READING: DuChamp remix project

At first, I found the video’s interactive controls anti-intuitive. They were too complicated. There were too many of them, and they flustered me. My roommate had a similar yet drastically different response. Playing around with the video before going to dinner, he stated his confusion, “What do you expect. It’s DuChamp.” Which brings me to my point– he had a response I never would have had. Although we were both undergoing similar emotions (confusion), his previous experiences allowed him a different, if not also greater, understanding of the material. He recognized that the video, which is highly abstract in nature, is actually based on an equally abstract artist. Taking this into consideration, I began to enjoy playing around with the video’s controls more. I simplified the settings by deleting all but one of the orbiting circles and then learned all of the mini-controls associated with that circle. By doing so, I learned the functionality of each button, even if I still did not understand the overall purpose of the video’s interactions.

(The first four images that come up for DuChamp on Google, then digitally altered).

I turned the video’s lyrics back on, after turning them off during the simplification process, and came to the conclusion that you can choose to pay attention to the lyrics or, conversely, ignore them, even turn them off as I had done. What you cannot do, however, is alter the opening’s appearance and the resulting impression you make. No matter how you go about changing the settings, the opening setup is always the same. DuChamp’s speech about art and intuition makes you wonder: what the heck is the point of this thing? What am I supposed to be getting out of it? And then you come up with your answers, even if they end up being as abstract as the original artwork itself.

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