Future Artifact

3/13

man i don't know about movies and special effects much but man this movie was realistic. it was such a well made movie. i knew it wasn't a documentary but i wasn't sure if it was real or not.
what this movie made me think was how US uses every issues that disbenefits americans and turn it around to aim at some country that is in bad terms with US. it's clever, but mean. I thought when president cheney ordered carrier to the eastern mediterrainean sea to see if they can pick a fight with syrians. that's what happend at iraq too right? i do believe Saddam was a menace to the iraq people but look at the civil war that is going on in iraq right now, it's just as bad or even worse then when Saddamn was in charge. video was definitely something worth watching.

minutemen march1308

Videos we watched in class today were really interesting. I like the way they were all presented. 'Death of a President' created a believable scenario for one future which could have occurred following the death of George Bush. I agree that I dont know how i would feel if someone made a movie about my death; but i'm pretty sure i'd be more flattered than anything. The idea that government possibly uses tragic situations as reasoning to engage in any type of agenda they have been trying to pursue makes me ...sad. And, on another note, the movie kind of reminded me of 24, the television show. (really good!)
Class was good though; it made me think.

Minute Paper 3/13

I thought the movie that we saw today was really well done. I don't really know if i felt happy or not that he was gone, but its a fictional story and it showed you what could happen if he got assassinated. I am still wondering though what our final project is going to be for this class.

3-13 minute paper

I enjoyed watching the movie today about the possibility of our president being assassinated. Not that I get some sick enjoyment out of the possibility, but it was intriguing to actually see a film that portrays "what could be" in a very realistic manner. Like mark, I agree that it was tastefully done, and I believe that many Americans missed out on a great film. Although, I can't help but think about how I would feel if a film was made about my assassination, already knowing that many.....many people have a problem with the way that I do things. I think that these last few classes have helped me to realize that it is crucial to see "outside of the box" of things and to see past the intended biased scope of subject matter. Good class... as always.

Re: 1 Minute paper 3/13/08

The future i say that word everyday and everyday it has a different meaning. IN a way that such every day is the same but is different. I f you can understand that than you can understand what i think when iam in Candy's class. I think future values is a good thing, to sort of predict what is going to happen or what might happen .  but i feel that if you make positive asumptions than you will get positive reactions. And vice-versa with that being said how can we make the future a better place , and the answer is change like the video about the President getting blasted. It funny because all those actors were in a way kinda of convincing but the reality was still the same when i left the class room . So , but I never voted for that cat and bush is  a cheater . he cheated in 2000 he didnt have to cheat in 2004 though Kerry just sucked at talking about the real issues but im going to make sure that or Generation does it right!!!

Minute Paper (3-13-08)

The first video was a fictional movie entitles "Death of a President"
and to me it was very stimulating. The idea behind the movie's name
itself does not depict it literally, despite the fact that it contains
more documentary principles than to be on a more dramatic and scary
situation. Another idea that relates to this the way I viewed it is
that it is like a political oppression. The idea of political
oppression that Professor Dator discussed in his lecture the other day
and speaking in this sense as shows in the video how activist voiced
their opinion by actions of violent and forceful. Then there were two
small videos that tied back to future jamming, one of them was your own
and this one was very entertaining and lively. The topic is something
that I wouldn't think about it but this is why future jamming is very
unique and special if we constitute ideas that bring out originality
and creativity. Last video is about robotics the background was a total
chaos of environmental destruction and humanity logic.
ruta...

Andrew's Minute Paper 3/13

There was something in class today that I didn't end up saying. While numerous people seemed dissatisfied with the approach taken by the other teacher, with the specific complaint that the media she presented appeared to be biased, I think that an important factor was being ignored. These videos from GNN were not standalone real news pieces, but instead reactions to the biases of the mainstream news. Thus, in a sense, they didn't show both sides for the same reason one doesn't show the opposition's side in a debate, it has already been shown. It seemed to me that these were not meant to be objective so much as a rebuttal or counter argument to the mainstream coverage of a given issue.
One aspect of the video/news story shown in class today that I found particularly interesting was the clear connection to a current issue facing the video game industry. As comes up so often someone commits a violent crime and happens to own a video game, someone brings up the idea that video games are brainwashing people, which this potential future showed a less violent representation of.

3/13 bush is dead?

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEQOvyGbBtY

speaking of controversial... haha everyone should watch the video above. i think you will get a kick out of it.

along the same lines, i had never heard of the "death of a president" before. i am going to agree with everyone and say that i think it was remarkably well 

done. i do feel it is a shame that more people didn't get to see it because of various reasons however, i don't think that it is the radical ideas that need to change. if these ideas were expressed so well everyday from such an uncensored point of view, they wouldn't be such a big idea.

is there a way to make things less invasive to maximize the impact of an underlying theme? i think the controversy should increase, then maybe it wouldn't be that controversial anymore.

with the movie that we watched today, i am thinking maybe they should have just called it something else and slipped it into the mainstream more. i mean, what cinema is going to show "death of a president"? what if the film was dubbed as "george falls" or something like that... it sounds like a story about a curious monkey riding a yellow bike.

i don't know... 

the futures artifacts that were displayed at the end of class were frightening. the idea of robotic armed soldiers terrifies me. that idea made me wonder though if eliminating human error would help a warring country, or if without that human element of passion, compassion, or rage it would work so well.

anyways, really--watch the video its funny.

minute paper

Today we watched the movie "The Death of a Presdent" which was a highly controversial movie about a possible future involving the assassination of our current sitting president george w. bush. I really liked the storyline of how the actual assassin was a disgruntled g.i. from the gulf war and cheney addressed the problem as another muslim extremeist terrorist. I truely believe that lies like this are fed to us on a regular basis so that they(governments) can manipulate their own desired future. Anyways the way they interviewed the witnesses and presented everthing in past tense was perfect for a seemless future. It reminded me of the geico commercials that talk about "jed clampett" from the beverly hill billies, when they interviewed this guy who was "skeptical of this whole texas tea theory."

Minute Paper 3/13/08

The film we had seen in class is something that I had never seen before. There were so many scenes in the film that were so impressive and tastefully done that I had to remind myself several times during the film that it wasn't real and that it was just a futuristic scenario. The film "Death of A President" was a bit controversial to me because it suggests the idea of the assassination of our current seating President. Aside from the controversy, this film was definitely really interesting to see and it did keep me on the edge of my seat. I remember hearing something about this film in the media and the controversy around it, but I never got the chance to see it until today. Now that I know that this film is out, I'm definitely going to see this film again from beginning to end.

Minute Paper 3/13

Wow, I have been meaning to watch “Death of a President” for some time now just to make my own judgment on the film and I must say after seeing it today I am really impressed. The movie somehow took an extremely controversial storyline and created something that was interesting, non-abusive, and not insulting. The clear cut, obviously fictitious, and sometimes even sensitive approach to a fictional assassination of the President allowed for a viewing experience in which the audience could take in the filmmakers ideas without feeling like having someone else’s ideology pushed in their faces which made for an engaging and believable film.

Mark Alexander

I have seen Death Of A president a few times before. Each time I watch
it I pick up something new. I think it's a great movie, but it is also
a perfect example of how useing material that causes too much
controversy can drown out the points the peice is trying to make. Like
we were talking about in class, many people didn't get to see the movie
or chose not to because they believed making a movie about the death of
a president, that is alive and in office is wrong.
The way many people reacted to this movie, by boycotting it, is a
shame. The death of the president is an acute part of the film. There
are many current issues that are brought up that were addressed other
than someone killing the president. The American attitude of Muslims is
represented well, and the part when they show Dickhead Cheney's desire
to tie a muslim to the crime so he can rally patriotic support for war
is an interesting point.
So, I believe that if you want to get a message across to a mass
audience, it is important not to be so controversial that people won't
even listen to it. It is good to have controversey in your work, but
there is a line that shouldn't be crossed if you are making a movie or
anything that is intended to have an impact on a lot of people.

Minute Paper 3/13

The movie we watched in class today was quite impressive. The actors did a great job and the whole movie seemed real and came together perfectly. I see all of these creative projects and it discourages me a little because it is hard to see how I could do something similar. What I learned from the movie is the government can do things that suits their best interest and we will not even know about it. It is scary that wars can be started because of some kind of conspiracy. I am not saying that the government is doing this now, but it is definitely possible.

mintue paper

The idea of making future artifacts is a good one. It lets you open up
your mind to what is going on in the present. The movie today Death of
a President was very well done. It makes me so angry that people can
just use a middle eastern anything to say they did _____ and its all
their fault and anyone that looks like them they must have know about
it. Say that a whole country and anyone that is or was from that
country is guilty and hates what we stand for. It just makes you
think. What our government can do , with out any of the citizens input.

My late blog

I really think the wide range of professors helps in showing the different aspects of politics and the media. This class was helpful because we focused on the ideology of media , like news paper headlines or magazine clippings which always are persuasive and try to captures as many people as they can in their false and biased advertising. Also the GNN media clip was put together really well but its hard to fully take it seriously because its just clippings of what people said and somtimes its taken out of context completly. For example if someone said The man said to me" I want to shoot you" and then taking only the "I want to shoot you" part turns the entire thing around. So its hard for me to even take that seriously....it was diffrent from most news casts and internest sources so that was pretty cool. It was an interesting class...See you Thursday ( sorry for being late)

3/11/08

professor talked lot about the media portrait of stuffs, especially war, giving me the impression that what is media feeding us? are they giving us misleading infos to shape our minds the way they want? or is it something they need to do because people can't handle the 'truth' well as they think they can handle, or is it just plain truth? i would say only very chill and laid back ppl would think that media is giving us truth and nothing but truth. because if i do just little bit of research you can see that there is whole another side of the story to the events on the news. do i think the US is doing the right thing by moving in to iraq and 'freeing' its' people? do i think that iraq is axis of evil and US is the hero of the world? i don't believe it. to iraqi ppl, there is probably nothing eviler then US. they came in and iraq has been in worst shape ever. ppl die every single day because of the war there and stuff. Our media portrays it as if iraqi ppl actually wants US military to stay there and help. but the other side of that story is, there is protests in that region every time saying that US needs to go away and pay for the wrongs they did to the people of Iraq. I believe everybody is capable of seeing the truth to the events. they just need to put in little bit of effort to get behind what news reports are saying. i don't know if i make sense. it's really late and im tired.

Minute Paper 3/11

The clip that we saw in class today showed us how people can put their perspective forward by using the complete opposite of it. In the clip, it showed us news reels of different networks at around the incident of 9/11, then the GNN combined these news reels into a informative presentation talking about how everything has gone down hill from 9/11. I think the GNN found a good way of trying to put a different stand point out there other than the local news.

ad busting part deux, GNN ideology

after looking at how an ad suggests a certain world, how things are in that ideology, and then in turn how an artist can turn the presentation around to disrupt or "bust" the ad, i am more an more excited and interested to see what everyone wants to do for the final project. that is, if everyone isn't too offended by some liberal media to stick around. 

today's class made me think about how many cultural ideals are fed to us through ads. what we want to be and want to be like i feel is obvious as a society by our obsession with beautiful thin celebrities. what i hadn't thought about before though, and what is being brought to my attention in my women's studies class also, is not only the image of what is beautiful and desirable... but what is seen as the norm. its scary to me that certain "norms" can be completely subliminal. i don't want everyone to think anything else should be normal, or that we are doing something terribly wrong or anything... but at least we should be aware of what's going on.

on another note, it was fun to get everyone into the discussion today because it was on a rather heated topic. it was frustrating though because i felt like for a bit everyone was saying the same thing but still arguing about it. for whatever reason, we asked each other what is truth today. correct me if i am wrong, but we talked about it at length... i feel like everyone was saying, there is not real truth other than opinion on your own experience, your own judgement on everything you see.... 

i like the videos that were shown today purely because they made laugh and think about thinks a little differently. we can't take ourselves too seriously or we shut off to new ideas and quit learning. 

Andrew's Minute Paper 3/11

I found certain aspects of today's class really fun. In particular, I really enjoyed examining the advertisements from a critical perspective. While this didn't seem to interest all of the class, this is quite a familiar task for me, because of a series of classes I took in highschool. My school had a set of media related classes, with one of the basic early activities being learning all the different tactics advertisers use to make us want a product, while usually guaranteeing almost nothing. So it was easy to look at an add and see them trying to sell, happiness, sex, or adventure by claiming that is what their product is.
One good point that was brought up that really stuck with me was that while the GNN stuff focused how biased the news tends to be, one also has to consider their own biases, and how they shaped the GNN coverage of biased news coverage.
I also was amused by the fact that this far into the semester, we heard about as much today from the substituting teacher about the major project of the class as we have heard from our regular teacher.

Minute Paper (03-11-08)

I really enjoyed today's class and it open up new windows of approaching the ideologies behind ad-busting and relations to culture jamming. Ashley's first day lecture on Thursday I didn't understand the conceptual meaning of ad-buster activity until today that we went deep into it and talk more about ad-busting and how we can disrupt such idea not by looking at what's good or bad, the true and false but the ways of seeing, knowing, and understanding the world. It all make sense to me now that we can never be biased and subjective based on our opinion of how we analyze such idea but stay on the objective side of any story and see for yourself the logic being naturalizes by certain institutions on different level of principles. There were some ad that got my mind the one about e-harmony. Like what Ashley says, "e-harmony naturalizes racial homogeneity and heterosexual." Another way to go about disrupting this ad is that e-harmony didn't evaluate on how long the relationship may go for each couples. If its going to last for a short period of time or they end up marry. One last interesting point made out today's lecture is that how this networks and news put out their information for the people to observe and make opinion out of it. Most audiences will look at it and say that all of it are not true. The questions then pops up, What is truth? Who claims truth? Its getting exciting each day in class.

posted ruta f.

---

Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your homepage.

Minute Paper 3/11/08

I liked today's class in starting with the adbuster activity. It was interesting to disrupt the many different popular advertisements that we see today. The commercial about eHarmony that Michelle had brought up came across an interesting point where you didn't see any interracial couples nor any homosexual couples either. The video that we had seen on GNN.tv also led to another class discussion on what is true and what is not. I personally think that anything you hear on the media doesn't necessarily means that it is completely true. The media has a way of putting a spin on actual facts and information that could lead to another way of looking at the story. I think that the truth can only be determined by what you yourself can gather from the different viewpoints.

minutemen march1108

todays class was... i appreciate all of the different points of view that went around the class today. truth, in my opinion, is constant. I think there are very few actual "truths" in life, and I see them as being recognized as "truth" regardless of situation, location, or social environment. I was not trying to spur an argument today, but I was trying to instigate the possibility of thinking differently and deciding for yourself what you choose to influence your mental environment.

Minute Paper 3/11

Ok, in this minute paper I’m going to avoid going into a tirade like I did last week and instead focus on clearly explaining why I feel the GNN films we watched during the last two classes are contradictory to the ideas Ashley has been trying to get across. In today’s class we talked about ideology and how it can polarize people and ideas, creating a “us vs. them” scenario where we are right and those against us are wrong. Now I don’t disagree with this idea, my problem is that this was presented to us through a film that was in every possible way intended to force its own ideology on us. Throughout today’s movie we where given two distinct sides to choose from, with the first side portrayed as the smart/hip/anti-conformist revolutionaries who made the film, while side two was presented as the stupid, sometimes comical, red necks who are saying either you're with us or against us. I don’t know about you, but personally this is as hypocritical as me bringing a Nike commercial to bust while wearing a pair of Nike shoes today. Another major problem with using GNN films to critique the watering down and lack of real news within our media is that GNN is in no way news. In fact if you think about how this type of film making is done, we can see that it is nothing more than film clips taken from news reports chopped up into meaningless sound bytes which further censure the original message. These bits of information are rearranged in a way that not only get across the opinion of the film maker (which is the only opinion we really got to hear) it also makes it seem like these ideas are coming straight out of the mouth of politicians, reporters, and the guy from Star Treck. Now this obviously makes for great entertainment, and we may get some truth from it, but it also can be no different than some Hollywood studio finding a mediocre review their newest film has received and then taking a positive sounding part of it to market their movie, thus abusing and perverting another persons words through editing.

Mark Alexander

mintue paper

Truth? that was the question. How do you know what you hear is real or
not. Today in class someone wanted to know how you could figure out
what is true. You never really can, you just have to be able to
question logically about what you hear, and hear and see things from
other sources. Even if you will never get to see it or be at that spot.
You can still take what you see and hear to conclude what it would be
like.

03.11.08

i was surprised by all of the different reactions to today's video. i
dont think the purpose of the gnn videos is provide hard concrete
undisputable facts, and therefore their meaning shouldn't be taken so
literally. the news that is channeled through the media and fed to us
is extremely biased and censored and, whether or not it is realized, as
ashley said, it serves the purpose of perpetuating certain ideologies
that shape our mental environment. the corporations and politicians
that only provide us with certain knowledge and information benefit
from us understanding the world in a particular way. i think the videos
are simply trying to point out that there is another side to the story
that we arent shown, that most news does not offer the whole truth,
that politicians only present americans with one point of view, and
hide information that would have us think badly of our government, and
that we need to to think critically and analytically about the
information that is fed to us through the media. i dont think it can be
argued that coorporations and politicians have motives (money) that
take priority over ethical practices. it doesn't seem to me as though
the government is concerned with fairness, justice, honesty, the
well-being of the american people (or ppl in general for that matter),
freedom of speech, or many other things that this country is supposed
to stand for. yes the videos are biased, but at least they're showing
another side of the story, a side that we rarely see, a side that in my
opinion holds more water because it is not told by the government and
therefore has no vested interest in my opinion.

minute paper 3/11/08

Today in class we talked about ad busting again. This practice of ad busting seems as though the ad buster has to find some subtle dicrepancy or not so obvious point of view, and take his thinking to extreme opposition. I strongly oppose this display of extreme propaganda that tricks people into sharing these same opinions. With the e-harmony ad, I saw nothing in ads that was anti-gay, as a matter of fact I have never heard them mention gay, homosexual, metrosexual, bi-sexual, transsexual,queer or any other clever nomenclature ever in their ads. We live in a free enterprise economy, and people are entitled to a target market whether it is intentional or unintentional. People are always looking for someone to blame for something, pointing the finger at this guy and that and all the assumtions that come with it. For do not appreciate the reasoning that something that is made in china must come from a sweat shop, my type of thinking is that if it is made in a sweat shop, it wouldn't say china, it might say u.s.a. Anyways this ad busting is effective in some cases, but leads to extreme thinking which steers people away from the heart of real issues and creates polarization.

Minute paper 3/11

Today in class a few people presented their ads that they disrupted. One
that I wanted to do was eHarmony because of the way they express how you
can find happiness by simply filling out an extensive survey that they
provide, so that they can find you a compatitable partner. Michelle
brought up eHarmony though so unfortunately I was out of an idea.
However, the argument she brought up was better than mines! The
interesting is that all couples shown in the commercials are
heterosexual and there are never homosexual couples. This just kind of
shows of how eHarmony portrays happiness: true heterosexual love.
--
Sent from my T-Mobile Sidekick®

One minute paper 3/11

In todays class we had a sub again and we talked about different ads and headlines and we discussed on how we could bust them. For instance one of the topics that was brought to the class, was that if you buy nike shoes then all your problems will go away. I found this ad to be a good one to bring in and it was very interesting. Then we watched a short clip on the war on terrioism, and how our politic were basically saying that you are with us or against us. Today was another interesting day in class.

Prof Stuart, dont know if you are going to read this but i am traveling for baseball and will not be able to make it to class on thursday march 14 i will be back sunday march 17. I gave the sub my travel letter she said she was going to put it in your mailbox. I am also going to try to send you an email about this. Let me know if i can do anything to make up for the class missed. Thanks for your understanding.

Greg Garcia