Molotov Man + Influence Article

This discussion is one that has interested me greatly. I'm a big fan of work like Humament or like William S Borroughs, where the artist cuts up and recontextualizes another person's words. I've engaged in work like this: photoshop collages, music mash ups, making poetry out of a page of a novel by painting over what I don't want to be read, etc. While these are art forms of recontextualiztion, which exist on the fringes of the artistic world and would probably be approved of by anyone interested in their form, there is a more general discussion of plagiarism and originality that bugs me as an artist. For me, and this is not an opinion or a suspicion but a blatant fact, everything that comes out of an artist has a source. Every story we imagine, every word we put on paper, every vision we see in our minds has a source somewhere else. Just as we are taught language, mathmatics, etc., we must learn creativity through slow absorption of creative methods. I remember a specific film class where the teacher asked where does creativity come from, as if there were a text book answer for it. And indeed, as people were submitting answers, it was clear that he was looking for a right answer, not individual opinions. Someone said from life experiences, the teacher liked this answer. I said from other art, the teacher did not like this answer. To me this simply demonstrates fear, some ingrained aversion to unoriginality that manifests itself in denying the vast influence, or influence in any cpacity, of other artists. As if there's any difference in finding creativity in life experiences or in other art. It's the same thing and certainly for scholars of an art form what has come before and after will be hugely impactful. But the teacher did not want to acknowlegde this fact. Which is funny to me because almost ever screenplay in that class was a genre film, following very strict genre conventions. People are bewildering.

Ideas for 48 hour video race

My initial ideas are to create some kind of claymation, stop motion, cut-out animation type thing and take pictures of it with a still camera. This seems a little tame but always wanted to make a film in this medium but I usually get distracted from actually doing it. If I can think of a more interesting medium by which to capture the images I may reconsider but i ccan't really think of anything. Nothing incredibly interetsting anyway. I could always scan images directly onto my printer. I would certainly need to do a test run before hand because that could be really difficult and infesible. But my plan for the time being is to use a still camera and make the subject matter, the materials, etc. in front of the camera really interesting. I've never really done any kind f animation before so I feel very drawn to doing this as a stop motion kind of thing and since this film would have a time limit I would have to push myself, my attention span, my patience in a big way and wouldn't be able to stop whenever I got bored. Boredom is a curse for artists, and for appreciators of art. If you never give something your full attention because it doesn't meet you halfway and walk away from it saying it sucked, that it was boring and slow, you'll only experience about 5% of the art in the world, and all of that will be thr formulted recycled crap that they know you'll like because you liked the exact same thing last year under a different title. Also, people who demand that the art they intake fulfill certain requiremtents are pompous assholes. Art is not a personal thrill ride, it is a powerful rhetorical medium and if you aren't open to experience art you haven't experienced before, to feel things you don't particularly want to feel, to allow the artist to create a story, images, a message, emotions, ideas then the amount of what you'l feel, experience, and learn from art is practically nothing except those tiny little thrills you already know you want. This relegates art to a position no better than pornography, in one degree or another. And, now that that side note is over, I hope that this porject will cure some of my boredom in the animation process and open me up to new methods of creation that are not limited by my American, facebook-generation attention span.