Senesthesia&Cymatics

I hadn't heard of senesthesia before reading these articles. Its a really interesting phenomenon. It was especially interesting to read that it is an actual scientifically documented field. At first I thought the artists were just trying to force the synthete experiences through their art work, but I didn't realize they were actually experiencing something beyond their control.

I liked the paintings from the synthetes like Carol Steen and Anny Salz, it was cool to be able to get a glimpse of what they experience on a daily basis. Though as I am not a synthete I really couldn't get much out of it beyond how cool it was that they were feeling sensations beyond what exists in reality. It was also interesting to see that there are artworks meant to invoke synthesia in non synthetes. Sadly, I have not seen Fantasia or been to a color organ recital, but now I'd really like to do both in the hopes of experiencing synesthesia.

The TED talk on Cymatics was also very interesting. Again they took an obscure topic like synesthesia and presented it and addressed it as a scientific phenomenon. I found some of the presentation to be a little bit arbitrary and far reaching, the starfish/snowflake sound images for example seemed silly at best. But there were really interesting implications of cymatics presented. The dolphin bit about capturing their language in a system of visual representations to better understand their communication was great. Also the installation segment where participants could actively manipulate and see sound presented on the surface of water sounds incredible. In general though, I think its great that scientists are taking a topic like Cymatics and exploring its potential in every way possible.

Reactions to Film and Class

In the beginning of the film to about the middle I found it mostly just repetitive and annoying. I wanted to see more of the image, but I was only allowed to see really fast paced images that flickered on the screen for only a moment and then switched to black. By the end of the film however, I began to enjoy it. The animations grew more complex and my interest in the film was brought back. The animations were still very fast paced but they took up a larger portion of the screen and the fades to black were less frequent. The sound too annoyed me in the beginning. It seemed jarring and unfitting with the visuals, but as the animations grew more complex the music seemed to compliment it more.

I’m very excited to be taking 6x1. I’ve heard great things about this class and I can’t wait to learn all of the techniques we will workshop. I’ve never really considered myself an experimental filmmaker as I usually stick to documentary production classes and films but I think I will find a way to incorporate the techniques I learn in this class into my other projects. Already we have began workshopping camera less filmmaking techniques where we have scratched, punched holes out of, and cut up film in order to manually manipulate the image. I completely trashed my film strip and I am excited to see it on the projector today. It was a lot of fun working on film this way, as normally you’re supposed to treat film with care and respect, here we got to wreck it to the point where the original image (50s looking health video) is almost recognizable.