Jeremy Wade

Link to Jeremy Wade Interview

I went to this show only knowing that the artist was influenced by japanese animation "kawaii" culture. Just seconds before the performance started, I learned that he was a dancer/choreographer. Then, for the first 10~15mins of the performance I wasn't sure what I was watching. I'm not sure if I had a hard time making sense of the early parts of the performance becuase I was caught off guard or it just didn't make much sense. But after the first section of the performance I was very interested in everything that was happening on the stage, and kind of waiting to see what he will do next. This was definately one of the weirdest performance that I have seen, but I enjoyed it much better than the performance I saw at Performa. I didn't really see a lot of connection with the Japanese anime culture, except for some of the illustrated characters. I think the whole message and content of the performance is much more relevent for and influenced by the modern American culture.

Lev Manovich Response + Notes

This reading helped me really understand the film we saw in class. So many techniques in video and movies that I have always seen, but never thought about, had a breakthrough in the history of cinema to be so widely used today. The comparison of the internet and computer age to cinema was very interesting. With more and more affordable digital equipments and softwares, along with the sharing of knowledge through the internet, it really is a different world from the old days of cinema. After reading Lev Manovich, it made me very curious how the people in the 1920's would have thought after watching Vertov's film. Everything in the film would have been completely new for them. Lev Manovich says we still fail to create a new language in cinema, and I guess I only knew about the main language of cinema because when I was watching Vertov's film, I was trying to find a story line or connection with the subject matters on the screen, overlooking all the different effects Vertov was using.