Identity

How is identity constructed? Is it fixed or fluid? Does it mean where you are “from”?
How do we affect the reading of our identity?

Historical references

Rembrandt van Rijn - gallery of self portraits

Frida Kahlo - various self portraits involving gender and major life events

Stuart Harvey - winner of photography contest

Critique

Sébastien Del Grosso

This photographic portrait gives the viewer a strong impression of the artist emerging from within. The way the subject is viewing his hand with intense focus and concentration displays a sense of care in creating his work. The presence of two mediums - photography and hand-drawn sketching - is a great display of hybridity, and how one merges into the other is fluid and doesn't distract. The lighting is fairly dramatic and highlights the hand with a gentle spotlight, and it shows through the omitted parts of the model.

The gaze

A view or perspective that is implied in a piece, offering the audience a voyeuristic opportunity to involve themselves as a participant of the piece. Jean-Paul Sartre is acclaimed to have been the first to address the concept of the gaze, whereas the concept of the "male gaze" is attributed to Laura Mulvey, a film theorist.

Post-colonial identity

The combination of experiences, beliefs, and perspectives that form an individual which follow a social event or events involving imperialism, colonialism, or similar societal oppression in order to create a resistant front against the colonizing party or parties. Identities may involve qualities of segregation, discrimination, and isolation. Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and philosopher, gave an analysis of the destructive nature of colonialism and how it negatively affected the colonized.

Hybridity

A mixture or cross between two entities. Hybridity can be applied in various topics, such as an individual's identity involving nature vs. nurture, the meeting of two separate races or cultures, and the conflict in postcolonialism. Theorists that are primarily attributed to discussing hybridity are Homi Bhabha, Néstor García Canclini, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, and Paul Gilroy.


By Using Himself as the Model for These and Other Studies, Rembrandt Was Making Himself into a Recognizable Celebrity at the Same Time That He Gave the Public Strikingly Original and Expressive Tronies. The Wide Dissemination of These and Other Prin. "Rembrandt Van Rijn: Selected Self-Portraits." Rembrandt Van Rijn: Self-Portraits. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Oct. 2016. <http://www.rembrandtpainting.net/rembrandt_self_portraits.htm>.

"Frida Kahlo - The Complete Works." Frida Kahlo - The Complete Works. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Oct. 2016. <http://www.frida-kahlo-foundation.org/>.

Hart, By Sydney. "Photography as a Method of Identity Formation - Culture365." Culture365. N.p., 30 July 2013. Web. 26 Oct. 2016. <http://culturedays.ca/blog/2013/07/29/photography/>.

@Propelsteps. "Amazing Arts & Artists : Sketch Photography by Sébastien Del Grosso." PROPEL STEPS. N.p., 12 Dec. 2014. Web. 26 Oct. 2016. <https://propelsteps.wordpress.com/2014/12/12/amazing-arts-artists-sketch-photography-by-sebastien-del-grosso/>.

mind in a jam

Glitch Art

My main intention for mind in a jam is to capture the essence of being stuck in traffic. At times like this, my psychological state is in disarray, a conglomerate of impatience, frustration, anger, regret, apathy, and everything in-between, even the unexpected instances of relief and relaxation of not having to keep my foot to the pedal. Bits of vehicles are visible, even a distinct license plate can be seen, reminiscent of being behind the same car for long periods of time.

Takeshi Murata is my primary source of inspiration for this piece. His videos that are a result of corrupted data is create an ethereal world where one frame blends into the next. At times, some of his works have a "smeared paint" effect from multiple datamoshed frames, reminiscent of Monica Tapp's paintings depicting motion-blurred landscapes.

mind in a jam's process involves taking footage from a dash cam and converting it from .MP4 to uncompressed .AVI using Avidemux. Next, the video is opened in Frhed, a hex editor, where I replaced all occurrences of "no" to "go" and saved the video. Finally, I opened the video in Windows Media Player rather than my usual go-to PotPlayer, where I take a screenshot of a corrupted frame.

The reading GlitchCodecTutorial by Nick Briz mentions the following: "If you take this same file . . . save it on a memory stick and open it on another computer through various media players you'll notice that you often get very different results" (Briz). This is crucial in the process of creating mind in a jam. In this time and age, videos are meant to be universal files that are easily shared and viewed, however some media players have different sets of video codecs - methods of compression using computer algorithms - and so the hex-edited video can look entirely different. This lends to my choice of using Windows Media Player's interpretation over PotPlayer's. As Adrian Mackenzie says in the reading: "Codecs catalyze new relations between people, things, spaces, and times in events and forms" (Briz). The focus of mind in a jam is not how representational is it, but rather how the viewer wants to interpret it; through their unique set of experiences, relationships, and behaviour, new meaning can be instilled into the work - this is the codec of the real world.

I wanted the name of the work to be ambiguous as well. This is a representation of a mind in a traffic jam, but it has the potential to extend to the portrayal of a mind jam if it were to manifest itself.

Reading:

Nick Briz. "GLITCH CODEC TUTORIAL." GLITCH CODEC TUTORIAL. N.p., 2010. Web. 24 Oct. 2016. <http://nickbriz.com/glitchcodectutorial>.