Final Post---for now

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.