Dyanell Stokes

In the earlier days of the course, my idea for this project was to create a video displaying the many themes and ideas of art movements corresponding to the timeline of topics taught in the class. However, with the prospect of copyright, I had to take this idea and condense it into something more manageable for me to create through my own means. So rather than simply displaying all of these movements and talking about them in a video, I decided to instead focus on only two or three.

My piece visualizes common themes presented in the Dadaist, Futurist, and Surrealist art movements. To name a few, these would include war, progress, dynamism, and speed. When I first set about creating the imagery for the video, I focused on futurism, allowing me to take a straightforward approach of using my editing and royalty-free imagery to display things like robotics, computers, and cars. However, I really wanted to explore what my new video editing software could do. Reeling in Dadaism and Surrealism would allow me to truly work with the software because I would have to try and convey imagery that was a bit more absurd and even nonsensical, yet not devoid of thought.

The soundtrack was created in the style of drum and bass. I felt that this would help convey the futuristic and progressive themes of my piece. The cutting edge sound, along with inspiration from pieces like Picasso’s deconstruction of the female form in “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” and “Girl With a Mandolin” led me to title my piece and the track itself, “Gynoid”, referring to a female-presenting robotic humanoid. I also paid homage to this inspiration in the video itself, displaying a female-presenting robot on a television screen dancing in a way that a female human can.

All in all, while the piece isn’t exceptionally long, it did take a lot of time considering that I was navigating a new software that provided fewer limitations and rules. Nevertheless despite this challenge, creating this piece was a lot of fun, and I am even more grateful for everything going to plan!