In the mid-18th century, France entered the Rococo period, a period of enlightenment and play. As the Enlightenment spurred more liberal ideologies in French society, aristocratic women were afforded more freedoms than in previous periods, such as high education and participation in social and cultural realms such as Salons. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, known widely for his 1767 painting "The Swing", created a large body of work throughout the period often depicting female subjects in genre and allegorical scenes as well as portraiture. Often subverting the typical male gaze in his works, his paintings serve as a reflection of the period of empowerment experienced by aristocratic women in the Rococo period.
Many people and cultures throughout history have taken great interest in the end of the world. Christianity has been used to answer questions about the Apocalypse in the final book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation. Artists from all around the world have used this apocalyptic text as inspiration for their works. In 1498, German artist Albrecht Dürer published a series of fifteen woodcuts depicting scenes from Revelation. One of these was “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”, which can be used to more readily understand the teachings and beliefs of the Christian Church in 15th-century Europe.
Witches’ Sabbath in Trier is a broadsheet that depicts a witches’ sabbath, and was a piece of the thriving print culture of sixteenth century Germany. The image of the witch reflects misogynistic beliefs about women, rooted in the Bible and the female life course. Witch persecution meant that people could find and punish the roots of evil causing their misfortune: witches sent by Satan. This othered population was most often impoverished women whose bodies were scrutinized as possible vessels for evil. Broadsheets like this one were a terrifying and fascinating form of entertainment, helping to spread misogynistic beliefs about witchcraft.
Tawaraya Sotatsu’s screen door print of the Japanese deities you cannot dismiss how unique each one of the figures appears. You also cannot help but wonder how these deities ended up looking the way that they did. We look back to 13th-century Japan to see why Raijin and Fujin ended up being depicted as they did. We consider their history, analysis, and the artist's importance within Japanese culture.
This document discusses the early life and artistic career of Caravaggio with his painting "Young Sick Bacchus". It also investigates the formal elements of the work and the contemporary theories behind it.
The only artist to be featured at all eight Impressionist Exhibitions in Paris was Camille Pissarro. The Impressionist movement emerged during a period of rapid social change and growing industrialization with more people moving to cities. In Pissarro’s works, he specifically concentrated on the conditions of different weather and times of day to alter how he painted scenes of a city. My paper focuses on the Boulevard Montmartre series and his use of building tonal relationships and skill of lighting placement across the fourteen paintings in order to establish a harmonious composition where the day’s essence radiates off the canvas.
Delphi - a touchscreen video game art installation for galleries and museums.
Viewers can explore a contemporary interpretation of the ancient Greek site of Delphi, home of a mythical oracle.
The Delphi gallery installation, designed for museums and cultural centers, gives each visitor about ten minutes to explore Delphi and visit the oracle to get a personalized message. The installation is easy to use, and accessible for general audiences of all ages and degrees of experience.
Two cubes (or a cube and a chair) are placed on a 7cm high, 2m square plinth stage; the large cube is a ventilated cabinet and tabletop for a touchscreen, the other cube is a seat. As players step up onto the plinth to interact with the touchscreen to explore the virtual world, they enter the installation observed by the other gallery visitors who watch the interaction on large video screens around them, displaying the virtual environment of Delphi onto the gallery walls, with soft, ambient sound of the Greek countryside and occasional interactive events.
Delphi requires controlled lighting and electricity, between 50-500 sq meters, large video displays, audio, plinth, and two cubes (or cube and chair) as above. An area of about 500 square meters is optimal, although smaller is possible. A CAVE version of Delphi is currently being researched.
Visitors can explore the environment in and around the hills and monuments of Delphi. By artificial intelligence, Delphi responds by AI to each visitors style of play, actions, responses, and behavior, choosing a classic Delphic maxim (150 Delphic maxims drawn from historical and literary sources) for each player in turn.
Unzip Delphi_Oracle_install.zip into a Windows folder to create a folder called Delphi_Oracle and its contents.
Change directories to browse into the Delphi_Oracle folder, and double-click on Delphi_Oracle.exe to play Delphi. If Microsoft Smartscreen asks to prevent an unrecognized app, click More info, and click Run anyway.
With mouse or touchscreen you can move and interact onscreen;
Slow or stop, left mouse button or touch the center of the screen
Move forward, mouse button or touch center top of screen (higher = faster)
Move backward, mouse button or touch center bottom of screen (lower = faster)
Turn right, mouse or touch right side of screen
Turn left, mouse or touch left side of screen
Look up and down, left and right mouse buttons together (or two fingers)
A touchscreen makes it feel very immersive, and a mouse also works just fine too.
Currently working to run Delphi in the CAVE software for CAVE systems.
Delphi is first and foremost a work of contemporary art and an interpretive reconstruction of a cultural treasure for everyone. Looking for a contemporary art gallery where I can premiere it.
-benb
copyright 2022 Benjamin Britton
June 14, 2022
all rights reserved
The University of Cincinnati Art Collection houses prints by two early 20th century German Expressionist printmakers, Max Pechstein (1881-1955) and Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945). Pechstein’s Das Vater Unser (The Lord’s Prayer) series (1921) originally a portfolio of twelve, is represented in the University of Cincinnati Art Collection with nine of the bold woodcut prints. Kollwitz’s small postcard lithographs, Two Chatting Women with Two Children (c. 1930) and The Hospital Visit (c. 1926), are intimate and show the artists soft touch. Though formally very different, these prints share a common subject, the suffering of Germans during the interwar period (1918-1939). Both artists personally experienced both World Wars and their tragedies, and while Pechstein rarely addressed it directly, Kollwitz’s career was full of her antiwar sentiments. The prints grapple with the grief, political turmoil, and financial difficulties associated with the interwar period and each artist turns to their own form of religion to exercise their pain.
Belinda Reynolds (music), Ting Luo (piano and poetry), Charles Woodman (images)
WORDS is a multimedia piano work with spoken words and visuals. The vocal part consists of an aural collage of Miss Luo, reciting in Mandarin and English, a poem written by herself, about the story of her grandfather, a composer during the late 20th century in China. The interplay between the audio collage, the video, and the piano part, create a multimedia composition that immerses the audience in a blanket of enticing, reflective sound-visual experiences.
A small robot rests on the floor as the camera zooms close, a finger reaches out to turn the switch and the robot comes to life.
Sisyphus was produced by Subterranean Video, a video collective based at the Boston Film/Video Foundation, in 1983.
Sisyphus was premiered at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art as part of a show called "Boston Now:1984"
A visual interpretation of an ambient expression expressed in time; 17:52
original music and video by svid subterranean video
visual timed countdown for new years in boston 1983 hynes auditorium by video projection
The Fruit of Chardin is a video symphony following a group of friends who meet in the evening to eat, party, explore the city, and make video and music together. Includes rare footage of Subterranean Video and an interview with video artist Nam June Paik, who discusses the meaning of Fluxus.
Did We Go? is an experimental video art documentary that examines whether humankind really reached the Moon in the Summer of 1969. Documentary filmmaker Aaron Ranen explores America to search for the truth behind claims of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing. Original footage of many significant historical sites and interviews with first-hand participants in the Apollo 11 Mission. No matter what you believed before, this documentary will astonish you and change how you think about the first Moon landing forever.
To watch the entire video (sixty minutes), click on a link below.
This 7 minute demo reel contains excerpts from several 2006-11 shows including:
- Discerning Crane, Herron School for the Arts, Indianapolis, 2010
- NWEMO All Stars, NOTACON, Cleveland, 2010
- Adam Tendler, performing Sonatas and Interludes by John Cage, New Genres Festival, Tulsa, 2009
- Meg Schedel, Odd Nosdam and Why?, SF Cinematheque, San Francisco, 2006
Excerpts from live audio visual improvisation on May 5, 2017 at the Mockabee in Cincinnati, OH.
David McDonnell - reeds and electronics
Ofir Klemperer - electronics
Zach Larabee - percussion
Charles Woodman, Loraine Wible, Sayak Shome - images
Six screen video installation proposal for a church social hall – the black bars represent pillars between the screens in the proposed exhibition space.
Produced almost entirely at Experimental Television Center (ETC), the video uses a simple animation of a rotating rectangle (produced in Deluxe Paint on the Amiga Computer) as a stencil into which are keyed various versions of a processed live image of the river outside the window at ETC. This was my second attempt at a multi channel piece. The four programs have been shown in grid’s of twelve and sixteen monitors. While relatively simple in structure and shown only three times, this remains a personal favorite.
Mixed and performed live at the Experimental Television Center in 1992 with a special appearance by Vanna White. Audio by Dub Syndicate "Tunes From the Missing Channel."
Featuring Jack Charney as the nude. All made with analog tools. Shot and mixed during the six months I lived and worked at the Vasulkas home/studio in Santa Fe. Two ¾” tapes of the nude were mixed through a key/stencil of third video (originally shot on 8mm film in Sienna Italy) to make one version of the combined images Video1+ Video2+stencil=A then this process was repeated Video1+Video2+stencil=B, then the combined images were mixed together again through the same stencil A+B+stencil=Mix1.
This whole process was repeated twice and then those two were also combined. Then later some of those mixes were transferred to Betacam and slowed down. The final tape contains excerpts from a variety of the previous combinations with 2, 4 and 8 layers.
Six screen video installationFeaturing Jack Charney as the nude. All made with analog tools. Shot and mixed during the six months I lived and worked at the Vasulkas home/studio in Santa Fe. Two ¾” tapes of the nude were mixed through a key/stencil of third video (originally shot on 8mm film in Sienna Italy) to make one version of the combined images Video1+ Video2+stencil=A then this process was repeated Video1+Video2+stencil=B, then the combined images were mixed together again through the same stencil A+B+stencil=Mix1.
This whole process was repeated twice and then those two were also combined. Then later some of those mixes were transferred to Betacam and slowed down. The final tape contains excerpts from a variety of the previous combinations with 2, 4 and 8 layers.
Master of Fine Arts Class of 2012
University of Cincinnati
College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning
Featuring the work of: Saurabh Anand • Jio Bae • Dustin Boise • Zachary Copfer Dan Dean • Erica Esham • Julia Feld • Cynthia Gregory Johnathan McLemore • James Schenck • Nick Scrimenti Randall Slocum • Michael Smith • Leah Stahl •Tilley Stone Alex Walp • Jennifer Wenke
Additional contributions by Mary Hancock, Chris Reeves, and Ashton Tucker, organized in collaboration with graduating MFA students, written as a supplementary project by Art History MA students enrolled in the art history Aesthetics and Art Criticism graduate seminar, Fall 2011.
This animation is created by Charles Woodman & Kim Anno. Woodman made the images and voice recordings Anno adapted "Canto 1" from Dante’s Purgatorio, making the text secular, and she created the soundscape effects. Keisha Kemper and Michael Burham are the actor’s voices.
Shot at the Ceran St. Vrain Trailhead and campground, near Jamestown, Colorado. St. Vrain’s Woods was inspired by Seurat among others. An exploration of the elasticity of time, it is a moving picture made only of still images and the spaces between them. A portrait of a place and a moment.
A few views of water and trees from my month long stay in Phoenecia, NY. This video utilizes an editing technique (a sort of continuous slow horizontal slide) that I conceptualized for more than a year. After several failed attempts I finally figured out how to make it work.
Live audio visual improvisation on 06/10/2016 at Modern Makers in Cincinnati, OH.
Ofir Klemperer (electronics), Eddy Kwon (violin), Zach Larabee (percussion), Sayak Shome (images), Charles Woodman (images), Matt Coors (wall treatment), Andy Knolle (projector massage), Harry Sanchez (projector massage), Dan Leonard (live camera), Melissa Godoy (documentation)
""Pulse Generator Pastry" is my first collaboration with my mother, the ceramic artist Betty Woodman. Betty created the shapes which contain the patterns in the video, based on the forms she uses in her work. I used those shapes as stencils into which both the positive and negative spaces were filled with textures, created using a piece of electronic test equipment called a pulse generator. The video was show in the storefont window at Salon 94 Gallery, during Betty’s show there in spring 2016. on Somehow the rapper ASAP Ferg ended up shooting part of his video for "Let It Bang" standing in front of the work.
Live cinema audio/visual improvisation. Brief excerpts from four 2015 performances - San Francisco Cinematheque 4/15, Headlands Center for the Arts 5/15, Spazio Contemporanea, Brescia, Italy 6/15, Micro Mini Cinema, Cincinnati 8/15
Live audio visual improvisation on 12/13/2015 at Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland, CA.
Zachary James Watkins (guitar and elecronics), Charles Woodman (images)
Live audio visual improvisation on 09/3/2015 at Micro Mini Cinema in Cincinnati.
Zach Larrabee (percussion), Dave McDonnell (saxophone and electronics), Loraine Wible (images), Charles Woodman (images)
Live audio visual improvisation with Phi 4 on 06/11/2015 at Spazio Contemporanea, Brescia, Italy.
Charles Woodman (images), Maurizio Rinaldi (Electro-acoustic sound act), Fabrizio Saiu (Percussion act)
Documentation of an audio visual improvisation. Performed at Headlands Center for the Arts Spring 2015. Charles Woodman (images), Zachary James Watkins (sound)
Live cinema audio/visual improvisation. Brief excerpts from three recent performances - Albright-Knox Art Gallery , Lateral Thinking at 21C Museum/Hotel, Villa Douce, Riems, France
Live Audio Visual Improvisation on 4/24/10 at Gallery CS13 in Cincinnati, OH.
Music: Lief Fairfield, Issac Hand, Steve Kemple, Eddie Kwon, Ethan Philbrick, Images: Loraine Wible, Charles Woodman
Live Audio Visual Improvisation on 11/03/10 at Herron School of Art, Indianapolis, IN. Eddy Kwon (violin), Lief Fairfield (violin), Margaret Schedel (midi cello), Valierie Opielski (guitar), Charles Woodman (images)
"Ye Ying Di" uses a video camera to track the movement of a dancer on stage. The performer's speed and position determine which sounds are heard and what image is displayed.
Demo of five screen installation. I was fascinated by the photos on gravestones in the Cemetery at San Minato in Florence, Italy. I began to think about the way in which a single image came to represent the entire lived experience of the person. Cinema as a whole also seems to be about representations of actions. I wondered about trying to film an experience directly lived as opposed to being represented. "I Morti" presents four streams of diary footage, images of daily life and travel. Collected over a 4 or 5 year period, these function as a counterpoint to the images of the dead on the fifth screen.
When considering the future of archives, it is essential to consider the role of archivists. Archives have suffered from a multi-decade cycle of poverty that stunts their ability to provide adequate care for records and services for users. The role of archival interventions carried out by archivists is often overlooked and invisible to users and the general public. Well-managed and useful archives require archivists to oversee their care. Archivists play a critical role in responding to concerns about digital cultural heritage loss, but their marginalization from the public sphere remains a significant challenge.
As the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County expanded at the beginning of the twentieth century, the library’s trustees turned to Andrew Carnegie to build new branch libraries. The construction of Cincinnati’s Carnegie branches extended access to dedicated library facilities outside of the downtown basin, because the branches were primarily built in the emerging hilltop neighborhoods. The library trustees were largely responsible for location decisions. Community associations saw the construction of a neighborhood branch as a desirable status symbol, and regularly attempted to influence the trustees’ decisions in their favor.
Discussion of the likely impacts of climate change on archives is significantly deficient in the archival profession. Archives hold rare and unique materials that are irreplaceable and institutional adaptation to climate change is critical to the survival of these resources. The earliest effects of climate change are likely to be increased weather events that threaten the physical safety of holdings. Hurricanes, floods, and fires pose particular risks to archives due to potential damage to buildings as well as from limitations of local infrastructure to rapidly respond to disasters. Disaster preparedness for archives needs to include planning responses to a wide variety of situations that threaten holdings. As societies begin to adapt to climate change, archivists should consider how values of sustainability and resiliency might inform archival practice.
Documentation of live performance of the music with cinema accompaniment. Performed by Meitar Ensemble as part of MATA Festival at Roulette in Brooklyn. Shot from an audience members' cell phone.
This first 16mm film made after graduate school, and also my last. Coyote Tracks culminates my interest in Semiotics and the exploration of cinema as a linguistic system. Each shot represents a single “pictograph” in a sentence describing a narrative journey. Shot in New Mexico and featuring a cast of old friends.
Companion/sequal to "Lota’ Burger" produced a few days later, and under the same circumstances. This tape uses a similar methodology, this time with a moving camera, shot from a car, and a more complex series of overlapping wipes. Produced at Eve Muir Studios.
An early experiment with time based correction and the ability to mix two tapes together, as well as one of the few projects in which I worked with an online editor who operated the controls at my direction. This tape features two versions of the same image (shot in Santa Fe) slightly staggered in time and then wiped over each other. Edited at Eve Muir studio by Trevor Long. I was paying for the studio time to edit a project for LANL and was able to squeeze extra time in to edit two videos, this one and San Mateo Drive.
My first attempt at a multi-channel video installation. The work was highly influenced by Nam June Paik’s retrospective at the Whitney and by Steina Vasulka’s “The West”. This piece was produced while I was living and working at the Vasulka’s House/Studio in Santa Fe. I had persuaded them to let me house sit while they spent six months in Japan. Access to their equipment, particularly to 4 adjacent monitors and four ¾” video decks, was what made it possible to compose a multi image work. “Virtual Space” was originally an eight channel work, mounted as two 2X2 stacks of monitors facing each other across a narrow space. Standing in the middle, the viewer had to look back and forth between the two sides. One side (L) is an assembly of footage gathered at the Lightning Field (a land art project in southern New Mexico by artist Walter Di Maria.) The other side (V) features four views of the interior of the Vasulka’s live/work interior as a handheld camera slowly and continuously pans across interior surfaces in the space. Subsequently, each of the 2x2 grids of images composing the two sides (L&V) was transferred to a single tape. These are represented here as LX4 and Vx4.
Produced almost entirely at Experimental Television Center (ETC), the video uses a simple animation of a rotating rectangle (produced in Deluxe Paint on the Amiga Computer) as a stencil into which are keyed various versions of a processed live image of the river outside the window at ETC. This was my second attempt at a multi channel piece. The four programs have been shown in grid’s of twelve and sixteen monitors. While relatively simple in structure and shown only three times, this remains a personal favorite.
My reaction to the Gulf War and the continuing transformation of war coverage into media spectacle. Edited at PPG and an early exploration of the Ampex ADO-1000 Digital Video Effects unit.
A mostly formal exercise in composition and image processing, using footage of water. Probably the first in a ongoing series of works dealing with landscape, investigating the idea of video as a contemplative viewing experience akin to painting. Filmed in California and Mexico, and developed over the course of two visits to Experimental Television Center. Final editing at PPG onto 1” open reel tape.
My first multi channel work for synchronized video streams. The piece starts in Cape Cod and moves gradually across the North American continent, ending at the Pacific Ocean. There is no attempt to cover all this of ground in any complete way - the work is an assembly of the places I traveled to and landscapes I admired during the four-year period in which I collected the material. All the scenes were shot with a single camera, then staggered in editing to create the appearance of a continuous shot. During filming I would pan, pause, and then move again, resulting in a series of staggered movements in which the different screens appear to drift in and out of synchronization.
A meditation/celebration of the Spaghetti Western and the pornography of violence. An homage to Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone. Copies of scenes from the original films, rented on VHS, were edited into a compilation reel. That material was processed at ETC, where Scott Davenport also added the text layer. Several versions of that were edited at PPG in an additive process, A+B=1 C+D=2, then 1+2= X, to create a ‘’final” hour-long version. The shorter “ sit down version was then created from that material.
A collection of images and sounds from television cop shows is interwoven with texts (selected by Scott Davenport) taken from pulp detective stories, the literary predecessor of the same genre.
