The Spiral Jetty

In the near ending part of the film it shows Robert Smithson running starts from the edge of spiral to the center. When he stops at the central dot the camera from the helicopter zoom further and further. The shape of spiral becomes more and more visible. This is the most striking moment in the film for me but it perplexed me as well that the intention for this movement.
After I read the text about Robert Smithson and his work as land art I have built up my interpretation of this scene. The essential goal of land art is to treat a landscape as an artwork, likewise to make people see artwork as close like the nature. However, the nature has its characteristic of solitariness, which even makes the artist himself feel the inaccessibility. In this scene the artist is shot gradually minor, until surrounded by he black lava. The sense of solitary, depress, flow and stillness is presented and thus, PERHAPS to support his question towards it.
However, at the same time I found this quote from an article in R.S’s official website:

"No ideas, no concepts, no systems, no
structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality
of that evidence"

the other way to make site transform into nonsite is: to get a tatoo one one's skin:p

2:30 video

My table top project aims to present an artificial scenes about penguins in Antarctica, in order to present the pleasant time of the lovely creatures remains not too much since the global warming problem is threatening Antarctica. By presenting this image I would use my fingers as a group of skinny penguins, and “they” act as playing piano as if the penguin dancing. This is the first moving part, and under the penguins there is a stripe of slowly moving images symbolizing the icy environment the penguins live which is the second moving part. This idea of playing on a moving plane form came from the slang “playing a new chapter”. I would also present a background music giving the rhythm to how my fingers move. The music is a reproduction of a song called “to the dancer on the ice” by Emilie Simon.

Ideally, the two and a half minutes would be divided by three parts:

- Fingers covered by a black glove, a series of images along with the music activate the fingers’ act.

- *A transition from the glove to the “penguins” presence, which is a keyboard drawn into the shot. The melody here is also added with drum sound and etc.

- Another stripe images. Same movement as the first part except for the fingers replace the glove.

Introspection of the performance:

There are couple incidents happened and made the performance become hilarious which I should introspect.

- With the help of two peers the images was moving ideally. One of the picture was not pasted very tight and it draw my attention to it. Thus at the time when the messy picture go into the camera my finger was acting not naturally and completely distract by the image. This should be avoided by the more careful preparation.

- On the *part the performance went to a bit lost control. I took off the glove on time, however I played the transition piece on the keyboard ridiculously. One hilarious mistake was happen that I press the wrong keyboard tone(raindrop tone became robot tone ), so there were a few blizzard sound would be heard on that part.

- At the end there was supposed to be a colorized “Victoria frog” across the image, to present to extinction of the gray Antarctica creatures in terms of the others. However, I forgot the frog completely.

The time count between images movement and music, the fingers presented as penguins went successfully.

Overall, I think the problems such as piano piece, fingers acting…could be easily avoid due to more actual practices. Besides, I still sees my over-complication to a 2:30 minutes performance. To reduce one or two elements from the whole, such as the music transition or the fingers transition, might work better than here.