The Sheep Market - Aaron Koblin

‘The Sheep Market’ by Aaron Koblin is basically a series of ten thousands images of sheep drawn by online workers of AMT (Amazon Mechanical Turks). The visitors can view each sheep and buy them on stickers or have them fill their field of vision as part of gallery installation.

In my opinion, the project represents the bad side of capitalist society. What AMT workers do is to answer Amazon customer’s question rather than the machines answering them. They get paid a few cents for each answer and Koblin asked them to draw sheep facing left. Sheep is often used as a symbol of the pastoral in art. Pastoral illustrates the values of the sophisticated by the unsophisticated and reinforces the universal rightness of their audience's values and an immanent apologia for wealth, power and inequality. The project portrays the same thing and also foreshadows the grim future of effective labour.

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The Furtherfield Review
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=220

The Sheep Market
http://www.thesheepmarket.com/

Montage I

I wanted to criticize MTV and kids from its famous show, 'Super Sweet Sixteen.' They are spoiled, have big attitude, and whine about everything. They do not even know what they are talking about. One girl from the show said Paris Hilton is her role model. Everyone from the show seems to worship Paris Hilton. I put her face on the Statue of Liberty and the kids from the show around her to depict it. Above them are people chanting for communist revolution. These kids are getting Mercedes-Benz, BMWs for their presents but can't even pass the writing part of permit exam. This seems unfair to me because their parents are rich, it doesn't give them rights to spend all that money to waste rather than go to charity or some other good use.

Montage II

My first intension was to contrast between people with aneraxia and African orphans dying from starvation. Mindset of the people with aneraxia wanted to have better figure and causes them to have such issues. They waste food everyday. Their one meal could be a week worth food for the orphans. This piece could be reinterpreted as people who do not appreciate what they have and always want better things while there are people who are desperate to get a little things.

Elephants Dream - The Blender Foundation

Blender project announced their production of short animated film, Elephant Dream, in 2005 and the film is released on DVD and Bit Torrent Download in 2006. Rather than following Disney's Pixar fantasy, Blender Project used European social-realist surrealist fantasy for film's visual. Its modeling, texture, set design, lighting source, and camera works make this film a piece of perfect art work. However, the characters' movement is somewhat awkward and makes it more like in-game animation.

The most significant thing about this project is the license which the film is released under: BSD-Style Creative Commons "attribution only" BY license. This allows the viewers who are not comfortable with character animations to use source files for the movie and improve animation using their skills.

The story sounds confusing and lame. However, the viewers' interaction with the movie seems awesome. I am interested in the graphic animations and if I get the chance I would like to watch the movie and tweak it a little bit to see how much better I can make this film.


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Furtherfiled Review
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=197

Elephan Dream
http://orange.blender.org/

Super Sweet Sixteen and Unicef

I made this project to show how spolied the children from the show are. While there are people dying from hunger on the other side of the earth, these brats always ask for better things. They could have done some decent deeds by donating half the money they spent on the party.

The Lost Biology of Silent Hill by ]]MEZ[[

Silent Hill is a title of a famous game with four sequels (total of five versions). It is looking to expand its audience range by making a movie version of it. The storyline of the game is basically solving multiple puzzles in order to escape from an army of zombies. Its various game elements such as sound and visual effects produce introspective thrill-connection.

The movie version, rather than emphasizing on the universal theme of Hollywood, plays out through game projections and is incrementally driven by a mixture of anticipatory/reactive adrenalin spike-&-pump. They do so by making film characters one of NPCs of the game which means no character development and just running away from the monsters.

The most important factor of the movie is the rewritten conception of ordered biology. The writers flip the gender roles of the characters. The woman protagonist, Rose, takes the role of hero, which was taken by male characters in game versions, and saves her daughter. However, Chris, Rose’s husband, falls asleep while the rest of his family is going through tough journey.

I, a maniac gamer, do not think of flipped gender roles. The movie is bad and ruins the reputation that the game version had created. Several games with zombies in it have turned into movies such as Resident Evil and House of the Dead. No matter how important the messages inside the movies are important, they were awful. The movie producers should leave games alone and create their own story. Two cents from a crazy gamer…

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Furtherfield Review
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=203

Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5mT5LhbRJw&mode=related&search=

Oil Standard by Michael Mandiberg

Oil Standard is a Firefox plug-in developed by Michael Mandiberg. The program replaces dollars shown on the web browser with its equivalent price in barrels of oil. Not only that, the project retrieves any oil-related news from across the Internet. It allows the prices to rise and fall in real-time, depending on the fluctuation of the commodities exchange.

This project could be interpreted in many ways. One possible way is the educational purpose because of its technological resources while another is making a social and political comment. Using oil as his subject, Mandiberg allows its viewers to link the ongoing issues of money, war, pollution, and so on.

I never got a chance to try it out, but I think it is very interesting project. Since the artist did not express his purpose of making this project, I do not know what this project is about. The fact the artist use oil as his subject makes it interesting, but the artist letting the viewers to set their own interpretation makes it more enjoyable. My takes on the project is that the rising price of oil since War on terror and Katrina and the Bush Administration's fault for not taking care of it.

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Furtherfield Review
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=183

Oil Standard
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=183