Assignment 4

Assignment 4 from jazele rabbani on Vimeo.

Natural Nature

In this piece of video art, I am exploring the notion that our ideas about nature are subjective. Our experience of the “natural world” is different for everyone depending on what a particular person sees every day, but for many—like myself—the “natural” world we see isn’t natural at all: it’s the suburbs and highly constructed. 

I grew up in Sylvania, Ohio which is a suburb of Toledo, a relatively small city. When I was a child, I lived in neighborhood full of old streets and houses. Then all of a sudden, the neighborhood started to expand and take over the woods we were connected to. Without even realizing it until now, my childhood consisted of walking through a forest and seeing it get taken down tree by tree to see the “new neighborhood everyone was so excited for” get built. To this day, nature is still being torn away and destroyed. 

I have always enjoyed taking walks around my neighborhood and parks; recently while walking in my neighborhood I started thinking about the nature and trees that are still here and the ones that once were. I appreciate all the natural elements around me, and I love focusing in and actually paying attention to what I see. For this reason, my body of work highlights the commonplace nature that people ignore. In my new video, trees reclaim their land and show themselves through the houses that once took over.

Layered 10 second video

Layered video from jazele rabbani on Vimeo.

Here is my practice layered video. It is of my two favorite places in one screen.

I do not have access to premiere on a laptop so I use the iPad version and it doesn’t have a green screening effect.

Assignment three

Jazele Assignment Three from jazele rabbani on Vimeo.

Here is my project for this assignment. I wanted to go off my drawing practice and make it better. I do think I was successful in making this. But honestly I didn’t enjoy making it. I tried to make it better for myself by creating shape cut outs and moving these rather than drawing each circle because it left behind the pencil marks. I also created a room as an atmosphere so that it could have space to bounce within. Doing this on my iPad has been extremely hard also due to the fact that I don’t have access to many editing apps. I would say I think my video is good for this assignment based on my lack of resources, the amount of time this took me, and the amount of frames I created to make this work. Also my shape isn’t 1920x1080 because I was not able to do that with the editing app I was forced to use. And for the sound I decided to put kids playing outside with ambient outdoor sounds. I did this to counter the image of a ball alone inside- so I put the outside with kids and people creating sounds and playing without the ball that would be what would make sense to be getting played with.

Artist Stop Animation I Enjoyed

Nada Fruit Stop-motion commercial from Andre Maat on Vimeo.

After searching for a very long time for a stop motion that i enjoyed, i finally found this one. I felt like this stop motion was so successful in looking interesting and doing something that captures the viewer. I like the way that each fruit is treated differently based on its traits. And then depending on what the fruit did and how the hand interacted with it, it then turns into the bottle of juice that was being represented or "created" by the moves the hand did with the fruit. The background mainly stays the same with a little bit of variation in each frame; this idea of slight change is shown in this by looking like wind in the tall grass, i think this works very well. It makes it look very natural while not making too much background motion that would be distracting or not enough because it just being still would be boring and this would not be as successful. Also the sound is not distracting, it goes along well with the video and it does a successful job at making this appear as an ad but still be entertaining to watch.

5 Second Drawing animation

5 second drawing stop motion from jazele rabbani on Vimeo.

This is my drawing animation. I actually enjoyed making this one and think it came out cool. If I were to try again I would probably try and make the circle look like it gets squished when it hits the edges and bounces off. Also I don’t really like the drawing aspect because it shows all the previous marks due to my eraser not being able to completely erase them. Also I am editing on an ipad because that is all I have so that is why there are black bars and the size is odd

Cereal trail from jazele rabbani on Vimeo.

Here is my first try doing stop motion. I wanted the cereal to create a trail and turn into a spiral. Towards the end I started to get it to flow better. This was quite hard since I didn’t know how the photos would transition from one another
Also was hard because I had to use my phone with no proper tripod or any equipment, as well as having to use phone apps to create this
But overall it sort of cake out how I wanted

Assignment Two

JazeleAssignmentTwo from jazele rabbani on Vimeo.


With this project I decided tong with a theme I've been working.on lately. This is trying to point out nature in neighborhoods while exposing the fact that people have just taken over nature with little to no thought ever put in about that. People walk and drive through their own and other neighborhoods everyday, but in reality those didn't just appear. There were trees and forests, and now just houses with people inside and the nature being ignored. I used sound to differentiate the sounds of nature vs man. The left side is natural, while the right side has to do with the construction and building of the neighborhoods. I am actually very happy with the way this came out, in the beginning I was having trouble with creating sounds that related well and worked well together. I think it accurately separates one from another while showing a message lying beneath the sounds and video.

The poetics of space

 This reading was quite hard to understand. But the focus was on the house and its pyscological aspects. To me the house is represented like a person. A house is a vertical being it says and it says that it can remain with its verticality because of its polarity within the cellar and the attic/roof. The roof gives away its purpose at first glance, while the cellar has no purpose until given one. The cellar is seen as dark and the attic is seemingly dreamy. This leaves the center of the house to be polarized and centralized. People are like this in a way that you need to have the positives and the negatives all within you to be who you are. The psychological roller coaster inside of a human, has both ups and downs, which is what creates the even balance that is needed to create a centralized you.

invisible cities

The way that this reading used imagery to describe this place was unlike anything i’ve ever read before. I like the fact that it uses time as a way to also describe as saying that the way the city of valanda is measured and based off of the past events that have occurred there. The city of sophoria was also described in much depth and in very specific details. i’ve never heard of a city being represented by two sides with one being a rollercoaster. this gives a lot of imagery to the way the city is set up and feels. It then says that one side is permanent and one is temporary, it’s odd because you don’t think of places and time together. but this makes me think about how i can describe a place within a time for the sound and video assignment i am about to be creating.

Smashed cars and Chinese chewing: the five masterpieces of video art

This article focuses on 5 different artists who are essential to video art and explore it each differently. The first artist talked about was Pipilotti Rist, and her video “Ever is All Over” is what is discussed. I have already seen this video, actually quite recently for the first time in class. It was interesting to see her create this video in a time where video was just beginning and portable devices were just starting to become slightly available. 

“TV Buddha” by Nam June Paik, is a piece that I have seen before but did not know much about. It was nice to read this blurb about it because it actually has a great thought provoking meaning. The buddha is staring at a tv with a camera pointed at him. It appears as tho it is a live recording, but the image stays still as a mirror image with nothing moving in the background. This presses the question: is the buddha staring into the present as a live image or the past by it being a recording. 

I’ve never heard of Joan Jonas not have I ever seen this work “vertical roll” It seems like an interesting concept to recreate the effect that an old tv would naturally create. I also think it was successful to never show the figure fully, and instead show piece by piece and let the imagination put those pieces together into a full figure.

The next artist showcased is Bill Viola with his work “He Weeps for You.” I actually saw this piece very recently while I was researching interesting video art. I think this is very cool because he uses a water droplet as a way to capture images instead of showing a room or image from a still shot. We talked recently about how you can project your art on many surfaces and I think this relates to that even though this isn’t the presentation.

Lastly Zhang Peili’s video “Eating” is interesting to me because it is shown as a triple stack of videos.  It shows three different views of one act occurring: eating. One is of the cheek/jaw, one of the mouth and one of the plate of food. I like the way this was presented and how the use of sculpture was incorporated to make it more visually appealing and interesting.

Assignment One

With this work I decided to explore the idea of waiting and inner thoughts. Waiting is a thing that every human does daily, even multiple times a day. Not much thought is put into the act of waiting, but here I decided to really dissect it. People tend to not enjoy waiting, they think it's annoying and a waste of time. Time is another thing, people tend to get bored very easily and waiting for someone causes time to pass, but the time can feel like forever in the moment. If a person is sitting alone waiting, they tend to get restless. I decided to show this through this video by using the thoughts that pop into my head as I wait for someone, while showing off my restless tapping of my feet and fingers, as well as the way I constantly am looking around to avoid the act of just sitting still. It is very hard and nearly impossible for most people to sit still, silently with no inner thoughts. This is something that I have realized and I wanted to point out, as I now am trying to be one of the few who are able to sit silently with no inner thoughts.

Loop Reading Response

Looping is a very intersecting idea to further explore in video art. I have never created a piece of video art, nor have I ever even thought about creating a loop. I definitely have seen loops, but I never thought much about them. There can be loops that simply just loop, but also there are loops that loop seamlessly. When they loop seamlessly, it creates the idea of no longer having a start or a stop. This idea is very cool because that means a viewer is able to start watching at any point and still see some sort of resolution or a story being made.
This reading explained the idea of being able to warp time with this concept. With time being a temporary thing, a loop video is able to have people experience more than one thing all within the same amount of time.
“The experience of the artwork is inescapably structured by the first moment of the story that is encountered.” 
As the video loops back upon itself, at this moment the viewer is tacitly addressed and their viewing position potentially shifts, opening up space for critical reflection beyond the closed-cycle”
“viewers’ understanding of both cyclical and linear temporal structures—or as Fast says, a “notion of time that is both dysfunctional and liberating””
These quotes I pulled from the reading explain very well what the loops are able to do for a viewer through time and deception of time. 

TMA Library from jazele rabbani on Vimeo.

Here is my trial of creating a video with creative camera shots and angles.

storyboard

this is a general idea of what i’m going to create in my video

video art examples

https://vimeo.com/123234110
this work I enjoyed because i like the way that the whole thing is very calming, and that is all white with nice sounds in the background.
https://vimeo.com/18457837
This one I thought was super cool because it shows oil in a different way. Oil is something everyday that reacts in interesting ways so it was cool to watch a video of it reacting and being interesting.
https://vimeo.com/61179431
For this one I like the fact that this has multiple views of the same thing or same spot. It is shown very interesting by making the vies all shot differently with one being blurred and then it is also interesting that there is like a layer on top of the videos showing you lines or word or the "behind the scenes" looking stuff.

what i make

website
Here is a link to my website that i created, and it shows all of my recent work