4 posts tagged “semiotics”
I take pictures on the fly and post them online as I go. I'm playing with the dynamics of text and image. Some of the image/text things are little jokes, some are simple moments of beauty, some are intersections between me and the world, my noting the beauty that sustains me.
Already there are picture series that are more than just snapshots or singular moments, but actually making text-and-image poems as a means of negotiating the complexities of daily life.
You can follow - visit --- on the fly
The Fool is the 'unnumbered' card of the Tarot trumps. It can lead or end the sequence of 21 Major Arcana. Iconically & historically linked to the juggler, a google image search of "0 THE FOOL" produces any number of interpretations on the theme.
Don't get caught up in semantics. The markers of the actual icon are pretty clear. The above image is the classic Rider-Waite representation.
Two things have popped up in the media recently that I link to the energies of 0 THE FOOL. Conveniently, one is upright, the other, reversed.
0 THE FOOL upright: the Fool as disbelieved source of wisdom, a la King Lear, the gentle trickster who reminds us of our humanity through Freudian slips and fart jokes.
Steve-O, that Fool from Jackass who has abused himself publically to make a living, has not been doing so well of late. After he was jailed for a short period of time, he shot the video embedded below. Now locked up in a psych ward, he wrote a long letter to his friends which he had his assistant "share ... with as many people as possible on the Internet (rather than try to sell a "juicy" story to the tabloid press for profit)."
Now, what do I have to add? The research I did into the immortality of the soul, the end of life in our current bodies, and the 4th dimension, was, by no means a bunch of bulls--t. I could stand before you all and say very similar words to the ones I say in the following clip, it's just that I happened to be under the influence of a very dangerous amount of drugs when it was filmed:
Heath Ledger's last full role as The Joker, which he described as a 'psychopathic, schizophrenic clown'.
The Joker is a shadow Fool because it is consciously destructive, as opposed to the upright-Fool's playful disruption so necessary to our lives. He uses the mask to cover facial scars that cannot be hidden. He has twisted himself to destroy the culture that created him through whatever was inflicted upon him. "Whatever does not kill you makes you stranger.
The upright Fool's activity results in the necessary periodic aeration or tilling of psyche. the Fool reversed is soaked with the need for revenge and poisons everything.
At one point the Norse gods sew Loki's lips shut to keep him from taunting; from that point forward his face is scarred and he is driven by revenge, working to destroy Valhalla until they chain him underground, where even there his stuggles make earthquakes.
last night was film kitchen at pittsburgh filmmakers. buzz miller organized it, had a bunch of us video people who collaborate with other artists screen documentation of our artwork(s).
buzz is so fantastic. his technical problem solving and inventiveness helps create some amazing theatrical experiences for audiences here in pittsburgh. he's developed a particular vocabulary of projecters and bodies on stage that creates visual symphonies of information for the audience to get overwhelmed in. and he's more than willing to share his love for problem-solving and theater-making with the audience.
anyway the thing i realised during the q&a for the rest of us at the end of the night is that i'm basically most interested in layering languages when i do collaborative work. working with images is less conscious than working with text/word but very close to text/word, as it is symbolic. then there's the language of images in musicians lyrics, then there is the un-conscious or less-conscious language of music (rhythm & pitch arranged over time) ... when dance is an element, there is the un-conscious language of gesture .. so my video needs to fit in with these other languages, and video is an easy read for the audience. recognition or reading images (think: television, internet) is something we are more adept at, culturally, than reading gestures (dance). the audience may be more comfortable reading the video. i have to always keep this in mind as i shape the video to nestle in with these other languages ...
time-based or performance-based artworks function like a language - there are complex sets of signs communicated to the audience over time; and the audience listens with eyes/ears/bodies, sometimes dances as an expression of resonance with the music performers ... still art (paintings, sculpture) to me end up being read like static words or iconic carriers of single meanings ... bound books live in a place between painting and performance, because the icons (words/sigils/referents) happen in a particular ordered series for the reader to digest, the reader sets their own tempo or pace for the consideration of symbols (where a music performer sets the tempo or pace & the audience is subject to the rhythm of icon/symbol/soundinstance presentation in sequence as determined by the performer ... )
i remain committed to moving images because of my fascination with (as i wrote for my master's thesis) the word standing outside of the sentence (the icon or single symbol) and its meaning, and then it is in the sentence, and the meaning shifts. figure and ground relationships with encoding and decoding meaning.
the individual has a relationship to that single iteration AND THEN we put that iteration in relationship with other things (in constellation - Duchamp's portfolios, Cornell's boxes) AND THEN we make them move over time (my symbol-series films, David Lynch/eraserhead, any plot-driven novel) AND THEN we juxtapose symbol-series (my symbol-series films/visual iteration + symbol series poetry performance/verbal iteration + soundtrack/sonic symbol iteration) (really well-made film, with controlled verbal language, color language, language of gesture of the actors all meshing together/or not) ... and the audience takes correlations and makes relationships between them, makes them causal or otherwise linked in a language-like way. we make related meaning out of parallel symbol systems, we create relationships between symbol-systems ... like we make meaning between words, like their relationships make meanings ... our perception of color shifts depending on the color it is next to. the same can be said for words. for many other things.
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'.
