Our reading this week was On the Rights of Molotov Man, from the perspectives of Joy Garnett, who painted Molotov and Susan Meiselas who originally photographed the Molotov Man. I think the topic is interesting because it goes into art and copyright law, and having seen too many of my friends' art get shared with no credit (or even stolen), I'm in general a fan of copyright law in protecting artists.
But this was a case where one artist created art based on another's art—and from purely a copyright law perspective, I do agree with Garnett that she had modified the photograph enough. But morally, I don't agree with what Garnett did—in that the Molotov Man isn't a figment of her imagination, but rather a real life person named Pablo Arauz. And I feel that this goes into the same gray zone as photographing someone without permission. Meiselas presumably had permission to photograph Arauz, but Garnett didn't. And Garnett removed Arauz from the context he was in, the story of rebel forces winning and marking an important moment in Nicaraguan history.
A day out
Our first assignment is due next class, so Jingjing and I got together Thursday night to review our vacation videos. We ended up choosing six that mapped to two places in Asia, three in Europe, and one in America:
We then copied and pasted those pin locations onto a few different maps of New York. At first, we were looking to explore Brooklyn as a way to get to know our new borough, but we quickly realized that because our pins were so far apart, that we'd have to go to the outskirts of Brooklyn—something we wanted to avoid since we didn't want to spend too long on public transport. We ended up mapping the pins to Manhattan, since we knew that trains would come more frequently and it'd be easy to navigate between the points. Our final configuration is below on the right, where we also optimized for neighborhoods or parks we felt we could get good sounds in, and thus build a good story.
On the day of, we ended up only hitting three out of the six pin locations (across 4 hours!) because we stopped by so many places along the way that we found interesting to record. When we got home, we went through all 21 (!) sound files to sift through any interesting pieces, and jotted down interesting timestamps for each file.
From there, we pieced together a short story about going out for the day, taking the train, going to get coffee, jumping in a store, walking by a park, and ending the day.
Here is our first draft, where we got familiarized with Adobe Audition and laid out the basic scenes (we mostly used the razar tool and cross-fades, hehe):
WARNING: can get loud at points, also we forgot a transition somewhere in there haha.
We showed our first draft to Gabe during office hours, and got really feedback about what to potentially add in to make the transitions less odd—and we ended up using the door opening and closing sounds I recorded in class in week 1. They don't quite sound like cafe/shop doors, but that's ok because they ended up really tying the whole piece together nicely.
We also layered some details onto the track, and finished by sound balancing with the Mixer:
I really enjoyed working with Jingjing, because whereas I tend to be really straightforward trying to lay out the tracks, she really prioritized the feelings each sound in each track gave us. I think it gave our final output much more depth than when we first started~
If we had more time, I'd want to go back in and remove the wind noises (we cut out the biggest offenders, but couldn't remove the small bits that overlapped with the more interesting sounds we wanted to keep) and also play around with the special effects in Audition.
Vacations
When we played the first draft for Gabe, we agreed that the whole story of our past vacations informing our exploration of New York City didn't come through at all. Gabe suggested another version, where we play both our past vacations and our new recordings at the same time—something that could perhaps lend itself to a physical interaction in the future.
It was a curious idea but we didn't have much time left for the assignment, so we put together this very rough clip as a proof of concept:
The first part is Jingjing's recording from a Hai Di Lao in her hometown in China, paired with mechanical toy sounds from Manhattan's Chinatown. The next is my recording of a serene morning in Hokkaido, Japan, paired with the serene background music of a clothing shop (and some conversation). The final part is a recording of musicians in Prague, coupled with singing and harmonica we recorded in Bryant Park.
I love the parallels we were able to draw between our recordings from around the world and the ones from Manhattan—that we can find similar sounds anywhere in the world.