[organ trippers (wat?)]

This is a new year for this blog I am forced to write at the expense of my teachers beating me within an inch of my life (or something like that, I don't really listen) So lets welcome in the new year with pazazz.

great, now that we have all that excitement out of the way, we can get down to the boring-err, very important and informative... stuff? that we are supposed to be writing about.

Also, a technical note: due to technical problems, involving my lack of internet, my roomate's not lack of internet and a flying space-monkey (don't ask, the whole situation is rather confusing), I am unable to post my photo's with my text. Therefore, I will post two separate articles, one on my thoughts, other with photos.

And now if you will raise your seatbacks to the upright position, and raise your tray tables up, we will begin making our descent from the air of my brain to actually talking about important things like....

THE REUTER ORGAN COMPANY

I have very little interest in mass production. It is great for toothbrushes and staplers. I don't want to build those. And so, to visit a company that creates these massive structures unique to each location in house from start to finish was an inspiration. How unique each of their pieces fit each client's needs declares their excellence of craft. And what the heck-I love classical music! 

Within the first few minutes of our tour, we learned that very little has changed since the invention of the modern pipe organ (Organs have apparently been around since the Greeks, but the organ we know today was pioneered in the 1700's). Main changes include the use of electricity to power the system, an idea which the Reuter company pioneered in 1917. The client base has remained static as well, as the main consumers of organs are firstly Churches, and then concert halls, universities, and occasionally very rich private owners. 

Organs are highly complex systems. The Keys that are played are simply a tiny fraction of all the movements happening behind the shutters. Those keys are housed in the console, the cockpit of the organ. The modern organ uses electrical signals sent down fiberoptic wire to trigger sound. The signals travel to the wind chest and reservoir. The signal triggers a specific flap to release air into a single pipe, which then produces a tone. 

For every specific sound an organ makes, 60 separate pipes must be manufactured. Larger organs can house up to 50 sets of pipes, making for thousands of pipes in each organ. 

The housing, cockpit, resivoir, etc. are all made of wood. For the wind chest, Poplar wood is used because of it's lack of knots, better for holding in air. Outsides and finishing woods vary upon color and taste.

All the wood is stored in house, where it is milled per project. It is then taken to the shop to be finished. More complicated work, such as the holes cut for the wind-chest and the ornamental work are cut with a CNC router, which apparently sounds like a jet taking off, so you know the thing is damn cool. 

Reuter Organ company is the only company to still produce their own organ keys. All are a base layer of wood, and are then overlayed in plastic, bone or finished as plain wood. 

Pipes that are over four feet long are rolled sheets of either copper or zinc, and finished with either automotive paint, varnish, or specifically for copper, flamed (a technique which includes exposing the copper to flame) smaller pipes are fashioned from a smelting of lead and tin, done in shop using a floating method. Pipes are all fashioned by hand, due to the difference in size of each pipe.

The final variant is valves, which are fashioned from sheep leather. These valves attach the pipe to the reservoir The reservoir is also lined with kangaroo leather, which stretches in two directions.  

In the final stages, the whole organ is constructed in house for a trial run, and then deconstructed and shipped to its new home.

Aren't organs cool? I'm done.

[Rips of Reality]

When we view photographs, we tend to think of them always telling the whole picture (no pun intended). We pull them out of context, using them to give us the complete spectrum of a situation. If a photograph is altered, or the situation posed for the photo, we tend to think of the picture as being false. Errol Morris, in his interview with The Guardian, brings up a good point: all photographs are posed. "There is always an elephant outside the frame." Errol says. In other words, the photographer decides for us what is important to see, and what is not. He decides at what point his subjects are ready to be viewed. 

This is important an important counter to the idea that photographs tell the truth, especially in todays society, where photographs can be so easily altered. Photographs, while helpful tools, leave out the most important part of understanding a situation; the context. On a basic level, we leave out the surroundings. Even if a whole room is photographed, we leave out the hallway, the outside, the neighborhood it's in. Secondly, we leave out every other sensation we have; we cannot visit the room because we cannot smell the air, touch the furniture, perhaps taste the food. Finally, we cannot understand the social aspects, the context of experience. When one visits a place, he or she has an interaction that they experience. In some sense they connect themselves through a mental record to that room. When we view a picture as the whole picture, we are missing out on those little details we might notice if we were in the room, those things only we would care about. 

[Spencer Art Museum Visit]

If I am being perfectly honest, I was exausted when I went to the Spencer. I spent the morning pumping myself with caffein and blasting Kanye West to stay awake. However, three objects stuck out to me during my visit.

The first was the Chinese sculpture of all the broken pots glued together. This technically wasn't apart of the official tour, but this piece made me rethink the definition of collage, expanding it beyond just the basics perhaps.

The second was the image of all the movie screens. The amount of emotion displayed through the repetition of blank space shocked me. I was filled by the overwhelming sense of the passing of time, and that while things are growing, we are leaving behind so much beauty.

The third photo that stuck out to me was of the man in the museum, standing in the crosshairs of cupid's arrow (or rather a statue of cupid). This to me was first of all funny, but secondly showed me about implied line, a theme I would like to apply to my artwork, seeing as my current piece is based on relationship and division.

Also, the fact that the guy in the arctic picture wasn't actually wearing any pants was really funny.

[PHOTOGRAPHY IS EVERYWHERE. HIDE YOUR CHILDREN & FAMILIES.]

Photography, as I said in my past essay, is everywhere. What we need to realize is that it does not just exist, but rather is active. Photography shapes your interest in the world around you. For instance, advertisements are meant to make you want something by showing you why you should want it. Photographs are constantly changing our perception of the world.

There are three main ways in which we interact with photos: we take them, we view them, and we use them. In taking them, we are deeming a moment to be memorable. This changes our understanding of a moment in  time. Whether the moments before were leading up to the taking of the picture (like in food advertising or a family picture), or the photographer simply snapped a picture of an event, the moment was deemed necessary to be remembered.

That moment then is defined by the photo. The reality of that moment is the photograph, captured forever. We view photo's as reality, which is not always the case. Family photos come under my particular scrutiny, showing the "happy family". Are those memories actually happy? There are times we view an image and are not fooled by this perceived reality. For instance, a McDonalds ad of a big, juicy hamburger on the side of a truck. Firstly, we know burgers are never as big as the side of the truck. Secondly, we know a McDonalds burger won't ever look that good. However, we still get hungry sometimes.

The third way we interact with a photo is for use. Whether an advertiser uses the picture of the hamburger to make us hungry, or an old woman uses a picture of her younger self to relive her old days, we use photos to draw up the past or the present and rearrange it to suit us better. We rely on photos to reafirm the truth, remind us of a loved one, restore our faith in humanity, and so on.

[Vivian Maire]

[Sontag's World of Photography]

Photography has been encroaching on our world for the past 200 years, finding it's way into the pockets of American all over, slowly at first, and now at a dizzying rate. It's hard to imagine that when I was first born, cameras took pictures on film, and no one had even imagined putting a camera in a cell phone. By the time I had my first phone, however, it already had a camera put in it, which I pretty much used to try and get selfies with girls I had crushes on. Now, at the age of twenty, I'm using a professional-grade digital DSLR, with more RAM than an 80's computer to take photo's like this:

(Completely shameless plug for the summer project I'm working on)

Photography has taken over. It has saturated every area of our modern world: art, music, surveillance, teaching, training, etc. 

When one steps back and looks at this from a sort of "cosmic view", it becomes rather disturbing. The idea that we take snapshots of time, like this one:

(another shameless plug for my summer project)

and it becomes a sort of reality to us is strange. And when we look at the scope of what is photographed, which at this point (thanks to Google Earth) is everything, photography can suddenly seem like a rather scary subject. 

This seems to the Sontag's tone (besides her pretentious verbage); a wariness of the effect of photography on humanity. But I believe her scope is muddled; she is not clear on her intentions from the beginning, and thus her voice becomes lost in the mix. Is she against photography, like it seems at the beginning of her paragraph? ("Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth." -Sontag, 1). Or does she just wish photography would stay an art. Perhaps I'm just bad at reading (a probability), but it seems Sontag has mixed feelings about the use of photography. 

This is, of course, understandable. Because of the depths to which photography has permeated our world, it is hard to get a conclusive read on it's effects. Photography is used in every field; there are no control groups available. So photography becomes muddled and confusing.

Ultimately, this makes me feel uneasy. What is photography doing to us, as a society, as individuals, as people in relationship, etc. It's difficult to see the effects, because we swim in the water. 

So, in conclusion to this rambling, I guess I'll just quote Phillip Greenspun; "Anyway, People take Pictures."

[A Viewer's Guide to Photography]

I would be a liar if I told you that at the beginning of reading this essay, I felt like Robin Williams from Dead Poets Society, urging the students to rip from their textbooks the analysis section of poetry. But then again that's just me.

The difficulty of art, whether it be photography or painting or sculpture or performance, is that there really is no way to put a worthy number on it. Or perhaps, there are too many ways of seeing it to put a value on it. There are rules in art; guidelines of aesthetics to help us know what is most pleasing to the eye, what draws us most inward. Sometimes, the artist wants to do the opposite of that, their intention to show repugnance and hatred. This is where art becomes difficult to give worth to: in that it has both objective and subjective elements.

Objectively, it is made up of forms. We can objectively describe the medium, shape, color, line, render quality, etc. We can also objectively show objects (or at least their representation). Subjectively, however, art is made up of ideas, feelings, intentions, the artist's perspective, etc.

Things get more difficult when the benefits of art are subjective. Some look at a Mark Rothko painting and can walk away unfazed, even bored. Others are moved to tears, and are filled with great emotion.

This is where learning to analyze art is important. Learning to approach it in such a manner that you reserve all judgement till after you complete the process of examination. Then, and only then can you examine a picture for what it is.