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Images from Happening Summer '07

Intermedia Happening Summer '07

August 2, Thursday

Mitat Alam Film Center

6:00 pm - 10:00 pm

Maya Deren and Experimental Work in Video

"And what more could I possibly ask as an artist than that your most precious visions, however rare, assume sometimes the forms of my images.


Deren was a dancer, choreographer, poet, writer and photographer. In the cinema she was a director, writer, cinematographer, editor, performer, entrepreneur and pioneer in experimental filmmaking in the United States.

When she was born in Kiev in 1917 and was named Eleanora. In 1922 the Derenkowsky family fled to New York due to the threat of anti-semitism in the Ukraine. They contracted and Anglicized their name to Deren.

As a young woman Eleanora Deren studied journalism and political science and became active in student politics at Syracuse University. Deren transferred to New York University where she was awarded her undergraduate degree in 1936. At Smith College she completed a Masters Degree in English Literature and symbolist poetry in 1939. After college Deren began working as an assistant to the famous dancer and choreographer, Katherine Dunham. Deren found inspiration and nomadic adventure with the innovative Katherine Dunham Dance Company, touring and performing across the US. It was in Los Angeles in 1941 that Deren met Alexander Hammid, a Czechoslovakian filmmaker working in Hollywood. In collaboration with Hammid, Deren produced her first and most remarkable experimental film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943).

In 1943 she changed her name to Maya and shifted her focus from dance to film.

Rhythm is a defining element of all of Deren's films, it arises from the play of repetition and variation which is integral to her experiments in narrative. Meshes deploys an innovative style of cutting on action where the protagonist steps over such disparate terrains as the beach, soil, grass and concrete. The rhythmic drumbeat and the repeated movement highlight her deliberate progress across these discontinuous spaces. As the central, consistent element, Its soundtrack enables Deren's temporal and spatial experimentation."

from the article by Wendy Haslem:
Maya Deren: The High Priestess of Experimental Cinema
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/deren.html

for more information on the woman "who makes the world dance":
http://www.cosmicbaseball.com/deren9.html#text

"Some Metaphors For The Creative Process" by Maya Deren
http://www.wam.umd.edu/%7Emolouns/amst450/village/deren.html

Project Proposal

before i talked about the way of my intermediatic job,i should say that it's really hard to me write a proposal,at least for a person like me.

since,as we talked about in the lecture,I always believe that my art understanding is composed of process of creating,sp i usually don't-almost never feel myself secure in saying that"ok.it's finished" and may be because of this reason i used to begin again and again to the same pieces.art becomes something alive for me,it's living ,growing and one day it would reach a conclusion,it died-just like an human being.Especially after coming of sufism influences into my life,i noticed more clearly the similarity of work of art and humans.That's why i explained all that,because these ideas creates the main story of my inermediatic work.

according to sufism and islamic mysticisim,cosmos is created again and again every simple day and there is a circle of creation,like all the circles of the life.and these occurance of "every new day is a new day"idea and every new step for reaching to the end,makes "the life" actually "the way".

and the interesting point is that,this way is going back to the basics,instead of images of future.more over,these journey to the basics is formed by minimal power of humans,as a nucleus which i mean this journey begins like back to the soul,which is really deep actually for explaining with my language restrictions.but i can say that the way of human,that is going to the himself again,just a spiritual way to the soul (kendine dönme).And it can just occur with rejecting and givinp up everything,even all the thing they have,even their personality.
at this point sufism begins to influence me and interacts with my intermedia project,as i explained until now,in three subject.

these are;
1.my work would be living,may be no one can witness that it reaches its end.
2.my work would be a journey which is going to the basics.
3.my work would be a symbol of giving up,leaving all the human kind emotional weaknesses,so the personality,especially the ambition.

and these three points creates my intermediatic idea "basic white,name-stamped t-shirts" which is totally not clear now,but symbolize leaving ourselves.

!Stop Motion Workshop!

Intermedia Community proudly announces that a workshop on stop-motion animation will be given by Burak. It will take place someday after our regular class time, we can decide the exact date together with the participants.

Participation is strongly encouraged!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_motion

Example for Midterm Paper

ART AS A SHAMAN RITUAL: Beuys and Walker

When he was asked by Michel Foucault, wether life itself could be approached as a work of art, Joseph Beuys answered with one word: absolutely! It was not only a challenge to a one sided understanding of materialism and bourgeois art, but also embracing a shamanistic persona.[1] Kara Walker, an African American artist well-known for her paper-cuts, though employing different media, has the same artistic responsibility and whollistic approach to her work. It can well be argued then that her paper-cuts hanged in the gallery is a shaman performance and very relevant to Beuys’ understanding of art. That is to say the two contemporary artists from different geographies have in common a traditional attitude.

Shamanism refers to a range of traditional beliefs and practices that claim the ability to diagnose and cure human suffering and, in some societies, the ability to cause suffering. The Shaman is perceived to be an intermediary between the material world and that of the spirits. On the one hand it is fiction, shaman is a performer with incredible talents who can make people believe in his deeds, which include even his body’s being cut into pieces and flying infront of the public. It, on the other hand, affectuates the healing –or desturbing- potential of art and creates facts, he does heal the pain and bring rain. He is an artist, whose art is embedded in his very life and his responsibility towards his community.

Beuys, in a similar manner, elaborated his artistic style with reference to the powerful potential of art and its fuctions in social, political and cultural issues. Human creativity is universal to him and its manifesting itself in the particular oeuvre is capable of bringing about revolutions. He articulates this argument and claims the the society as a whole is to be regarded as a work of art to which each person can contribute, striving for –on the top of everything- freedom. This is called Social Sculpture.

“Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build ‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’… EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand – learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.”[2]
Indeed art helped him carve out a space for freedom providing him with the social technologies of expression and discussion. “With his paintings of the early 1980s” writes Greg Masters, “of the raped landscape and funerary cellars (in effect, of the brutalized psyche), a dialog was finally opened.”[3] It was not only a shamanistic underlining of what was wrong in the society, ie. suppression of collective shame and blindness, but also an invitation to a public discussion.

As much as Beuys was claiming to make the science of freedom in his warious works, Kara Walker was also exploring the raw intersecion of race, gender and sexuality through her silhouetted figures cut out of paper. Hers was also a search of peace and freedom, and a harmonic social fabric when she creates that theatrical space in which her figures violate each other. Moreover, she avoids her work to be a meta and impose itself on the audience, on the contrary, very much like Beuys and even in the athmosphere of a gallery, she lets the viewers walk into the installation, their bodies cast shadows onto the walls, interacting with the silhouettes. “I project fiction into those facts” she says[4]; merging the fiction and the fact, making a rituelistic performance for the audience. Walker’s nightmarish fictions simultaneously seduce and implicate the audience, whenever they include themselves in, they face the nasty facts. The visibility and therefore reality of those facts make the audience responsible as well, who is now a part of that world.

The most “agreed upon” meaning of Shaman is “he knows” in Turkic-Mogol languages[5]. In fact, he both knows the reality, and the methods to ameliorate it. It is crucial for the responsibility of the artist: everybody is exposed to the world, but he has the tools to respond to it. Beuys and Walker do that employing different media, but creating the same effect of a shamanist rituelistic performance.

-------------------------------------------
[1] Joseph Beuys: Interviews, published by the Walker Art Center, p: 4
[2] Beuys statement dated 1973, first published in English in Caroline Tisdall: Art into Society, Society into Art (ICA, London, 1974), p.48. Capitals in original.
[3] Greg Masters, “Joseph Beuys: Past the Affable”, on web http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/beuys.html
[4] Kara Walker, in the documentary PBS Art:21
[5] Mihály Hoppál, “Sámánok Eurázsiában”, Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2005, p:14

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Özge Uraz

Project Proposal

Feyza Çeliktaş


For my project, I’d like to take the process of writing to a metaphorical level. This process of writing consists of the interaction between the writer and life. There’s a certain give and take relationship which is the basic idea for this project.

Since a writer takes something from life, manipulates it and gives it back I thought what I’ll be doing needs to be similar. The closest I can get to this is through physically taking something from life and manipulating it in a sense a writer would psychologically do. My plan is making collages with the quotes/paragraphs from writers/writers’ works (they’ll either be cut out from photocopies or typed by me). The background for all these collages will be some paper that I’ll have on floor (in stripes, maybe) that the audience will step on and stain consciously or unconsciously. Through this, I hope to achieve some collage-work that still belongs to the writer but is made by me and the audience.This physical process will be my performance and it’ll be done during the happening. The collages may be displayed or given out to the audience.

Project Proposal

Sevecen Karadağ / 2002100190
CET

My Project includes:
Concept : Music music music, what feel when you listen to music, what music is for you…
How I will design the concept:
Slide show in Flash : I will design a slide show which includes the types of music like rock, pop, blues, classic etc. and at the same time a music will be playing (I haven’t decide the music yet). The slide show will be sliding during the presentation.
Poster: I will design a poster about music, how a poster? Poster size A1 594 x 841, the poster only includes a big note will be aligned in the center of the paper, the rest of the paper will be designed by typography like singers’ names , musical instruments’ names , music types’ names, lyrics etc. in different types of font, color and font size. I will printed the two same posters, I will place the posters, one on the left side, the other on the right side and I will form note lines by using cassettes’ bands between the two posters and I will hang photos, cds, cassettes, lyrics etc. namely something about music on the note lines. And I will ask my friends and classmates to add about music whatever they want.

Project Proposal

Çağlayan Saba Uğurerkan

Project Proposal: Fate of a love

This will be a performance on the scene. I will sing three songs, and there will be photographs in the background. The songs will tell about the fate of a love and the photographs will fulfill the story.

Before every song, there will be a slight show in the background which will underline the spirit and feeling of the songs.

I have not decided whether I should get the photographs from the internet or from someone who has already taken them, which might be the most difficult part of my project to collect them.

The intros of the songs will be in the background during the slight shows. The last photograph will freeze while singing. And, I will sing acapella.

The first will be an art of Turkish Classical Music, the second song will be from Turkish Folk Music and the last is from Turkish Pop Music; each describing the periods and giving the intense feelings in the story.