Module 8: Video Review

More Human than Human Video:

The human body is captivating to everyone. The world is dominated by unrealistic images of the body. The nomadic people of Austria left behind a statue of a women's body, but it was very small, only 10 centimeters high. It is housed in Vienna, Austria, along with many, many other artifacts. This statues is the first clue as to why the world is dominated by unrealistic images of the human body. Statues of the human body were exaggerated all over Europe. Studies of the brain show that the brain was programmed to operate that way. The prime evil extinct to exaggerate the human body didn't carry out to Egypt. Rather than exaggerate, Egyptian artists chose to show each part from the clearest angle. Egyptian style never changed. Egyptians made statues and images of the body to last forever. Egyptians had an obsession with order. They created images of the body because of their culture, not because of the wiring of the brain, which could explain the human body exaggeration of the human world. Culture is king.  The seagull experiment shown in this video directly correlates to one of the previous modules and readings. I think this video was accurate in that culture is king. Culture dictates many things in our lives, and how we perceive the body is definitely one of them. The video explains the ancient perceptions of the body and the art that came with specific cultures, like Egypt.

Cairo Museum Video:

I chose this video because the title had caught my attention and sounded more interesting than any of the other videos. Egypt is a land of forgotten tombs and unsolved mysteries. It has many secrets. In downtown Cairo there is an Egyptian museum. There are tens of thousands of objects within the museum walls. It may be the best museum in the world because of all of the artifacts and you cannot see anything like it anywhere else in the world. There are many, many, more artifacts hidden within the basement. The museum was opened in 1902. There are many boxes, some that have not ever been opened before. There are remains from some of the most famous rulers in Egypt upstairs in the public part of the museum. 40 mummies of famous kings were found in the late 1800's in the desserts of Lexor. The bodies were then transferred to the museum in Cairo.  There is so much in the basement that it is hard to decide which objects should be chosen for exhibition. Conservation begins in the fields, not in the museums. I'm glad I chose this video because it was very, very interesting. Who knew that there could be so many artifacts that still exist from thousands and thousands of years ago. The video touched a point on what the funeral room looked like in the tomb of one of the ancient rulers, which is what the reading talks about as well. In the video, they show how they had to prepare one of the artifacts to prevent it from ruining and it looked very similar to the "Seated Scribe" that is present within the text, which is a common sculpture type from that time.