Hysteria!

My final project is really strange, and I don't truly understand it. I first became enthralled with the idea of adapting TS Eliot's poem, "Hysteria," in an abstract visual and auditory form. This poem, to me, encapsulates the feeling of being in love with somebody's laugh. From there, I realized the difficulty in expressing the warmth and romance of Eliot's poem. This led me to aim at capturing contagious laughter in an abstract form. So although I kept the title, the end product truly does not represent the tonal qualities of Eliot's poem.

Upon recognizing this, however, I recalled a moment in which my mom and I broke into hysterical laughter during an interview. I had audio! I spent two weeks recording different moments of conversation, but was unable to record an audio which effectively matched that from the interview with my mom. Rethinking my project once again, I realized that I laugh harder with my mom than I do with anyone else. So I decided to ultimately make this video honor a single moment in time.

The visuals are presented as stop-motion animation. I used bright colors against stark backgrounds and quick movement to compliment the tone of the recorded audio. I manipulated the visuals to match with the audio temporally. I do feel that this piece succeeds in capturing the moment in which this laughter was captured. But I don't think it is as accessible as I had hoped.

Wordsworth is not the Massage

Marshall McLuhan demonstrates a lot of his intellectual prowess through the use of other people's intellectual property. By constantly referencing and quoting historical figures who revolutionized the content of their own medium, McLuhan finds support for smaller arguments that he makes. However, each of those figures were most interested in the content of their productions and creations.

William Wordsworth is an excellent example of that truth. He revolutionized his own field of poetry by becoming a founding father of the Romantic Age of English literature.

I am a very research oriented individual and gained a lot from the experience of researching Wordsworth. I struggled a bit more in establishing a clear thesis that combines Wordsworth and McLuhan into one cohesive message. However, by spending enough time thinking about it, I realized that the two actually have less in common than one would initially assume. This helped me disprove McLuhan key argument once and for all.

Hey guys! Buy my book!

God is real and so is art. Fuck the statement. by Zach Ben-Amots | Make Your Own Book

Convocation Reflection:

As someone who sat on the Committee for Public Occasions, I enter all convos with preconceived notions of the speakers. To begin with, I know a lot of background information about each speaker, have seen them speak, and, most of the time, feel that they provide valuable insight for the Lawrence community. Upon reviewing Kwame Anthony Appiah as a potential speaker, I immediately noted that his speaking style might be tough to relate to a LU student. But his content seemed incredibly valuable.

As Lawrence students, Honor Code means something tangible. The Honor Code is an acronym. According to Appiah, however, the Honor Codeis about the way people relate to each other through a system of globalized values. Ultimately, I did not relate to all of Appiah's key points and I believe his entire argument can be summed up within this quote, "It is with honor that we can have unanimous and reasonable pursuit of a decent life."

My personal disagreement with any of his points stems from one simple fact: Appiah was identifying real, global issues, but could not identify real, global solutions. For Appiah, Honor Code implies something explicitly intagible. I think that this convocation raised some very interesting questions, but did not provide many of the answers I was looking for.

"Something is Happening" Exhibit:

I really loved participating in the exhibit, "Something is Happening." My mom has been a gallery director for more than a decade. Since she began in her position, I have helped set up for anywhere from 5-10 exhibits every year. In all of this time, the closest I have come to participating was through my mom's work, but never through my own. I loved the participatory aspect of "Something is Happening."

Along with that, I really admire a lot of the work in the exhibit. Each two-photograph series was unique in style and content, and we all focused on different aspects of post-production. A lot of my themes for this show, and my work this term, have been ironic. The book title, “God is real and so is Art,” along with the photograph titles, “Bobby Frank” and Robert Inverted,” serve as testaments to that fact. But that irony is not intended to take away from my genuine appreciation and respect for the work being shown.

“Something is Happening” was modest, engaging, and fun. And these were my favorite snacks (except for the pretzels).

Ambient Ish:


The absurdism of each sound correlates, in my mind, to the understanding of the way we process information. However, these sounds specifically relate to the way that I imagine Beer the Deer processes information. I came up with the idea for this project while drunkenly staring at him and wondering what he might be thinking.

In creating my soundscape, I wanted to layer sounds to create a gradual building effect. Overall, I wanted to create a sense of calm which slowly descended into greater and greater chaos before everything 'snaps' and returns to the initial calm. I recorded each of these sounds with a Zoom recorder. The items that were recorded include the following: a running car, a passing car, an egg beater, a creaky chair, whistling, yodeling, yelling, clanking pans, and a wooden box snapping.

I feel that these ideas can be illuminated clearly by McLuhan's John Cage quote, "Everything we do is music."

God is real and so is art.

I found the toughest part of this project to be the aspect of spontaneity. Robert Frank's images emulate that quality so effectively, while still capturing emotion, movement, and beauty. I have never really tried to seem spontaneous in my artistic endeavors, and am more akin to structured and symmetrical images. McLuhan quotes John Cage in a section that clearly illuminates the concept that I was struggling to understand:

"Give up illusions about ideas of order, expressions of sentiment, and all the rest of our inherited aesthetic claptrap... Theatre takes place all the time, wherever one is. And art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case."

Opposite this reading in The Medium is the Massage is a visual display of voice tracks. After deciding not to continue with a project titled "Fuck Off," imitating an Ai Wei Wei series, I went back to some random photographs I took over the past week. I discovered that I was most interest in a visceral texture in several of the photos that had some of the same qualities as the voice track images in McLuhan's book.

Each of the photos are intended to be paired in twos, except for the first and last image. These pairings are mostly dictated by shared aesthetic qualities.

God is real and so is art. Flickr page

"Ode to Robert Frank"

"Wooden Shed Door"

Refugee Essentials
"The end of the line."

The Origin - I was really interested in some basic ideas of materialism and attachment, recurring themes in The Medium is the Massage. Just before making "Refugee Essentials," I was in a group of people who were temporarily displaced by a pipe burst in my house. The event had a relatively minor effect on my own possessions and all of our lives. We were each allowed to return to the house to grab "essential items" from our rooms before the house was restored. I was really intrigued and amused by some of the items which individuals considered essential.

The Method - The audio originates from two sources. 1) I conducted short on-camera interviews about the central event in this film. 2) I collected audio samples of dripping and cascading water flows and breaking wooden boxes. The audio established stark contrast between the first and second half of the video. The visuals includes shots of lights seen through thick household objects used as color filters and close-ups of material objects. This visuals support the same contrast between the beginning and end of the video. The filtered images of lights hint to themes of death and severity, while the material objects establish an unexpectedly ironic tone as a conclusion.

The Inspiration - McLuhan writes, "The circuited city of the future will not be a huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis." My experimental video is called Refugee Essentials. My project tries to display some of the material obsession that comes out of this age of mass production.

I really admire Jason Yi's ability to find beauty in items, objects and images that are often dismissed as ordinary or mundane. Although I couldn't attend his lecture, I read several articles about his work and saw his installation. In an interview with a Lawrentian reporter, Yi stated, "It is important to not overlook the mundane and transform something seemingly inconsequential to have consequence." For his Lawrence installation, Yi has done just that. In using zip ties to represent the sky, the viewers are forced to acknowledge an important fact: the things we interact with and witness on a daily basis hold a lot of beauty, inherently.

In "The Medium is the Massage," McLuhan forces the reader to do the same thing that Yi does. A great example of this arrives on pages 49 and 50, where the words "Printing, a ditto device" are pasted all over both pages. We are again forced to look at every detail of a series of words that we might otherwise dismiss.

Also, I recently became interested in still photography and made an attempt at the first "series." These are the schools I attended in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

The World I Live In.

I love movies. They are the central driving force in my life. As a viewer, I gain inspiration and insight from great films I watch. As a film major, I am receiving the knowledge and skills to succeed as a documentary filmmaker. I am really only interested in directing documentaries professional, not narrative film. The reason for this was articulated perfectly in a Mark Twain quote that I read several years ago: "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, truth isn't."

I made two films during my first two years at Lawrence. Freshman year, I co-directed a short documentary about the experiences of three undocumented Latino youth in the Fox Cities that are pursuing higher-education and stable employment. I worked with Kate Siakpere and Nancy Corona on the film, titled "¡Adelante!"

This movie resulted my first television appearance on Green Bay's Fox News channel for my involvement in the Civic Life Project. I instantly became a star.

Last year, I completed "Forgotten History," a longer documentary about the experiences of African American students at Lawrence throughout the school's history. It was screened at Lawrence's first Black Affinity Reunion in September of 2014. Last week, I decided to recut the film to be ten minutes shorter. And I can't decide if it's too late to do so.

After making "Somewhere Between," I made a mediocre film adaptation of Raymond Carver's "Cathedral." The process involved the casting of local actors in Colorado Springs, the assembly of a film crew (film students at Colorado College) and filming in one four-hour period. This is the only narrative film I have directed.

The first short film I made was a ten-minute documentary about the attempted suicide of my best friend, Will. The film is titled "Somewhere Between" and features interviews with Will, his girlfriend at the time and his mother. Four years after making the film, I've decided to upload it and share the movie with this class, but cannot find it on my computer or hard drive.

I recently watched "The Blues According to Lightnin' Hopkins." In one scene, two musicians play a guitar and harmonica duet. The harmonica player, performing on his knees, breaks into tears at one point and screams between notes as he does so. I found this to be the most powerful scene in the film.