Animation

Stop Motion Animation

This song has been stuck in my head since I first saw it on tv at the mall, and the music video I can still remember clearly to this day even though I haven't seen it in years. I felt bad for the teddy bear in the animation.

Memento Mori

At first I thought Memento Mori only applied to artworks. During the Baroque times, there were a lot of paintings about death and how many of the things we hold dear now don't follow us to our graves. After seeing a lot of the photography photos, I'm on a whole new level of creeped out. Aside from the child being dead, there's a very short window for them to take the photo as rigor mortis sets in, the blood accumulates at the bottom, etc. And the smell! Dead people fascinate me, but I would never take a photo next to one.

Stock Market Crash: Then and Now

I feel that The Great Depression and the economic recession we have now are very similar in pattern, BUT there aren't very obvious effects that can be seen in comparison, simply because this time around there are more safeguards to protect the American way of living. While I think hard economic times has a psychological effect on the population (no money? I should rob someone), it wasn't as bad as before, where mothers would sell their own children to give everyone involved a better life. Homelessness is also not as prevalent this time around, even if it is still an epidemic now. The biggest problem that is making this recession harder to get out of is that big business is taking over, getting rid of small businesses and monopolizing the prices. The prices go higher, yet you're still just barely scraping by. You have to pay that bill anyways because you're stuck in a contract with a large business. There will be no competitive pricing for consumers to run to.

Bread and Circus

"Bread and Circus" is basically public entertainment to keep the masses happy. It was a political move to control people. In Rome, the coliseum is a prime example of such entertainment. The technology that went into putting on a successful show was advanced at the time. The coliseum had hidden tunnels underground and raising platforms to get animals on stage. The population of Rome would gather there to be happy. I think the government doesn't even care to use bread and circus. Corporations do, however, and they control the government for the most part. "How can I dumb my consumer down? Make them pay more? Give them less?" Like McDonalds, you're fed crap disguised as chocolate cake. And we fall for it anyways.

Madama Butterfly

Madama Butterfly is an animated story/opera about a woman who falls in love with a sailor, bears his child, only to find that he was an asshole schmuck (typical). She then kills herself I'm assuming, and then reincarnates into a butterfly that lands on her now adult daughter's head, bringing the cycle around again. I thought it was interesting and to-the-point. There were some weird elements, like her pregnancy being a fish tank, but it made the animation somewhat poetic. I like how the plot was relatable. There are a ton of people in the military facing separation because someone on either side couldn't be faithful.

Juan Carlos Delgado

I find Delgado's work interesting. I would've never thought to freeze a sculpture/ make it a built-in function. It's multimedia because it's always changing in time. I would like to see him do the same thing but on a larger scale. An entire room that encompasses the seasons would be absolutely beautiful. Green and bright the first time you come upon it, frosted over the next. I want to see more. But then again, I simply prefer large-scale work over tiny work. Unless it's so tiny you'd need a microscope to see.