Following
Having a bit of knowledge about Eyecon and its workings I had a small idea of what I was walking into when I went to see Jeremy Stern's piece Following. A recreation of sorts of the areas around us, Stern drowve all over and recorded his travels, not with commentary, but with the natural sounds that he encountered. In that way they created the commentary of what was where. To me "natural sounds" does not mean only the sounds of nature or something of that matter. Natural sounds are the sounds of everything around us at all times, whether they be birds chirping or machines roaring. As I walked around the gallery space I was first drawn to the paint on the wall, which I'm sure was for another piece, but it was the first thing to have caught my eye. The wall was painted black, with some of the white exposed in the back making wonderous patterns that reminded me of the night sky. While I believe that the walls were for another piece entirely they added to the overall atmosphere of Following. It made we wish that Following had a more night and day feel to it. What I mean to say is that I wish that somehow there could have been a projection of some sorts to show what time of day Stern recorded his findings. It would have brought a much larger sense of time and place because it would have shown that what we were experiencing did not just take place in a few hours, but in a few days. Four main speakers played the sounds and cameras attached to Eyecon recorded our movements. I tried walking back and fourth from one area to another and even running a few times to get different sounds. What I found a lot of times was that the sounds were all very similar, but that might not have been Stern's fault at all, he was just recording what he experienced. Another step that I wish he could have taken was to have many more speakers just blasting the sounds that he recorded, because I noticed myself struggling to try and hear the sounds, as they were not very loud. All in all a good piece, but it needed some major adjustments to make it grand, at least for me.
Kevin Hand
When I heard that an animator would be coming for a presentation to visit our university I was more than thrilled to go and attend his presentation in the ASUN Theater. Especially when I heard that it was an animator from the Adult Swim program Superjail. Myself being an aspiring animator I was expecting to hear the processes that they go through from storyboarding to the actual animations themselves. When Hand began his presentation he began to discuss how he arose to the poison of an animator today. He presented a few previous projects that highlighted the peak points of his amateur career, from 3D modeling for crime scenes to modeling ships that have been raised from the deep and even futuristic machines that have not even been put into creation yet. However, while all fascinating and a helpful reference to how one rises to the field of a professional, the highlight of his presentation that I was looking for was the information about his animation. Yet when he finally got to the subject of talking about animation, help only spent a minimal time explaining any, if any, information at all or even showing videos of what he worked on. All of the videos that he showed were from YouTube, which to me showed a bit of unprofessionalism. I would have better enjoyed the videos if he brought them himself. Instead the Internet at the university was having a few kinks that day, so the videos became laggy, from their already slow-loading time. The videos were also very blurry and were hard to see, especially projected on a wall as it was. Another problem he had was that he tried to use Skype to chat with one of the higher-ups on Adult Swim, which would have been amazing had the Internet been online. It was also apparent that Hand had no idea what he was doing when he tried to access the network to chat, something I would have expected he would have sorted out before his presentation. All in all Hand was a disappointed and shallow presentation, full of bugs and technical difficulties that could have been avoided or worked around had he have been prepared.
Joseph Delappe
When going into Professor Joseph Delappe's presentation, I only had his Gandhi work to go on, and even then I knew very little about it. Truthfully I had no idea how one would make art out of video games that had no graphical value for its time. Today, especially after the introduction of Ico from Team Ico, many video games are trying to make themselves accepted as art. With their improved graphics and new ways to warp light and even create cartoony vector graphics for those more oriental style video games, such as Okami. However what Delappe did was not art directly on the video games themselves, but it was more like performance art, reenacting scenes from famous shows such as friends, and acting them out over the internet with microphones. For many years also have tablets now that allow us to draw on the computer as we would on paper, but one of the more impressive projects was when Delappe attached a pencil to a mouse and had the tracks of his mouse create pictures with it. A wonderful concept with interesting results. When he introduced the Gandhi work I was surprised about the massive scale to which the entire project took place. From actually walking the entire length of Gandhi's walk, to creating a towering replica of the man himself the effort put into the entire piece really put all the work into perspective for me. All in a pleasant presentation, though I wish there could have been more videos other process of many of his works, mostly pictures were shown.
--VMS
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