Last week our director gave us the go-ahead to put our early literacy video, Growing Readers, under a BY-NC-ND Creative Commons license. This is exciting for several reasons. What this means is that anybody who wants to is now free to screen, copy and distribute our video as long as 1) we get credit, 2) no one is making a profit from it and 3) the video isn’t modified in any way. Any group, institution or individual is free to show and share this video without worrying about obtaining our permission. The BY-NC-ND CC license is the most restrictive, and is sometimes referred to as the “free publicity” license in that it essentially encourages the sharing and distribution of the licensed work while prohibiting any modifications from being made.
This seems to fall in line beautifully with what libraries are about- the free sharing of information. I hope to see other libraries and non-profit educational and cultural institutions that produce media looking to Creative Commons as an alternative to traditional copyright. It seems to me that releasing work under this type of license could only benefit the participating institutions- it’s a great way to encourage people to find, use, and share your work with others.
I’ll be uploading and linking to Growing Readers soon- both the English and Spanish versions!
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.
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…
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.
Published October 13, 2008 , Leave a Comment Tags: , , , , , ,
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 remember watching Errol Morris’ Vernon, Florida for the first time and thinking about how everyone can be compelling if you can just figure out how to get them to talk about what’s interesting to them.
I’ve always loved watching Errol Morris’ interviews. He has no problem using extremely long takes of someone just talking. These days it’s almost bizzare to see such long stretches of footage, unmolested by edits.
I love this bit of philosophy on picture-taking from Vernon…
