From the website:
"The streams come from webcams dispersed all over the world and are captured by a server. A fictional landscape takes form and continually evolves in function of what is capture by the cameras. While this projected landscape evolves, the viewer's image is also captured by a webcam located in the exhibition space and incorporated into the landscape one sees. In addition, a monitor allows for the consultation of ephemeral archives presenting the last 24 hours of the currently visible landscape."
http://b-l-u-e-s-c-r-e-e-n.net/streamscape/show.php?lang=1 will take you directly to the shifting landscape itself.
On Saturday, Dec 15 I staged a work called pattern recognition as part of a benefit for Common Ground, a women's shelter in New Orleans. A 20-minute spoken word performance with backing video and sound, the work presents a constellation of verbal & visual symbols spread out over time.
The video has alot of layers and I've struggled with size & compression issues for the web. Higher image quality will be coming soon.
Audio was produced by DJ earWIG in Texas. He uses found sound techniques, and applied that working method to audio recording of my violin performance.
I used found video and other animated found images to create the video.
Working with found material, to me, is like analyzing and manipulating sensory information. All sensory information is found or discovered. Art is the purposeful arrangement of any kind of material information for the viewer to sense.
Each viewer will read into that information what they will, each viewer working from their own perspective and projecting their own maps on the information they are receiving.
The found video I used comes to me from archive.org. This library of video functions as a memory bank for the West, as glitchy and subjective (and filled with sales pitches) as your average human's memory. So keep in mind that on some level as I manipulate this found video I am manipulating and re-presenting our communal memories.
This is also the website where I found DJ earWIG in the first place.
The spoken word element, which is hidden here, was a selection of my poetry. I wait until the last minute, almost, to select what I'm going to read when I do these performances. I can't perceive the finished work as it happens. Only the audience does. From the stage, I get to watch them make connections between symbols and images in the spoken word and the video, which I can't see while I read.
Feedback involves things like, "Did you plan that? How did you get that to synch up with the video like that?" etc. I am a highly intuitive person, and my performances with backing film happen with sychronicity as part of my tools. One audience member at this show referred to that as the 'man behind the curtain effect'.
Psychologically there is the truth that, when coming of age, girls have to come into their power. Girls have to create some constructive relationship to power that our culture claims is inaccessable to us. Our culture claims that only men have authority and power, and women and girls can only gain access to that power by manipulating the men who have it.
The easiest way women can manipulate men is with and through their sexuality, by sexualizing their own bodies -- see how Pat's role shifts to prostitute almost immediately in the video. In part this is because this what our culture expects and allows, even encourages and rewards - dare I raise the spectre of Paris-Britney-Lindsey? Yet if a girl embraces this role, she may be condemned to it - see the media's immediate attacks of Paris for her suggested humanitarian trip to Rwanda.
The screen of the cultural mainstream has her in her role and won't let her out of it, not very easily.
Pat's character's father demands she maintain some role she doesn't want, does not allow the girl to create herself. She leaves, subjects herself and her body to the urban wilderness in order to have the liberty to determine her own identity. In the short term, she sells her body to preserve her soul. The incomplete conflict with asserted male authority comes to the surface soon enough.
Side note : the asserted male authority of both the father and the pimp is to protect teenage sexuality from predators. The men are running a protection racket, and fear of rape is the weapon aimed at controlling the girl.
She wins on her terms, having gained the strength-in-numbers of her peers and simpy continually asserting her own power. It is only a music video, after all ... perhaps a little freudian slip by the entertainment industry?
So, who's pimping who? Where does the power live in her series of relationships on this five minute journey to individuation and the right to self-determination?
1.
Last night I showed some work and ran the A/V side of a presentation of extremely difficult information.
The work was the video projection with dance choreographed by Stephanie Tiel, a piece called Flip the Script. We presented it at the Union Project, along with about twenty minutes selected from a documentary called Invisible Children.
Invisible Children documents a problem in Uganda, where people are abducting and indoctrinating children into killing machines for an insurgency.
Flip the Script traces an individual's journey through the long inner argument, the struggle that is addressing reality without compromising the self.
It's the old truth, the personal is political.
Believe it or not, these things are connected.
Whatever darkness some other human has decided to make visible in the world, thanks to the internet and the global reach of news media, we are more and more able to witness what they are doing. How we choose to deal with distant evil, our relative ability to stomach that darkness made visible by others, is a simple mirror of how we choose to deal with the darknesses and struggle inside of ourselves.
God forbid we ever admit to the struggle!
2.
How do we, as a culture, address culturally traumatic material?
There's very little language available to us for discussing the horrors of war. I spent a few weeks working with material from Iraq this fall, footage shot by soldiers there.
This material included footage of other soldiers being blown up.
Its complicated and difficult, this war, and it has become wallpaper on our televisions. Instead of discussing or portraying what is, over there, the media turns it all into an argument of one kind or another. They don't ask, What's true? Instead, they ask, Who's right?
This stimulates endless pontification by talking heads, instead of simple representation of what is.
3.
How do we, as a culture, address historically traumatic material?
Memoirs from Hijiyama is Jonathan Yuen's memorial to those who survived the bombing of Hiroshima. He provides an information context that is very instructive.
I am beginning to call this kind of work the poetics of annihiliation. The aesthetic, the wow-factor of the design eases the fact that you may be reading about the peeling-off of skin that survivors endured, that you may be looking at the stop-motion of a house exploding from the blast that killed so many people.
It is painfully beautiful, and still, his website that responds to the click of a mouse, his website that unfolds as a book would, page by page, but in many dimensions, not just paging left to right.
Went and found him on another social networking site, sent him kudos. He went and looked at my work and asked about me producing some video for him. I suggested instead I send him some audio that I'd recorded, for him to treat as found sound.
This track is one of three pieces he put together, cutting altering and rearranging the recordings of violin performances I emailed to him. The whole shebang, called The Monitor Collaboration, is found here.
Listening to it, I know that a video or two are not far behind. The pieces are soundtracks for something ...
Pittsburgh documentary filmmaker Chris Ivey has been making documentaries about the 'revitalization' of East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh for the last three years. He just released the trailer for the second segment and it looks to be as interesting as 2006's East of Liberty.
...to the next performance of Flip the Script
a multi media performance piece I created with choreographer Stephanie Tiel. Three dancers take the audience on a transformative journey, from denial to battle to reconciliation. The stage is set and defined by gorgeous, oversized video projection. Next performance: Dec 9, 2007 at the Union Project in Pittsburgh, PA. Then February 25 in Chicago, IL.
this while looking for a french grammar to listen to while editing.
beautiful short short chalkboard drawing animations
