Collage Project: Subway Art

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF5E_JDwpos

The theme I chose for my collage is subway art. I meant to juxtapose the feeling one gets from seeing art that is placed there by the MTA in specific subway stations with a vision behind it, to the colder feeling one gets at the sight of the vandalization that is now considered a form of art. When I started going out with the intention to work on this project, I found that my original ideas were wrong. My ideas of “intentional” and “unintentional” art mixed together and I began to appreciate the two equally. I decided that I should switch my focus to try to show the viewer how these two forms of art are quite similar. This would be a little harder to pull off then my first goal: many of my graffiti pictures were taken by sticking my camera out of the window of a train cart in the tunnels and blindly taking pictures to review later and find the art there. These all naturally give a darker feeling than the usually cheery art the MTA provides. How could I  show that these two were the same when the look of my photos was inherently different?

I thought that a way to connect the two and get rid of this disjointed feeling could be to fade in and out of color. By this I mean that the organization of my video is as follows: first my series of MTA art photos which start in full color and fade into black and white, then my pedestrian art begins which starts in black and white and slowly comes back into color for the ending. I think that my choice of playing with the coloring narrows the distinction between the two forms.

The song I chose to put in the background is called She Moves She by Four Tet. I knew I would want something instrumental because words would likely grab the viewers attention away from the photos I wanted to show. But I still had a lot of trouble choosing the right song: I originally wanted to insert a Steve Reich piece which starts with a clarinet and adds 12 more pre-recorded clarinets that gradually build up because it sounded like something I would hear in a train station, but when I showed it to friends they found the piece annoying. I decided to go with something less repetitive and more disjointed and random- this “folktronica” piece I think captures more of the essence of what I wanted to play in the background, which is an exotic but simple piece that you’d think you’d never hear anywhere else.

I think my decision to make this collage a video was a successful one. I thought it would be another challenge to put the video together, since I am technologically challenged and still not used to Mac products. I edited and cropped the photos as I could first and then started to put the video together. Surprisingly, iMovie was easy to use and pretty self explanatory, I got the hang of it right away and there wasn’t much else to do once I placed in the photos I wanted and controlled the panning and time that each picture would take up because I thought the collage would have more power in simplicity.