VanDerBeek Trip

I took a lot of notes while I was at the exhibit. I'm pretty sure I liked more than half of what I saw. I struggled not to over-interpret anything because I hate when people do that to me. I thought some of VanDerBeek's work was nice explorations of texture, like the metal work series and some of his traditional paintings. I wasn't expecting to see traditional media at this show, but I got a Mondrian feel from the wall of paintings on plywood. It also struck me that VanDerBeek was really exploring geometric relationships with circles, orbs, eyes, celestial bodies, etc. I liked most of his collages; I thought they were very Dali. I got an impression of turning people into architecture.

I think the movie showing I caught was "Astral Man". It reminded me a lot of "Dr Who", "The Tomorrow People", and other 60's sci-fi shows and movies. The audio when I first entered the theater was also typical for the genre, odd sorts of underwater-sounding noises, which I think were used in sci-fi at the time to give the feeling of a submarine in space. At this time, the dancers were prone, I think having restless dreams. Then, the dancers stood up and were more active. As the dancers sped up and started interacting with each other, the music changed to a peppy classical violin. I think the movement of the dancers, the music, and the psychedelic backgrounds all interplayed well. The next movie started with some blurry shifting figures and what I think was an audio track from a therapy session talking about an uncomfortable dream. Slowly, the blurry shapes focused into macabre human figures that visually expressed the tension of the voice describing a bad dream.

Unfortunately, several of the projectors in the room with the 360 movies weren't working. Technical/electrical difficulties at MIT. Go figure...
Before reading the description of the project, I sort of saw a historical progress through the movie clip I was watching the most. The entire piece was an attempt to summarize the totality of human history in a multi-movie piece. So, it made sense to me.
The other projection piece, I didn't like as much. I got the idea of "Poemfields" giving a multimedia styling to lines and words of poetry. I like the idea, I didn't like the execution. I didn't think it was visually appealing, and I didn't watch it long.

Wow, this is getting long. I'm going to do a bullet list of the pieces that struck me:

• One of the Dali-esque collages featured a man holding a woman's hand, but her face had come off and was falling. I at first thought this was perhaps about dehumanizing women in romantic pursuits. I looked closer and noticed the man had a watch, and was thus taking her pulse. Now, a statement on the impersonalization of the medical industry.
  
• Variations V - I didn't like the piece, but I like the idea of an audio-reactive environment to play in
• Panels for the Walls of the World
• Audience feedback in ongoing art
  
• Fax machine art!!!!
  
• Nixon & "If no tyrany exists, invent one" - This seems relevant, again.
• "On a treadmill" & a Southeast Asian about to be shot - Makes me think of the 'War on Terror'
• A comment about finding few Communists in Cambodia (which no doubt involved killings during the search) combined with a comment about legalizing abortion made me think a lot about what of many possible messages was being expressed. The hypocrisy of killing some people is bad but some people is okay? That we will always make up justifications for killing another human being if we really want to?
  
• Social Imagestics: Somewhat accurate predictions about Year 2000 culture's use of technology and social media being international and reactive and the resulting lack of privacy. "We will get the future we learn to expect", or, perhaps, are taught to expect.
• Vanderbeekiana: I really liked the still images transitioning into structurally similar but very different content images. My favorite was the nude woman turning onto a landscape with a road and castle, then back into a woman.
• Strobe Ode: Ow! My eyes!