Article #1

I have been following a the website cinema-scope.com over the last few weeks and have come across many interesting articles. About a week ago, I read one article that really fascinated me, because I really didn’t understand it at first and needed to read it over a few times. The format of this article is very strange and not conventional at all. The article is called “Manny Farber and All That Jazz,” written by Jean-Pierre Gorin. The article is about how in 2006, Jean-Pierre Gorin held a tribute for the late writer and painter, Manny Farber. This tribute was held at the University of California, San Diego. The article starts off in a very convention way, a description of the night and the events that occurred. Gorin states, “An exhaustive affair, the evening included a panel discussion, live music and excerpts from various Farber films.”

The main presentation of the of the night was something I have never heard of, a 4K technology presentation of 13 of Manny’s paintings. The 4K technology is a military mapping technology and showed these paintings from a digitally created perspective that was the same as Manny’s, as he painted them. That sounds really cool. To be able to experience a piece of art, the same way the painter did, that’s a completely new idea in the world of interactive art and really needs to be build upon and expanded more, in my opinion. Now, as I stated, I was really fascinated by this article because of the format. After this paragraph of introducing what happened that night, Gorin has included what was handed out to the spectators of this tribute. I thought that was an interesting choice because there really only one paragraph in this article, that is like an article. The rest is essentially just a list of what Gorin wants the people to get out of this night and what he is trying to accomplish with this tribute. I’m not sure if I’ve ever really seen that before in a publication and I thought it was a bit confusing, but it worked There are 10 different, as Gorin puts it ‘precepts,’ that he has written for these people. They are written a very interesting way. He repeats phrases a lot to get points across. For example the second precept begins, “Let the paintings be seen. Let the paintings be seen. Let the paintings be seen.” he wants these people to look and enjoy these paintings. He doesn’t want them to just look and be like, oh yeah, that looks nice. He wants them to really look at them. And with the 4K technology, he wants these people to experience the painting and truly get their minds around it. That’s what I really liked about these precepts, was that Gorin would go into a lot of detail about Manny and what we should be looking at in these pieces. However, the way it is written, there is an overriding message of just enjoy these paintings and really look at them and appreciate them for the beauty that they are. Precept 8 really explains this well, “There is a fundamental playfulness and pervading sense of pleasure that every inch of a Farber painting or article communicates. Try to get some of it in the way this evening will function.”