you tube

On You Tube today, I watched a pretty funny video entitled Smosh-Boxman. This music video format is pretty popular online, and i think it hasn't totally dried up its potential. This video is the best when the lyrics explain something going on in the picture, like when he says that some kid "wasn't that intelligent," while he's chugging windex. That's pretty funny.

Vision

this essay was a reaction to the artist colloquium on february second, and i believe the history and future of projection relates to the viewing experiences we've been discussing in class:

Gavin Jackson
Extra Credit Colloquium--2/2/07

Last Friday, Perry Hoberman and Anne Friedberg of USC came to speak about the “parallax between theory and practice,” especially when it came to projection technology and art. Hoberman, an installation artist, was interested in stereoscopic imagery, and his 2004 installation, Public Objects, displayed an anamorphic image 4 times, that was only visible in 3-d at a certain point.
Anne Friedberg showed her website based on her book, The Virtual Window, which examines viewing technology’s history, and how it has shaped our perception. Both talked about treating “the screen as an object,” or recognizing the importance of the viewing experience and its context. For example, Hoberman showed video of a piece he did where people had to line up objects on a screen from three different locations: a computer screen, actual life-size objects, and I believe the projection already on the screen. Interactivity such as this is one reason they both sort of hinted that new ways of projection are on the horizon that will change our perception of art and the world.
Friedberg and Hoberman’s websites also emphasized the viewing experience as one subject to the tools and technologies available. Hoberman made a point in his vectors article of classifying the eyes as a tool of the mind, and nothing more, for the mind arranges and classifies all the images, as proven by the different forms of malperception he researched.
I’m very interested in reading The Virtual Window, for the website, at least as presented, looks less cogent and ordered as the book sounded. I still got a good idea of a few things from the viewing tool she brought up though, with a silhouette watching Uncle Josh at the Picture Show. The question for artists of the future, and film viewers everywhere, is how will that silhouette be engaged in moving images in the future?

D'Est

1) This film addresses the viewer as nearly one and the same as the camera, putting you in places where a person would normally feel uncomfortable. Like Micheal Snow's film, it doesn't reveal itself in short bursts of frames, but develops its themes and action over long takes taking many minutes.

2) Filming and editing D'Est in the way Akerman did allowed for both long takes and inclusive takes. The pans seem to be in slow motion, not staying on one person as long as it does for the man on the bench, but it appreciates each subject pretty equally, with a large depth of focus. It's really in the space, without manipulation or fast editing. It reminded me a lot of a movie which i forget the title of, but set the record for the longest single take in a film, for there were no edits in the film, just a single camera touring the Kremlin and watching characters from different time periods walking in and out.

4) I would say that Akerman's film isn't fiction, but it is stylized reality, especially because a lot of the subjects aren't their to spread knowledge, but to be visually studied. The subjects also interact with the camera, looking at it, even pointing out their fruit for sale. In a documentary, the camera has a much more journalistic and less visual purpose.

5) David writes that "the suspension of a gesture or the nearly intolerable stretching out of sequences" really replicates "the strange banality of life in the former USSR." I would agree that such a bleak, oppressive society would burden people, reducing their motivation to do everyday things, to the point where they almost need to force themselves to complete every activity. The fast exposure speed, or slow motion, creates an illusion of weight and resistance, externalizing the peoples' struggles.

7) I believe the ideal position for viewing the film may be the three-projection installation. The only reason is that time would be even more stretched out. Instead of getting lost or controlled by one pan or image, you can shift your focus, and then return your attention later to possibly the same tracking shot, giving an enhanced feeling of the lengthening of time and coldness in the Russian streets.

8) I thought sound was used very effectively in this film, with certain intrusive noises fading in and out, and music dominating the soundtrack. I thought the music always seemed to sync up with the image really well, especially when there were instruments playing. The blending of recording a performance and a performer performing for the camera reminded me of Altman's "The Company," which doesn't have a guerilla type documentary feel, but a more prepared and stylized version of reality.

9) I noticed that the interior shots looked warm, and the people were balanced within the frame. Unlike the outside shots, which had harsher noises and a more random assortment of individuals. When the camera was inside, an inner peace was felt, like when the country house with the open door was featured. Almost to say that when one goes out into the public, they're going to be confronted by some zombie like characters and the droning of vehicles and a very un-personalized space, where one doesn't own anything except the appearance of their own face.

jonas mekas-february eighteenth

Jonas Mekas' february 18th video is a digital short chronicling an event for opposition to the war in Iraq. There's a banner with the famous phrase, "War Is Over; If You Want It." It's paired with very somber music, even though the event itself appears to be quite intimate and warm, with people packed to the rafters dancing and celebrating around a cake of some sort. The bittersweet quality of the film makes sense when he reveals the date it was filmed: february 18th 2003. There's a lot of nostalgia to go around as the film reminds one of the seventies and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Now, however, the nostalgia only puts february 18th 2007 into sad perspective as the war rages on, and Bush's wish to invade Iran may just be granted.

Reaction to a Barrage of Video

"If both the image and the sound in video are only "basic," only "outlines,"...be humanly "pushy": I can push up against the screen, as if to throw myself on the viewer," so writes Vito Acconci, writer, director, and star of Theme Song, a video invitation for love. The point of Theme Song is not only humor, which is present, especially when he changes the background music by switching tapes on an off screen cassette player, but Acconci also seeks to put his ideas about the video format into use. No better way to create the human to human contact that Acconci wishes to wring out of video than acting in one hundred percent direct address. Only by laying down, close to the camera, staring at his close audience, can the viewer's attention be grabbed. Acconci's performance is all about humility, maybe even humiliation, and it works. Without seeing it, one would probably be apprehensive about watching this guy for 36 minutes hit on him/her, but, when one is confronted with the video image, it's kind of hard (at least for me) to look away; i was pretty entertained.

Another attention-grabbing performance comes from the Uma Thurman from Pulp Fiction like Lisa Steele in Birthday Suit-With Scars and Defects. In the piece, she is totally nude, pointing out her scars in closeup in a very objective fashion, configuring her poses for the camera by looking at the monitor. This interesting use of video as almost a mirror seems a bit self-indulgent, but it works, especially, in my opinion, because of the intermittent nude shots.

Most of the pieces were void of narrative, focusing more on performance. In Beneath the Skin, however, Cecelia Condit blends these two aspects into a funny and creepy voice over, weaving a story about a boyfriend and the corpse in his house over footage of the woman telling the story, along with pictures. The beautiful woman laying in a bed has a face projected on her face at times, as if the dead woman is trying to invade her brain space or something. The pictures of mummies were pretty funny, obviously historical pictures, not the actual corpse she was referencing. The subtle effect of this video lends to the general creepiness. As the voice slowly reveals the real horror of the story, the images speed up, and one gets an idea of the trauma this character may experience from living this story.

Silent and Colorful

Dealing with time some more, we watched some very interesting, and silent again, films in class. All of them were filmed on a walk also. The first and most intriguing was Variations, shot by Nathaniel Dorsky on 16 mm @ 18 frames per second. The effect of the slower exposure speed was pretty captivating, it almost gave you a chance to appreciate the images more, as if they were fragile or something. It reminded me of a hangover, waking up to the world in a way, where everything is sharp and you start to again appreciate reality.

Stan Brakhage, whom we read some quotes from also, shot Comingled Containers, a 16 mm film with extreme close ups and underwater exploration. Brakhage seems to be really into breaking preconceived notions about images and how the eye and the mind should interpret them: "Imagine an eye unruled by man made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through the adventure of perception." This quote struck me as very apt when i was at Perry Hoberman and Anne Friedberg's presentation on windows and stereoscopic vision. Perry's Vectors article on brain visual quirks had clips of what that affliction would look like if you had it, reminding us that the eyes are really just tools--the brain is where we arrange the image according to our comforts.

Wot the Ancient Sod, examines time and objects in a silent, color, 16mm format. In this film, Diane Kitchen films close ups of decaying leaves, at some points obscuring detail with such close leaves, showing only the flapping borders of foliage. It takes a much more specific bite out of the theme of "going on a walk." People usually take for granted leaves, the existence of which are defined more in the hundreds/thousands on a plant than in singular form. The theme of the importance of each leaf and its decay to the natural balance of nature brings up time as a subject. Time kills, rejuvenates, and continues. These are basically just clips of that process.

Dealing with time and film using a segmentation technique, Tomonari Nishikaka takes bursts of film with different shapes continuing throughout a sequence, and "an adjustable slit" with a camera on auto mode to get the correct exposure and create continuity in the frenetic, chaotic assortment of images. Of course, chaos is only the effect, the truth is that the shots were meticulously planned out to go with each other based on positioning within his animation viewfinder.

Along with experimentation with time, these films can be seen as an expression of freedom, something which Maya Deren cherishes in her "Amateur vs. Professional" article, writing, "Like the amateur still-photographer, the amateur film-maker can devote himself to capturing the poetry and beauty of places and events and, since he is using a motion-picture camera, he can explore the vast world of the beauty of movement."

So Is This and There There Square

Our first class featured one very confrontational film, along with an interesting digital video from the eighties. Both helped to reorient and widen my senses about what it means to watch a film. For example, Micheal Snow's silent film, So Is This, consisted of words, usually one at a time, appearing on screen for various amounts of time. It was a difficult film for me to watch; i would have much rather read a coffee table book where i would be allowed to read a lot faster. One of Snow's objectives as an artist is to examine time as an artistic medium, which is really why he started making films. I think his film works to make time seem a lot longer than it actually is. One example of his playing with time was the play on words he developed with the word this. It was a very slow developing piece of dry humor. As far as it being a protest against the censorship board, i thought it worked as a parody of how the Canadian censorship board wanted to treat its citizens like children, boxing in their artistic experiences.

There There Square, by Jackie Goss, was a very effective short digital video laced with interesting interpretations of North America's land mass and funny facts about surveying and cartography. At one point in the film, she examines the border of Tennessee, explaining why the northern border wasn't a straight line. Apparently, the surveyor's compass got knocked off course by the iron ore in the mountains, and once he realized it, he tried to go down a river but didn't go far enough. Instead of using different methods, he just kept the border that he made, defining reality through a map that he drew. Goss also brings up the fact that maps denote ownership, and tells an interesting story (with words again) about you looking at your house from a hill, watching your dad drive by it just to see what it looks like to passersbys. She also morphs and spins maps to show land masses from other cultures' points of view. I used the example of being in the south pole, where the ideas of direction are totally different from those in the contiguous United States, whose perspective is dominated by the Europeans who came from the East and ended up dominating the country.

Both films challenged my sense of what is interesting and engaging on a movie screen. They both used words, one in a playful, though drawn-out and laborious manner, the other in an entertaining, involving manner. I have to say i prefer the latter.