). In the pig picture, there's one pig that doesn't want to be herded, so he is, instead, leaping away from the group, only to be restrained by his owner (like society reinforcing this need to fit in). Note that each are examples of animals that might not naturally decide to migrate together. Instead they are being domesticated by humans to do so.

I tried to tie this back in to humans with the central juxtaposition of two images, that of a pig and a human. Exhibit C(3?).


Its pretty deep, fyi. If you noticed, the pig and the woman almost have the same expression on their faces. That's because the pig is the woman. And vice versa. The pig is being forced by the man to go with the other pigs. The woman is similarly burdened (illustrated by the sand bag she is forced to carry. FORCED... BY SOCIETY).
This culminated in another of the central images, that of humans. Like animals flocking together.


good. that should do it. more posts to come.
Keith Burgelin

Collage for Matt

Here ya go, and enjoy

---Matt P

Gurpy Collage by Krys

This collage reminds me of our physical roots. I'm talking about particles to lifeforms to hedonistic misuse of our bodies. I wanted to implement the universe to express origin and importance. My perspective then moves down the collage to express hate, deception, and to point how myopic people can be with the blessings of the universe.

deep shit right. Thus my piece is titled : Shit on Earth. :D

---Krystian Hill

"The World on Stage"

Here are some notes on the "The World on Stage" reading.

-"All that is on stage is a sign"
-becomes a self contained illusion outside of social praxis
-creates a bridge between the stage and its fictional analogue of the world
-the power of this sign (image) is not exhausted either by its illusion or its referential character.
-signs and images are more than their iconic identity
-theater is really a language whose words consist an unusual degree of things that are what they are.
-signs may represent images, but they are still real images outside of the scene.
-persuit of the "essence" of things disregards their other functions in real life
-"the sensation that things as thy are perceived and not as they are known" - Shklovsky
- art makes objects unfamiliar
-the image is unique and unreproducible
-root difference between image and sign
-"the material of the sign is totally indifferent to the object it signifies... but the relationship between the material of the physical image and it's object is altogether different; the two resemble each other" -Sartre
-reading a scene present almost no phenomenal distraction
-more real than on stage, mind can create images
-the eye is window to the waiting consciousness
-vs the theater production which is a condensation into "real form"
-some things refuse to be signs or images
-the viewer gets worn down, no more initial amazement
-clocks will always be a disturbance onstage, we are perturbed that theater time is being measured by a real clock
-somethings are too interesting in real life to be used on stage (running water, fire, ect)
-"double vision" of the audience to overlook casting ( ex: child troupes)
-the medium becomes the message
- animals on stage give the effect of bisociation ( natural animal behavior and culturally programed human behavior)
-the actor putting objects on stage neutralizes the objects "Objectivity"
-same way animals in a zoo lose their objectivity, " this is the kind of animal you would see here"
-something on stage can rouse the awareness of something external
- art is a certain perspective on substance
-props(furniture) and their placement can force the actors to move and act differently
-the actor allows us to recognize the human "from the inside"
-are it nature.


--Allie S.

music

I wanted to post some short songs I had recorded, but then I realized I have no idea how to do that on this blog thing. Anyone know how?

In the meantime... here's another painting I made recently:



-Angus

Wednesday's Review

Hey all,

We had our weekly meeting for theater 10 today. Please remember to post your insights to the blog. It doesn't have to be long it can be a couple of sentences. I think the more we post the more we can start a "virtual" dialogue.

In today meeting we discussed:

· The reading, "World on Stage".
· Our newest member Kyle McElroy
· The inconvenience of Wed.'s at 2PM
· And the possibility of finding a meeting time where we can all meet and discuss our first design proposal.

We will probably not meet next Wednesday. Keith if you can think of another time, where everyone is available for next week, please let me know. If any of you have any thoughts or comments please feel free to email me directly.

-Brian

My Collage!!

So here is my college of random dressess and other clothing! I added onto the pictures with pastels just to make them pop more. enjoy!

See ya!

Jules

My Collage

Hello all,

This is my collage I did. I took two photos. One inside and the other outside to get different effects.

~Brian

DOORS ARE SUPER IMPORTANT

-jimmy wagner

Just writing about the reading of "Behind the Screen Door" by Aronson that we discussed in our group meeting and in class.

Basically what I got from it was actually insight on doors used in theater. Before this I had never even thought twice about important a door could be and took it for granted.

The first example used in the article is how a door can set the mood. A person bursting through the door, such as Kramer in Seinfeld instills a comedic mood in the audience. While on the other hand, a slow opening of a squeaking door creates terror.

Aronson writes how a door can be the boundary between complete order or complete chaos, known and unknown, and how it separates the scene into different parts. Aronson writes, "The door hides; the door reveals."

It was also interesting that the Ancient Greek plays did not have doors, and instead had to make a production out of the elaborate entrances. This took away the element of surprise and anticipation of what could possibly be behind the door. Doors also seem to be very useful because they can completely change a setting, which makes the play more complex and entertaining. For example, an actor or actress can walk through a door and be in a different house, or miles away in the middle of a forest.

The last thing that the article briefly mentions is how a door in a theater represents all of this and more, but that a door on screen or in video is simply walked through.

-jimmy wagner

Collage Post

Here is my collage, sorry for the glare, cell phone pictures are what they are. Hope you enjoy!

-Allie S.

OOOps

ps. sorry i couldnt make the meeting today guys! I'll make it up to you i promise!

K.Shaw

YAY! my collage!

K.Shaw

Collage Pictures

Hey. Just wanted to post the pictures of my collage. I don't have a digital camera, and photobooth for mac actually acts more like a mirror (can you change that?) so the pictures are bad quality (taken with cell phone), and in multiple pictures so that you can see more clearly, but at least its something.

I was going for two groups of people on the stage, fighting for the best and most worthy reward ever, chocolate.

-jimmy wagner

-Jimmy Wagner

Collage day and etc

Today we did collages! Yay! We had a blast and I had fun while learning about picturing stage depth concepts and color mapping. Al said we will return to our collages later maybe next week to learn about ways to differently look at the stage in 3D.

Tommorow I will post about the reading. Farewell till then!

K. Shaw

I suppose I'll post a painting I've been working on this week. It was a bit big for my scanner so I had to scan it twice to get the whole width scanned.

-Angus

Our First Meeting

Great meeting everyone. It looks like we're off to a rocky but promsing start. As soon as you finish the reading post a response to the blog.

Make sure you post before the end of the week.

We will meet as a group again, next Wednesday, 15th at 2:00 PM in front of Second Stage.

We will also continue to define our goals as group, so please bring your ideas and your insights.

Cheers,
Brian

We the Right Angles stand for:

Clear Communication

Art in all its Cruelty and Beauty

Camaraderie in Collaboration

Procreation

Spontaneous Prose

Charts as Structure (Organization)

Forging New Frontiers

Discovering How Things Work

Being Flexible with Opposition/Binaries

Destroying to Rebuild

Developing Futurist Attitudes

Being Fast, Fun, Sexy

Being Louder, Faster, Funnier

Walking the Edge

Controversy

Believing in Freckles

A Sense of Culture & History

A Sense of Popular Culture

Allowing Space for Individualism

& Polyamorism

Messages that are Brief, to the Point

Elephant Seals

Penguins

People Watching or Studying/Learning by Watching

"Celebrate we will, for life is short but sweet for certain."-Anon

First Post

Hello Fellow Right Angles, here is our blog, we will write things here to show everyone else what we are up to.

-Allie