This project stemmed from the question of how digital media can be the source of art materials.
Digital media as an art material
Since digital media is ubiquitously embedded in our daily life, Artists actively examine the digital media landscape and incorporate its feature into their work. The scope of artworks relating to digital media is wide and broad, ranging from using digital media as a platform to using it as a subject of their work.
Wait! If you want to know more about art works rleating to Digital media, here is the link for more infos. 1. Digital & Media Art 2. Errik Kessel 3. Creative Coding as an artistic practice for artists and designers
As a student who studies fine art, I am also interested in how digital media can be part of my art practices. Here, the project <The Act of Cleaning ver 2> started with the question of if digital media content can be the main source of my work. With the question, I decided to re-make the sound part from the video the Act of Cleaning made in 2021.
The Act of cleaning – Sound part
During one of my classes called, Music and Technology, I was intrigued by the fact that technological development allows people to make music without actual instruments. I was chewing on the fact over and over, and here, my idea comes up, what if I only use existing digital sounds existing on youtube and make some sound pieces out of them?
Here, I chose 4 commercial videos on youtube and extracted sound from there.
Wait! are you curious which youtube video that I used? 1. Mc donald commercial advertisement 2. Ferrero Rocher commercial advertisement 3. Lindor commercial advertisement 4. Starbucks commercial advertisement
All the videos are from the multinational corporation’s commercial advertisement which represents hyper-consumerist capitalism, seducing viewers to desire what they present.
By rearranging the sequence of the sounds from the 4 videos, I completely distorted all sounds. Eventually, It is not recognizable if the sound is from which brand anymore. By doing so, I create something completely new out of these 4 sounds.
The act of cleaning – Visual part
The original video, titled The Act of Cleaning, is about how natural phenomena of one’s body become the target of one’s hyper-awareness, which leads to hyper-control over the body.
The video mainly consists of two parts, the first part shows butter melting down in front of the camera and the other part shows butter being absorbed into the clothes. The butter, which is taking up space, is constantly melting, and, as a result, is grubby and sticky. This is a visual metaphor for how I see my body.
With the sound sources that I extracted from the digital media, I want to connect the discording relationship with my body to the commercialized ‘perfect body’ which often media(or commercial advertisement) depicts as desirable.
I want the sound pieces. that I made, to add a more dark ambient atmosphere to the sound as well as the conceptual layer, the fact that these sounds are extracted from the commercial ads, to the video.
Art and digital media
With my personal interest, during this course Digital Media and Society, I was researching a lot the link between art and digital media. Here, I see this project The Act of cleaning as the visual result of my research. If you have any feedback or comment about the work that I made, please feel free to share with me!
I am also curious to know more about artworks using digital media actively.
your video was really fascinating, and the reasons behind making it also corresponded well with the visuals and the sound so thank you for sharing it! When you wrote that you sampled the sounds from advertisements, I started trying to listen more closely, but the interesting thing to me is how, even without being able to hear the adverts because of distortion, the sound piece still communicates some dystopian, industrial quality. Since you have remade the sound piece in the past, will it change again or is this its final form?
It is an amazing and experimental work! The sound piece are full of imagination and vitality, I feel there is some beast in the background and my heart beats become higher and higher. It reveals the sensual and emotional possibilities of normal sounds and objects, as long as you have hyper-sensibility. I really recommend you kept working on this path of experiments and develop it into more systematic art/sound pieces. Looking forward to it!