Unedited environmental project, joke edition.

This is our wedding in an elevator that we shot for our environmental project. Instead of a beautiful setting like most weddings, our wedding was shot in a cold elevator. The video below is unedited and it just for for fun until I figure out imovie * do you think I'd really use that music???? 

Table Top Design Photos

These are the three sets explained on Tuesday for our table top design.  Posted by Isabelle. 

The Inanimate Female Form

This inanimate female form was spotted by Jessica on her way to Intro to Design Class. As you can observe, the object was subject to negligence and possible torture. Coincidence or act of some divine plan that such a victim resembled a woman? Such a sight still holds its mystery, but one can find multiple meaning since perspectives vary. This image also resembled that of the statue of David, in the scene from the film “Children of Men”. The scene shows the David statue with a prosthetic metal piece connecting the missing leg piece of the statue. Likewise, the female statue’s leg was detached yet not important enough to be pieced together. She also had a missing head which further devalues her existence.

-Jessica Leon

The Metaphor of Scenography

Reading Notes for “Metaphor” by Borges and “Richard Foreman as Scenographer” Arson
By States from Group “P.E.T.I.O”
Due November 04, 2008


“Every word is a dead metaphor”-Borges
The thought that a word, every word, is a “dead metaphor” is in itself a metaphorical thought. Metaphors are a scarce combination of words that can result in infinity of meanings. The importance in the metaphor is what the reader feels when it’s read or heard. Likewise, theatre encompasses similar characteristics. Like the metaphor, theatre can have several combinations of the same elements, and project infinity of meaning to its audience.
Having a familiarity of objects or comparisons can have a momentary comfort on the audience. For example, many metaphors are comparisons of familiar associations, like a woman to a flower or life to a dream. The same in theater, if the audience sees a comfy couch set by an artificial fire place in an imitation living room, they feel a sense of comfort and familiarity to such aesthetic replica. The thought of associating unlike elements can be a bit shocking, but far more effective on the audience. The unfamiliarity of unlike elements leaves the observer stunned, that they look twice or read twice in order to depict the relation of the rare metaphor or extraordinary setting.
Both metaphors and a stage consist of patterns that can be moved around and convoluted to create a new meaning when presented. A poem and a play or simple metaphors are placed in such ways that give its audience the will to see what they want to see. All the elements that need to be presented are presented, but it is up to the observer to find meaning behind such placement of words or props.

Childhood: The Everlasting Dream

Don't allow your world be taken over by the Gray Cloud.

Collage by Josh Hungerford

Now try figuring out how to do the stage settings for something like this. Doesn't really work so well.

Reading notes for "Can Theater and Media Speak the Same Language?" by Arnold Aronson

Though many have attempted the mixing of projected images or movies with theatre, the two are completely different vocabularies and cannot easily mix. Partially this has to do with the differences in how art forms represent their subjects. For example, two-dimensional arts such as photography or painting depict objects, but they would never be mistaken for actually being the object, no matter how realistically they are shown. Instead, they serve to merely signify the objects drawn. Theater, on the other hand, “is the only art form to use that which is signified as the signifier of that object” (Aronson 87), meaning that it exists in the real, three-dimensional world. Instead of merely showing an idea of an object, theater involves the actual object itself. The sets and scenery all exist in a solid form so that if the viewer wished, they could step onto the stage and touch them, feel them, actually be in the world depicted.
Another factor is the frame in which the art is presented. For two-dimensional art forms, the frame is the canvas or the photograph; the objects only exist on that frame, though they may ideally stretch beyond them. The frame for theater is the stage itself, or sometimes even the whole theater, in which the actions are taking place in the present, rather than images of the past as shown in two-dimensional art. This fact of it occurring as the viewer watches is what sets theater apart from other media and art forms. Movies are similar in some aspects to theater, but they still are only recordings, only showing the past, though the actions take place in the present. This is a key part of why movies and theater do not mix well, as they contrast each other in the ways that events are created and displayed.
Furthermore, the juxtaposing of these two forms of art together on one another breaks up the focus of the audience through the uses of multiple frames. Movies and projected images must appear on some sort of screen or backdrop, a two-dimensional frame attempting to work within the three-dimensional world of the theater. The audience sees the projected images in their own frame, taking them for what they are, but placing that frame as an object amidst the larger frame of the stage production. The two clash, not being able to work together well. The differences between the two exist over their dimensional structure, place in past or present, and even in their tangibility. The theater is full of physical objects that take up space, have volume, actually exist in the present moment; oppositely, movies and projected images are really nothing more than light cast upon a screen, and can be turned off in an instant. Theater exists and cannot be destroyed, whereas movies and images only exist for that moment. Due to these differences in frame and structure, the two do not mix well in general.


-Josh Hungerford

Highlighting Inanimate Objects

Posted By Isabelle Bright

Declaration of the Rights of All Objects

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all objects are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Existence, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. All experience hath shown that objects are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, but when a long train of abuses, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such society, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of Inanimate Objects. The history of mankind is one of repeated injuries and usurpations, all to establish an absolute tyranny over inanimate objects. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

They have torn apart families of bananas one by one, estranging them from their bunch.

They have as a whole worked to subject inanimate objects to a jurisdiction foreign to their constitution, and unacknowledged by their laws; giving their assent to numerous acts of tyranny:
For causing direct physical harm to objects, by battery of tennis balls back and forth, kicking doors open, and slamming windows shut:

For slaughtering thousands of flowers and removing their corpses to be displayed in public against their wishes:

For turning inanimate objects against one another for use in the murder of their compatriots, as is the fate of scissors, turned into helpless accomplices to the mutilation of sheets of paper:

For maintaining objects such as trees in the position of slaves, taking the fruits of their labor without just compensation.

They have plundered them, ravaged them, burned them, and destroyed the existences of inanimate objects.

In every stage of these oppressions, inanimate objects have petitioned for redress as best they could: their repeated attempts have been answered only by repeated injury. A species, whose collective character is thus marked by every act which may define tyrants, is unfit to be the ruler of free inanimate objects.

We, therefore, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Inanimate Objects, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good inanimate objects of this world, solemnly publish and declare, that all inanimate objects are, and of right ought to be free and independent. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge our fortunes and our sacred honor.

All Objects are created Equal."