Thursday, May 14, 2009

Art Event #10

Artgerm on Deviantart
http://artgerm.deviantart.com/

I have been following this particular artist's work for quite some time now. I first found him on the ever popular deviantart.com, a website that I've really grown to love. I like to browse on here a lot of the time to view other artist's work. It's a great way to share your work and have some kind of online portfolio to showcase it and get feedback from others. Anyways, the artist's name is Stanley Lau. He is from Singapore and he does a lot of digital art works, and uses photoshop (I wish I could be that good in using photoshop someday haha!). I was most attracted to his work because I enjoy his kind of style, his use of colors, his sense of perspective, and the way that his characters have this fantasy-like realism is fantastic. Browse through his gallery if you have time. It's a real treat.

Art Event #9

Bunimovich Stadium
http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Harrison/Flash/Chaos/Bunimovich/Bunimovich.html

This is a flash animation that illustrates two balls moving at the same speed in Bunimovich Stadium. This may not really be considered "art", but I think it's interesting how art and science constantly coincide with one another. Learning how to work with Flash cannot only be beneficial in creating artwork, but in also demonstrating certain scientific concepts. Like in this website that I found for instance, there are various other flash animations illustrating different physics principles. I think Flash is a great tool for anything like this really, and I'm glad I got to learn how to use it in this class.

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Art Event #8

"French Cinema"
DATE & PLACE VIEWED: Tuesday April 16, 2009 in Arts 240 at 6PM

Dr. Remi-Fournier Lanzoni was the lecturer at this event. He was the author of "From Crime Scene to Popular Screen: The Millieu in the Cinema of Henri Verneuil". This event's schedule included a lecture for about an hour, from about 6-7PM, and then a screening of the French thriller film, "Tell No One". During the first part, Dr. Remi-Fournier Lanzoni went through a powerpoint about all the various aspects of French cinema. He mentioned a lot about the use of chiaroscuro, especially in crime cinema. Dramatic lighting was utilized, especially in the film noir type plots. The lecture was more of an exploration of film noir genres through the years, as well as a touch on other genres that aren't really "film noir", but are more of tributes to that particular genre. Different genres altogether, may still include elements of film noir, but are not classified in that film genre category.

During the second part of the event, we watched the film "Tell No One" which was, to my surprise, very very good. I would recommend it to anyone. It was a crime film that included much suspense. I appreciated how this whole event was very French oriented. The one in charge of the event was a French professor here, but I forgot her name. I've always been interested in learning French, and being at this even made me want to learn the language even more.

In terms of how this event relates to our class, I suppose the category of "film noir" can contribute as an artistic style that can be included in people's work. The whole use of dramatic and emphasized lighting, chiaroscura, shadows and a strong sense of competition sounds like something interesting that can be played around with in the artwork that we do in this class, be it through photoshop or even flash with the animations that we're doing. With my social issue topic being incareration alternatives, and crime being a major factor associated with incarceration, perhaps I can put that "film noir" feeling to good use.