I have updated my spring video--I have finished with the visuals and now am onto sound. I was trying several things last night and it seems to be somewhere between Philip Glass' piano étude no. 6 and the guitar I used in my hand video, but I think I'll be composing something of my own for this one, probably either piano or guitar (neither of which I play). There is always the possibility of wind sounds getting in there, too. I doubt there will be spoken words.
I also have video videos from a rope swing, the start of one of my stop motions with diagrams of body systems (for acupuncture), and one with a graveyard that starts really thinking about words and language. I have so many plans for language--using books to pull out words and string them together--I mean literally photographing the books and inserting the sequences throughout so that they are more footage. I just wish I had more time to be doing all of these things.
hello again, after a several month absence. I have not been posting because I haven't known what to be writing or making for that matter, and I am finally working on editing a video that I would like to share. I have been taking photos//footage for the last few months but it has mostly been sitting on my hard drive as I collect and collect and collect images, not really knowing what they are for. Tonight I started making a video out of what I've taken in the last month here. I have been thinking a lot about blur--seeing and not seeing at the same time--and it is spring which is an apt time to be thinking about this, as wood energy rises and we all begin to move and vibrate after a long winter. It is a time for both blurring vision with such frenetic activity, as well as clearing vision as we birth and grow. There is a push and pull, a tension in the air, a vibrancy. Everything is pushing, pousser, growing out of its old self, birthing, always moving, even when we are still we are moving, moving.
In terms of how far along this video is, I would say, perhaps 35% overall. Visually, I would say it's 85% there, but I'm not exactly sure where it should end, whether here is far enough or if my most recent moon rising sequence and fully-leafed-out-silver-maple sequence should be in there, too. My most most recent things are not meant for this, they are something different, so it's a matter of sifting through, and trying a lot of options, per usual. Then there is sound, which is done in the same fashion--I am contemplating actually making some music by mixing and editing, and perhaps even covering some tracks I have been, admittedly, obsessively listening to lately (mostly from Trois Colours soundtracks, Rouge and Bleu, especially), because they are so full of the edginess that this time of year embodies. I expect it may end up being highly layered in parts and sparser in others--but these are just ideas.
My important questions right now are about how to end it visually. Do I leave things at a cusp, vibrating and then boom it's just over? Do I try to find rest, even a heightened energy state where it remains for a little bit?
The truth is, I don't know which of these videos is my final project for this class because I'm just making them. They all have to do with process.I don't know which I will talk about in our critiques tomorrow, or maybe I don't need to talk about one of them but all of them. I feel like they need to be seen in relation to one another in some sort of way whether in sequence or in tandem because it seems that they are parts of a greater whole (a narrative, even? could I be making a narrative?).
Anyhow, here is my statement.
I don’t know where my body stops and the earth begins. There is only a blur. My eyes move; the trees move. We grow, branch, crack, split, decay. We grow again. Pushed by the wind, we speak in whispers, afraid we might say too much, afraid no one will hear.
I forget my body and the earth sometimes. I forget that I need soil, air, rushing water and the afternoon sun. I need to remember that my body is falling apart and coming together, that we're all falling apart and coming together. I make my videos and paintings to help remember.
In using photography, which is mechanically mediated, as well as language, which is personally mediated, I aim to validate the empirically existent as well as the poetic and personal, as reality. The shifting quality of my stop-motion videos is a result of the inevitable movement of my body—and my camera with it—as my eyes move through a space. Moving up close to far away, my eyes never rest for long; forms blur and reiterate one another. I see them again and again, attempting to understand and translate their physicality, growth and decay as they change through time. As a body of work, these visual and verbal fragments come together to form an experience where motion and stability—the sure and unsure—are conflated.
I have been continuing to take series of photographs of landscapes as well as my lung x-ray, which I intend to make into videos similar to the way in which I made my previous video honestly don’t know. They will be three separate works, between 2 and 4 minutes long. The subject of the first is my lung x-ray which I have been carrying with me the last few weeks and photographing it while holding it in front of the sun in different landscapes. In this video, I intend to make repetitive sequences of the light moving through my air-tract and heart. For the sound, I will use a more lengthy cut-up of writings that speaks about the relation of body to earth and will record my own voice speaking for this.
For the second video, I took many sequences of images as I traveled between countries over the break, and intend to work with these to create a video concerning stability and disorientation in moving through landscapes. This is related to the last video I am working on in which I have been returning to one spot in the woods for the last several weeks and taking series of photos as the woods have changed in color and quality of light with fall coming on here. In this video, I would like to cut between views of the same spot with and without leaves, showing the same place in different times, and showing the repetitive engagement with a single place I have had. For the sound, I will make voice recordings of thoughts I have been writing the last few weeks, concerning stillness and movement through time and life. For example, “where did we come from? where are we going?” I am also working on paintings of the trees in this spot, and would like to display the video and a painting in tandem together. The video will be projected on the wall next to the painting so that it is the same size, each measuring approximately 3’ x 4’ so that the viewer is able to enter the two views. This will most likely be the final project that I present to the class, though the other videos may help me clarify ideas for this work.
