Sunday, May 6, 2007

Jennifer Montgomery

Jennifer Montgomery showed two super-8 films. The first was How to Use Equipment, which was from a New York film club project, and was pretty funny. It was basically people trying out super-8 filming and projection, and featuring the amateurishness. My favorite scene was a woman on the telephone with an early 90's computer behind her. This clash of technology between the old (super 8) and the new, relatively, is viscerally exciting for me. Recording my lp's onto my computer is probably one of the most satisfying activities there is in my opinion.
Her structure for Notes on the Death of Kodachrome was emblematic of this juxtaposition; she starts with her friends in a very strange art film from the early 80's w/ naked people and such on super 8, and then spends the rest of the time looking for the equipment she used to make that film. She films her quest on digital video, revisiting with all of her old friends, who are now fairly famous folks. She talked to Todd Haynes, writer and director of the film Far From Heaven, and recounts a dream about a super 8 projector she had. After the conversations which seem to go around more than through any memories of the 70's and 80's, she has a vignette on super 8. The vignette is her dream, where the projector is made out of kitchen apparatuses, and she is an oriental emperess. I found it to be quite entertaining, and wished there would have been more comic super 8 vignettes instead of all that talking.

New Art

On Monday, one of the TA's lectured the class on New Media, which is basically any art that involves a computer. A lot of the ideas she discussed we had already encountered in 115, but she brought up some new material for us to consider.
The most interesting piece was DJ Shadow's short assemblage, 911: State of Emergence, a collection of images spliced together to create associations between our leaders and the violent fundamentalists in the middle east. Because it was such a fast paced piece, it created these connections without a lot of reflection; it was like a typical Fox News production, except for its conclusions, which were opposite of the usual cable news network's. Of course, the fact that it was on the web also points to the community that's viewing it. It's for everyone w/access to a computer, and it's goal isn't to make money. The fear mongering practiced by the administration after 9/11 was mirrored by the media, attempting to keep people glued to their TV screens so they could make more money on advertising. There's no profit goal for the website on which DJ Shadow's piece was displayed.
What her presentation made me think most about was technology, and how it impacts the work that artists--especially filmmakers--produce. For example, the short film made w/a low pixel digital camera in 2003 was inspired by the blurry, blocky look of broadband video, which nowadays is much clearer. Her work is now pretty much irrelevant, but it makes a lot of sense for the time it was made.