The Knife, The Chair, & Gary Hill

The Knife & The Chair:

In both of these videos, Jack Goldstein uses ordinary objects and shines a new light on them, changing the viewer's perspective of that object, making it appear more beautiful and artful.

The Knife to me at first was a monotonous video, however when it got more towards the end that is when I actually started enjoying it after the knife had reflected multiple colors already. I was waiting for something to pop out, the knife to disappear, or something shocking to happen but it never happened so the video made me anxious to see what would happen to this knife. However, towards the end I realized nothing was going to happen. The knife was a piece of art, it was something that had been turned beautiful. It got me thinking there was more beauty to a knife than I would've thought thanks to the its' reflectiveness and the colors that were shone on it. The colors got me to think about the different uses of knives and how when they are being used to cut, eat, or just sitting on a table that wide variety of colors also reflect back and forth across it in our everyday life yet we never really stop and look at it since we see it all the time. I also feel like the red, blue, and yellow color could represent the different uses or views on knife. Like the red would represent it as a weapon, the blue would represent it being calm and cool being used in cutting and eating meals, and the yellow would represent it being as something valuable or important. No longer is the knife viewed as dangerous or a weapon, but rather as art that has beautiful reflective and colorful qualities.

The Chair also was similar to The Knife in that an ordinary object was centered without moving in the video. Instead of a knife, there was a chair placed in the middle of the screen. At first I had no idea what it was because of the lighting on it but slowly over a period of about 7 minutes feathers begin to drop onto and around the chair. The feathers are bright colors that stand out against the background and the chair making the video a lot more fascinating and brings the video to life. Throughout the video the feathers end up sticking to the chair along with around it. I was also waiting to see if anything happened like maybe the chair would fall down or a huge mass of feathers would cover it but instead the feathers just slowly floated down and around the chair. I enjoyed that though because it had a certain serene quality to it making it very relaxed and calming to watch in a way. I feel like he is trying to say something about passing of time and how it passes on slowly even when nobody is there or watching. He could also be trying to say how nature affects us and brings color into our life or perhaps how nature is comforting and relaxing.

Gary Hill's Videos:

I like the composition of the "Mediations" video and the way he explores and connects sounds and language. I really like what the vibrations of the speaker did to the sand and animated it while the voice was speaking. I felt like he really personified the speaker and succeeded in connecting voice and speaker as one. It seemed like he was trying to bury the voice, maybe like it was his conscious thoughts and didn't want to hear it anymore. His "Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?" video looks like it was made at his house with a normal video camera but what makes them different is the way he uses sound and language I feel like when Alice is playing that mini piano, she makes the atmosphere really eerie and odd, especially combined with the voices when they start talking. They also sounded sort of robotic to me but later on it made sense to me as he was gradually changing the voices, slowing them down, and also reversing them making them incomprehensible. He seems to move the camera around a lot too and I felt like it was very dreamlike but in a very creepy odd way. I felt very uneasy watching it as I began to not be able to understand them. I feel like he has a fascination with exploring language and sound and that's exactly what he did in that video. In his "Incidence of Catastrophe", yet again he explored sounds and language but this time using text as well. The flashes of text and words are kind of like a guide or narration to what's going in and sort of becomes his wall and shapes who he is. A lot of emotion can be seen in this particular video compared to other ones since he's the subject and he cares so much about language . At the end he shows how vital language is in our lives and how without it, we are nothing.