R2 Reading Response

I really loved the Aaron Koblin TED talk (as in I sent it to everyone I know after viewing it). It reminded me a lot of a movie I watched back in high school. I went through an Ellen Page phase at some point and during that phase I was also taking a film class where we had to present on our favorite movie. It was called “The Tracey Fragments,” and I remember liking it because it was so out of order and jarring and a lot of it played like a music video. After doing a lot of research on the film, I realized that at the time of its release (years prior to my viewing of the film), the director actually put up all of the footage they shot for the entire film on their website, even scenes that didn’t make it into the final film. They encouraged fans of the movie to download the footage and basically have their way with it. I remember watching a bunch of different edits of the movie where people re-contextualized a lot of the footage and I thought it was the coolest idea at the time. 

Likewise, I found the Wikipedia TED talk to be fairly enlightening because, although I use it all the time, I have never really been clear on how the crowdsourcing part worked. However, I do think it’s an insanely brilliant idea because just about everyone you meet has limited knowledge of something and, if you piece it together, a pretty comprehensive bank of expertise is created.

R1 Reading Response

For my producing class my partner and I decided to create a mock documentary about the links between creativity and synesthesia. I originally pitched the idea to my partner because there was a musical artist from Norway named Ida Maria that I listened to all throughout high school who I had just recently found out had synesthesia. I had no idea what it was until I looked her up at the prompting of my dad (who kind of fell into my obsession with her after me). The idea of synesthesia is hard to comprehend, especially because I have associations of different colors with different things but that’s more of a learning technique that was used when I was younger for memory purposes and there are certain classes that I have now that I associate with different colors. However, synesthesia is not just an association it’s a visual manifestation of color in response to something like numbers or letters. In the case of Ida Maria, she saw music as color, which obviously encouraged her to pursue music as a career. 

There was another woman we researched, Taria Camerino, who was a pastry chef that tasted color, music, shapes as well as other people’s emotions. She was able to identify objects based only on their taste. I always found it so interesting that their experiences with synesthesia seemed to inform their careers and what they did with their lives. Even with Daniel Tammett, he showed a few paintings he made that depicted how he viewed certain calculations. While the equation element was unique, the attempt to recreate what synesthetics see in response to certain objects and words is pretty common from the research I did last year (there was one artist who would listen to a song and paint what she saw and each painting was titled with the name of the song that inspired it).

Len Lye 1st Response

- The audio reminded me of a 1950s advertisement or instructional video
- saying that I know that Len Lye (knew the name was familiar) did an ad for the post office - might not be this video but it's interesting that it reminded me of an ad
- lots of seemingly random images that went along w/ the music - must have took meticulous planning
- Because there was no clear narrative I tried searching for a pattern and the closest I came was lines (vertical and horizontal) appeared when guitar was playing - kind of like guitar strings - bending and swaying with the music
- triangles, diamonds, circles for piano keys - smaller like the piano sound
- thicker strings or lines during a cello sound or whatever that deeper sound toward the end was