Art & Technology

Eamonn Keenan Art 211 Fall 2017 Opera Assignment Die Walküre Response             In the opera, Die Walküre, stories are told from Norse Mythology.   Stories of love, betrayal, and hardships are told in 3 Acts that add to a total of 3 hours and 56 minutes.   Considering it was my first opera I have ever watched in full I will say it definitely had interesting moments throughout.   The specific opera that I watched used a semi-circle, wooden ramp as a stage that curled around the orchestra.   They also used minimal props, which I found to force the viewer to use their imagination throughout the Acts.             For Act 1, We have a story about Sigmund, a Norse Mythology hero, who is travelling through a storm and is wounded.   He passes out in a yard from exhaustion and is discovered by Hunding’s wife, Sieglinde.   Whether it is from pure boredom or is truly sincere, she has an attraction to Sigmund.   He tells her he was wounded in a battle and was fleeing from enemies.  

     After watching one of the clips for "Sound of Music" I picked up on a few that changes in the progression of technology in performance art.  The clip that I saw was filmed on a camera in what seemed like sometime in the 1960's.  The ability to use a better camera than what was used to record operas already helps the ability to better tell the story.      Also, the performance was taken it what appeared to be a closed set.  To be able to control a setting from all angles and use multiple cameras creates a depth in the room that could not be done in opera.  They also were able to create the appearance of the weather outside the set because of it being a closed set, just furthering the ability to suspend disbelief while watching.      The last thing I noticed was that the content of the broadway was more upbeat than what we had previously seen with operas.  In "Sound of Music" the woman is singing to children about all the things that make her happy while th

        In  Pjotr Sapegin’s Madama Butterfly animation,  there is a woman who meets a sailor and she falls madly in love with him.  They sleep together, which was oddly graphic, in a scene that is meant to be romantic.  The sailor then leaves and the girl is left with his hat and record player.  She then finds out in an oddly portrayed way that she is pregnant and her world is filled with joy again as she waits for her sailor to return.  When the sailor does return the girl waits with her child for him to climb the hill up to her again.  After waiting all day and night he finally returns in a car.  The car ends up filled with his assumed wife and other children and they take the girl's child from her.  As they travel off the girl is heartbroken.  She thought she had a sailor coming home to her and her child to create a family, but ends up all alone with nothing.  She then takes her own life and gets blown away with the breeze.  As you see her in what is assumed the afterlife she is

For this project, I was assigned to take two items and combine them to create an entirely new item.  I decided to take a tennis ball and tennis racket to create an apple.  I went into photoshop and took .png files of a racket and tennis ball and added them to a file.  From there, I used a layer mask to constructively edit the racket into looking like an apple stem.  I then added in a tennis ball as the apple, but tried to add a red layer mask on top to make it seem like more of an apple.   That failed, but I feel that is due to my color blindness.  To finish it off I created an eclipse layer to appear as the shadow for the apple to give the image depth.  This project definitely tested my creativity, but also my time management skills.  Due to the fact that Hurricane Irma hit, I had to balance schoolwork deadlines with the evacuation deadlines that I had.  Overall I am proud of this project.  I feel that I express an understanding of the assignment, which is to take two items and cre

     In the video, "Microbiologist Raul Cuero PhD on Sparking Creativity on Living Smart with Patricia Gras.mpg" on Youtube, the story follows Raul Cuero and his life growing up in Columbia.  Raul grew up in a struggling environment and reached a higher education through basketball.  During his higher education, he experienced stereotyping that someone of his physical stature and inability to speak the language would not be an educated type.  This adversity only fueled him, pushing him to become a microbiologist.      In the one on one interview, Cuero speaks on how educating himself helped him travel and experience it all.  He talks specifically about how his book helped him reach more people and that they all at first, felt he was from a privileged background.  Cuero also speaks about when he was in athletics, people thought the opposite of him.  Thinking that he was not educated.  He then talks about becoming universal, a lesson he learned from these adversities.  When yo