Journal: Experimental Video Art
FINAL CUTS: FIRST BATCH
Today I saw the first batch of final projects from Jonathan, Traci and Tocarra. I had to skip class for Jonathan’s piece, but I heard from other students that it was a slightly better version than his rough cut the week before. Ecological in focus, his multi-channel piece focused on the overwhelming presence of litter in NYC, and how locals took this for granted. When I saw his rough cut, I felt that the shots of litter were simply too decorative, too beautiful to really highlight the damaging aspects of pollution, and community neglect of that facet of urban living. I heard that he removed the dialogue, and opted for a sound loop/collage of sorts that emphasized particular comments made by locals that Jon interviewed. I’m curious as to how these soundtrack elements were deployed, and I’ll reserve judgment until I see it in its entirety.
Traci presented a much more realized cut of (insert title here), a meditation on how human visual perception can evoke memories of the past. My issues with her rough cut had to do with the lack of symbiosis between the visual and audio elements (it didn’t help that she resorted to the clichÈ shots of a laptop that are a common trope in MS student work)…as I stated in my verbal comments, her piece is a half-baked idea. She either has to really evoke a connection between the eye P.O.V. shots (very clever on her part) and the recorded sounds of a cafÈ that play with them, or not. I think the concept is interesting, but I feel that she’s playing it safe. Perhaps if she manipulated the sound a bit better, or perhaps pick shots of other locations than Times Square (another common trope that needs to be abandoned), her ideas can really flourish.
Tocarra’s final project, “Organic Plasticity,” was probably the most daring piece I’ve seen during the semester (I missed the first part, but later saw a DVD copy in its entirety). Composed of close-up shots and long takes of her face, breasts, pubic hair, and a hand with menstrual blood of a female ‘subject,’ her piece was equally provocative, unnerving and irresistible to watch. Even though the reversed sped-up effect in the end (as well as some shaky tilt work) felt a bit hackneyed, it didn’t take away from the intense, affirmative depiction of ‘woman-ness’ that is rarely depicted in video and film. It was slightly disheartening, however, to hear the tense exchange between Tocarra and Laura regarding the (mis) appropriation of racial connotations in video art, the rejection of feminism in images depicting women, and the proper role of critique of such images. While it was refreshing to hear an intense dialogue on issues that are relevant and important, I thought it was getting too exclusive and too redundant between them…and full of miscommunication and misunderstanding. It’s one thing to engage in a critical dialogue, it’s another to take comments as a form of attack, and attack back. I wish we could have had exploited this energy to speak out, to engage with video art works earlier in the semester, but at least we had it at this juncture.
ROUGH CUTS and COURTNEY LOVE
Jonathan and Traci were the brave birds that showed their rough cuts today in class. I am frustrated that I wasn’t able to shoot my final project due to a laptop crash, and bad weather. I’m thinking of scaling the project back to something less ambitious and simple. Most importantly, I need a working PC that can run the webcam motion-detection program.
Jon’s piece was a reaction to what he argues is the rising amount of litter in New York City, and the city locals’ complacency in doing anything about it. The video was made up of three channels, two depicting close up shots of litter in selected areas of the city, and a larger bottom channel showing a low angle shot of people walking on a street. In the course of the short, there was rolling text of Twitter (‘micro-blogging’ social software) comments on the pollution in the city. To me, I felt that the placement of channels were overwhelming and distracting. From what I’ve learned and seen in the class, its difficult to effectively deploy several channels simultaneous in video. More channels doesn’t mean that you’re covering more ‘ideas.’ In many instances, it can do no more than serve as a cheap effect. I’m not saying that Jon did this, but I told him in my comments that he should go for a rougher, dirtier aesthetic, and perhaps cut back on the channels.
Traci’s video rough cut was an exploration of memory through images and sound. It was a simple two-channel piece with shots of a table, laptop, and close-ups of a coffee cup. Sounds from a cafÈ were heard in the background. I was trying to make sense of it, but the concept was beyond me.
Laura showed us a film titled “Big Sister, Little Sister,” a mish mash of interviews of Courtney Love’s mother, Love herself, and footage of Yoko Ono and John Lennon. The ‘narrative’ (or lack thereof) was complex and challenging, and there were instances where I genuinely believed that Courtney was really speaking. The video struck me as a response to how women like Courtney and Yoko have been unfairly stigmatized in the popular culture as parasites of rock royalty (Yoko broke up the Beatles, Courtney planned Kurt’s suicide, etc)…but whose contributions of that aspect of the culture are continuously omitted or ignored. It’s a strange little alien of a video, part documentary, part faux-documentary, part Courtney Love tribute. It actually made me listen to Hole’s “Live Through This,” an album that equals Nirvana’s “Nevermind.”
BLOOD and GUTS
Laura showed us some of exhibited work today. One was a two channel piece inspired by gangster films called THE ONLY ONES LEFT, and the other was an excerpt from BLOOD AND GUTS IN HIGH SCHOOL. Before the screening, Laura talked a bit about her experiences as a painting major, and initially working with traditional video art pieces that incorporated found footage....primarily from music videos and daytime talk shows like SALLY JESSE RAFAEL. She also described a fascinating project where she visited a go-go bar and gave Rorschach inkblot tests to male patrons. Laura expressed how she commonly experiments with narrative in her work, by having characters speak out of beat, move out of beat, and remove situations out of time. In THE ONLY ONES LEFT, a mafia-influenced 3 channel piece serves as a denouncement of the corporate world. CEOs literally become killing machines, set in and outside a mansion. BLOOD AND GUTS IN HIGH SCHOOL is a loose adaptation of a best selling novel by Kathy Acker. In a series of vinettes, a young woman is depicted selling cookies, having a brief conversation with another woman in a school gym, talking to a prison guard, and walking in a cold, deserted area. The dialogue is sparse, and the characterizations are purposefully off-beat, which draws more attention to whats going on in the film. The odd camera angles also foster a sense of disconnection and dislocation. I really enjoyed it.
PAPER MASKS and FOOTCHASES
We spent the first half of class watching the rest of Sadie Benning's FLAT IS BEAUTIFUL, a video short combining Super 8 and Pixel Vision to tell a sprawling coming-of-age story that commented on the construction and policing of gender, consumer culture, and an attitude of escapism that supplanted social interaction. We also talked about our final projects. Sarah wanted to continue on the themes of her earlier autobiographical piece on being 15 years old. Jonathan wants to do a piece of the presence of litter in NYC, using multi-channels and interviews with locals. Dara and Kristy want to create a kind of parody on the Verizon commercial slogan, "Can You Hear Me Now," by capturing traffic cam internet feeds and responding to the overt presence of surveillance on civil life. Bianca proposed a experimental short that focused on nature in the city, by using found and homemade footage video and audio. Traci was interesting in playing with her apartment space and document her roommates actions and reactions to a physical change of the space itself (putting bubble wrap, balloons, etc). Jenny wanted to explore the social idea of happiness through home video and archival footage, and Natalie wanted to provide a fashion show satire that explored notions of otherness and cultural exoticism. Carlos wanted to incorporate footage of CNN, graphics, and audio in a collage that commented on the scope of messages in our culture.
Laura showed us a chillingly good film by Deborah Stratman called IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE, that opens with the pursuit of a fugitive on the run, and continues to a near silent montage of businesses, parking lots, and neighborhoods in a gated surbuban community, before culminating in a dramatic foot chase of a stranger trying to evade a helicopter. The experience of watching Stratman's piece is mostly jarring because she focuses on locations that are associated with human activity, and removes the presence of people. Apart from one found footage shot of a young girl sleeping in her bedroom, there is no evidence of human life in this community. It seems as though the film wants to response to the virtuality of cities and the absence of anything remotely real. The sound design was extremely effective in creating a sense of alarm and discomfort in the climatic chase, which if the viewer pays attention closer, is made to look as it were shot during the day instead of the night (the fugitive's shadows give the trick away). The structure and choice of camera angles really made me think of how Bianca and I explored space in our experimental short on Coney Island and made me interested in pursuing more of Stratman's work.
CRITIQUE DAY: FOUND FOOTAGE
Today we saw our found footage videos. Jonathan used looped clips from a Popeye cartoon, war footage, and the song "Get a Grip" from Muse for his piece titled "Get." The piece attempts to blur the distinction between what's real and imagined in images of war. While entertaining as a satirical view of patriotism, I felt that the use of the Music song made Jon's work seem more like a music video than video art. The problem with using music of any kind is that it can overwhelm the image, particularly if the song is recognizable.
Dara's film, "Lost or Found" was a 'mashup' of KING KONG, METROPOLIS, and THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA. She described her work as 'ethnographic' fictive filmmaking, which made the exoticised King Kong synonymous with the objectified female in cinema. I felt that the images worked really well together, and disagreed with some of the comments that films other than KING KONG could have been used since it was extremely recognized. I think her ideas came across really well.
Carlos's video blended clips from Blade Runner, Panic Room, and was full of religious iconography. It seemed like a meditation on war and religion, but it was a bit too didactic to really understand. Traci's "Appropriated Play" was a perfect illustration of the term "appropriation." It began with a dizzying, speed up, and slowed down commercial of a microwavable Chinese dish (even though the characters were in Japanese), and ended with the actual commericial intact. What was most revealing about the video was how it terrifically displayed how cultural appropriation of a mass project can be morphed, changed, transformed and stripped of its cultural indexes. Her 'remix' of the commercial 'erased' its offensive and negative connotations. What emerged was something 'cool,' 'popular,' and culturally 'appropriate.' Anya's piece was a loop of a woman bouncing around a space, with the typical reel 'countdown' breaking the pattern. It was sensual, erotic, and reminiscent of Andy Warhol's BLOWJOB. Bianca's video incorporated images from early 90s music videos and resituated them into a vibrant montage with ecological themes.
PORNOGRAPHY AS VIDEO ART
Laura showed us some examples of experimental video art made up of found footage. One of the more moving ones was LET US KISS AND SAY GOODBYE, a very moving montage of scenes from pornographic gay films that served as a tribute to male amateur adult film actors who had died from AIDS. Laura told us that after its premiere in the famous Castro Theater in San Francisco, everyone in the audience fell into tears. Most of the actors were well known in the gay community, and the film provided a fitting memorial to their dignity and humanity. Another piece, Tony Cokes' Evil 13, incorporated an interview transcript with a U.S. diplomat on the Rwandan genocide with red and blue swipes while Nirvana songs played as a soundtrack. The music and striking visuals butressed the point about the lack of U.S. and UN involvement to halt the disasterous conflict between the Tutsi and Hutu communities in the African nation.
TELEVISION AS VIRUS: ACCONCI RESPONSE
After reading Vito Acconci's essay on television, it really reminded me of David Cronenberg's VIDEODROME. In the film, a programmer of sleazy late night cable programming comes across an illegal recorded broadcast of a show titled VIDEODROME that featured women and some men being bound, gagged, and abused. After seeing the footage, the protagonist, Max Renn, becomes 'infected' by the tape, and begins having a series of bizarre hallucinations. One of the clever aspects of Cronenberg's film is that it is not only a preciest critique of the simulcrum that makes up our mediated world today, but also purposely distorts the real from the imagined. The film's thesis is that television, as a device to expels mediated images, acts like a cancer, and leaves a trace, a decay. It got me thinking of making a video that would use some dialogue from the film into a broadcast with a droning voice that would subminally 'infect' its viewers with violent, sexual, and explicit imagery. I would argue that the internet does something akin to the television, but is arguably more invasive, because it entails more interactivity. You can turn a television on, you can leave it as a virtual 'babysitter' for children and adults alike, but the internet requires that we provide the input, the initiative, which is more likely to evoke a cyclical pattern that we can never let go of. I hope I can provide a response, or a 'virus' of some kind.
ROOTS OF VIDEO ART
Over the course of the past couple of weeks, I've been exposed to a series of interesting and challenging works of video art. Momoyo Tiramitsu is sculptor and video artist, and one of his works focuses on three solary men (Japanese businessmen robots) that endlessly crawl around an offices, hallways, and escalators in a corporate building as a round table of employees mock and chased them through video feed. The speeded up P.O.V. shots are immediate, comedic, and slightly disturbing. The film posits the idea that capitalists are evil, virilic, and are a species of beings that will always exist.
Another piece from the Damascus Archives features a close up shot of a man who speaks about his Syrian heritage ("I'm Syrian, lucky me!" is his mantra) and how his country has 'colonized the world' and 'invaded America." He argues that the 'entire globe is the Syrian world.' The video is a play on religious extremism, fundamentalism, and treats cultural hegemony as a sick joke. Syria was considered by the Bush administration as part of an imagined 'axis of evil,' and its obvious what motivated Suna Kubra's humorous response. All that hegemony produces, as a fictitious construct, is a sameness. It shouldn't take one long to figure out how Syria could easily be replaced by any powerful post-industrial country with military and geopolitical might in this video and still relay the same critique.
Christian Lucas' CABLE XCESS and HOST equally mocks and celebrates analog techology through a mixture of video game graphics, recorded video, and low-tech images. CABLE XCESS is best described as a preventative health care ad that warns about the toxic effects of television. The overwhelming video and sound collage depicts a somewhat schizophrenetic experience with a subject that claims at the end that she is 'no longer sick.' HOST is a P.O.V. shot from an ATM machine with a subject that claims to be losing the ability to communication, and 'wanting things to slow down.' Her tone of speech and delivery is akin to that of a person making a confession to a priest. Except in this context, the 'priest' is no longer human, but an depersonalized machine.
