Ethan Dorer

While I have had artwork put on display, I have never had it displayed in a formal gallery setting. I liked seeing how the space came together as well as the thought that was put into the arrangement of the room. Everybody worked will to display the photographs in an arrangement that made visual sense. It was an interesting experience to see people look and talk about my art and I had fun talking with people about the background of specific shots such as the bike shot.

I am presenting on Godard and how McLuhan uses the example of Godard's film Breathless in his book. Before McLuhan's inclusion of a frame from Breathless in The Medium is the Massage , he talks about the idea of amateurism as being removed from the same environment as professionalism. This detachment from a need to stick to the conventions of the art allow the amateur to create in ways unknown to the professional. I found that this concept of amateurism connected quite well to the approach Godard and many other filmmakers had during the French New Wave. The movement itself was founded on creating an approach to creating film that resisted the traditional approach of French and Hollywood film. In this way it was an inherently amateur approach to film yet it provided a freedom to those who partook in it which allowed them to create great art.

In this piece I set out to distill the sounds and feelings of my experience in elementary through high school down into 60 seconds of noise. The goal was to create a soundscape which captured the essence of school by extending beyond the mere ambient sounds of a school hallway. Some of the sounds from school that stuck with me were from the mind-numbingly repetitive educational videos.  I wanted to play with this idea of repetition and the sounds included were from things I remember experiencing in a repetitive and often routine way such as saying the national anthem every morning, watching Bill Nye when the science teacher was too bored of teaching, or running the PACER Fitnessgram test. The chaos of these compounded noises is somewhat guided by the authoritative sounding voice of a 1950's school documentary narrator yet in the end everything is ruled by the sound of the school bell. https://soundcloud.com/user-287357877/60-seconds-of-public-education

I was inspired by the McLuhan quote "Environments are invisible. Their ground rules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception." My process for this project was influenced by the idea that the patterns elude perception so instead of searching for the environmental rules I collected images in a stream of thought manner in hope of seeing the elusive patterns when choosing my photographs for this collection. In choosing the names of my photos, I relied on a mechanism outside my own control by having a friend choose the names using a random word generator. In this way there is no intentional name for each image yet patterns of meaning emerge from the pairing of word and image. I found Flickr to be an easy to use art venue and liked how it allowed for albums to be shown as slideshows. The site made it very easy to upload my images as well as provide names and descriptions of each photo.

Shelby Rodeffer's work centers around the way various styles of text can enhance the effect of the words themselves. Rodeffer's pieces blend text and image to provide commentary on different social issues such as gender roles in society. Coming from a background in sign painting, Rodeffer uses her knowledge of lettering to shape her text in a way that mirrors the message of her illustration. Her use of traditional sign making is interesting due to the way it is both practical as well as artistic While she often works on traditional surfaces such as signs and windows, she also takes her lettering to surfaces such as silk. These silk banners are reminiscent of masonic banners and she makes use of her lettering to bolster the odd and somewhat ambiguous feel of the banners she is referencing. Though she often relies on work as a sign painter to make a living, she mentioned that recently she has begun to get work producing her art. Artists often face the difficult reality o

In making this video I was inspired by the language in McLuhan's quote "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future". Somewhat ignoring the meaning behind the quote, the notion of simultaneous forward and backwardness led me to want to use a split screen yet still give my piece the connected feeling of being in the same space and time. Despite this, the appearance of both sides of the screen being concurrent creates an environment where time has folded over on itself to create a unique depiction of this space. I chose the imagery of the path because of the ambiguity of which way is forward. I tried to keep the fence in the right side of the split screen and the forest on the left because of the quality I felt each subject lent to the feeling of setting. The trees have a timeless quality to them while the fence feels more rooted in the present.