Event 2 Blog


        For event number 2, I attended Christina Yglesias’s workshop called “U still up”? Christina is an artist and curator working in web, video and instillation. She is currently trying to receive her MFA from UCLA Design Media Arts. It was a solo show put on by Christina herself. The purpose of a Christina’s work was about her interest in the ways communication has shifted with us living in such a connected time with technology and wondering if you can have a relationship with strangers.

   
Christina Yglesias and I
Layout of the event
        To initiate this project she asked for pen pals on Craig’s list. The people she asked to be her pens pals were all strangers. Both men and women responded wanting to be her pen pal, however most were men in comparison to women. Three of the strangers she used for her project ended up being male and the other one used was female. In each of her conversations with her pen pals she asked for their consent to use their conversations in her project. After getting their consent to be in her project she asked them why they wanted to or were willing to talk to a stranger.
        The conversations that she had with the four random strangers were presented in the show. Each conversation was displayed on a TV screen in the form of a video portraying the texts conversations between Christina and the strangers. To make the texting conversations come to life, she hired actors off of Craig’s list to act the part of the strangers as well as herself for the videos. Displayed on each of the four TV screens was a side-by-side video of an actress playing Christina’s role in the texting conversation and on the other side an actor/actress played the role of one of the four strangers. Christina mentioned to me that the character personalities of the strangers was left up to the actors/actresses to interpret for themselves when reading the texts for the video.


        For the most part in each video basic conversation starters were covered. For example, the people’s name, age, job, if they go to school or not, etc. was asked in the beginning of every conversation with the strangers.  All of the conversations held with the men at some point or another asked Christina for provocative type of pictures of herself. Each time she turned them down simply by saying no. I guess this type of question is bound to come up if you are starting a texting relationship from Craig’s list. In the video with the female the majority of the texting conversation was about the daily activities they encountered each day. Their conversation consisted of more feminine topics, given that they are both female and in comparison the conversations with the males were a little flirtier. During the segment I listened to most for this video Christina and the stranger engaged in a conversation about race, primarily about the diversity in LA. This was interesting to me because the female stranger seemed to be complaining and upset with some of the diversity around her. It was nice to see/hear that Christina disagreed with her and argued for the sake of diversity and its importance. 
        There was a separate piece of work that differed from the video displays, and it was a dense script containing a follow up conversation with one of the male pen pal strangers. This conversation was not displayed on the TV screens, but was still included in the exhibit. The conversation began with Christina talking to the stranger again and the guy actually forgot whom she was, so she had to remind him and ask for his consent again. Because of the continued conversation with the stranger she ended up inviting the stranger to her art exhibit. If he showed or did not show remains a mystery.

        After watching the videos you realize that it is hard to construct a texting conversation into a flowing dialogue when spoken in person. In texting conversations messages between people are often short, direct, or can switch topics quickly. Because of this, the video sequence can sound awkward when spoken in a live conversation. This event in particular goes to show how technology has not only improved drastically over the years but that it can also be joined with art, which allowed this event to be possible. If it were not for our world and communication being so connected through technology today, then the whole purpose and curiosity behind this event would not exist. Attending this event was fascinating. I thought it was so cool that Christina came up with the idea to ask for random strangers as pen pals on Craig’s list, which is not a common thing for people to do. All in all, I definitely would recommend this to people and hope that some of my classmates were able to attend.


  • (All photos are mine)
  • Attended the event on Tuesday May 2nd, 2017

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 2: Math + Art

Image
Before this week’s lecture on math and art I never considered the fact that math was a foundation of art. Professor Vensa’s lecture “ Mathematics-pt1- Zero Perspective Golden Mean” demonstrates the degree to which math was and is used by artist in their work today. Artist used mathematics to create their paintings, drawing, etc. One of the procedures used was “the golden ratio,” which was a divine proportion that was considered to be aesthetically pleasing. It is similarly noted in the article  What is the Golden Ratio?  that the golden ratio "is known as one of the most visually satisfying of all geometric forms- hence, the appearance of the golden ratio in art,"(Hom). The vanishing point theory was a graphical perspective also used by artists to display the correct geometric perspective. Therefore, as professor Vensa stated in the intro to math “the connection of art and science is mathematics.” (Courtesy of:  http://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMT668/EMAT6680.2000/Obara...
Read more

Week 3: Robotics + Art

Image
When the topic of industrialization is brought up I tend to think about factories and mass production. The creation of machines was responsible for such mass production. A machine that we all use today was starting to be formed and created at this time in history too. It is the machine we all know today as the computer. Instead the first similar to its kind was the Turing Machine. An English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist named Alan Turing created the machine. Professor Vesna mentioned in her Robotics pt.3 lecture “he was a phenomenal genius and really made a major impact in computer science and artificial intelligence, and is considered the father of computer science.” Courtesy of:  http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article040101.html While learning about Alan Turing from this week’s lecture it reminded me about a movie I saw a few years ago. To my surprise, when I looked up the movie I found that it w...
Read more

Week 1 Blog Post: Two Cultures

Image
     Both professor Vensa and C.P Snow have optimism that there will end up being some sort of bridge or “third culture” that will close the between the arts and sciences. However, “there is still much work to be done in building the bridge between the humanities and the sciences, “ (Vensa, 122). I agree with the optimism portrayed by C.P. snow and Vensa about the possible existence between the literary intellects and scientists. I am a psychology major so I experience both of the two cultures everyday. Experiencing both cultures within my major illustrates an example of a bridge being formed between the two cultures.       In our immediate world here at UCLA there is an obvious division between the literary sphere and the scientific sphere. Our campus is specifically divided into two halves; north campus and south campus. North campus consists of the literary and art majors, whereas south campus consists of the math and science majors.  The ph...
Read more