Last night I wrote a poem/monologue that I think will work nicely with our video project. Since I felt our project was so much about motion and architectural patterns, movements, and navigation, I used language that’s chiefly concerned with distance, location, light, connection, angles, and architecture in general. My main tension I think can be partially summed up in the line “I want things together that have previously not met.” What’s interesting here is that this kind of video footage seems familiar, it feels like it has “met” before. I think our challenge moving forward is to create a sense of “uncanny” in the way Pound would use the term (simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar) through juxtapositions of movement, language and sound. What the language does, (especially by using the “I” sparingly) is vaguely locate a voice that is or has spent time navigating these images and sounds, one who can de-familiarize them or give them to an audience in a new way. I like the idea of text rather than spoken language for a few reasons. I think first it creates more distance between the audience and speaker—text is harder to locate than a specific voice. Secondly, it’s simply harder to read and pay attention to the sounds and images which I think makes it a richer landscape to navigate and experience. Text is also important in navigating a city space or a public area. Thirdly, you’re constantly being bombarded by newspapers, ads, books, screens, t shirts, maps, marquees, etc that change the way you navigate a space and that have largely evaded our video footage. I’m still debating including a “you” in the text—I want to implicate the audience in some way, mostly because it’s such a passive video; it’s more soothing than chaotic. If the “you” doesn’t implicate the audience, it will at least suggest narrative, architecture, homogenization at some level. (It would be ideal if the “you” was equivocal or plural).
I’ve learned that poem you set out to write is never the poem you end up with and it’s been no different with the video project. Obviously collaboration complicates that, but I think we’ve worked well together and so far the video experience has been a good one—we had some problems with some of the footage being in AVI format and so we weren’t able to use it, but overall we’ve been able to do what we set out to do.
I also want to say that I’ve had a great semester in the seminar. The challenge is always making your art relevant, new, dynamic and as fully aware of other art and artists as possible. I feel like I’ve learned and been exposed to quite a bit of interesting material, artists, thinkers, etc that are helping me revise and rewrite what art can be and its possibilities. ie Crawford’s Stop Motion studies has really helped me situate and explain Marc Auge’ s concept of the non-place and kinds of body discipline. I really feel like the seminar has done what I hoped it would; make me a more versatile writer and thinker.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Motion, architecture, and narrative space
So I’ve been thinking about my post-modern studies paper a lot lately and I can’t help but let it inform this video project and my fascination with narrative and Auge’s concept of the non-place. From the start I wanted to do something with public transportation and faces and the language one finds on trains, bus stations, etc whether it be ads, newspapers, maps, or books and then I realized Crawford already did that project with his stop motion studies. Now I think I’m trying to more or less ignore facial gestures and different body disciplines and focus more on motion, architecture, perspective, borders, and text in general.
Derrick and I went to Denver yesterday and got a lot of great bulk video walking around downtown and riding the light rail—we focused on the movement outside the window and the intersection of lines, people, and buildings, rather than anything inside the train itself. I want to try to film in what Auge would call a non-place, ie supermarkets, hardware stores, graveyards, boulder falls, etc because these are places that are inherently full of narrative space, histories, and language. While we’re interested in using a mix of different frames and a contrast of motion and stillness to create these equivocal moments of narrative, we’re also considering using text to “label” what you’re watching. For example if we were to show boulder falls in a frame, the text might say, “This is a waterfall.” But we also want to play with the text and its semantic relation to the images a bit more. Rather than simply mislabeling the waterfall as “a tree” later we might slightly tweak a phrase, for example: “This is a waterfall” to “This is the deadliest waterfall in Colorado.” This qualification drastically changes your experience of the otherwise beautiful, non-descript waterfall and creates a particular response—suddenly you’re looking at a place of death as part of a larger collective, having a collective experience. The “this is” construct is important in making the connection feel given or expected, so that when the unexpected noun/adjective/verb appears the stability and integrity of narrative and language is immediately implicated. (If we do our job right) our hope is that these moments would suggest multiplicity and equivocation more than simple failure or collapse.
Perspective is something we’re still trying to figure out. Our favorite shot was taken sitting on the light rail where Derrick and I filmed the same landscape out of the same window, but from two different angles. Our thought is that if we put these next to each other or sandwich another frame with them we could again make a statement about multiplicity and narrative through movement rather than text. We’re also thinking about other ways of doing this—whether we both move through a hardware store together or use still shots in the produce isle of the grocery store I’m not sure yet. We’re also still figuring out how many frames we want and how they should work, whether they’ll always be there and just turn off and on like little tvs or if some will disappear, get larger, smaller, move around, etc. Right now I prefer a symmetrical three frames that turn off and on to give the piece a greater sense of stability and architecture since there is going to be so much juxtaposition and chaos happening already.
Derrick and I went to Denver yesterday and got a lot of great bulk video walking around downtown and riding the light rail—we focused on the movement outside the window and the intersection of lines, people, and buildings, rather than anything inside the train itself. I want to try to film in what Auge would call a non-place, ie supermarkets, hardware stores, graveyards, boulder falls, etc because these are places that are inherently full of narrative space, histories, and language. While we’re interested in using a mix of different frames and a contrast of motion and stillness to create these equivocal moments of narrative, we’re also considering using text to “label” what you’re watching. For example if we were to show boulder falls in a frame, the text might say, “This is a waterfall.” But we also want to play with the text and its semantic relation to the images a bit more. Rather than simply mislabeling the waterfall as “a tree” later we might slightly tweak a phrase, for example: “This is a waterfall” to “This is the deadliest waterfall in Colorado.” This qualification drastically changes your experience of the otherwise beautiful, non-descript waterfall and creates a particular response—suddenly you’re looking at a place of death as part of a larger collective, having a collective experience. The “this is” construct is important in making the connection feel given or expected, so that when the unexpected noun/adjective/verb appears the stability and integrity of narrative and language is immediately implicated. (If we do our job right) our hope is that these moments would suggest multiplicity and equivocation more than simple failure or collapse.
Perspective is something we’re still trying to figure out. Our favorite shot was taken sitting on the light rail where Derrick and I filmed the same landscape out of the same window, but from two different angles. Our thought is that if we put these next to each other or sandwich another frame with them we could again make a statement about multiplicity and narrative through movement rather than text. We’re also thinking about other ways of doing this—whether we both move through a hardware store together or use still shots in the produce isle of the grocery store I’m not sure yet. We’re also still figuring out how many frames we want and how they should work, whether they’ll always be there and just turn off and on like little tvs or if some will disappear, get larger, smaller, move around, etc. Right now I prefer a symmetrical three frames that turn off and on to give the piece a greater sense of stability and architecture since there is going to be so much juxtaposition and chaos happening already.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Crawford, Horvath and Video Narrative
Crawford’s stop motion project was really interesting both visually and conceptually. It’s strange that he mentions narrative and his investment in narrative in his artist’s statement. I’m curious how narrative is formed in these frames; we have motion and subways that are being propelled forward but at the same time the motion is constantly being pulled back, restrained, and possibly negated. The stifled feeling this creates is sometimes stressful but at other times comes across as fluid and quite beautiful. I think narrative also comes from different reactions—the smiling, the snarling, etc. There seems to be narrative hiding behind the smile in particular. I’m thinking of Certeau here and possibly Auge; internalized conceptualizing systems, micro-histories, body discipline, and other meaning making activities. There’s language and labeling everywhere in these frames—newspapers, ads, books, signs, etc are constantly influencing the subjectivity of the passengers and their response to the camera.
I couldn’t get all of the Horvath videos to work on my computer, but as I progressed and watched more I found his body of work to be quite dynamic and versatile—I really liked “Album” in particular, I thought the pace of the piece was one of the more natural and relaxed ones that I found. I loved the cuts and the work with the music which is so hard to match up with motion in general. Album also had a different more collaged sense of narrative than works like “Boulevard” or “Tenderly Yours.” We get a fairly clear domestic space/experience occasionally interrupted by obscured bodies, faces, clocks, white noise, etc. It suggests an evolution of the family unit—the simplicity, safety of it seems to be threatened by post-modernity, chaos, war. Horvath also seems quite invested in bodies and faces as the measure for expression and selfhood in general. I think “Boulevard” in particular did some interesting things in that respect.
“Boulevard” collages and juxtaposes two to three frames of video on the screen giving us glimpses of the city, the countryside, the highway, etc. The images are almost always moving, advancing forward. What the collage does and what some of Horvath’s shots do is play with (in this case a female) body and the way film and bodies simultaneously reveal and conceal. We get these moments of vulnerability—the woman is at the city overlook without a coat looking cold and the voiceover is saying something to the effect of “she had big dreams but look at her now.” Other times I think the body and face act as mask—we have mannequins (although since they’re retro and very much sex-objects I think Barbie, patriarchy, misogyny more than mask), we fly by a King Lear marquee which fits with the tragedy and monologue style of the film, but the reference to theatre is also self-reflexive in a way; she’s putting on a show, her body is acted. The film has an almost noir feel to it but it might be more along the lines of the “college art film,” the unsatisfied woman, the horrible men—some of the dialogue like “I want to fall in love with him after he puts his dick in me” made me cringe a bit too.
“Tenderly Yours” reminded me of some European modernist love story—a Good Morning Midnight of sorts (maybe it’s because she’s so French). It was also very similar to “Boulevard” in terms of the narrative, the pacing, the melancholy tone and isolation of the woman. The narrative itself and the way it’s told from a distance really emphasizes this and further removes the woman from the memories, actions, etc. Again the body is obscured but I think in a different way with different effect—it seems obscured by memory, especially in the initial love-making scene. It makes me think of the body as so physical, hyper-physical in a sense that memory, language, narrative can’t touch or get at. One can never reproduce the body.
I couldn’t get all of the Horvath videos to work on my computer, but as I progressed and watched more I found his body of work to be quite dynamic and versatile—I really liked “Album” in particular, I thought the pace of the piece was one of the more natural and relaxed ones that I found. I loved the cuts and the work with the music which is so hard to match up with motion in general. Album also had a different more collaged sense of narrative than works like “Boulevard” or “Tenderly Yours.” We get a fairly clear domestic space/experience occasionally interrupted by obscured bodies, faces, clocks, white noise, etc. It suggests an evolution of the family unit—the simplicity, safety of it seems to be threatened by post-modernity, chaos, war. Horvath also seems quite invested in bodies and faces as the measure for expression and selfhood in general. I think “Boulevard” in particular did some interesting things in that respect.
“Boulevard” collages and juxtaposes two to three frames of video on the screen giving us glimpses of the city, the countryside, the highway, etc. The images are almost always moving, advancing forward. What the collage does and what some of Horvath’s shots do is play with (in this case a female) body and the way film and bodies simultaneously reveal and conceal. We get these moments of vulnerability—the woman is at the city overlook without a coat looking cold and the voiceover is saying something to the effect of “she had big dreams but look at her now.” Other times I think the body and face act as mask—we have mannequins (although since they’re retro and very much sex-objects I think Barbie, patriarchy, misogyny more than mask), we fly by a King Lear marquee which fits with the tragedy and monologue style of the film, but the reference to theatre is also self-reflexive in a way; she’s putting on a show, her body is acted. The film has an almost noir feel to it but it might be more along the lines of the “college art film,” the unsatisfied woman, the horrible men—some of the dialogue like “I want to fall in love with him after he puts his dick in me” made me cringe a bit too.
“Tenderly Yours” reminded me of some European modernist love story—a Good Morning Midnight of sorts (maybe it’s because she’s so French). It was also very similar to “Boulevard” in terms of the narrative, the pacing, the melancholy tone and isolation of the woman. The narrative itself and the way it’s told from a distance really emphasizes this and further removes the woman from the memories, actions, etc. Again the body is obscured but I think in a different way with different effect—it seems obscured by memory, especially in the initial love-making scene. It makes me think of the body as so physical, hyper-physical in a sense that memory, language, narrative can’t touch or get at. One can never reproduce the body.
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