ETHAN HARNISCH

  (I suggest freezeframing it occasionally and seeing what you get.) My video is a video and a video first, and a video only.    Somewhat branching from my photo series, I went back to the trees for my video project. The video consists of layering various slowed down or sped up footage, with a gradual ascending into the complete stack of footage and a somewhat mirrored tapering off of layers back down to the most slowed-down footage.      I had many ideas for the final product, all consisting of the same sort of footage and continuing my interest in the qualities that throwaway media has (such as blurry images and footage). Once I had enough shots to work with, I tried at a few different ideas, ultimately ending up where I've done videowork before: on my phone. The entire product was completely edited and finished on my phone across three different free editing apps, which resulted in a unique degredation of resolution and quality (this or something like it...

      Each photo in my "Up River / The Moment Before or After" series can stand on their own as glowing and blurry fields of view. Collected in a book layout, however, the photos start to take on even more complex qualities, with a new "bigger picture" perspective on every photo, as well as a new aspect of percieving possible or invented relationships between photos. There is no true connection to these photos, other than they were my favorite 20 out of around 200.      The book itself I wanted to keep very simple, with the only thing standing out being alternation between one photo on a spread (with the other page left blank), or two paired together. I tried to find the best photos to pair together and the best to stand alone, as well as the order of photos and the experience of it all flipping through each page. The pages themselves are all black background, making the glow between the leaves stand out even more. I equally considered a white background, l...

     John Cage's approached everything he did with a Zen sensibility that went through every aspect of his process and performances. From his earlier works making an assortment of household sounds, to his grander more tech-based works involving large amounts of interaction between performers and technology, to his edible drawings and other physical works, it all is with this idea that every resource and interaction is equal and that his only role in it is to set it up. He compared composing music or any form of art to a camera, and any performance of it is the act of taking a picture. All you can do is set up what you want and natural probability and chance will take the rest.       In the context of new media and McLuhan, the philosophy he brought to his scene in art and composing lines up with McLuhan's description of technology's disruption of media and life as "allatonceness", just that Cage's philosophy (Zen-Buddhism) already dealt with that on a ...

Everything is sounds, organized sounds are music, and everything in between is noise. My piece is a minute-thirty seconds. It is mostly noise, with a pulsing submerged percussion keeping it from falling apart violently.  It was created all by ear on a Korg Monotron Delay, a $40 analog synth about the size of a pack of cigarettes. By the nature of my process and the nature of analog synthesizers, I could not recreate it if I tried.  Noise allows a wide variety of chaos in its sounds, and is neither limited by nor exluded from the intelligent structures that music theory can provide. John Cage's attitude about music and sound understands the restricting and freeing aspects of music theory and knows that these rules, while empowering, also inherently contain and organize.  To avoid this, however, a drone can be used. Drone makes every pattern of music into one single, possibly pulsing noise, to which any amount of mutation can occur. The drone frees noise from music, while a...

"Up River / One Exposure Left"  Flickr link:  https://flic.kr/s/aHsmR3ba8Y Picture this: You are the photographer on a boat, with a crew heading deep into the jungle upriver to a destination you were not told. You  were  told, however, to take as many pictures as you can with a poorly kept camera of the sights you see along the way - most of it being more jungle. The camera's setting dials are sticky, and your shots end up being mostly blurry, overexposed images of green and white. You can barely recognize what's in every shot, but you know each one strangely well because they capture the anxiety of being on that boat, darting your eyes back and forth along the tree line on either side of you, looking for movement. These blurry photos capture the emotion you felt and technically everything you saw, but just as scared as you. The camera doesn't know they're bad, so they're taken anyways. These are the throwaway shots; ones that aren't usable but capture...

    "Nothing can be further from the spirit of new technology than 'a place for everything and everything in its place'. You can't go home again" (McLuhan 16).      In my senior year of high school, I submitted my series for AP studio art as a set of ten large scale scribbles, technically, which were all taken from rough sketches I had done throughout the year. Using a tiny viewfinder, about a centimeter across, I mapped out each sketch finding my favorite views, photographing them, and gradually drawing them larger and larger until the gestures had become mapped into my hand and I could recreate them practically from memory. Editing each in their own way based on their personalities, my series was done, conjoined just by a loose process, devoid of any tangible themes. A kid even tried to insult me online by calling me "Mr. Charcoal Scribbler", so I changed my username to that. At the time I was very self-conscious about my art, particularly the absurdi...