OK, so I was trying to remain apolitical here but I had to post this.
It’s Errol Morris, for Pete’s sake.
Archive for October, 2008
I made this for a video I’m working on but I thought I would share it. I’ve decided to license all my video work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, so I thought it would be nice to have a nifty end title. , or !
This clip is in the public domain. Happy Wednesday.
and I recently started a Yahoo group dedicated to executing various assignments from the amazing and astounding . Learning to Love You More is the brainchild of artists and Harrell Fletcher. The project exists both as a website and as a series of traveling exhibitions. The premise is relatively simple: “assignments” are posted to the site, and anyone who wants to can accept one of these assignments and submit the results back to LTLYM.
As of today there are 68 assignments, which take the form of everything from “” and “” to “” and ““. The instructions for the assignments are all very straightforward and specific.
I think LTLYM is an example of just how beautiful the internet can be. It’s totally open and democratic- anyone who wants to participate can. There is no target demographic. Each assignment is like a gentle yet penetrating question about who we are and how we relate to the world.
I love what Miranda July had to say about “connecting” online: “There are so many opportunities to put a picture of your face online, or write what your hobbies are… But at a certain point, it’s like- who cares? That’s somehow not doing the job…” And it’s so true. We have all these ways of reaching out to people online, but somehow it’s still so sterile and distant. You can look at someone’s Facebook page and see a picture of them with their cat and read what their favorite movies are and where they went to high school, but it’s all there in that cookie-cutter template. It doesn’t leave much room for exploration or imagination or…warmth.
Here’s an interview with Miranda July on LTLYM…
I think the part of that interview that really strikes a chord with me is this:
No one’s making an archive of these “unimportant” things, like pictures of parents kissing as taken by their children. And it’s such an uncomfortable thing- of course there’s not going to be a coffee table book of that. But now we have an archive! And the second there’s many, it becomes proof of something- something that is so unspecific that it’s lively. To me that’s really alive- that kind of half-nauseous, half-beautiful feeling.
Because often times the way things are, if we really look, is rather nausea-inducing. We get so caught up in maintaining this veneer over ourselves and our lives, that when someone holds a mirror up to us and allows us to see ourselves, warts and kissing parents and all, it can be fairly disconcerting. LTLYM, in it’s own subtle way, offers up a gentler kind of mirror. By being carefully prodded to step outside of ourselves in order to dissect and examine the very guts of our lives, we are suddenly given permission to embrace our idiosyncrasies and our imperfections. They become something to study and learn from rather than something to be ashamed of.
LTLYM celebrates our collective curiosity and the very act of making. The “reports” are only proof that you’ve gone through the process- that you’ve participated. The emphasis is not on polish and perfection but on following our natural creative instincts and how, when viewed as a whole, we really do have more uniting us as humans than we do keeping us apart.
The first assignment our group chose to complete was . This is mine…
1. I do this exercise every day with my baby. It works your stomach, your arms and your thighs! First, get a chunky baby and sit her on your feet while you're seated on the floor. Hold on to her waist.
2. Next, start bouncing her up and down by lifting your feet up and lowering them back down. Keep your stomach muscles flexed.
3. Bounce her up higher and higher...
4. Lower her down to you and give her a kiss. I usually repeat 5-6 times, or until my stomach gets tired.
P.S. I would love to somehow integrate LTLYM into a library program. I’ll think on that…
I picked this one out for my mom. It’s her birthday today.
From Wholphin:
When Brad Seibel’s 2000 paper suggested squids brood, it was called “erroneous.” Years later, with the help of Steve Haddock, Seibel had the opportunity to take a submersible 7,000 feet below the sea where he captured this footage confirming his hypothesis. Take that, cephalopod traditionalists!
The song is “I’ll Read You a Story” by Colleen, courtesy of The Leaf Label with arrangement by Woodwork Music.
P.S. I liked the comments I found on this video’s YouTube page, so I am including them as well (the first page of them- there were three)…
awesome.
my neighbor looks like a squid!
Did this really happen?
beautiful beautiful
Squid are awsome!!!
CALAMARI WOOT ITS DELIOUSUS
YUMMY!!
amazing I love squids I just don’t like eating them
wow, this was amazing, thank you for sharing. Birth is a Beautiful thing, no matter what the species! : )
That was awesome! Was the grey part connected to the squid? What kind of squid is it?
Passage à l’acte, 1993, by Martin Arnold.
So I’m kind of doing this time warp thing where I’m remembering all of the films I saw in school that really left an impression on me in some way. And now they’re all on YouTube (and Goog-Tube, in this case)! We all know how I feel about YouTube, so part of me feels guilty for promoting these mind-blowing films in the context of a yucky little player. However, I can remember what a pain in the butt it was for my profs to just get a hold of some of these works to show us, and I remember wishing I could have access to some of them so I could just watch them over and over again. So I guess my rationalization is that it’s better to see this stuff on YouTube than to not see it at all. I feel the same way about my cell phone- I find myself resenting its existence but that doesn’t mean I don’t USE IT EVERY DAY. Ha.
One of my favorite courses at the Art Institute was the sophomore Video section with Cyan Meeks. Cyan was a video artist pretty fresh from grad school. She was very political and always seemed to be involved in some documentary project or rally or live video-mixing somewhere. She dated a tattoo artist and wore this one black leather jacket just about every day. I think some of us were a little apprehensive about how young she was, but in the end that wound up seeming like a positive thing rather than a negative. She was very plugged in to what was going on in the world of weird videos.
Most days we would show up and Cyan would screen videos for us and then we would talk about them. And most days I left feeling very excited and inspired. The range of works we saw that year was pretty mind-blowing; everything from and to and to and .
The day we watched this Martin Arnold piece (side note: it was funny when we started to referring to our videos as “pieces”- we always did it with a little bit of sarcasm, but somehow just calling them “videos” ceased to be arty enough)… OK I’m just going to bail out on that sentence and start over. The day we watched this Martin Arnold “piece” was one that has stayed with me. Martin Arnold is known for taking tiny clips from popular films and editing the crap out of them with the result usually being some kind of intense and darkly funny cultural critique. He uses rapid-fire editing, bam bam bam, advancing the action and sound for a fraction of a second and then reversing it, forcing characters to inch painfully, violently forward in their motions, with a sense of being stuck in time moving slower and much less smoothly than molasses.
Passage à l’acte (literally: “passage to the act”) consists of approximately 10-12 seconds from To Kill a Mockingbird which Arnold has extended to around twelve minutes. The source material is a simple family scene at breakfast, transformed into something tense and claustrophobic by Arnold’s editing. Like with most of our screenings, Cyan didn’t give us much of an introduction. She liked to get our gut reactions to what she showed us. A few minutes into it, some of us started looking around at each other like, “what the hell?” We didn’t quite know what to think. Watching what Arnold had done to this film was kind of like someone repeatedly poking you in the face- poke, poke, poke, poke. Or maybe like Chinese water torture- drip, drip, drip, drip. It was frustrating! Of course this was fairly early on in the year, before we were seasoned video-art viewers. We had only seen a few works at this point, mostly narrative-based stuff, so this one threw us for a loop. We started grumbling around and Cyan told us to just hush and watch.
Maybe five minutes in something started to change for me. I gave up on expecting “something to happen” and just kind of fell in with the rhythm of Arnold’s jackhammer editing. I was transfixed. Suddenly there was tension and anticipation in the smallest movements and details- is the kid going to make it through the door? Is Scout going to drink her juice, or is it just going to remain suspended in a never-ending journey toward her mouth? The originally brief verbal exchanges between characters became angry, accusatory, drawn-out arguments. In other words, Passage à l’acte was never easy to watch, but I think once we stopped trying to “figure it out,” it became much more interesting.
By the end of sophomore year we took great pride in being able to sit through things like Vito Acconci’s (2.5 hours!) without batting an eye.
P.S. I have no idea what Cyan is doing now, but I would be curious to know. A Google search of her name pulls up “Skinny Puppy, ” “Termite TV” and “Vampire Freaks.com,” so I’m sure she’s busy, at least.
HD stands for Huge Dollars (which I do not have)
Published October 16, 2008 Leave a CommentTags: , , , ,
I am trying not to lust after a HD camera but .
I defy you to look at the image quality of this video (shot with a Panasonic HVX200- two of them actually, ha) without drooling.
In addition to looking lovely, this video is part of something really cool going on in my home state of Oklahoma. It’s the first in a series of free performances happening this fall as part of something called in Oklahoma City…
It’s especially ironic for me to be thinking about HD right now, since I’m starting work on a project that I’m shooting on a tiny single chip Sony with the intent of making it look really grainy and video-y! I’m just full of contradictions…
Excerpt from Mothlight, Stan Brakhage, 1963.
Mothlight, which in its entirety runs close to four minutes, was created by encasing dead moths and other organic materials between sheets of perforated tape and then making a print to 16mm film.
I’ve been reading () and watching () Stan Brakhage lately, and it seems to be affecting my eyes.
I once had the privilege of watching an original print of Brakhage’s a silent (as most of his works were) film documenting his wife giving birth to one of his children in a pool of water. As in most of his films, the lack of sound seems to intensify the visual impact of the experience. Baby Moving had such an impact on me, in fact, that afterwards I literally felt as if someone had knocked the wind from my lungs. It was such an intensely physical experience that it took me a long time- days- before I felt that I’d be able to verbalize it.
As I saw more of his films, I realized that that very concept seemed to lie at the heart of Brakhage’s work- he succeeded in pushing filmmaking so far out of the realm of familiar visual language that viewers are left with no choice but to experience his work in a very physical, very primitive manner. It’s for this reason that I think so many people are turned off by Brakhage’s work- experiencing something unfamiliar can be uncomfortable; we are given no obvious point of reference, which can cause us to feel off-balance. Plus we’re so used to being fed a steady diet of plodding, predictable, narrative visuals by films and television that when we see something that strays from the usual framework, it can throw us for a loop.
I’m talking about this nearly half a century after Brakhage made some of these films, and his work is just as unsettling and challenging as it was when he made it.
Here’s Brahkage on filmmaking and “communicating”:
Is your intent in making a film to communicate?
I get this question everywhere; and the big hang up is the word “communication.” It’s like this: let me explain by way of a story, a true story.
A man falls in love. The girl doesn’t love him. She hurts him; she wants somebody to hurt and he wants somebody to hurt him, but he doesn’t know that yet. He’s downcast. Then he meets another girl and he loves her and she loves him. He no longer needs to try and communicate with her: they just take walks together, and make love, and talk. Then he has it: some expression of his love is out there in the world.
Then he takes her to introduce her to his parents, and he is involved in communicating again, and this is very difficult. Well, this is like when a man works out of love and the work is out there; and then he takes the work into society, and that’s always very difficult. I mean no one truly understands it, just as no one’s parents truly understand one’s true love. Yet a work of art must have a life in society; once the artist had finished making it, it belongs to others. But he never made it with the idea of taking it into society. Any man that sets out to find a girl to introduce to his parents is never likely to fall in love. Any man that sets out to make a work for audiences is never going to make a work of art. A work of art is made for the most personal reasons- as an expression of love.
- from Brakhage Scrapbook: Eight Questions
photo by Richard Rodriguez
Richard Rodriguez has always had an eye for design. I can remember being blown away by the sketchbooks he kept when we were in school; while mine were always messy and jumbled, with scraps of paper falling out and coffee stains covering half of the pages, Richard’s were always immaculately clean and full of bold, precise drawings, designs and photographs. He had a deceptively simple way of organizing things visually- his imagery was somehow striking yet subtle, offering up an unpretentious invitation to interpretation both at face value and somewhere much deeper, if one was inclined to look there.
Richard now lives and works in New York City. He’s done quite a bit of design work in recent years, all the while continuing to explore and refine his particular aesthetic. He’s always cited an affinity with musician and multi-media artist David Byrne, which I think is apparent in his work. Byrne has always seemed to be motivated by a kind of childlike curiosity and determination to seek out thoughtful ways of dealing with seemingly mundane subject matter, qualities which I’ve seen in Richard’s work time and time again.
Richard started blogging in 2005 as a way to organize his thoughts and ideas. He started a blog using blogger.com and “not knowing what it was”. Eventually he figured it out. Everyonesinlovewithyou.com has slowly evolved from a smattering of interesting links and internet ephemera into one of the most stunning photo blogs I’ve encountered.
Richard doesn’t have any particular subject matter- it’s more of a way of looking at things that binds his photos together. You can line up his pictures of a street fair, a hand-painted storefront sign, and the display case at a neighborhood bakery, and somehow they’re all identifiably similar. I think it’s this quality that reminds me of , pioneer of color photography. Eggleston, who had a background in painting, was known for taking photos that may have appeared, at first glance, somewhat haphazard. He photographed shoes under a bed, puddles during a rainstorm, lightbulbs, ceiling fans and broken down cars- and the “subject” was often cropped or located off-center. People accused Eggleston of shooting from the hip, when in reality his photographs were carefully composed, with much consideration given to color palettes and depth of field.
While not bound to a particular subject, Richard’s photos do succeed in conveying a sense of time and place when viewed together. Most of his photos are taken in and around New York, with special attention paid to details that would go unnoticed by most. A picture of the back of a girl’s head on the subway, a bunch of pink flowers on a median in Times Square, and silhouettes of dancers outdoors at night during a festival all contribute to the ever-evolving visual language that Richard uses to describe his surroundings. Some of his photos could be described as having a documentary style, but they are often accompanied or followed by an image that spins the literal back out into the universal and mysterious.
I’m not sure how much Richard even considers himself a “photographer,” as much as a collector and designer of visual information. While I look at his photos and see beautifully layered, complex compositions, I get the sense that Richard is more focused on building a kind of image-design library; an archive of the ways he has gone about arranging three-dimensional elements within a two-dimensional plane. I interviewed him in my kitchen recently, and we talked about this very thing. Rather than looking at his blog as the “finished product” or as the ultimate and final way to show his photos, Richard seems to be using his blog as more of a digital sketchbook. It’s constantly evolving and changing, with new images being added almost daily to build on the dialog with past images and to provide clues for what’s to come. While there are certain obvious limitations to viewing work on the internet, the fact that artists can use blogging as a platform to solve visual and conceptual problems within their own work seems to make up for it in spades. I think that’s really interesting.
Here Richard talks about blogging and photo adventures.
This is a segment from a longer piece I made while I was at the Art Institute. The whole video, called Echoes: A Video Poem in Three Parts, was almost half an hour long.
My dad’s little brother was killed in the Vietnam War when he was only 18. My dad was in in the Navy at the time, still basically a kid himself. My dad didn’t talk about his brother much when I was young, so he was always kind of a sad mystery to me. One summer when I was home from college, my dad announced that he wanted to attend a reunion of some of the men who had served with my would-have-been uncle during the war. I felt I needed to document the experience.
Drive is the middle section of the video. The footage is from the actual drive to the reunion, which took place in Killeen, Texas. The text is from an interview with my father.
Originally I had audio with this segment, but it was under copyright. My professors at the time didn’t talk to us much about using copyrighted material, and when they did it was kind of like, “no one’s going to come after you because you’re just poor students”. Which kind of makes sense, but I wish I had known about other alternatives because I’d still like to show the piece but with original audio. So I’m showing it here, silent. I think it still works.
I always felt like this was the most successful part of the video because it encompasses, I think, this kind of haunted feeling. I struggled for a long time over exactly how to deal with my father’s interview. I actually had a video of him doing the interview, but somehow watching it was just too… specific. For me it was painful to watch because my dad was so honest and so emotionally raw- he was very openly talking about emotions he hadn’t dealt with in a very long time. It was powerful stuff, and I knew I had to handle it delicately. I felt that showing the interview by itself would be almost too much for people- the rawness of it might somehow prevent people from really thinking about the more universal issues of what my father was dealing with. So I felt that I needed to remove the viewer from the immediacy of what my dad was saying and how he was saying it. I did this by literally taking my dad out of it, leaving only his words. Then, for visuals, I played around with the footage from the drive, slowing it down and altering the color and texture, in an attempt to create a kind of dream-like, thoughtful space in which to reflect on what my dad had said.
This project is the hardest thing I have ever done. Not just art-wise, either. It was hard to ask my dad questions about something I knew was painful for him, it was hard to go on that trip and to tape people I didn’t know talking about a dark and difficult shared history, it was hard to witness my dad dealing with a ghost from his past, and it was hard to put something together that I thought would do justice to the memory of my dad’s little brother. But because of those things I also think it’s one of the most honest things I’ve made.
Making things, for me, is about trying to translate something internal into something external. It’s about trying to process your experiences and put them into some kind of shape that you can meditate and reflect on. And that, I think, is inherently difficult. It’s difficult because life has no natural shape or order- life is chaos, and making sense from chaos is quite a task. But it’s what we do, as humans. We take our messy experiences and our messy emotions and spread them out like tea leaves and try with all our might to divine some kind of meaning. Whatever shape this takes for people, this meaning-making, whether it takes the shape of religion, or art, or science, or a career, or a family, or love, or addiction, or rebellion- we need something to anchor us amidst the chaos. Otherwise, we’re lost.
I first learned about Jacob Smigel through a friend who had heard part of Eavesdrop: A Wealth of Found Sound. I ordered Eavesdrop from Jacob’s site and was extremely happy with my purchase (a mere $10!). Along with the CD, Jacob enclosed several stickers, a black and white photograph of an old man getting a haircut, and a hand-written note saying hello and asking if I knew some members in a band he thought was from Kansas City (I didn’t).
Jacob spent years scouring thrift stores and yard sales, looking for discarded cassette tapes and forgotten answering machine recordings. He assembled the best and most bizarre of what he found and released it as Eavesdrop.
From (where you can hear lots of his work, BTW):
Eavesdrop is a collection of anonymous recordings found at thrift stores, yard sales, and in trash bins over the past four years. These unaltered tracks come from audio or micro-cassettes, 8-Tracks and home-recorded records. Many of the clips are segments from audio diaries, tape-letters, the sound of road trips, fights, crying, family moments, telephone conversations/messages, or the amusements of children or the mentally handicapped.
A minimum of editing or manipulation was used in the making of this album. I did not add music to the tracks (or mash them up), but instead served as preservationist (or curator) to present the listener with the most powerful recordings in their natural state. Some are funny, some are ridiculous, others make no sense. A few are so perfect I can’t believe I actually found them.
Eavesdrop is a scattered documentation of what I call “the golden age of personal recording (1965 – 1986).” It is about the wonder that is putting our experiences, feelings, and lives down on tape.
In addition to curating found sounds, Jacob is also a musician. His latest (and supposedly last; he’s starting medical school soon- go figure) project is an album called New Mexico, which combines music, field recordings and spoken word to paint a portrait of an old adobe cabin his family visited on holidays during his youth. Jacob’s music has a folksy quality to it and his voice kind of reminds me of Stephen Malkmus. One of my favorite tracks consists of Jacob talking about a mysterious encounter he had with a pack rat while staying in the cabin with some friends.
I really dig Jacob’s ability to create a kind of sacred context through which to display people’s personal histories, whether they belong to him or to someone he’s never met. New Mexico is great on one level just because it’s a pleasure to listen to, but it’s also a very layered and complex examination of a time and place that has special meaning to the author. The songs and stories on the album function as little vignettes into Jacob’s past, each one a kind of meditation on the meaning of memory and place.
Eavesdrop is fun to listen to in a different way. When I was a kid I carried a tape recorder around with me and narrated whatever I was doing. I would tape myself cleaning my room, brushing my teeth, making up a song, whatever. I have no idea where those tapes are today, but if I were to stumble across them I imagine I would feel like I did when I listened to Eavesdrop for the first time. Even though the clips have been “curated,” you can’t help but feel that you’re playing a part in discovering them. None of these recordings were created with the intent of people actually hearing them, which allows us to drop in and listen to people at their most honest, most vulgar, most vulnerable, and most interesting.
Parts of Eavesdrop are occasionally played on which is another great spot to hear found sound.
