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.