How creations welded from the scrapheap have become a folk art rage

"Muffler men are the cigar-store Indians of the late 20th century, trade figures made to stand in front of shops to advertise what is sold inside. Both are considered forms of folk art, but the skinny metal figures with shimmering muffler heads and torsos and pipe-thin legs found outside auto repair shops are wittier, more imaginative and flamboyantly painted. . . ." -Rita Reif, "The New York Times"

Art can appear in the most unexpected places. Muffler men, for example, have become one of the most striking and remarkable of recent folk art creations. From Walla Walla to Daytona quirky mannikins constructed from discarded automobile mufflers are popping up across America. Cobbled together as business signposts, these comical sculptures are sprouting outside automotive repair shops everywhere.

Car debris harmonizes with human anatomy as rusty cast-offs assume a new identity as savvy "objets d'art." Signage turns into art as mechanics fashion cowboys, dogs, robots, space aliens, and a host of other creatures from metal scraps of the profession and with the aid of their workaday tools and acetylene.

If for only a passing moment, the muffler men enliven the roadside and help to break up the monotony of daily commutes. More than mere advertisements, they interact with their communities by greeting the passerby. The significance of muffler sculptures turns profound when they become local celebrities and are hailed as community landmarks.

But what do they mean? For the creative mechanic who made them they are exclamatory signposts and store mascots. For the academic folklorists who analyze them they are symbolic icons with cultural meanings that proclaim individual identity and group membership. For the collectors who treasure them they are exemplars of "outsider art." For most nonspecialists who wave as they speed past they are funky delights.

This colorful book documents the widespread appeal of muffler men as a form of occupational art that enriches the workplace, the local environment, and now the art gallery.

Timothy Corrigan Correll is a folklorist whose research focuses on material behavior and folk belief. Patrick Arthur Polk serves as the museum scientist and archivist for the UCLA Folklore and Mythology Archives.

Learn to edit your videos using Pinnacle Studio 17 Plus and Ultimate. This book works as both a set of tutorials and a manual, with comprehensive Contents and Index sections. It shows you how to get the best out of the program, suggests workflows and provides troubleshooting techniques. Beginning with some basic principles, you can then get started with the sample footage that comes with the program. Learn the basics of editing and how to use audio and multiple tracks. Studio's Smart editing rules are then explained. For more advanced techniques, download raw material (or have it sent to you on DVD) and make projects that teach you to harness the full power of multi-track editing, transitions and effects. Subjects covered include working with photos, keyframing, creating titles and menus, Importing and Exporting and the all-important subject of keeping your complex movies in sync as you edit. Developed with feedback from three previous books in the series, the text and illustrations have been fully revised for Studio 17 Plus and Ultimate users.

Published to accompany a landmark exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from March 15 through June 18, 2008, California Video presents the first comprehensive survey of the history of video art in California. Since the late 1960s, California artists have been at the forefront of an international movement that has expanded video into the realm of fine art. Whether designing complex video installations, devising lush projections, experimenting with electronic psychedelia, creating conceptual and performance art, generating guerilla video, or producing works that promote feminism and other social issues, these artists have utilized video technology to express revolutionary ideas. This illustrated volume focuses on fifty-eight artists, from early video pioneers such as John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, and William Wegman, to Martha Rosler, Diana Thater, Bill Viola, and other established and emerging talents. Thirty-five recent interviews shed new light on these artists--their influences, creative processes, and impact. Together with commissioned essays, rare reprints, and unpublished video transcripts, California Video chronicles a distinctly West Coast aesthetic located within the broader history of video art.

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Art - Photography and Film, grade: 6 (Schweiz), University of Zurich (Kunsthistorisches Institut), course: Global Issues in Contemporary Photography: The Politics of the Big Picture, language: English, abstract: The paper investigates the construction of Chinese youth identities in the photography work of Chinese artist Cao Fei. For this purpose, the author first offers an overview of the current debates on cultural globalization, to go on discussing local and global aspects of Cao Feis work.

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2008 in the subject Art - Photography and Film, grade: cum laude, University of Edinburgh, language: English, abstract: Photomontage has more to do with film than with any other art form - they have in common the technique of montage. (Sergei Tretyakov) By considering that photomontage and film use the technique of cutting and gluing as dominant artistic device, and that montage, a technique unifying art and technology for the first time, emerged as a dominant artistic feature of the avant-garde, this thesis will explore the ideological and perceptual implications of its advent in avant-garde art and film. The technological advances of the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly the advent of photography, allowed avant-garde artists to break free from traditional concepts of artistic production - they dispensed with the old criteria of uniqueness, originality, handicraft and personal style. At a time when many avant-garde artists abruptly ceased to paint, photomontage emerged as the privileged locus for a caesura with traditional art forms. Photomontage envisioned film aesthetics insofar as it combines and juxtaposes images of various perspectival planes and angles (Raoul Hausmann described his early photomontages as "motionless moving pictures"). A corresponding observation can be made on the use of montage in cinema, a technique which crucially underpins the illusion of movement created through the succession of photographic stills. The present thesis will investigate photomontage and film in order to examine the effect technological reproduction played in revolutionising artistic production, perception and ideology - where the technique and philosophy of montage was key.

This is a beginner's guide -a hand-holding fun ride with step-by-step instructions and illustrative screenshots. If you want to write a professional script or screenplay using the open source tool Celtx, this book is for you. You need not have any previous knowledge of Celtx or any other writing software.

This is an up-to-date guide to all the basics of HD video, one of the hottest new features on D-SLR cameras. It looks at, among other things, recording audio, shooting techniques and outputting final video files. HD video is one of the hottest new features on digital SLR cameras and photographers are eager to understand how it works and optimise their results. Digital experts Rob Sheppard and Michael Guncheon have created an up-to-date guide to all the basics. They address gear, recording audio, shooting techniques, formats and standards for HD video, editing video and audio files and outputting final video files, everything a photographer new to the technology needs to know!

In celebration of Louisiana State University's sesquicentennial, Treasures of LSU trumpets the numerous and diverse riches found throughout the Baton Rouge campus and beyond. The 101 distinguished artworks, architectural gems, research collections, and scientific and cultural artifacts highlighted here represent only a small fraction of the material resources that surround and engage LSU faculty, staff, and students on a daily basis. As LSU chancellor emeritus Paul W. Murrill declares in his foreword, "All reflect expressions of superb quality. All encourage, in one way or another, the human spirit to soar."

Some of these treasures act as artistic backdrops to everyday campus life. In Unity Ascending, the striking Frank Hayden sculpture, greets all who enter the LSU Student Union. Vibrant Depression-era murals decorate the corridors of Allen Hall. Other treasures reside in out-of-the-way places. The Department of Geology and Geophysics houses the Henry V. Howe Type Collection of shelled microorganisms -- tiny, beautifully varied fossils that frequently aid geologists in determining the ages of rocks and features of ancient environments. The LSU Museum of Natural Science, in Foster Hall, holds one of the largest and most prestigious research collections of bird specimens in the world.

An LSU cadet uniform and a hand-spun Acadian quilt from the LSU Textile & Costume Museum; an enchanting silky-camellia specimen from the collections of the LSU Herbarium, founded in 1869; pottery by Walter Anderson and portraits by William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds from the LSU Museum of Art -- all showcase the immense variety of LSU's assets. Other featured treasures include a historic dogtrot house at the LSU Rural Life Museum, John James Audubon's double elephant folio Birds of America from the E. A. McIlhenny Natural History Collection at Hill Memorial Library, and cherished campus landmarks like the Indian Mounds, the French House, and Mike the Tiger's habitat.

Full-page color photographs set off the treasures to stunning effect. Interpretive essays by LSU faculty, staff, and students explain the origins, history, and sometimes myths surrounding each item. Published by LSU Press during its seventy-fifth year of operation, Treasures of LSU is itself a treasure that inspires pleasure and amazement in discovering the wealth and diversity of LSU's resources and affirms the university's numerous cultural contributions to the world community.

In an age of digital technology and renewed anxiety about media piracy, "Inherent Vice" revisits the recent analog past with an eye-opening exploration of the aesthetic and legal innovations of home video. Analog videotape was introduced to consumers as a blank format, essentially as a bootleg technology, for recording television without permission. The studios initially resisted VCRs and began legal action to oppose their marketing. In turn, U.S. courts controversially reinterpreted copyright law to protect users' right to record, while content owners eventually developed ways to exploit the video market. Lucas Hilderbrand shows how videotape and fair use offer essential lessons relevant to contemporary progressive media policy.

Videotape not only radically changed how audiences accessed the content they wanted and loved but also altered how they watched it. Hilderbrand develops an aesthetic theory of analog video, an "aesthetics of access" most boldly embodied by bootleg videos. He contends that the medium specificity of videotape becomes most apparent through repeated duplication, wear, and technical failure; video's visible and audible degeneration signals its uses for legal transgressions and illicit pleasures. Bringing formal and cultural analysis into dialogue with industrial history and case law, Hilderbrand examines four decades of often overlooked histories of video recording, including the first network news archive, the underground circulation of "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," a feminist tape-sharing network, and the phenomenally popular website YouTube. This book reveals the creative uses of videotape that have made essential content more accessible and expanded our understanding of copyright law. It is a politically provocative, unabashedly nostalgic ode to analog.

VirtualDub is one of the most popular video processing application for Windows. As an Open Source application, it's free, and is constantly updated and expanded by an active community of developers and experts. VirtualDub particularly popular for capturing video from analogue sources such as video tape, cleaning up the image and compressing it ready for distribution over the Internet. This book provides a rapid and easy to use tutorial to the basic features of VirtualDub to get you up and running quickly. It explains how to capture great quality video from various sources, use filters to clean up the captured image and add special effects. The book has shows all to use VirtualDub to cut and paste video to remove or insert sequences, including removing ad breaks or trailers. It goes on to cover the art of effective encoding and compression, so you end up with great quality videos that won't hog your bandwidth forever. VirtualDub is the fastest and most effective way to capture, process and encode video on your PC. This book gets you started fast, and goes on to give you full control of all the features of this legendary tool.

If you're looking for an easy and stimulating way to master Adobe Encore DVD and fine-tune your moviemaking skills at the same time, look no further than Adobe Encore DVD: In the Studio. This full-color tutorial will help you push the limits of Adobe Encore DVD by helping you to create highly imaginative designs and projects. Designed primarily for Adobe Creative Suite developers, particularly those using Adobe Premiere and AfterEffects, as well as filmmakers who wish to transfer their projects to DVDs, the book combines practical learning materials and project-based lessons. But Adobe Encore DVD: In the Studio is not your average tutorial. The book draws on the experience of author Doug Dixon--an expert on Adobe Encore DVD, the author of other books on DVD development, and a core member of the product's alpha and beta programs. Well-versed in both the use and design of Adobe Encore DVD, Dixon imbues this O'Reilly Media digital book with the unique perspective of an insider who really knows his pixels. Adobe Encore DVD: In the Studio discusses the protocols involved with DVD files and file systems; pixel aspect ratio issues; common gotchas using both still and motion media; and a plethora of tips and tricks to using dynamic buttons. You'll get up to speed on importing from Photoshop and AfterEffects, making motion video menus available, and looping video and audio. You'll also learn about adding multilingual menus and subtitles, encoding rules, scripting, and even placing Easter eggs in a DVD! By studying this comprehensive, hands-on tutorial, you will be able to quickly and efficiently develop professional-looking DVDs studded with special effects worthy of a Hollywood studio.

Another winner in the extremely popular How to Do Everything series, this friendly, solutions-oriented book is filled with step-by-step examples on shooting, editing, and producing professional-quality home or business videos complete with sound, animation, and other finishing touches. The book covers all the hardware and software involved as well as techniques for creating streaming video for Internet use.

FROM THE EDITOR OF THE STANDARD HANDBOOK OF VIDEO AND TELEVISION ENGINEERING THE ALL-MEDIA GUIDE TO PROFESSIONAL VIDEO PRODUCTION

You dont need an engineering degree to succeed in video production. In this book, video expert Jerry Whitaker shows you production from the inside out, from studio lighting to creating post-production special effects.

The Art of Video Production

Perfect for anyone who wants to build skills in the fast-growing field of digital video production, and produce video for TV, HDTV, movies, the Internet, or any other application, Master Handbook of Video Production shows you how to--

* Select, install, and work with digital equipment

* Understand MPEG video compression

* Design video production centers

* Master standard-definition and high-definition production

* Assess bandwidth, scanning, and resolution issues

* Optimize use of video computer graphics, time code, and archiving

* Master video switching, timing, and distribution

* Achieve the highest production values in video and high-definition video

Now you can make exciting digital movies using this easy-to-use and information-packed resource. Covering all editing basics, as well as serious film-making techniques, you will be able to successfully apply visual effects and control sound with pinpoint accuracy-- and deliver digital stories you never thought possible.

Many of the historic houses in and around the town of Victoria, Texas, were built between 1875 and 1910 by immigrant owners. From 1973 to 1975, with the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rick Gardner traveled throughout the region, taking photographs of these historic homes. Gardner relied on his own instincts and guidance from knowledgeable locals as to where he should aim his lens. This book is an appreciative glimpse at what these vernacular houses looked like a century after their construction. Gardner has teamed up with Victoria historian and preservationist Gary Dunnam to present these rich images along with brief historical sketches of the houses and, where possible, the persons who occupied them when they were newly constructed. The result is an understated and elegant suggestion of what life may have been like for the merchants, bankers, agriculturalists, and others who built and lived in these homes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Designed to appeal to those with a love for old houses and especially for the preservation of historic structures, All the Houses Were Painted White offers its readers a stately appreciation of these homes and their place in the South Texas landscape. It is also a tribute to the architects, owners, and anonymous craftspeople who built the houses-to their vision, skill, ingenuity, imagination, creativity, and endurance.

Photographs are an integral part of our daily lives, from sensationalist images in tabloid papers, to personal family snapshots, to the art photography displayed in galleries and sold through international art markets. In this thought-provoking exploration of the subject, Steve Edwards provides a clear, lively, and imaginative approach to the definition, importance, and meaning of photography. He combines a sense of its historical development with an analysis of its purpose and meaning within a wider cultural context. Edwards also discusses both well-known and more unusual photos, from the highly controversial Cottingley Fairies to Ansel Adams landscapes, and from the shocking and influential Eddie Adams image of a Vietcong suspect being executed to the portrait/performance art work of Cindy Sherman. Edwards interrogates the way we look and think about photographs, and considers such issues as truth and recording, objectivity and fine art, identity and memory.

Go here. Do that. Work here. Buy that.

Spend each day bored, staring at a screen, wondering if this is really all there is.

There is another way.

My name is Nightscape. Through years of training, I get to see the city in a way nobody else does. With this book, I want to show you what the world looks like through my eyes and inspire everyone to find their passion.

Don’t let anyone tell you what your limits are.

With their cameras and notebooks in hand, photographers Sabine Schmidt and Don House embarked on an ambitious project to document the libraries committed to serving Arkansas's smallest communities. Remote Access is the culmination of this fascinating three-year effort, which took the artists to every region of their home state. Schmidt's carefully constructed color images of libraries and the communities they serve and House's rich black-and-white portraits of library patrons and staff shine alongside the authors' observational essays about their experiences. The pages here come alive with a deep connection to Arkansas's history and culture as we accompany the authors on visits to a section of the Trail of Tears near Parkin, to the site of the tragic 1959 fire at the Arkansas Negro Boys' Industrial School in Wrightsville, and to Maya Angelou's childhood school in Stamps, among many other significant destinations. Through this testament to the essential role of libraries in the twenty-first century, Schmidt and House have created a clear-eyed portrait of modern rural life, delving into issues of race, politics, gender, and isolation as they document the remarkable hard work and generosity put forth in community efforts to sustain local libraries.

Filmmaker Jay Holben has been battling in the production trenches for most of his life. For the past 17 years, he's chronicled his adventures in the pages of American Cinematographer, Digital Video, Videography, and TV Technology. Now, in Behind the Lens: Dispatches from the Cinematic Trenches, he's compiled nearly 100 of his best articles on everything from camera technology and lenses to tips and techniques for better lighting. Whether you're making independent films, commercials, music videos, documentaries, television shows, event videos, or industrials, this full color collection provides the tools you need to take your work to the next level and succeed in the world of digital motion imaging. Featured topics include: *Tech, including the fundamentals of how digital images are formed and how they evolved to match the look of a film, as well as image compression and control *Optics, providing a thorough examination of lenses and lens interchangeability, depth of field, filters, flare, quality, MTF, and more *Cameras, instructing you in using exposure tools, ISO, white balance, infrared, and stabilizers *Lighting, featuring advice on using lighting sources and fixtures and how to tackle common lighting problems Additional tips and tricks cover improving audio, celestial photography, deciding if film school is right for you, and much more. For over a decade Jay Holben has worked as a director of photography in Los Angeles on features, commercials, television shows, and music videos. He is a former technical editor and frequent contributing writer for American Cinematographer, the current technical editor and columnist for Digital Video, and the lighting columnist for TV Technology. The author of A Shot in the Dark: A Creative DIY Guide to Digital Video Lighting on (Almost) No Budget, Holben is also on faculty for the Global Cinematography Institute. He is now an independent producer and director.

Corporate video production used to be seen as a bland area of video, with a talking-head, PowerPoint-slide style. Now, corporate video is seen as more important than ever before, with opportunities for companies to distribute video online and more contracts available to video professionals. Stu Sweetow shows aspiring and pro videographers how to land coveted corporate contracts with comprehensive techniques learned from his years in the industry. Corporate Video Production teaches videographers how to make imaginative corporate videos with eye-catching design, rhythmic editing tricks, and essential scriptwriting and interview techniques. Readers will learn how to shoot on location or in a studio and how to work with employees-turned-actors. Armed with Sweetow's advice, videographers will get contracts and produce online videos and podcasts for corporations, government agencies, and non-profit organizations.