Final Project "Multiple Personality Disorder"

The following is my final project for Honors Art and Technology. Our assignment was to create a three minute video art piece using different effects. After watching the movie Silent Hill I got the idea to do something that had to do with different personalities for my project. In the video I act as three different people who are all extremely different and struggling because they all have different motives but need to come together as one person. 

Hatsune Miku

If you thought Miley Stewart (Actress Miley Cyrus) creating a fake alter-ego of Hannah Montana for the stage was weird wait until you hear about popular Japanese pop star Hatsune Miku, a holographic female persona with virtually no human being behind her presence on stage. Hatsune Miku is shown as a sixteen year old, 93 pound, 5'2 foot female anime character with blue ponytails and a pencil thin waist. The meaning of her name stands for the 'first sound of the future'. Her personality was created to portray her as an easy-going, fun-loving, energetic and happy girl. She has even been said to have been in a "relationship" with another holographic Vocaloid character named Kaito. 
What is Vocaloid? This is how Hatsune Miku sings. Technically she is a synthesizer application developed by Crypton Future Media which uses Yamaha Corporation's Vocaloid 2 synthesizing technology to produce sound. After the Vocaloid 2 was produced, Crypton Future Media began to develop Vocaloid 3. The creators of Hatsune Miku's music partly come from voice samples from a japanese actress Saki Fujita at different pitches and tones but is then altered and changed by a synthesizer engine to create full words, phrases, and songs. 
This Japanese pop star was officially released on August 31st, 2007 and Crypton promoted her as "an android diva in the near future world where songs are lost". Not too shortly after, Nico Nico Douga a popular Japanese video sharing site began to post Miku's videos and her popularity increased. In October 2011 Crypton posted a letter from the Japanese Minister of Economy onto Miku's facebook fan page addressing her "contributing to the furtherance of the informatization by minister of economy: 

One fan was quoted saying "She's rather more like a goddess: She has human parts but she transcends human limitations. She's the great posthuman pop star". Although I do agree with Lexy on her post about how it is unfair to create a role model that no one can live up to (tiny perfect waist, perfect proportions at 16, floor-length blue hair) there are benefits to a holographic star. For one, she will never die. She is never going to go off stage and get drunk, or get our of a car and flash the paparazzi. She can be seen as the perfect star because she will forever have a perfect image without ever having to opportunity to mess up. 

Scopitones

The Scopitone was a jukebox that played music videos for the public before the internet and MTV came alone. It has a 16 mm film component and was originated in France. The films were called 'Soundies' and were put in nightclubs, bars, and amusement areas. By the 1960's the popularity of this machine quickly died down, the very last one ever made in 1978. The following are just a few examples of what a scopitone would have looked like on the juke-box screen. 

Difference between advertisement and propaganda

Advertisement and propaganda can both be portrayed in the same way, making it hard sometimes to distinguish between them and how we are supposed to view the message. Both are mean to appeal to emotions and trigger a response but they are meant for different purposes. Propaganda is also often done through advertising, so it can be tricky. The picture below is an example of propaganda -

The next picture is an example of advertisement - 

Advertisements are meant to make people feel like they need the product in order to make their lives better. The woman with the long thick luscious hair is promising that if you buy the product, you too can be like her, beautiful and happy. The first picture is progaganda because it is using peoples feelings to get them to do something. Propaganda only presents one side of something, giving the public no other choice. Unlike an advertisement where the message is "Hey, you should buy this because it will --------(something helpful or positive)", the message is more of a guilt tactic to get people into thinking a certain way in order to support something (for example, a political stance), do something (ex. join the army) or get other people to do something (ex. vote). 

Favorite Flash Mob!

How cool would it be to be living your average daily old boring life and for suddenly something super exciting and high-energy to start randomly happening all around you? I think it would be so cool to participate in a flash mob - especially one that no one in the area knew was about to happen. Usually the type of flash mobs we see in the movies are dancing flash mobs but since I think Christmas is one of the most  festive times of the year i picked the "Christmas Flash Mob". I like it because it is on of the most un-anticipated ones I saw. It takes place in a mall food court where there are people of all ages with all different agendas. The flash mobs I see in the movies are all young able people, and I liked how this video included the elderly and children.

Performance Piece

For my performance art piece, I wanted to make a statement about social media. My generation has gone from AIM chat to Myspace to Facebook to Twitter and then to an explosion of Snapchat, Tumblr, Instagram etc. Facebook is mainly the only one of these I really use. It is appropriate for finding long-long friends, sharing pictures and posting things. I have never been a fan of dumb statuses though, which is mainly how I see Twitter. My friends forced me to get a Twitter last year and I tried to pick it up, but never really got into it as much as  I feel everyone else did. Twitter to me is just a bunch of annoying statuses about doing nothing and can just be bothersome to some people. People would never say out loud to the entire world, "Going to the bathroom" or "Need a coke" because people would look at them like they were crazy yet people have no problem doing this on the Internet. During my project I was dressed up as a twitter icon and did some of the actions that people on twitter do such as statuses, tweeting at other people, and "following" people. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Usme7jVrfmE

Over the boundaries of gender

Meet Eva and Adele, two women who are supporters of the theory that the body is the canvas itself. You don't need a canvas or a video camera, you yourself can be a big statement. If you visit their website, www.evaadele.com, you can get an idea of their different statements, different projects and biographies. One of their statements that I found interesting was "over the boundaries of gender". Eva and Adele are married and although you wouldn't be able to tell, Eva is actually a man, who chooses to express his marriage with Adele as a female-female marriage. Eva had his gender legally changed but chose to keep his body the way it is without undergoing the actual sex change. They are always seen in full make-up in public, as part of their image. One of their projects that I found interesting was CUM. Like any other two 'women' who love having their pictures taken in full make-up, Eva and Adele adore collecting pictures that other people have taken of them and use it to portray to the public how other people see couples. They will often provide a stamped postcard to the photographer so that they can receive a copy of the photo in return for permission for the photo to be used as the photographer likes.