Hey look: An update!

No, we're not dead. This semester has been kicking everyone's ass lately which is why you haven't seen an update here recently. However, we have some really cool stuff in the works, both for this blog and events in meatspace. So stay tuned.

And now for something completely different:

If you haven't seen this film or don't know who Banksy is, you're really missing out and you should use the power of the internet to educate yourself. Oh, wait. You're already doing that.

Who is Banksy? Well, Banksy is this guy:

He's that graffiti street/performance artist who held an art show featuring a live elephant; hung his own artwork in a number of art museums; tagged the wall in the West Bank, you know, that wall, among other things. We're big fans of Banksy here at URF, considdering his skill at subverting and disrupting normal reality. He does some cool shit. He even made a movie.

(SPOILER ALERT! WATCH THE DAMN MOVIE ALREADY!)

But the movie isn't about Banksy. It's about this guy, Thierry Guetta:

Take note, hipsters. Oh, wait, let me give you a better shot of his "ironic" facial hair configuration:
Yeah. That's right. Mutton chops. Mutton. Chops. (!) The word on the street is that these will soon be required for acceptance into Top-Notch Liberal Art Schools (tm), such as Bard College. At the very least, you'll all be looking like this in a few years, so get used to it. But what does this guy actually do? Well, when the film opens, he's "employed" ripping people off so they can think they look cool selling vintage clothing in L.A. What else? As if we're not convinced enough by the mutton chops to believe this guy is a little bit unhinged and full of himself, we're told that he has this odd habit of filming everything. Everything. So, when he just happens to be blasted into the street art scene by way of Invader and Sheppard Fairey ("What, no hyperlink?" you ask? Fine. Fine. Here's your hyperlink.), we, as well as the street artists our oh-so-hip protagonist meets, don't really question him filming everything. Even the ultra-reclusive Banksy, apparently persuaded by the mysterious power of mutton chops, allows himself to be filmed. But it's all ok because, as Thierry tells everyone, he's a filmmaker; he's making a documentary about street art.

Except of course, he's not. He has boxes upon boxes upon boxes of tapes, most of them unlabelled, all of them unwatched. It takes a nudge from Banksy for him to actually put some footage together into this epic street art documentary that Thierry had been talking about for so long. So Thierry makes a film called "Life Remote Control" and shows it to Banksy. And it's total shit. Un-watch-able. The kind of thing that makes moderation projects rejected by the film department at Bard College look like they could have a shot of winning "Best Picture" at the Oscars. Hipsters interested in being "filmmakers": This is how low they've set the bar for you. So Banksy, seeing a few snippets of actually good footage in the mess, takes the film from Thierry, explains that it'll clean up in editing, and tells him to go back to LA, maybe do some art (Thierry has been dabbling in street art while filming Banksy, et al.).

So is Thierry Guetta a filmmaker? As Banksy puts it: "Maybe Thierry wasn't actually a filmmaker; he was maybe just someone with mental problems who happened to have a camera."

Banksy decides to take the project, which is how we've come to be watching the film in the first place. Thierry, meanwhile, has fashioned himself a street artist alter-ego by the name of Mr. Brainwash, complete with production team to roll out his "art" on a commercial scale. On the subject of that "art", it's part Warhol, part Banksy, and part Sheppard Fairey, and wholly unoriginal. But, as his first show "Life is Beautiful" demonstrates, although he does virtually none of the actual creative work, and though his style is completely stolen from other artists, Thierry Guetta can sell a painting. Indeed, his work is highly commercially successful, much to the confusion and amusement of Banksy, Fairey, et al.

That's the story we're given. But consider this: Mr. Brainwash, and perhaps the entire character of Thierry Guetta as well, is a creation of Banksy's, in a move to pull an elaborate self-referential prank on the art world by creating an artist out of nothing, but who produces work that the art world cannot help but love, even though/especially because it has no meaning except the commercialisation of art. This would not be the first time that Banksy has made a statement like this, since after his work began fetching high prices at auctions, he put on the front page of his website an image of a crowd bidding on a painting that said "I Can't Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit." Of course, this reading of the film only adds to its meta-weirdness.

Go see it. Go make art.

URF Youtube channel--concerts and art projects for readers!

Hi all. First--everyone come to Rocky in Weis tomorrow (friday) at midnight, ya hear?

Second, I am now publicizing the URF Youtube account. It will serve two functions. The first is an extension of our general principle, which is helping YOU guys (Bard people of all sorts) use new media to make art. Log on and send us your videos, existing or new, animated or live, serious or silly, ten minutes or ten seconds. We're openly inviting you to contribute to a digital exhibition--make it private and share with other URF readers, or make it public and share it with everyone.

Log on with:

Username: URFreader

Password: VillageJ

Our goal is to make art. Though we will not be censors and provide specific rules and guidelines regarding acceptable content, please use your judgment and respect and don't just post stuff for the purpose of being offensive.

Second purpose: Perks for reading us! I've uploaded two videos to the account as an exclusive for URF readers, and I'll be uploading more periodically; you're essentially subscribing. The current two are boots from two different acts of a super-cool concert. (I'll be checking periodically to make sure no one sets them to public, but the first twenty-five people to send themselves the invite are welcome to it!) Currently I've put up Andrew B1rd's Beatles cover and a Low Anthem/Swell Seas0n collaboration (leetspeaking a little to make it less google-able). I have better ones on the way.

Go nuts! See you tomorrow at Rocky!

Contemporaneous tomorrow!

8pm in the chapel for a fantastic program of new music by living breathing working composers. Among many other wonderful composers, there will be Phillip Glass and the world premiere of my favorite piece of Dylan's, "Lighthouse," an amplified string quartet. You won't want to miss it.

Connection: Fictionpress

Since Bard URF has so many writers, we now have a collective Fictionpress account to publish in-progress or completed works. Short stories, poetry and even novels will wander online from time to time, with updates being posted here on the blog!

Check out the first story, a novel called Runaway Sky, that is being serialized for us to completion by S.B. Sorajo >>> Click Here

All stories allow anonymous comments, so go ahead and make your mark!

Otherwise, if you want to get your work up and online, just poke me at jn8828@bard.edu and we will do so ASAP.

Jono

Connection: AndJono

Hey guys, I will be taking and posting videos of our crazy shenanigans on the AndJono YouTube channel, as well as the BardURF dedicated YouTube account. The videos on the BardURF channel will all be more focused on recapping or showing original work, while my channel will be just the flight of fancy maybe has a point stuff that I don't quite plan, but do make.

One video is already up: URF and Jono Get Acquainted, so go look at it! >> URF is for YOU

Unionized Chaos 9/18

Yup--we had a great time. Here are some of my pics from the night. Watch for video later.

The orchestrators (ba dum chh) of the event, David Bloom and Dylan Mattingly

The setup

Ready, aim...

Fire.

Saturday Night "In C" Jam Session

Saturday night, or, if you are reading this after I go to sleep, tonight, will be a different kind of jam. Show up, with or without your instrument, at the Parliament of Reality (the glowy fountain pond thing up by Fisher, for the six of you who haven't been kicked out of it by security after dark) at 6 pm tomorrow. You'll meet our buddies in Contemporaneous, who are extending an open invitation to play with them. The piece: Terry Riley's "In C."

Composed in 1964, "In C" is considered the first and greatest minimalist masterpiece. It's composed in 53 short, numbered sections; some are only one or two notes. With an endlessly repeating C serving as a metronome, musicians begin together playing section 1. At the time of your personal, individual decision, you move to section 2. Your neighbor moves a few seconds later, if she feels like it. Then, when you want, you move to section 3, and on and on until everyone ends up on section 53. Because each musician decides at a given time to move on, the piece can never be performed the same way twice.

Photo credit Jenna Galka

Pictured above: last year's "In C" jam in SMOG. Lasting an hour and two minutes, the session attracted many musicians outside of Contemporaneous and a crowded audience of several dozen. Tomorrow's, in the elements and the glow of the Parliament, is much, much bigger.

It will be followed by a performance of "Workers' Union," in which the rhythm is unison but the pitches are all relative to one line. People who want to play in this piece, which I'm told should be everyone, should come to a rehearsal at the Parliament at 4 pm.

Every performance of "In C," a one-page piece with very few different pitches, is absolutely inimitable. The one-time experience of that night's In C is a mosaic of the momentary fancies of each of its creators. From a small and tightly ordered little piece comes a chaotic experience that will be one of the coolest hours of your year.

So bring your instruments, your voices (speaking from a biased perspective, choir sections for In C are not to be scoffed at), or just your ears to the Parliament at 6. You'll have a blast.

Media Meal Recap: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

Q: If slam poetry and jazz had a baby on the internet, what would it be called?

A: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (yhchang.com)

Q: Why should I care?

A: You won't care until you see it. Go to yhchang.com. Watch "ARTIST'S STATEMENT N0. 45,730,944: THE PERFECT ARTISTIC WEB SITE". Come back here when you're done. Go. Like now.

...
...
...

You're back? Doesn't your question seem silly now?

Q: What the fuck did I just see?

A: Just text and music, no more and no less. Surprising what can be done with a few simple elements, no? The internet doesn't need to be all flashy and colourful and complicated and interactive to be beautiful, or to make a statement.

Q: Why not make it flashy/interactive/etc.?

A: You could ask the same question of black and white vs. color photography, and the same sort of pretentious answers could be given. But in reality, the format comes from the challenge of keeping bandwith small so users with primitive internet connections, like the 56k modems most users had in the late '90s (or the similarly slow connection currently in place here at Bard College) wouldn't have to sit through interminable loading screens. The result has been a focus on the "art" part of "web-art", rather than an obsession with all the cool shit you can do with the internet.

Q: And this makes YHCHI special, how exactly?

A: Since the art is made for the internet, and more importantly for the sort of audience that exists on the internet, YHCHI's work is subtly, but radically different from off-line art. Consider: Although there are many references to life etc. in S.Korea, the work has international appeal, especially with translations into 14 different languages. The impact of technology, and more importantly the commercial aspect of technology, on not just the behavioural side of life, but on thought itself is a major topic. Although this has been a topic of focus in academic circles, internet users see this issue played out every day, from the moment they log on to the moment they close their browsers. Far from being an abstract and remote issue, how commercial technology -- or technological commercialism -- effects thought is an immediate and inescapable concern for internet users. Finally, since the internet has given all users an essentially level playing field for commentary, YHCHI is highly aware of reactions to their work, not from the institutional art world, but from ordinary people. This has enabled the art to hold a mirror up to itself. Take "METABLAST" as an example. It's text is a forum thread discussing their previous piece, "OPERATION NUKOREA".

Q: So the art creates a reaction, which in turn becomes more art?

A: Exactly.

Q: And YHCHI does this without becoming trite and infinitely self-referential?

A: Sure! Just because there are a lot of un-serious (read: stupid) people on the internet, doesn't mean people can't do serious things on the 'net.

But I'm sick of interviewing myself. I've got personalities showing up with press passes, asking if they can shoot video.

Now it's your turn. Watch some more. Post your ideas/thoughts/rants/etc. in the comments.

Minecraft, OR Why-the-shit-aren't-you-playing-this-game-right-now?

A new craze has swept the URF dormitories this week. Up until now, our game of choice has been League of Legends- a successor to the popular "Defense of the Ancients" Warcraft III mod- which is a boatload of fun in its own right. Sadly, Bard's piss-poor excuse for an internet connection makes it nearly impossible to play during most of the day. So we found a new game- one which takes things in an entirely new direction. It's so simplistic, so blissfully straightforward in its concept, that I'm surprised it wasn't conceived years ago.

I speak, of course, of Minecraft. If you've never heard of it, hop on the inter-tubes and head to www.Minecraft.net. Wait, I guess you're already on the inter-tubes, so just click that link. There, you can find a free, java-based version of the game that you can play right in your browser. You can buy the full game for about $13, (which is completely worth it, by the way), but all of the essential features exist in the free version.

But what IS Minecraft? I'll counter this question with one of my own: Do you enjoy playing with Legos? I'm going to assume you said "yes" (If you didn't say yes, I kind of want to punch you in the face, but I suppose it's a punch to the face that you're entitled to). Minecraft is, for lack of a better explanation, a gigantic, immersive lego set. This is the world of Minecraft:


It's composed entirely of differently-skinned, pixelated cubes, and is randomly generated every time you start a new game (complete with trees, water sources, mountains and caves). At its heart, the game is essentially a collosal construction tool. In the free version of the game (which is available in single and multi-player), the world is freely morphic. left-clicking deletes the block which you are looking at, while right-clicking places a block of variable appearance. You can build just about anything that you can imagine, be it a house, a copy of a real-life building, or a piece of abstract art. On the flip side, you can tunnel hundreds of feet into the ground and discover massive subterranean caverns. Also, lava.

When we first discovered this, me and several of my dormmates logged onto a server and promptly wasted a couple hours just building stuff. Someone built a beach-side house. I made a hot tub, and then began on a wizard tower. Others busied themselves with constructing a massive "skybridge" that spanned the entire world. It was decided unanimously that the house needed a structure to mark its location, and so began the construction of a giant golden penis reaching into space (it more resembled a yellowish staircase, but it's the thought that counts). A couple of random people joined, contributed their own creations, and, for a time, things were good.

But then, disaster struck. A denizen of the internet, calling himself "Tempodrop," logged on to the server. A few moments later, he made his way to the top floor of my tower (Which I was just finishing up). I fancied that he was admiring the building. He looked around for a bit, and turned to a wall. A block disapeared. And another. And another. I typed at him furiously, but to no avail. he scampered about my tower, destroying the structure I had put so much time into. Soon, all that was left was a haphazard collection of blocks floating in mid-air, barely recognizable as some sort of tower. I fell to my knees, raised my arms to the heavens, and muttered "fuck."

After that, we set up our own server-- lovingly named "Punchdome") --so that we could kick and ban any ruffians that attempted similar antics. It's a wondrous place, full of man-made volcanoes, a deathstar, an underwater tree house, and a remade wizard tower (complete with a basement, which was accidentally flooded and is now full of water, sadness, and broken dreams). One user made a ridiculously extensive system of tunnels that led to all the different structures, and repeatedly creeped people out by popping up right next to them and then vanishing.

Minecraft is a refreshingly unique game. Were many games focus on intense competition as a selling point, Minecraft is peaceful, even soothing in its gameplay. And as far as a conduit for creativity goes, you can't get much better than this. Give it a try- make an account, join a server and build something. Hell, join the Punchdome (if it's up, which isn't often), and see some of the things we've made. Just don't break our stuff.

Notes from the Starship: Dylan Mattingly poised for major composition honor

"Sometimes people write music because the world seems off-kilter, because the world seems to be missing something and there's only one way to fix it. And sometimes people write music because the world seems so overwhelmingly beautiful that you want to preserve it any way you can." -Dylan Mattingly

A lot of you at Bard probably know Dylan already, and if you do, there's a large chance that you've heard him jamming on any of twelve instruments, or maybe heard him insist you listen to this song or piece or moment and watched it turn him into excitement incarnate when he put it on. If you know him, it's almost certain you know his musicianship is something special.

Dylan, a second-year conservatory student in composition and classics, was selected this week to be one of just twelve finalists in Orpheus Project 440, a contest for composers set up to honor the 40th anniversary of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Dylan's selection for the final round means he has already surpassed 48 formidable contestants, and that he has a significant chance of being one of the contest's four winners, who will each have a work commissioned by Orpheus and performed in Carnegie Hall.

In addition to being a prodigious composer, URF member, and awesome dude, Dylan is one of Bard's (and one of the world's) most dedicated and effective proponents of the music of our time. "Music is my optimal language," he says, "and I want it to express my world." His philosophies put great faith in new music's potential, while every vibrant second of his works inspire our own faith in its kinetic. As one commenter on his Orpheus page put it, "This is music that puts its loving arms around the present, as if nobody ever had the nerve to ask if classical music was dead. Dylan tells it like he feels it and nothing gets in the way."

In his brief time at Bard, Dylan has already made significant contributions of this sort to our community. Contemporaneous, the independent music ensemble to which he helped Bard give birth, has already achieved highly successful performances in New York City and other major venues, in addition to its well-received Bard shows and a hugely popular SMOG jam session. The group, which Dylan co-directs with fellow conservatory student David Bloom, plays eclectically programmed works written only by composers who are still living and writing music. Many of these composers are our age. Their goal is to promote and advance new music of which the fractured musical societies of the 21st century may not be aware. The existence of Contemporaneous, and Dylan's guidance, have both been invaluable to the Bard community's awareness, understanding and love of the music of our world.

Now, Bard, here is your chance to get involved in that movement. Musicians, appreciators, bystanders: this is a call to arms to help one of our own achieve this remarkable and well-deserved success. The judges of the Orpheus Project take comments on his contest page into account in their decisions. At this point, having listened to his five-minute clips on the page dozens of times over, they're probably looking at the comments more than anything right now. What YOU say will matter, so please take a few minutes to listen to the clips on his contest page and leave a comment about them. If those clips don't do it for you (and why should they?), here is the full recording (Part 1 and Part 2) of his most recent premiere, "Homeward Angel," commissioned and performed by Symphony Parnassus.

Please help Dylan win this one. One more time, this is his contest page and you should leave comments on it. Or else.

Media Meal Recap: How to Cause Trouble

This past Thursday URF hosted its first true Media Meal. This meant there was a presentation, and I gave one called "Introduction to Disruptive Realism". If you aren't familiar with what disruptive realists and urban playground lovers enjoy, here are some AndJono videos:

Made You Look

No Pants Subway Ride

Train of Wonders

We discussed methods of interpretation, categories of events and a few examples. Then we posed the following questions to the attendees:

1: Would you consider these events and performances, all or in part, artistic? Is there a line that should be drawn in considering these creative and/or performance pieces? Elaborate thoroughly.*

2a: If you have been part of an event before that would be considered part of the Disruptive Realist category, please explain your experience and consideration on whether or not it was a creative endeavor.

2b: If you haven’t been involved with an event like those presented, describe the ideal event you think you would enjoy participating in and why You can either describe an event you have heard of or one of your own creation.

And here is a sample of the responses:

"If someone does something, and considers it at least partly meaningful and calls it art, then why not accept it as art?"

"I would also be interested in cheap, interactive installations like hanging a bunch of swings form select trees, or placing beds in arbitrary locations and then napping on them. Also I love naps."

"Disruptive art is not exactly artistic when its main purpose is to simple have fun."

"The closest thing I have come to disruptive realism is the organic canvas at Bard. It was definitely a creative endeavor for the photographer, the performers and the painters. It was really cool to add paint to someone in conjunction with their pose and what other people had done."

"I can't think of a more appropriate way for Bard students to show school spirit / promote campus unity."

"I would consider these events artistic. They are original, provocative, beautiful or jolting, all aspects often associated with art. Each event is planned, designed, crafted in order to provide a certain effect, and more significantly, a specific effect on a particular audience."

"Art is often a question of whether or not art is for the person or the public, but these [events] seem to fall into all of the above."

"My friends created Humans vs Zombies, which is played all over the country, and I participated twice. I think it was creative because you are constantly playing the game and people watch. You have to change the way you do everything. You become the game."

"For something to be considered 'artistic', intention must be established (or demonstrable), as an occurrence lacking intention falls under the same category as 'mundanity'. This seems to a definition of 'artisticness' that necessitates the concerted intention to 'be artistic' or 'create something artistic', but such a definition seems insufficient if we are to apply it to what we also intuitively understand as the interpretative role of art: Is it possible to have an intention to artistically discuss intention, or does this become too recursive to be meaningful?"

Food for thought, I guess. If you are hungry for more, go ahead and come to dinner on Thursdays in 7pm!

Twilight and Stephanie Meyer: An “Important” Piece of Literature

No matter which way we view modern literature, Twilight is, unfortunately, is present no matter where we turn. While many argue that these highly-addictive series of novels are “not literature” and are “worthless pieces of crap”, let’s take a minute to explore why this novel filled with vampires, average girls, Washington state and werewolves is important to our society.

Towards the end of the last semester at Bard, I was asked in my literature course, “If you had to pick an author to prevent from becoming obselete, which would you choose and why?” I immediately thought of Mrs. Meyer and Twilight.

(A quick side note, I am (and always have been) a big horror and monster fan. I love werewolves, zombies and especially vampires, hence all of the following references.)

To begin analyzing the importance of these novels, let’s do a quick overview of the Twilight plot.

Major Characters:
-Bella Swan: An average girl with an average face in an average town with average hair and an average car in an average school with average friends and an average family. (You can tell Meyer made her this way so every girl in America and the world over can relate to her in some way, shape, manner or form.)
-Edward Cullen: A vampire who is the epitome of teenage sexual frustration. He also sparkles.
-Carlisle (Car-Lyle) Cullen: Edward’s vampire daddy. He also sparkles.
-Alice Cullen: The “different” one in the vampire family. She can also see the future. Guess what she can do? Yep, sparkle.
-Charlie Swan: Bella’s average redneck dad. Likes baseball, guns and is also a cop.
-Jacob Black: Probably the hottest guy in Twilight. A werewolf, overall non-abusive guy. Pretty much the perfect guy (See Fig. 1). Also a pedophile (we’ll get to that later). Another pinnacle of teenage sexual frustration.

Plot (?): Bella moves to Forks, Washington state after her mother and her apparently baseball-trainer new husband move to Florida to do baseball training. Picked up by her dad Charlie, she begins attending Forkes Public High School and becomes that “fancy new kid”. Some words happen and she meets Edward Cullen who at first looks at her as if she is the tastiest thing on the planet (hint, hint, hint). He goes away for a week due to his sexual frustration and hunger pangs.

Bella eventually figures out he’s a vampire from incredibly obvious hints from Edward, Jacob Black and Native American folklore and the fact that he threw a fucking truck out of the way to save her life (Vampires have super strength, in case you didn’t know). Instead of being terrified to hell by the fact that he’s a vampire like any normal person, however, she falls head-over-heels in love with him. He falls head-over-heels in love with her and her delicious blood for some reason. Also she finds out that vampires sparkle in sunlight, as opposed to bursting into flames like all the other cool vampires do.

So they date for a while, then some evil Canadian vampires along with one Jamaican vampire show up (This is somehow plot relevant). Mr. Canadian vampire wishes to devour Bella, so he chases her to her old ballet studio in New Mexico, breaks her legs and bites her, but she doesn’t turn into a vampire. Also he videotapes the entire thing, teaching young children what a voyeur is. Edward and his family fight Mr. Evil Canadian and kill him by ripping his limbs off then setting him on fire.

Let me digress for one moment to say that in the ballet studio, a room usually COVERED in mirrors, Meyer breaks so many vampire rules it’s almost hard to believe. The big one? All of the vampires in Twilight have REFLECTIONS. But enough of that.

So a few more books happen, Edward and Bella get married, they have a vampiric baby that Jacob falls in love with (told you he was a pedophile) and Bella finally achieves her dream of becoming a cold, undead monster. The End.

Now that you understand this incoherent excuse for a plot, we can begin to analyze Twilight. For one thing, Stephanie Meyer provides us with is a perfect example of how not to write a piece of monster literature. And through this achievement, she also gives us something to rally around with a communal hatred, or love if you’re about fourteen years old.

People say that Dracula is old, Blackula is racist, and Lestat is gay, but they all have one thing in common that Twilight does not. This is grammatical sense and a usually outstanding job of editing before publishing. Mrs. Meyer not only gives us this model for bad literature, but also gives us a lesson in spelling, grammar and an attempt to show us what to avoid when publishing our first piece of teen fiction. Or follow. Whichever.

A thing Mrs. Meyer may not have realized however is what she gives young women. This would be the model for the seemingly perfect boyfriend, who just so happens to be an abusive, cold, unloving man who leads you on only to let you down and then break your spirit and then kill you (in the case of Twilight, quite literally). A typical conversation between Bella and Edward:

Bella: I will love you forever Edward.
Edward: Yeah…I’m gonna go now. Have fun being alone for an entire novel.
Bella: Love you! I’m gonna go do reckless things in hope that I can see a hallucination of you while my adrenaline is coursing through my veins!
Edward: Bitch be trippin’.

While all of this is nice and good, I have to digress for just another moment. As I’ve said, all vampires in Twilight sparkle in the sunlight as opposed to bursting into flames. Now I can only assume that Stephanie Meyer did not want to create morbidity in her novel about one of the most morbid monsters in existence by having her diamond-encrusted boy toy burst into flame. So she did the only logical thing and replaced the morbidity with something that all fourteen year-old girls love. Sparkly things.

That said, one must also look at some of the elements she puts in her novel to further confuse her attempt at creating an appropriate piece of fiction for pre-teens.

a) Vampires can only be killed by ripping off their heads, arms and legs and then being lit on fire.
b) When Bella and Edward have sex for the first time, Edward somehow forgets that virgins bleed on the first time, causing him to go into a vampiric rage, break her ribcage and most likely cause internal bleeding.
c) Vampires seem to have superconductive, radioactive, acidic vampire semen because Bella gets knocked up and has her baby in a matter of weeks.
d) When Bella needs a C-Section to deliver her demonic vampire spawn, instead of using Edward’s adoptive father Carlisle, an accomplished surgeon of about 400 years, he decides to chew through Bella’s uterus to get the baby out. Yes, that’s right. Chew. Uterus. Nom, nom, caesarian section.
e) Do I even have to go back to the fact that Jacob is a pedophile and everyone is okay with this?

So now that we’ve covered most of our bases on the subject of Twilight, I want to introduce an interesting argument I heard on Taverncast, a podcast that I listen to. One of the hosts on the show brings up the subject of Twilight and mentions how the movies have created hysteria. Much like how the majority of men in the 70s and 80s waited for days, camped out and dressed up for the Star Wars movies, grown women, teens, tweens and even some men are lining up for days and days to see the next installment of the Twilight saga. The movies have a cult following, which is fascinating to watch. Girls talk about their favorites, they dress up, and they buy everything with their favorite character’s face on it. So I pose a question to you. Do you believe that the Twilight saga has created a cult following? If so, what would you classify as the demographic of this cult? Some may argue the goth, some the 'scene' and others may just argue the desperate. What do you think?

Keep sparkling.

welcome to the neighborhood.

A lot of people right now are talking about how art is dead. Music is dead, a new form passing away every few years, these people say; god knows literature is dead; the visual masterpiece is forgotten in an ocean of works that are reproducible, easily widely distributed, and, with every technological advance, easier and easier for those undeserving of pedestals to create. A lot of people are talking about what computers, the Internet and everything else the last few years have brought are doing to our brains; destroying our capacity to do anything worthwhile, distracting us from our potential as human beings, encouraging us to wallow in brain-melting po-mo muck.

Most of those people are not us.

Art is alive and kicking, and we are pioneering this century's new methods of creating and understanding it. Our generation--that weird group of people still wondering if humanity will make it to the end of our adulthood--still has plenty of passion and plenty to create.

We are the Unlikely Realists' Forum, a brand new community dedicated to understanding new media and the art of the 21st century. We are a handful of students and faculty spreading the word to the Bard College community that it's time to start claiming our legacy as people--telling stories and creating beauty, not just in spite of but particularly because of our screwed up and terrifyingly changing world.

You'll see us around campus engineering several arts events; our first was last week's disruptive realist project, Organic Canvas. We'll have a big show once a semester in Village J first floor, and near-weekly film screenings, video game tournaments and playthroughs, and something else I'll let Bowman talk about because I forgot.

We also have weekly media meals. Join us in Village J every Thursday night at 7 for presentations (exciting ones), discussions and FREE DINNERS. We're not geared towards any kind of art major (most of us aren't). If you're alive, and you like art or tech or life, we want you. Come share with us, and keep watching this blog to see what we're up to.

And spread the word. We need you.

Connection: Stormtroopers 365

I'm no photographer. The concepts and analysis of photography escape me. But that doesn't mean I'm not capable of having an opinion. Albeit it may be a misinformed one.

I'm just poking in to have people take a look at a photographer I came across on Flickr. Being that I'm a Star Wars geek, I find this guy's work very entertaining.

CLICK HERE

Event Recap: Paint the Living

This past weekend, the Unlikely Realist Forum put on a small event of unforeseeable beauty: Organic Canvas. The premise of this event was that a small number of people would be silent, stoic and emotionally fixated canvases for anyone to stop and paint on. While one could guess that the result would be a few very colorful individuals, this particular type of unscripted performance art leaves just enough room for the actors (and the audience) to make the performance their own.

All photos courtesy of Isabel Filkins.

View all photos on Flickr

With only five colors, a few dozen students stepped in to make their mark on four students. The marks started small and simple: a symbol here, a flower there, but almost like the evolution of art itself the types of creation changed into new and unexpected forms.

After the symbols came the abstract lines, the connections between two people as they momentarily held hands or stood near each other. These moments disappeared as soon as they changed position and the moment (and the context) was lost. Song lyrics and quotes sprouted up along with patterns and more expressive and complete paintings. The artists built up an investment in a limb or a neck and worked hard to make their piece right. Paint went from the obvious blank skin to the hair, fingernails and eventually the bottoms of feet.

The question in understanding this work that I pose is the following: Can the rudimentary roles of form and content be applied to Organic Canvas? The what and how of a painting is far more obvious than this, so I feel it merits discussion.

The first is what part of the performance is the content? The event creates several products that can be considered the ‘facts’ of the work: The people with the paint on them is first and foremost on this list, followed by the pictures and videos of the event, which include the audience and the painters as part of the art itself. This lends me to delineate performance art into a primary and secondary existence: The first is the performance, and the second is the memorabilia of the performance.

In the performance itself, the content is still the body and the paint, while the form is a combined effort of the actor and the artist. The positions of the actors range from thoughtful to anguished to submissively orgasmic, and the artists each respond appropriately to the space presented to them. In this case, while not traditionally an art form, the content of the performance itself and of the resulting artwork are immediately apparent. The form then becomes an extension of the emotions immediately seen between canvas and artist, which is so much more profound as the form and content extends to the action of painting itself.

On the other hand the recording of the event creates actual composed still images or clips that no longer focus on the active participation of the viewer and the work. The even is past and now all that happened is fixed. Not only that but the painters are now viewed as content in the digital media, with the form being relegated to the photographer. Certain instances of painting were done with knowledge of the recording, such as instances of fresh splattered paint and certain facial expressions and poses. We forget that the process was the artwork in the primary, yet now in the secondary it is gone, with only footprints on the beach. As time passes the event itself fades further and further into nonexistence in terms of the primary, but it is the secondary that gains permanence, even though the goal of the event was the experience itself.

It would be worth considering for future events what it means to perform an artistic work vs. viewing it as a recording. There certainly could be a world of analysis in the simultaneous screening of a film and the performance of it live in an experiential manner.