Reading 1:

Natalie Bookchin – Mass Ornament

Mass Ornament is a collection of YouTube videos of people dancing in their homes that are synchronized to different pieces of music. From Natalie Bookchin’s site, “In his essay Mass Ornament (1927(, Zigfried Kracauer argued that the synchronized movements of chorus line dancers reflected the logic of the Fordist economic system of mass production. Today, YouTube dancers, alone in their rooms performing a routine that is both extremely private and extraordinarily public, reflect a post-Fordist era.” it seems that she drew inspiration from Zigfried Kracauer’s statment.

I like to think that though the internet and YouTube, people have been given tools for individualism and be able to distribute it like never before. In some cases this leads to isolation instead of coming together. For example, posting your own unique YouTube video vs going to a gym to dance. However, as Natlie shows, these individual videos can still be choreographed into a single dance, which we can all say we share in common, as we can all identify by seeing ourselves dancing to our own tune in our own homes.

Are these videos just showing that we are all mass producing the same thing? That individualism can be condenced and ordered to a single movement we are all a part of? Is individuality easy or does it really take a lot of work to truly be individual. Knowing there are about 7 billion people on earth are we really so unique?

Natalie Bookchin’s site: http://bookchin.net/bio.html
Mass Ornament: http://vimeo.com/5403546

Olia Lialina – Gif Model

I actually chose a series of smaller works by Olia, in her work with gifs. Now a days we have video games with multi-million budgets and teams of hundreds of people putting work into amazingly done Video Games. I truly believe that video games should be included as a real and true form of art. I have no way how to critique and measue how they should, but I know they should be. The point is, that we rarely look back at simpler media such as the simple gif. Olia has made some nice gifs as recently as 2013 and they vary from simple, quirky, fun, and emotional.  They are really simple gifs, but they are really well looped.

 Each gif has a very simple “feeling” that is very clearly displayed and looped. In particular the top most loop of gifs (pictured) has a scrolling background that changes as the song in the background plays and it really does add/change the emotion of the gifs playing in the foreground. The gif is a very common media file andit seems wer are getting more complex in our understanding of media art, but sometimes “less is more”.

Website: http://art.teleportacia.org/olia.html
Gif Model: http://art.teleportacia.org/exhibition/AGM/