Response to Tumelo Mosaka talk

“Location, location, location.” I liked that he said that when let loose how bewildered he felt in the midwest.

I should’ve written this when the lecture was more fresh in my mind, but here goes my best reflection. The things that I came away with from Musaka’s lecture:

He wasn’t the greatest storyteller, but such things can befall people who have to speak in a second language and I didn’t mind. And, for one thing, I think it’s pretty fishy to go to school just for curating. That just seems odd to me.

I admired that he admitted he is young and doesn’t yet know everything about art and curating, something that not every curator I’ve heard speak has believed. I like the way that he doesn’t make art himself necessarily, but actually he does by curating. The way that he finds artists, and who he finds, then how he assembles them is different from how any other curator would. Isn’t that art? The assemblage of expression? The collage of other human ideas?

I really need to go over and look at those videos. I wish he would’ve talked about the show more, but I guess it was interesting to hear about his process and a little history leading up to now.

I did get some ideas while he was talking about bringing art to the people and curating. I thought of a few projects I’d like to start either on the breaks or after I’ve graduated and gone back home. When I’m home, I am constantly eager to share what I learn at KCAI with others and how art, and having dialogues about it, can really bring a community together. I think I might try and take over a run down building downtown where I live and try to start some sort of community gallery or one night showing. I wonder if I could make some publicized assignment to the community, and to invite anyone to take a photo and submit it. Maybe the photo would be in the parameters of a word like “home”. Anyway, I’m kind of excited to get back to my community. But after reading a lot of articles written by Russian cubo-futurists it really is a stick situation to try and “bring art to the people” because any way you go at it, you could be labeling people as less than capable. Or worse, elevating yourself because you are the “cultured one”.

Man!

You've got to be kidding me, blogger just crashed and I lost my very long writing.

Great.

Damn it.

Okay well I wrote about how this project may in result be a more personal lesson piece about how I need to shoot my next important pieces. Maybe I'll just talk about all this stuff on monday when we screen the rough cut.

The rough cut as of now is about 5 short pieces, all tweaking a little and experimenting with what I can do digitally with Piece Touchee as a style per se.

All the pieces are different possibilities I imagined for the plot of Piece Touchee to move while I saw it for the first time.

I watched quite a few films from A Critical Cinema 3 and will talk about that too on monday.

Piece Touchee experiment

2/2/11

To start off this semester I want to jump start back into video with a short video and editing experiment. My goal is:

To make a short piece to get me back into the groove of narrative. I want to also work with elements that I haven’t tackled yet and will need to before thesis production. These being; costume, artificial lighting, USING A TRIPOD, makeup, special effect etc.

To accomplish these things by re-creating Martin Arnold’s Piece Touchee. Also this piece will function as an editing exercise, which is my favorite process, and I feel the solid meaning or crux of the piece will only reveal itself, while editing.

2/8/11

So, now that the piece has been shot I've begun the editing experiment. I've learned the micro movements Arnold used and all the different ways I move the frames in FCP. Now the doubt also begins. I'm not sure what to use for the audio track, and a remix of a 1950s song doesn't quite seem appropriate anymore. I will bring this up tomorrow for discussion.

As for the reading I've been doing, I found an interview with Arnold in A Critical Cinema 3 where he briefly discusses Piece Touchee but I need to read it a few more times to interpret his ideas. Most of the things I read needed to steep for awhile and I will read them again tonight. I also checked out Film Theory and Criticism, a book that I've been picking through and really need to buy. Among that group of books were two more, Mythologies and Death at 24x a Second. Then yesterday I found A Barthes Reader in order to decode Barthes writing Garbo's Face. Again more steepage.

Hopefully I will have some more cohesive thoughts by Thursday. I will post my developments by the end of that day.

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As planned, I am now home in Iowa after completing my last exam and sitting here ready to review the semester in my blog.

This semester has felt like a marathon and I can't tell if it is more relieving or more disheartening that I am not sure if it happened at all. I feel as though I've gone through this drawn out journey and now that it's over I have no idea what to do but just sit. Despite the culmination of major stress (the most I believe I have felt up to this point) and more meltdowns I thought possible, I don't feel like the work went as far as I traveled psychologically. To attempt to track specific thoughts and their correlating emotions through the months may be the way for me to see the path for myself.

When I made the transition from home to school in August, I had been resting myself, post-dirt. Over the summer I had been doing a lot of reading on environmental issues, activism, growing my own victory garden and working on the farm. I had began to find more peace in art through direct action in the way I lived and tried to put the problem of how I could transfer that to video (and to my apartment in KC) out of my mind. I started to become more bitter about the difficulty of the place we are in now and the ease of inaction. I focused this frustration on my fascination with bones and furniture and made a somewhat dark peace about what corn meant to me at the time and how things were starting to feel backwards at home on the farm.

After Acidosis for Economics the bitterness had found a pessimist stasis. Not inspired to make a video yet, I felt I needed to dive more personally into this frustration of mine. When I looked at books of high design in furniture I started to feel disdain towards the value being put on trivial objects like a stream lined desk chair when all I could see was the ugliness "those kind of people" enjoy the ignorance of. (I was on a very high and judgmental horse for awhile) Just, angry. Then I would ask myself how my "art" was any more relevant or valuable than a desk chair. Down and down I plummet into the most basic questions, "what is art?" and "what am I doing with my life?"

So I then decided to express in a project, explicitly or implicitly, a rather painful experience I had watching a steer merely exist in a sling until he died. This experience would then be related to a more global issue that was directly related to my experience. After our mid-term review I came to agree with my teacher very emotionally that it is about the quality of life of the animal.

Without writing an extremely lengthy post (I guess it already is) I move to my ideas for my final piece. By the end of October many sources of anxiety were starting to have a physical toll; roommate issues, safety issues, beginnings of familiar unrest. I started to get really upset about misunderstandings and a divide growing between my family and thought I had a pretty clear picture and plan for my final project.

This idea was to project on 4 sides of a bulk feed bag cube. Each side would have a personal confession addressing my recent work and their opinions about it. After a succession of calamities, the installation felt all wrong. I felt that now I had come full circle back to video. At this point the clarity was all but nonexistent in my thoughts other than basic survival by making a video. I decided to try and externalize all the confusion and bitterness in the days I had left before my final crit. I had been watching so many videos about corn, and way to many animal abuse videos captured by animal rights groups. It was awful. It was pain that I felt about everything and guilt for failing at accomplishing the piece I had set out to do. I hoped that the viewing in crit would be away for me to release that bad energy and find again the good place I had found in the summer with my family.

Turns out, I feel the video was more successful than the realized installation would have been but it wasn't any less painful to watch. I wanted this semester to be over, I needed it to be. Watching the video let me see a little bit of myself from the outside. I don't think I'm over it yet and I'm dreading when my family sits down to watch it this weekend.

All I can say right now is that I'm glad that it happened, and I feel that I'm ready to move onto narrative pieces again. Not so much ready as feeling it's okay for me to do something fictional next semester. After our documentary unit last spring all I wanted was to focus on real things. I saw so many problems that I wanted to take to the world and let other people tell made up stories. I felt I had a duty to, I guess. Now I think I will try and draw narrative from real life, but try and take literal action in response to my frustration of problems versus inserting it directly into my work. For example, volunteering with Badseed in downtown KC and learning how I can bring organic and sustainable practices back home. I need to also remember to not worry about everything, but I refuse to take a step back into apathy in any aspect of my life. I don't care if I can't do anything about secret dolphin poaching in Japan for the sake of false nationalism. I will not default to apathy for the sake of a struggle-free life.

I don't know about you, but I think Angel Redinger is also struggling with some of the same issues I am.

Maybe I'll have more wise to say in a week or so.

Production 3 concept idea

This will be presenting a documentary type video piece, edited similarly to the movie Timecode:

where the viewer is guided to pay attention is manipulated by the volumes of all four channels being mixed. This is how the story is told. With different combination of mixing, a slightly different narrative occurs.


I'm not sure whether the subject of this life after corn piece will be with just specifically cattle, or more areas of livestock production. I am in contact with our local Locker and might be dealing with the subject of slaughter.

Production 3 Ideas

In continuation of the Life after Corn series

I want to use the surface of the seed bag (intact) and project from the inside onto all four walls. Using it as a multichannel documentary installation.

I will construct a frame for the bag so the inside will be hollow, room enough for the players and projectors, as well as room for me to set it up. The bottom of the bag will be cut out so it can just be lifted up and enter from underneath.

"Sling"

"Sling"

Reaction to Eero Aanio's Bubble Chair, and the chronically parallel rise of the mass commercial feedlot.

Bulk seed bags material, corn

Life after Corn series, 2010