https://drive.google.com/open?id=1S2fhjPyJQLPiFm4S9QceJ36xFtzpBqnS

1. What was the quality of your attendance and participation?

I definitely participated a lot in this class. I tried to add my opinion and point of view to every discussion. I tend to be very outspoken, so I tried to add my two cents without monopolizing the conversation. I believe I missed one class. I tried to attend as much as possible, since this class is important to me. The only time I missed was because I was sick and unable to get out of bed.

2. Support and Collaboration

I was a very good team member, always doing my work on time and urging my teammates to do the same. I usually teamed up with the same people, so we developed good collaboration skills and knew how to actively work with each other in a productive way.

3. Project Work

I spent a lot of time on each video. For the One Minute Interview, I spent over 18 hours editing 1h30 of footage to 1 single minute. This was a very long and difficult process, but I am very happy with the results. I also spent a very long time editing the final video, and I’m proud of how it turned out.

4. Extenuating Circumstances

One problem that I had to overcome was creativity. Naturally, I am a ver creative person. However, sometimes following guidelines can be difficult. It sometimes feels like I have to cram my idea into a box to fit the guidelines. This can be frustrating, like with the One Minute Interview, because I had so much good footage that I had to cut. However, it taught me how to get an idea across and show a concept while also following guidelines and condensing my idea and footage.

Even though Dadaism had an international outreach, in was not very stable. The movement died down post-war when people became optimistic and developed new movements in art and literature such as Surrealism. Dada, as a matter of fact is said to be the beginning of Postmodern Art. Dada is also said to be a main source of inspiration for many anti-art, political and cultural movements since the 1920s. The Situationist International, founded in 1957, was a group of avant-garde artists who gave their critique on Capitalism. They were so effective that their texts, plays and art provoked the biggest upheaval in France’s history. In May 1968 thousands of European workers rioted against the new consumerist lifestyle. These workers felt defeated by ruling classes and their outrage was felt for years. Everysocial class, wage earner, sector of France was impacted by this revolt.

The purpose of this riot was to terminate capitalism and return to more a more communist way of living. The lower class were against group leadership and guiding ideologies. They did not like to be held under someone else’s power. Dada was effective because it reached the people of the lower class, the people who struggled. It was highly followed because it gave these people something to blame their difficulties on. The Situationist International understood that Capitalism had a way of hindering things and tried their best to fight against it. The automobile industry hindered public transport development for years, pharmaceutical companies worked hard to delay cures from coming on market because it would stop their cash flow, an so on…  And as we can see in these examples, capitalism would have the same effects on art, but by being extremely anti-traditional it was harder to stop the growth of art in those years.

Even though Dadaism was short lived, the first avant-garde movement in history is what created the 20^thcentury. All the following movement were offspring of Dada. Surrealism, pop art, Abstraction…. Were influenced by it. If it was directly related to Dada it was in consequence to Dada. We even hold Dadaism responsible for the emergence of Jazz Music. Who can say they invented music with their movement!?

The Dada Manifesto is a short text that was written on July 14, 1916 by Hugo Ball and read the same day at the Waag Hall in Zurich, for the first public Dada party.

In this manifesto, Hugo Ball expresses his opposition to Dada becoming an avant-garde artistic movement. He stayed active in the Dada movement for another six months, but the manifesto created conflict with his friends, notably Tristan Tzara.

Why “Dada”?

“I don’t want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people’s inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own.”

What does Dada represent?

“To make of it an artistic tendency must mean that one is anticipating complications. Dada psychology, dada Germany cum indigestion and fog paroxysm, dada literature, dada bourgeoisie, and yourselves, honoured poets, who are always writing with words but never writing the word itself, who are always writing around the actual point. Dada world war without end, dada revolution without beginning, dada, you friends and also—poets, esteemed sirs, manufacturers, and evangelists.

How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated? By saying dada.”

Basically, the aim of Dada art and activities was both to help to stop the war and to vent frustration with the nationalist and bourgeois conventions that had led to it. Their anti-authoritarian stance made for a complicated movement as they opposed any form of group leadership or guiding ideology. It started as a response to WW1. 

Key characteristics of Dada art:

Dada art is nonsensical to the point of whimsy. Almost all of the people who created it were ferociously serious, though. Abstraction and Expressionism were the main influences on Dada, followed by Cubism and, to a lesser extent, Futurism.

The Shock of Being Seen feat. Sofia Nordman

https://vimeo.com/296468183

The Printing Press

“A Matter of Fact” with James Burke

• Thanks to technology, we can communicate with anyone
• Other people make things you use
• Natural world has been mechanized to fit means of distribution or method of manufacturing
• Up until 1450
  • News was all word-of-mouth (usually from the church)
    • Everyone was isolated to their own city and town (approx. 7 miles)
  • Everything was oral (most people were illiterate)
    • Troubadours would sing songs to remember the past
  • Act of writing was mystical à not many people could write and it only be done in church
    • Monks in monasteries lost manuscripts and books because they could never find what they were looking for (nothing was properly categorized)
  • Black death helped peasants who survived because their work was a rare and highly-payed commodity
    • If you managed to stay in a town long enough, your boss/owner couldn’t force you to come back: you were a free man
  • By 1400, paper was everywhere
    • Indulgence à bought from the church and it gave you penance against the sins you had committed or had yet to commit
      • Not supposed to be affected by commercial side of life
      • Worked on a sliding scale: those who were worth more had to pay more for their indulgence
    • Johannes Gutenberg à credited for creating the printing press
    • 1517à churches were putting out even more indulgences and the money was used to upgrade the churches
      • Fake indulgences were going around
    • Martin Luther created a list of reasons for which indulgences should not be sold
      • Forgiveness should not be sold
      • Luther was the first person to use print to share a widespread message to German civilians
      • Church put his work on a list of prohibited books
    • Print shops became meeting places to share ideas
      • Started by printing Bible
      • Printers were first real capitalists (80 million books in first 40 years)
    • 16^th century herbalist (pharmacist) started the scientific boom by printing pictures (carvings with ink) to identify the plants they were talking about
    • Latin started to die when dictionaries in “modern” languages came out to immortalize language
    • Cross-indexing showed how ideas might interrelate (1+1=3)
    • Thanks to printing, we have a world were “fact” means something new: it is now fluid

How YouTube is Used Around the World