In the first week, we learned about Installation Cinematic Art with example artists such as Isaac Julien, Doug Aitken, Michal Rovner, Paul Pfeiffer, and my personal favorite – Alex Pragner.

We also learned about the avant-garde musician John Cage’s 10 Rules For Class.

'Some Rules For Students and Teachers' by Sister Corita Kent and John Cage

After that we learned about Stories and Your Identity with example such as local filmmaker Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo, Woody Allen and Steve McQueen.


 

This is my first time being introduced to Installation Cinematic Art and I am drawn to learning more. Most feels alien to me yet I find some of the artworks rather intriguing. A simple Google search led me to this article – The Top 10 Film/Video Artists on Artsy, and Christian Marclay‘s masterpiece THE CLOCK. It pushes the use of the video medium to be more than just entertaining film and instead be a philosophical question on time itself.

Another artist I found was Douglas Gordon. In this interview that I found he talks about how he hated film yet felt a deep connection, and how he pushes the medium of videography as he call it “domestic situation instead of communal cinematic” (such as his famous 1993’s 24 Hour Psycho and 1999’s Through A Looking Glass).

I feel that to understand Installation Cinematic Art or Video Installation, we first must understand Installation Art and how space and time is used to evoke the emotion/message from the artwork to the audience. I looked at a few examples of Installation Art.

Barbican’s Rain Room – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkvazIZx-F0

The Treachery of Sanctuary:

The Treachery of Sanctuary is interesting as it is an interactive video installation that merges technology with art.

Next off I taking a page from Ilo Ilo’s inspiration of stories and indentiy, I look at PBS The Art Assignment’s Expanded Moment – Jan Tichy. Artist Jan Tichy talks about his inspiration of his film artworks from his adopted city and how he uses those to reflect his emotion to it. Another recurring theme is the passage of time and stories that develops from it.

An unusual place I found inspiration was actually a video done by YourSingapore tourist advert video, A Purrrfect Singapore Audition, which has a simple storyline featuring cats from around Singapore. I find that in some level it talks about your identity as a Singaporean while using an interesting subject – cat in this case, and combining in it with a variety of camera movements and angles.

https://www.facebook.com/yoursingapore/videos/10156419982395704/?theater

I find that everything is getting more and more inter-connected in terms of usage of medium and ideology and I am excited to learn more for the upcoming semester. As a final thought, I want to share with everyone this video about Art Critique.