Wednesday 15th October 2014
Scale
Stop making sense - Talking Heads - Psycho Killer. It starts off with just him, his guitar and his beat box lit up on a huge empty stage, making him appear really small in comparison to his surroundings. It's not until the song ends that the rest of the band come on stage and join him.
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| Scale as a ladder, Herod, 2009 |
Scales of context
Small - The body/the page
Medium - The street/the stage
Large - The city/the region
Extra large - The Nation/the world.
"Size determines an object but scale determines art." - Robert Smithson
Martin Creed: Thinking/Not thinking (Work-1090) - different scales of dogs, comparing a large dog to a small dog and you don't realise the size difference until they're both in shot. As a side note, I think the song is really catch.
Much Ado About Nothing (2013) - The director, Joss Whedon, filmed this version of Much Ado in just 12 days, in his own home and let the actors wear their own clothes. It's very small scale but still striking and inventive in the way he's interpreted the play.
Much Ado about Nothing (1993). Compared to the 2013 version, Kenneth Braneth had a huge budget, there is a Hollywood cast and it was actually filmed in Italy. Immediately, there's a clear difference in sense of scale - however, I feel it's different interpretations of the play and so both scales are effective. On a profit and award winning scale though, it's clear that the 1993 Hollywood version is definitely more known and credited for.
The Venetian Carnival, Walking Theatre, 2014. Venice is known for its huge scale annual carnivals, people from all over the world travel to attend the Carnival. The costumes and events are equally huge in scale proportions. They still wear masks, as traditionally they would be word to conceal their identities and spend the whole masquerade under as an anonymous character. In the 13th Century, carnivals would be held in France where the King would trade places with the ‘commoners’ for the event and switch back again once the carnival was over. However, it was ended when the ‘commoners’ didn’t want to give the power back to the King, supporting the Stanford prison experiment in which the students were consumed by having powers and grew these superiority complexes, believing that they were in charge. Masks today also have more sinister purposes today, for example, the hacking group ‘Anonymous’ are a modern day threat whom hack into secretive and classified documents and publicise themselves visually wearing iconic V for Vendetta masks, using fear and this disguise for their benefit.
Father Ted, On holiday. In this episode, Father Ted is trying to explain scale to Dougal by using toy models of animals. "These ones are small, the ones out there are far away."
Costume Scale
Performance area – in the scale of performance it can range from, a small room to a moderate theatre size to an outdoor performance space or street performance to finally a world touring arena sized performance.
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| The Drum, Theatre Royal Plymouth - 175 seats |
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| The Lyric, Theatre Royal Plymouth - 1320 seats |
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| Festival of Lights Parade, Plymouth - outdoors performance |
Batman Live, World Areana Tour 2012 - 15 countries and 28 cities across Europe and South America, performed in 6 languages (English, German, French, Czech, Portuguese and Spanish), seen by over 600,000 people.
Wednesday 1st October 2014
We began the session by walking in to the song 'safety dance' by men without hats, after we finished listening to the song we listened to a tribute YouTube video, 'we can dance' - Hollywood movie dance which consisted of a montage of dance sequences from various Hollywood films which matched the rhythm of safety dance. We observed the movements and costumes and noticed many dance sequences which we didn't really notice before, I found this an interesting start to the lecture.
Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984)
A French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic. Michel was born and raised in France when it was ruled by Nazi Germany.
"my field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being"
Discourse - intellectual conversation
Heterogeneous - different
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| Las Meninas by Diego Velazquez 1656 (The Maids of Honour) |
Diego created an inception or enigma of a painting as he used mirrors to create the illusion that he is painting us, like we are royalty and the royal family are observers. The king and queen of Spain can be seen in the mirror in the background, whom he was commissioned to paint presumably. The size of the canvas we can see Diego painting on is the actual size of the painting we see, also being the only painting he did this size.
In 1957, Pablo Picasso painted Les Meninas 58 times in his own iconic style (below)
Joel Peter Within, Salvador Dali, Gerad Rancinan, Family Guy and others have also recreated Las Meninas.
In his book, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), Foucault talks about the painting (below)
The painting is the opening subject of his book, he continues by talking about the 'gaze' and how the spectator isn't aware of what they're viewing until they notice the mirror because then we realize that we are the subject of the painting. Foucault talks about invisible lines and focus points and expresses the power which Diego has with this painting, confusing the viewers and creating the enigma.
Power - who watches the watchmen?
| Bentham is a utilitarian theorist, believing human beings are intrinsically bound to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and that "good" and "bad" are defined by what is pleasurable and painful: "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we should do." - Bentham, J. 1789, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation In attempt to persue social control, Bentham designed an architectural device he called the Panopticon, which is Greek for "all-seeing". The Panopticon was a universal institution based on the design for a Russian factory that minimised the number of supervisors required, and proposed by Bentham for the design of prisons, workhouses, mental asylums and schools. The cells had no doors and in the centre is an "all seeing" tower in which prisoners can't see in, but watchmen can see out.  "The Panopticon... must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men... Bentham presents it as a particular institution, closed in upon itself... But the Panopticon ... is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system; it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use." - Foucault, M. 1977, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison http://studymore.org.uk/ybenfou.htm There are between 4 million and 5.9 million CCTV surveillance cameras in the UK, according to a new report from the British Security Industry Association (BSIA). In 2008, NBC reported on the UK CCTV 'Big Brother' project: http://youtu.be/7s94Yu_Io1u The film punishment park is another example of giving power to the wrong people and the power being manipulated: http://youtu.be/ywTYbpOJadw (Punishment Park, Peter Watkins, 1971) "Don't tase me bro", during a John Karey speech, a UF student got tasered for asking a question. Supporting the believe that you can't question authority. More shockingly, after the incident the student was almost expelled from his university and had to publicly apologise on television for his behaviour: http://youtu.be/iqAVvlyVbag Madness Madness and Civilization was presented as Foucalt's doctoral thesis in 1960, and was published in 1961. Foucault became a professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1960. In this he correlates the end of the Middle Ages with the disappearance of leprosy: 
Lepers were formerly isolated within the community in special sanatoria. Although the disease of leprosy disappeared, the structures that surrounded it remained. The Ship of fools or Narrenschiff, appeared as leprosy vanished. At this time, places dealt with madmen by sending them away. Foucault says that the Ship of Fools suddenly appeared because of the uneasiness that began at the end of the Middle Ages, madmen were seen as dangerous and ambiguous figures. The Ship also raised a Muslim flag, which during this time, was opposed and shocking.
Research
The Stanford Prison Experiment (1971) -
A Psychologist, Philip Zimbardo, was curious to how captivity affects authorities and inmates in prisons. Zimbardo transformed the Stanford Psychology Department's basement into a mock prisons, subjects volunteered by responding to newspaper ads. If the volunteers passed a test on health and mental health, they were chosen for the experiment, all volunteers were male college students. The students were then divided into 12 guards and 12 prisoners, Zimbardo joined in, acting as the Prison Superintendent. The experiment was scheduled to run for two weeks.
After only one day, every subject went insane. On the second day, the prisoners staged a riot in the mock detention centre, barricading their cells with their beds and taunting the guards. The guards then used fire extinguishers in defence. Some guards began forcing inmates to sleep naked on the concrete floors, restricting the bathroom as a privilege, forced prisoners to do humiliating tasks and had them clean toilets with their bare hands.
Surprisingly, when the prisoners were told they had a chance at parole, and the parole was denied, none of the students asked to drop out of the experiment. Even though none of the students had any legal reason to be imprisoned. Over 50 outside observers witnessed the experiment but did not question the morality until Zimbardo's girlfriend objected. The experiment was stopped after only six days, which the "guards" were disappointed with.
Discourse
Stealers Wheel - Stuck in the middle with you, from the film Reservoir dogs.
Reservoir Dogs - The tipping scene.
A discourse on tipping restaurants, what percentage should you tip at certain places and why do we have to tip at restaurants when we don't tip at fast food places? I think Buschemi's point is well argued, when did we decide it's a moral code to tip places and why do some places add tipping fees onto the bill?
Royale with cheese - Pulp Fiction.
In pulp fiction, they have a discourse about the differences between countries and how in France they call a quarter pounder with cheese a 'Royale with cheese' and they call the Big Mac 'Le Big Mac', discussing how they've made the same thing seem superior. Interestingly in both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, almost straight after these intellectual conversations both resort to the people conversing, shooting and committing violent assaults.
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