Double edge sword

The Boston Marathon Bombing was terrible and I hope they find the ones responsible as soon as possible.  On that note, PetaPixel reported that Reddit and 4chan users are working to identify the Boston Bomber/s using any and all available photos.  The police, FBI and other law enforcements have pleaded to the public to submit any photos taken from the marathon, before and after the bombings, so they can scour the pictures for any suspicious people.  Because of this, they already have found two questionable people who they would like to interview.

This is great that the public can help with the investigation but like the title of this post states, it is a double edge sword.  Reddit and 4chan users are collaborating to find any suspect from all pictures submitted online.  This is a great idea for sharing ideas and opinions but it is also awful for sharing false evidence.  This tactic ends up being a witch hunt and many innocent people will become a victim like the main character of The Scarlett Letter.  One poster from the Reddit website wanted to remind people about Richard Jewell, who was wrongfully ousted as a suspect of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing.  Richard Jewell's life was ruined because of the false accusations by the media.  With the help of the internet and forums like Reddit and 4chan, internet users might as well be part of the media and the same mistakes can happen for an innocent bystander who was photographed with a black backpack. This marriage of technology, art, and media (polygamous marriage?) has shot people into 15 minutes of successful fame like Carly Rae Jepsen (the Call me Maybe singer) or everlasting unwanted notoriety like Epic Boobs Girl (eventually EBG came around and accepted her internet fame).

So if Reddit and 4chan users do help find the suspect/s, they most likely ruined tens, if not hundreds, of lives along the way for falsely accusing innocent bystanders.  It's great to be socially active, online or outside, but like many things in life, there are appropriate venues for certain types of activities.  Leave the investigation to the pros, help out the law enforcement, don't impede it.

Catnap433

So my performance art project consist of me taking a short nap.  If Tilda Swinton can sleep in a glass case and Marina Abramovic can sit and stare at her audience and can call it performance art than my project is in the same vain.  My piece is called Catnap433 because I take a short on and off nap for 10 minutes at exactly 4:33pm Pacific Standard time.  This performance was taken at the Columbia Center Mall in Kennewick, WA.  I hardly ever get enough sleep because I am kept busy with full time employment, full time parent/husband, and full time student so I'm always tired.  Once in a while I doze off during the day for a few minutes.  Cats are known to take a quick nap, wake up and then go back to sleeping for a block of 5-20 minutes and my behavior in the mall reflects that.  I had my wife video record me while I was resting on the chair in front of a busy crowd of shoppers and patrons.

The reason I had my wife record me while I was asleep was to have visual evidence that the world does not stop for me or anyone else.  The world continues to live on even when I close my eyes, feeling like I faded away into absence.  As you can see, many shoppers, walkers, chatters, and so on kept on doing their business while I had no care in the world.  Along with that, I sense that it was the same in other parts of the city, state, nation, and world.  My video is juxtaposed with pictures, news clips, and videos of what happened throughout the world during my 10 minute nap.  I have visual evidence of exactly where I was and what I was doing when North Korea threatened the safety of foreign embassies, President Obama apologizing for an inappropriate remark, Jay-Z visiting Cuba, and Sergey Brin driving around in a pink Batmobile. The performance displays the insignificance of my actions and others as well.  The actions only matter to the people affected.  The juxtaposed videos may show my sloth behavior but the other people's actions did not directly affect me either.  The audience can interpret all the cues of human behavior through this piece but in essence,   I may have taken a cat nap but the world never sleeps.


Catnap433 from Ken DelaCruz on Vimeo.

International Internet Memes

I love memes.  They are hee-larry--yous.  My favorite ones lately is

Condescending Willy Wonka,
 

Scumbag Steve


and Disappointed Asian Dad.



I find memes as a mixture of art and technology.  There is an art to create a memorable meme.  It pertains to photo, video, and audio editing.  It uses the internet as a medium.  Memes are and if not, should, fall into the genre of net art.

  What I thought was an American culture is actually something that crosses the oceans and country boundaries.  Most of these foreign memes are as creative, memorable, and funny as American memes.  Here's a link to Mental Floss's collection of current internet memes.  I really find the Pantyhose Canines funny.


Lately some of these overseas memes has crossed over to us.  The Harlem Shake, where people start out mellow for the first 15 seconds, go nuts in the last 15 seconds, started in Norway and this cute one that started in Korea, called Kiyomi Gwiyomi, stars lots of cute asian girls doing a hand choreographed dance.

Thicke Blurred Line

A few days ago, Youtube banned a video from crooner Robin Thicke (who by the way is the son of Alan Thicke, the father figure in the 80's/90's family sitcom Growing Pains).  Gizmodo reported the decision by Youtube in this article.  In the video, it has the crooner himself and two well know hip hop artists, T.I. and Pharell, singing and dancing with 3 topless and panty clad women.  Youtube had the video on their website for less than a week until it decided it was considered porn.  In the article, it states the policies and procedures of how Youtube deems a video not suitable for the site.  It cites other videos that were banned under their rules. I have no opinion on Youtube's decision but I do feel the internet is a Wild West scenario where anything goes and this includes Youtube but the website has a responsibility to deem what is appropriate for its audiences.  These artists know what they are doing.  I feel they always hide behind the definition of art so they can stay trendy and controversial which ends up in publicity and increase sales.  They play innocent and cite freedom of speech and artistic integrity but they are put in a position where they can decide what is morally right.  SpiderMan's Uncle Ben said with great power comes great responsibility.  The artists and all involve have that power but are they being responsible?

It is funny to me how easily accessible adult material is nowadays, especially pornographic material.  Growing up, you either had to sneak or steal a magazine or video from an older brother or friend or watch blurred out porn.  Now, it's just a quick search on the internet.  I'm not a prude and I am glad the censorship is progressing to being more open but at the same time there is a time and a place for these things, not just nudity but violence, foul language, sex, etc.

What I find ironic is the title of Robin Thicke's song blurred line because when things are censored, blurring lines is what is used to censor things.  Don't get me wrong, I'm usually on the side of art but artist needs to stopped being douchebags about their materials.  Robing Thicke needs to be honest and state, he just wanted some naked ladies dancing around cause it would look cool and controversial. I dig the video and the song. Heres a link to the video.  Here are a few more examples of music videos with nudity but I feel they have more artistic integrity: Asap Rocky and Killer Mike.

*All three songs are catchy and are on my playlists.

Reference to Alice Loc

Alice Loc in our DTC class did a project a few weeks ago discussing the stereotypes of Americans for each state by Americans.  It was a great insight of the inner prejudice in every American.  This website, displaying projects by Yanko Tsvetkov, takes the same idea by Alice and does a global spin to it.  Yanko designed maps of other countries with American views of each country in mind.  This is the whole world according to Americans:



This project is pretty truthful in my opinion.  I've been to many countries all over the world thanks to my travels with the US Navy but in every new country I visit, the only thing I knew about the country were things I heard about through bias opinions or stereotypes.  For example, I've been to Perth, Australia and all I knew about Aussies were they have a lot of koalas and kangaroos.  I even purposely went out to eat a kangaroo steak but I enjoyed my time in Perth, one of the best places I have ever visited because they have a colonial looking city like Boston or Philadelphia but with a great beach like California.


My visits to Tokyo, Japan were bias because of all the ninja movies and anime I've watched.  Now, I wish I could live there.  It is my goal to find a overseas job in Japan because I've visited it so often that I am enamored with its culture and history and food (other than sushi and teriyaki).  I've also heard many bad things about Thailand and it's sex industry.  Yes, they do have a sex industry but it is not what defines them.  If that's what defines Thailand, then Americans are nothing but scary gun owners (which isn't true).  Thailand is known as "The Land of Smiles" and it is very true.  Thai people are wonderful and modest and Thailand has great places to visit and sightsee.  For me, it was breathtaking to visit Thailand.



All in all, Yanko hit on target about the stereotypes of all the countries including American views of themselves.  The only way to overcome these stereotypes is to actually go out and get to know the people around the world in your neighborhood or school or better yet, go out and travel.  If not, you'll just perpetuate the views of Americans by the rest of the world.

The Hawkeye Initiative

I was a big fan of comic books.  I still am but not as much as an avid reader but more of a spectator of the media crossovers.  I remember growing up in my early teens reading comic books and all the heroines portrayed in the art were posed in such awkward ways, usually way too sexual.  Being a fan of the booming trend of comic book movies, I never noticed the blatant exposure of the heroine's butt.  I came across a Huffington Post link that had 8 examples of movie posters with the heroine of every different movie pose in the same exact way, showing the backside.  Heres a few examples:

 

As you can see, all the superheroines are posing the same especially being surrounded by men.  The news link just addresses the easy and I follow another link in its post to a website call The Hawkeye Initiative, base on the comic book character that Jeremy Renner plays in the movie The Avengers.  I will admit comic books is the last place people should look at for feminine equally.  It is a boy's club, much like Playboy and I don't think it will ever change.  Even women artists and writers concede to the sexy heroine archetype but The Hawkeye Initiative, satirically engages the sexy poses, diminishing the appeal all together much like a visual of a shirtless hairy Robin Williams eating a bucket of fried chicken (I saw a drawing of this in a Maxim Magazine a long time ago).  That imagery can make anyone lose their arousal.  My point is, The Hawkeye Initiative is precisely to desexualize the comic book heroine poses based on the replacement of the heroine by Hawkeye.  These visuals are hilarious and I feel I need to share, laugh and point.

 



The website is full of wonderful amateur artwork and they are all hilarious.  I prefer my comics books to stay the same but it is refreshing that the customers are fully aware of the manipulative marketing of the industry.

Pixar rules

There is a webpage that I stumbled across that explains Pixar's 22 rules of storytelling.  These rules were originally tweeted Pixar's Story Artist.  I have watched every single Pixar movie and most of them more than once including all there short films (even ones from the 1980's).  My personal favorite feature film has to be Finding Nemo with a close second of Up.  My favorite short film is Partly Cloudy.

I won't go through every rule on the list but there are a couple that I thought were great advices to creating a riveting story.  Most of the tips seem to be common sense to a writer but these are what I would consider helpful advices for any struggling writer no matter the genre.

Tip 14: Why must you tell this story? What's the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That's the heart of it.

I like this tip because it forces the writer to question his motives of his/her writing.  Sometimes I feel I just babble on and on in my writing without saying anything but this tip addresses me, as a writer, to stay focus on the story.

Tip 20:  Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike.  How'd you rearrange them into what you do like?

There are plenty of movies I dislike but I think this tip is about movies that you might have enjoyed but the pacing and editing of the story is what hindered the enjoyment.  It is not about a movie a you hate and figure out what changes you can do to make it better.  In other words, if you hate the movie Twilight and you think the movie would have been better if it didn't have sparkling vampires in it, that is not what the tip is trying to get at.  If you mildly enjoy Twilight but you think the editing and storytelling was out of sync and you know how to make it run smoother, more to your liking and pace, then you have made a good story into a better one (*Not that I think Twilight was a good story but it was just an example).

For example, I would have like the movie Avatar but it was overly drawn out.  It was a sci-fi action movie but the beginning of the movie was rather slow and tedious.  I would have started out with an action sequence, like a scene from the end battle and then lead up to how we came to the beginning.  This would set the pace of the movie and give a hint to what to expect.