1. Remediation by Bolter & Grusin
Quotes from the reading:
- If the ultimate purpose of media is indeed to transfer sense experiences from one person to another, the wire threatens to
make all media obsolete.
- The wire bypasses all forms of mediation and transmits directly
from one consciousness to another.
- When Lenny himself puts on the wire and closes his eyes,
he experiences the world in a continuous, first-person point-of-view
shot, which in film criticism is called the “subjective camera.”
- Still, contemporary virtual reality is, like the wire in Strange Days, an experiment in
cinematic point of view. Meanwhile, the proliferation of media in 2K
L.A. is only a slight exaggeration of our current media-rich environment, in which digital technologies are proliferating faster than our cultural, legal, or educational institutions can keep up with them. In
addressing our culture’s contradictory imperatives for immediacy and
hypermediacy, this film demonstrates what we call a double logic of
remediation. Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase
all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very
act of multiplying them.
- The logic of immediacy dictates that the medium itself should disappear and
leave us in the presence of the thing represented: sitting in the race car
or standing on a mountaintop.
- Yet these same old and new media often refuse to leave us alone.
Many web sites are riots of diverse media forms—graphics, digitized
photographs, animation, and video—all set up in pages whose graphic
design principles recall the psychedelic 1960s or dada in the 1910s and
1920s
- Immediacy depends on hypermediacy. In the effort to create
a seamless moving image, filmmakers combine live-action footage with
computer compositing and two- and three-dimensional computer
graphics.
- The desire for immediacy leads digital media to borrow avidly from
each other as well as from their analog predecessors such as film, television, and photography.
- A painting by the
seventeenth-century artist Pieter Saenredam, a photograph by Edward
Weston, and a computer system for virtual reality are different in many
important ways, but they are all attempts to achieve immediacy by ignoring or denying the presence of the medium and the act of mediation.
- Our primary concern will be with visual technologies, such as
computer graphics and the World Wide Web. We will argue that these
new media are doing exactly what their predecessors have done: presenting themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media.
- What is new about new media comes from the particular
ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older
media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media.
2. Chapters 1 & 4, Motion Graphic Design
Quotes from the reading:
Chapter 1:
- This article
suggested that its readers cut the pictures out and place them in a zoetrope to recreate the illusion of motion. This fueled Muybridge to invent
the zoopraxiscope, an instrument that allowed him to project up to
200 single images on a screen. This forerunner of the motion picture
was received with great enthusiasm in America and England.
- In 1884,
Muybridge was commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania to
further his study of animal and human locomotion and produced an
enormous compilation of over 100,000 detailed studies of animals and
humans engaging in various physical activities. These volumes were a
great aid to visual artists in helping them understand movement.
- In 1889, Hannibal W. Goodwin, an American clergyman, developed a
transparent, celluloid film base, which George Eastman began manufacturing. For the first time in history, long sequences of images could
be contained on a single reel. For the first time in history, cinematographic
films were projected onto a large screen for a paying public.
- Dada and Surrealist artists sought to overthrow traditional
constraints by exploring the spontaneous, the subconscious, and the
irrational. These forms of Modernism abandoned the laws of beauty
and social organization in an attempt to demolish current aesthetic
standards of art. This was manifested in music, poetry, sculpture,
painting, graphic design, and experimental filmmaking.
- During the early 1900s, Swedish musician and painter Viking Eggeling
described his theory of painting by way of music, in terms of
“instruments” and “orchestration.” His desire was to establish what he referred to as a “universal language” of abstract symbols, and he
strived to accomplish this by emphasizing musical structure and
avoiding representation.
- Richter’s silent films of the late 1920s demonstrated a more
surreal approach that combined animation with live-action footage. At the time, these shocking films challenged artistic conventions by
exploring fantasy through the use of special effects, many of which are
used in contemporary filmmaking.
- Jan Švankmajer was one of the most remarkable European filmmakers
of the 1960s. His innovative works have helped expand traditional animation beyond the concept of Disney cartoons. ... [H]e employed a wide range of techniques
and used almost anything he could find, including man-made objects,
animals, plants, insects, and bones in order to fuse object animation
with live action.
- Inspired by Eastern European culture and the films of Jan Švankmajer,
identical twin brothers Stephen and Timothy Quay (the “Brothers
Quay”) were among the most accomplished puppet animation artists to emerge during the 1970s. Their exquisite sense of detail and
decor, openness to spontaneity, and use of extreme close-ups have
enchanted audiences worldwide, and their innovations contributed a
unique sense of visual poetry to animated film.
- During World War II, [John] Whitney discovered
that the targeting elements in bomb sights and antiaircraft guns could
calculate trajectories that could be used to plot graphics. From surplus
antiaircraft hardware, he built a mechanical analog computer (which
he called a “cam machine”) that was capable of metamorphosing
images and type.
- In 1974, John Whitney,
Jr. and Gary Demos formed a Motion Picture Products group which led
to the first use of computer graphics for motion pictures while working
on the film Westworld (1973).
- “[Saul] Bass fashioned title sequences into an art, creating in some cases, like
Vertigo, a mini-film within a film. His motion graphics compositions
function as a prologue to the movie—setting the tone, providing the
mood and foreshadowing the action.”
- During his [Pablo Ferro] advertising career in the 1950s, Ferro introduced
several techniques to the commercial film industry including rapid-
cut editing, hand-drawn animation, extreme close-ups, split-screen
montage, overlays, and hand-drawn type.
- Harry
Marks, who was working for ABC, conceived the idea of the moving
logo and hired Douglas Trumbull, who pioneered the special effects
in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), to help him animate the
sequence to ABC’s Movie of the Week, which captivated audiences
nationwide and brought about a major graphic design revolution.
Chapter 4:
- A major benefit of video wall architecture is that it is scalable and
interchangeable, allowing many screen sizes and horizontal or vertical
configurations.
- Immersive environments shape a sense of place by providing order,
ambience, comfort, and insight to a physical or virtual space. They are
a unique confluence of architecture, interior design, images, motion
graphics, and sound that operate holistically to provide aesthetic,
meaningful experiences and enhance social interaction.
- Today, the field of exhibit design combines graphic design, interactive media, motion graphics, and product design. Exhibit designers
typically have backgrounds that include a variety of disciplines, such
as industrial design, architecture, interior design, graphic design, and
theatrical design. They must demonstrate strong creative skills and
sensitivity to basic aesthetic principles, such as color, composition,
and perspective, as well as a knowledge of materials, lighting, and the
ability to work independently or as part of a team.
- An imaginative, well-designed exhibit creates a memorable and lasting
impression on its viewers. Its success is judged by the effectiveness in
which its content meets the aesthetic and spatial requirements of a
site. The design must incorporate the essence of the individual products or brands being featured, while tying them into a cohesive, unified
environment.
- Other considerations involve the creative use of lighting
and architectural elements such as stairways, lounges, reception desks,
entranceways, conference rooms, flooring, ceilings, walls, and so forth.
Further, materials can range from sand and tree bark to synthetic materials such as translucent concrete or fiberglass.
- In recent years, motion graphics have played a significant role in
interactive educational installations. For example, multidimensional
forms and patterns move and change in size and color on several giant
screens in response to people’s traffic patterns in Goldman Sachs’ new
Learning Center in New York City.
- In retail spaces, immersive environments can create genuine,
emotional branding experiences by putting guests into new intuitive
and exotic worlds. An example of this is the HBO Shop in HBO’s New
York headquarters in Manhattan. A combination of large-scale instal-
lation, and motion graphics transform the store into an architectural
canvas onto which large-format video projections, choreographed
lighting, and audio work together to create a unique visual experience
- It seems likely that, as technology continues to advance, motion
graphic designers will have more creative opportunities to play a
greater role in designing the content for these types of public spaces.
- Today, motion graphics are playing a much greater role in shaping our
architectural, urban landscape, due to the rapid advancement of LED
technology. Integrated software/hardware systems can stream and
scale live video content from various media sources, including servers,
DVD players, camcorders, and computers, to accommodate large-scale
architectural installations. e.g. Chanel Tokyo
- LED lights wrapped around buildings “have forever
changed the skyline of Atlantic City”
- Digital signage—one of the fastest growing marketing opportunities in the world today—ranges from sports scoreboards to giant video
screens in large public spaces such as shopping malls. As a “real-time”
messaging medium, it is used to present many forms of content over
high-speed networks to video displays in public venues.
- Interactive
digital signage solutions, such as touch-screen kiosks, can deliver dy-
namic, timely messages that can impart information or influence con-
sumer behavior. In advertising, its marketing content can be crafted
based upon specific information that consumers provide or from the
purchases that they make.
- Dynamic digital signage—typically com-
posed of a server, a monitor, and software—is emerging as a new gen-
eration of sign technology in the advertising industry. It is capable of
delivering dynamic visual content to multiple locations, meaning that
advertisers can communicate a brand or message locally or around the
world to employees and customers from a central location.
- In response to the demands of advertisers to reach more audiences,
and to the decline of prices in LCD, plasma, and projector displays, the
need for digital signage has accelerated. Wal-Mart, The Gap, and Foot
Locker have already adapted dynamic digital signage technology to promote their brands nationwide.
- As staging becomes more extravagant,
the prospects of giant illuminated video screens and elaborate lighting
facilities call for new methods of choreographing data to synchronize
with the changing scenery or music being performed.
