i.thou work sample 9.11 via youTube
i.thou, a film in progress since 2009. Tightly curated video is processed and reprocessed, the data files are altered, the result is collaged with further animation. Audiocollage keyed to the video.
This labor-intensive process includes at least half a dozen software tools and relies on the compression technology that drives digital video to work. About half of the film is currently “complete”.
The content unfolds in a dreamlike world. Symbols melt one to the next, gestures are iconicized, and the deconstruction of the visual language of film picks at its underlying illusion.
In this poetic landscape the story can be read in many, many ways.
Windows on the War at the Art Institute of Chicago
During World War II they made posters. The exhibit includes display of stencils used to make one image, since most of these posters were made using spray paint and stencils in a modified printmaking technique. Each country used painterly images to talk about enduring the process of making war, giving faces of sorts to enemy leaders, and create images to tell the story of discovering the atrocities perpetuated in the Germans’ Holocaust.
windows on the war : gallery view
The Art Institute of Chicago currently displays an enormous selection of these posters from its own collection. Of course I thought about how we talk about war now. I thought about the lack of created images representing the struggle with America’s wars abroad. I thought about how the more publicized American artists fiddle with ‘beautiful decoration’, cleverness, and technology. I thought about how young artists crucify themselves on the pursuit of fame in the castrated visual language of the academy. I thought about how digital media will not survive in the way these works on paper have survived. I thought about how each poster did not have an ‘artist’s signature’ yet somehow ‘credit’ was given the artist, or the group of artists, responsible for the work on view.
Then, I thought about the work.
I am interested in the artists’ choices as they created visual language of the evils unfolding somewhere else.
ben shahn poster describing nazi brutality
Wall text accompanying the 1942 image by Ben Shahn, published as an offset lithograph by the Office of War Information, US Government Printing Office:
This is one of only two designs by Ben Shahn printed for the Office of War Information. Inspired by the destruction of Lidice, Czechoslovakia, an industrial village razed by the Nazis in retaliation for the 1942 shooting of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich, Shahn portrayed a cornered man cloaked in a hood, fists clenched against a high brick wall.
This design prompted critics to ask what kind of “realism” could best communicate to the American people – the storybook folk realism of Norman Rockwell, or the chilling documentary realism of Shahn.
nikolai denisovskii : straining in vain
Nikolai Denisovskii’s stencil poster, one of an edition of 650. Russian.
From the wall text : Despite the fact that Germany’s human resources are exhausted, the Fascists keep announcing new “super-total” mobilizations.
Plucked clean from all ends,
There sits the blood-drinking vulture.
But no matter how hard the killer tries,
He cannot get his chicks to hatch.
Against an ominous sky, a Nazi bird of prey with Hitler’s features sits on the skulls of slain German soldiers as if they are eggs from which it is possible to hatch new recruits. The text by the young satirical poet Mikhail Vershinin displays an admirable economy of means, underscoring all the ironies of the image in just four brief lines.
a statesman for contemporary germany
Nikolai Denisovskii’s stencil poster, one of an edition of 1,000. Russian.
From the wall text : The Lublin camp, with its calculated and fearsomely methodical technique of exterminating people, again strongly underscores the STATE-SPONSORED nature of the German organization of mass murder and torture. From the newspaper, Krasnaia zvezda.
In this chilling poster, the soldier being honored symbolizes all of the occupying German forces along the Eastern front, which were Hitler’s willing executioners. This poster coincided with the Red Army’s first encounter with a Nazi extermination camp – Majdanek – on July 24, 1944.
The wall text describing what it was like to discover the concentration camps broke my heart. I have read anecdotes of American GIs suffering post traumatic stress responses (sleep disturbances and more) years after they discovered what they discovered freeing those camps. The Russian stories are in its own category.
For images from the Art Institute, click through here.
They supposed it was a muslim terror cell.
Its easier to talk about Amy. Especially in the creative community, we know people who struggle with that self-destructivity.
What happened in Norway traumatizes every member of the human community. Its a trauma because it is unfamiliar. Its a trauma because we don’t have words for it. We do not want to imagine ourselves among the hunted.
Mass killing by a single person only is familiar through our violent films and video games. Those arenas provide us the privileged illusion of control with our game controllers, our remote controls.
We feel powerless witnessing Norway. Who wants to feel powerless?
schadenfreude : pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others
”Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. ”
Russell Brand on Amy Winehouse: ‘We have lost a beautiful, talented woman’
This particular poison, schadenfreude, allows the witness the vanity of feeling superior to someone who otherwise would be an object of jealousy. Schadenfreude’s cheap ego boost also provides an out. One does not have to offer a helping hand to someone one snarks while stepping over them as they lay dying, while giving you their best.
I think that we need public rituals for witnessing distant atrocities, distant suffering. We need ritual mental and emotional space for what we see in the media.
Once I went to New Orleans to figure out what it meant for that place to survive a hurricane. I don’t know how to get to Norway from here. I only know the media, with its cheap made-up stories built to ‘tell us something first’, fails us.
Just look at his picture. You know, of the highly-organized, white-faced, conservative Christian.
toggle the arrows in the lower right hand corner for full-screen mode.
wanna make one of these things for yourself? google cooliris and have a blast.
here’s a single set, of stills from CHASE.
facial recognition software meets icon
hanuman, hanuman, hanuman, not hanuman
invitation to name Buddha
unnamed (Buddha)
You don’t find poetry in the words. I love cinema. I deconstruct and reconstruct film’s vocabulary in my current creative process.
You don’t find poetry in the words. The mastery we find in this kind of artwork is not in the script, the plotlines, the rush of it. Its not in any one element, but the spirit in which the whole hangs together.
I study film because I know that eventually I’m going to make full-length narrative films. Sometimes the discoveries I make I find worthy of sharing.
Parallel Lines ~ The Parallax View & Zodiac
Central characters in both films : behavior is driven by their occupation (newspaper reporting). Some of the tension in the films is created by these characters struggling with these the role asked of their position.
Parallax Corporation and the Zodiac killer are each faceless powers against which the reporter(s) struggle or argue, an “other” with no fixed identity. in both narratives the representative individuals of that other change as the narrative moves forward, the reporters discovering and rediscovering the face(s) of the oppressive “other”.
Neither film presents a tidy resolution.
Watching Parallax, I was struck by the visual connection to Zodiac. Both films have golden southern california sunlight, broad shots with a sense of natural light. Green-grass-sunny-day contrasts with rich darkness. My only viewing of Zodiac was in the theater, opening night. I was struck by the depth of darkness in it, not from the amount or proportion of “blacks” on the film but the richness of contrast, the texture in the dark. A quality of saturation and tone shared with some of David Lynch’s films. Parallax shares that quality.
Subsequent discussion of Fincher revealed he went for the visual vocabulary of 70′s film to match the time period of Zodiac‘s narrative.
The reporter(s) at the center of each narrative are idealized truth-seekers in a film narrative context of assumed corruption. Each seeks truth at great personal cost, enduring self-transformation of either cynicism, getting lost in the cloak-and-dagger discovery process, upending their own assumptions, struggling to get others on board with their discoveries.
Can either of these narratives survive if set in the present? The news can lie to us, legally. It does so, mainly by omission. With one word, I jump the shark : infotainment.
We have come to the place where our fiction tells truth more than our fiction that claims to tell the truth.
Cinematography and narrative : the open, natural daylight bitten into by darkness. The narrative tension of men carrying psychological flashlights into the unknown, into the dark other-places both inside themselves and in their evil opponent. The lead characters attempt to find, define, conquer the unknown darkness outside themselves; they journey their own darkness.
No resolution. The rise and fall of fear in each film. The rise and fall of fear in each character. Will conquering the evil “other” resolve the fear each character lives with . . . Was that fear invoked by the other in the narrative?
Backdrop of paranoid tension, in each film. That paranoia the edge found between the rich darks and clear yellows.
Every day anniversary. Moon in the sky. Drunks howl for her. A wolf in the woods says, pour me a drink. He puts on his own red cloak.
Lets trade stories. Lets trade sore retellings. Walk down a hall of mirrors. Spectacular tragedy. It wasn’t supposed to be. It wasn’t supposed to be.
Words live in the house next door. Lets sit on the porch, the one book-ended by empty suits of armor. Lets sit on the porch this night. Lets watch the moon wax and wane.
The drunks stumble into the street. They wear the ashes of their bodies. The wolf looks up at me. He tests the blade of his scythe against his own fur first.
There is a Buddhist practice of mindfulness, of listening to inner and outer difficulty. One watches ones own thoughts pass like clouds to learn the truth about human nature. One cultivates attention without judgement.
We have a spiritual anatomy. We are beings living in bodies which are perceived as objects. Our legal system and the bureaucracies of our lives are managed by the metadata attached to the objects of our bodies (name, rank, serial number).
Imagination, the doorway to inner consciousness. Imagination, the storyteller that shapes our possibilities. What story explains what is now? Did that story make this reality possible? How do our beliefs shape what we make in this world? What story do we line our sensory experiences with? What meanings do we ask of our imagination, to color what we percieve?
So far, two of my 30/30 poems are video clips. Animations. It is a puzzle, keeping the text as the focus, playing with the tension of moving text and moving image.
When I make performance works of poetry reading combined with backing film and audio sketches, they work in a much more complex and fluid way than these videos. The bling poem is fixed, for one thing – its like an in-print, book publication. Performances shift and change, they take the audience elsewhere. Since they cannot be replicated, there’s an electricity present . . . mm.
April 11 : honeytongue
Bling poems because the words are given the bling of movement, color, illustration, imaginary context. The words are dressed.
Most of the poems I’m publishing at my tumblr I’m posting as photos. tumblr has the worst text editing markup management system of all time, at least for me. One has almost no control over how the text looks. That’s dissatisfying.
There is nothing more fruitless than having a work process argue back with me. At times, discoveries are made during the workarounds.
Poetry begins as a series of images; poetry is the most synaesthetic of forms. When the words lock together into the right combination of sound and meaning and the images invoked parade past in an imagined slide show . . .
