15 posts tagged “media studies”

The following video is a piece constructed by Prof. Eric Faden from Bucknell using a mashup of thousands of Disney Movie clips in a 10 minute educational presentation about copyright. 

Things that were accomplished yesterday:

• Attended my very last class of college.  It was a lecture on Vermeer. Not bad.
• Collected my final drawings and wrote a final script. Turned in my Media Studies thesis.
• Bought myself (and my house) a congratulatory gift.
• Took a nap.
• Celebrated with said gift in the company of good and great friends.
• Took a hardcore sleep.

To accomplish in the following weeks:

• Finish my Studio Art thesis.
• Finish a 10-page paper on Tank Girl.
• Take a Dutch and Flemish painting final.
• Party hard.
• Graduate.

Here is another 'morning scene' of my third character.  There are a few frames missing (I havn't drawn them yet) but I wanted to post it all anyway.  I kind of enjoy seeing it all stacked together on Vox.  Looks like a real comic book page!  Horray!

I just wanted to briefly share some of the frames from one page of my senior project for media studies.  The sequence is inherently simple, but you'll probably ask "Hold on a second, uh...how does this relate to media". And then I'd say "You'll just have to wait and see!".

So yeah. Wait and see!  It's a work in progress!  Right now these are all being drawn by hand with a pilot precise V5, a japanese mechanical pencil, and some sharpies.  Really high tech over here.  I've scanned the pages in at a high resolution with the intention of working it them into flash somehow.  I still need to play around with things, but enjoi regardless, plz.

The past three meals I've had over the course of today and yesterday have all been soups.  Matzha ball.  Chicken udon.  Lentil vegetable.  This oncoming of soups indicates a fortuitous path in the universe.  At least, for me.

The weekend was filled with traveling and work.  Friday I went down to Trenton, NJ with Chico to take a quick visit to his family.  The rest of the weekend I cozied up in Brooklyn, finally gaining the creative momentum to begin work on my Media Studies senior project, which in its present form exists as almost four pages of graphic narrative.  I'm really excited about the work now that I've jumped into it, and reading Voxers' fascinating questionnaires certainly invigorated my thoughts.  So many, many, thanks again to those who contributed.

Meanwhile, the muses of Youtube videos and musical doncations from online friends have been exceedingly rich.  Backdropping my work was a wide-array of tv episodes, from the bizarre Tom Goes to the Mayor (the video above is from an episode with Michael Ian Black...the best secret handshake in the world) and Wonder Schowzen to the competitively comedic Kenny vs. Spenny.  Meanwhile, my friend Analog P. opened my ears to Boards of Canada and rg sent over Regina Spektor's 'anti-folk' album, which I've been listening to on repeat since I got it.

So things are good.  The bittersweet oncoming of parting ways with school in the next month is very apparent.  I don't think I've ever taken so many candid photos of Chico and I with my cellphone.  Just mini mementoes, tiny faces to carry around with me, wherever I may go beyond graduation.

So things are great.

Dearest friends, neighbors, and comrades of Vox,

As some of you may or may not know, one of my majors in school is that of Media Studies, the theoretical and academic investigation of Media.  As a second semester senior, it is now my current responsibility to formulate a collective artifact of my studies throughout my academic career in a Media Studies Senior Project, or thesis project if you will.

The project is to be wrought in the form of a multi-faceted mini graphic novel of sorts, most likely constructed in Flash for the purpose of animating certain attributes and enabling the incorporation of sound, movie, interaction, etc.  I wish to tell the tale of three characters: one who is media saturated, one who is mid-media saturated, and the last who hardly uses 'media' at all.  The point of the project is to develop a sense of the way we encounter media in various ways, and most importantly, how we relate our identities with such media. 

This is where you, yes you my Voxer, come in.  Over the course of the week I've managed to gather survey input from close friends and family to inform the personalities/characteristics and motions of the three characters featured in the piece.  If any of you would be interested in participating in this cumulation of identities, mediated or non-mediated, I would be forever thankful.  The survey would be kept entirely anonymous, and other than a snippet of personality or a particular phrase to be included in the final piece, you would be left safely out of the frame. 

Please let me know if you're interested in contributing by either commenting or messaging me, and if so, I will e-mail you the survey and give you mad props in the credits of the piece.  I'm amidst generating the characters as we speak (at the wee hours of the post-time), and whatever response I can get, I'll take.

So thank you in advance, both for reading over this rather despondent plea of a second semester senior attempting to graduate, and for participating.

Hearts, domo-kuns, and multi-layers,

.tiff

The Pirate Bay, a well known Swedish BitTorrent site, has determined the best way to freely distribute torrents that go against all spectrums of copyright law in almost all countries is to purchase a country themselves.  In attempt to make this fantasy a reality, The Pirate Bay has begun accepting donations to purchase Sea Land, an old British Naval Platform. 

According to a website set up to secure the purchase of Sealand, The Pirate Bay plans to give citizenship of the micronation to anyone willing to put money towards the purchase.

"It should be a great place for everybody, with high-speed Internet access, no copyright laws and VIP accounts to The Pirate Bay," the organisation claims on its website www.buysealand.com.

Read more about 'Sea Land', the magical nation with high-speed Internet access here.

      After waking up unintentionally at 6 AM yesterday, I was finally able to finish all of my work by about 9. (*joy*)  I zipped my papers up, sent them to my professor, took a shower and made quick plans to head out and go christmas shopping.  Seeing as I had been locked up in my room for the past three days with academic journals and Text Edit as my only compadres, I expected that I would steer clear of all things school related.  
      But to my surprise, I had a sudden jolt of energy to steer over to my local library and grapple some books to read over my holiday in preparation of my thesis projects.  Ever since last summer when I discovered I didn't have many books to display in my Vox, going to the library and digging up books to read has become a new thrill for me.  My favorite sections of course are the Sociology/Media Studies shelves and some of the fiction.  This time, in search for pieces about digital identity, I came up with these books:

• Cyberethics
• Nobrow : The Culture of Marketing - The Marketing of Culture
• High Tech High Touch
• New Essays on New Media
• The Search for Being : Essays from Kierkegaard to Satre on the Problem of Existence
• The Philisophical Works of Descartes (Book 1)
• Derrida in 90 minutes
• Foucault in 90 minutes

Are you the kind of person who likes to balance their intake of popular music by switching between hip hop, motown,  alternative, and 80's hits on the radio? Oh are you? Well you are in for a surprise.

Girl Talk is the hottest popular culture overload to date. Its just so meta. Girls love it. Boys love it. College kids love it. Hipsters love it. And I think its about time voxers get a taste too.  You may find it a bit overwhelming at first, your aural senses bombarded with switching beats and overlapping lyrics that visit your most expansive adventures in pop music.  Sometimes you'll get lost, and wonder where you started from.  But then, mixed beats like Ying Yang Twin's 'Whisper Song' pulse behind the sensitive melody of The Verve's 'Bittersweet Symphony' and you'll notice that everything is in its place again.

Harold, just blogged about it, including the album Night Ripper's first track.  I'm going to go ahead and post the third track, 'Hold Up' for your listening pleasure.  If you want to map out my favorite moments, key into the track at 0:42, 1:45, and 2:28 for some delicious mix-up moments. 

I could approach this music at a different point, and go on about its existence as a cultural artifact of the media-saturated society that is our modern time.  But I won't.  Girl Talk is just too much a of a guilty pleasure to spoil. F'uh raaaals.