Sunday, March 15, 2009

FINAL PROJECT 3!

Here is my project 3 which I finally managed to upload.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

After about 18 tries, i can't get my project 3 on Vimeo or Youtube. I will have to do it tomorrow because I don't have final cut at home and I guess I need to export a smaller video.

Anyway here is my countdown project! I never uploaded it.

Friday, March 13, 2009

SOME OF MY NOTES ON SUSAN SONTAG AND ROLAND BARTHES

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence.

A pseudo – presence. How much of this person is here? None of him? It doesn’t feel that way.

Images are inextricably linked to memory. Like dead relatives and friends preserved in the family album, whose presence in photographs exorcises some of the anxiety and remorse prompted by their disappearance so the photographs of neighbourhoods now torn down, rural place disfigured and made barren, supply our pocket relation to the past.

OUR POCKET RELATION TO THE PAST.


Recording images is a way of certifying experience.

Is our image version of the past going to represent the important parts? Will it seem that a trip to FlorIda which we photographed relentlessly was more real than other events? What about the things we do every day that we do not photograph? Waking up, going to sleep. Going to work. The building we live in. A flag. A field. Colours. The weather. The things that make up our lives. Will these things remain as real because we haven’t documented them? Is any experience real if it isn’t documented for memory?


Images – especially those of people, of distant landscapes and of faraway cities, of the vanished past – images are incitements to reverie.

THE VANISHED PAST.

INCITEMENTS TO REVERIE

After an event has ended, the pictures will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and an importance) that it would otherwise never have enjoyed.

To phorograph is to confer importance. There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified.

These things seem so important in their reproduced form.
Why were these things recorded? We do not quite know, but they must mean something.


While an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed ina brief span of time , a device is available to record what is disappearing.

What will these images make us remember?

The way this person speaks? And this person? And this person? If you knew them, would watching them remind you of other things about them? The way they tilt their head, a word they particularly enjoyed, their hands.


A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence.


Is any experience real if it isn’t documented for memory?

IS ANY EXPERIENCE AS REAL IF IT ISN’T DOCUMENTED FOR MEMORY?

Repeat the listed things but for longer.

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence.

A pseudo – presence. How much of this person is here? None of him? It doesn’t feel that way.

Photographs give people an imaginary possession of the past.



As moving images, cinematic and television images are combined with sound and music in narrative forms, and their meaning often lies in the sequence of images rather than its individual frames.

What does it mean that this follows this?

What does this image mean? Why has it been isolated? Maybe it means this to me? Or this? Or this?

If a photograph is a trace of reality skimmed off the surface of life... is this what your life looks like? Not mine.

Debates about representation have considered whether systems of representation reflect the world as it is, such that they mirror it back to us as a form of mimesis or imitation, or whether in fact we construct the world the world and its meaning through the systems of representation we delpoy. Is this what the world looks like to you? Or is this what you think the world should look like?

NOTES ON PROJECT 3

I am not really satisfied with my project 3. Initially, I just shot a whole bunch of super 8 film during the break because I really wanted to try out the camera. That was a really exciting process. I have never shot film before (except for still photography). I've only shot with a video camera and the experience is fundamentally different. I think that for people who really love to make things the process of shooting something on film is so much more rewarding. When I was doing it, I guess I was imagining the best, or imagining some version of the choppy, colorful super 8 films I'd seen but I had not idea what I was going to get. And the surprise when you see a roll of film you've made is so great - it's better than any other surprise because it's something that you created.
Anyway it was really rewarding shooting the super 8 because it turned out so much better than I ever could have imagined. The colours are so beautiful and the really mundane things that I shot - like fields and the view from my car and the montreal streets looks so dream-like and anachronistic. The quality of the movement and the fact that the medium is so visible in the product - like the film grain and the imperfections- gives it such a nice aesthetic.

Anwyay so I had these two rolls of super 8 that I was so in love with and I've just had a really difficult time figuring out what to do with them. This has often been a problem for me because I really like to create imagery and my initial interest was in photography and not design and I often feel that when you add words to something it can become so literal and straightforward that it ruins it. But it didn't seem like enough to present the film on it's own.

So at the time I was reading Susan Sontag's On Photography and I had noticed some really beautiful lines in her writing (my favourite being 'a photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence' and I thought that it would be really great to do something with these words and pair them with images to try and make a really dreamy sort of unsettling instructional video of sorts. Which sounds really strange but made a lot of sense in my head!

So I did a TON of research and then I also read Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes which I thought was even more beautifully written than Susan Sontag's work and I wrote this whole script about it and recorded myself speaking and it just sounded awful. I thought it was pretentious, and it also became obvious that pulling all these quotes from these really famous authors without the context wasn't really working. I had also tried to tie it into a script of my own writing which didn't really work either.

Anyway so then I paired it down to a few quotes that I thought were working and telling a more ambiguous story. But it's hard to see what your own work really looks like sometimes and when I showed it to the class it was too fast and busy and hard to read.

So ultimately I ended up with about one tenth of my original writing (or less than that) just a few lines that don't entirely make sense together but make sense with the images. I am not really satisfied with it. I know that some of the type is still too fast. And it doesn't entirely make sense. Anyway I guess it doesn't entirely need to.

I guess I'm just really glad that I shot the Super 8 and I've been shooting more since and I know it is going to become something that I do all the time so I think that was a really great thing that came from this project. I really want to accumulate an archive of super 8 films from my life and from this time.

I think that this was a really good project for me for that reason but I am not entirely satisfied with the final results.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

LA JETEE!

Everyone has probably already heard of these but Chris Marker's La Jetee and Sans Soleil are such great videos. La Jetee is made up entirely of still images except for one shot that moves but you get such a sense of narrative and movement that you hardly even notice.



THESE VIDEOS ARE REALLY COOL!

This girl goes to Yale for her graphic design masters and her videos are quite charming I think.

I can't embed her movies but go to her funny website here:

MIN OH AWESOME WEBSITE!

'Math' is my favourite, it is really charming and I like the analog aesthetic (it's about halfway down), I also like 'Duelers' (which looks like a wildlife educational video from the fifties or something) and 'A Walk" and 'A Monkey's Butt is Red' which is sort of wierd but also kind of awesome. I like how she doesn't need any fancy technical skills or effects to make her work totally great! I think it's really interesting and conceptual but not pretentious at all which is nice.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

TEN THINGS THAT ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO ME

1. MY OLD PHOTO COLLECTION

I love collecting and taking photographs more than pretty much anything. I have been collecting for years and before that I used photographs in the normal way that everyone does - as reminders of people who are not there, as proof that we were once in a certain place, as a way of seeing the parts of the world that are not accessible to us, and all the other ways that photographs can be used. I love photographs. This picture represents about one fiftieth of the amount of photographs that I actually have. I particularly enjoy collecting photographs from a long time ago. Susan Sontag says that photographs are both "pseudo-presences and tokens of absence". I like the idea of experiencing things that I wasn't around for through these tiny, carefully chosen slices of the past.





2. OLD PHONE

This phone is special to me for several reasons. First of all, it comes from my early adolescent years just before I was allowed a cellphone and reminds me of really different times. It also holds a special sentiment because a phone will probably never be as important to you again as it was when you were a fourteen year old girl! At that point in life, a phone seems like a lifeline to everything important. I also keep it around because it's been years since I haven't spoken to anyone I used to talk to so much on that phones. Its is a small token of people that moved out of my life as I got older.





3. OLD COUCH

This is a beautiful old couch that my great aunt Doris gave to me. I love it because it is something I remember in a completely different context from my childhood - as a couch I had to sit stiffly in while wearing my best clothes when I visited my mildly frightening great aunt - and now it has revived itself in a much more casual context in my apartment as something that my friends hang out around when they come over.




4. PAPIER MACHE OCTOPUS

Someone I love a lot made this octopus for me. There is a very long and meaningful explanation for why someone would make me this strange little octopus as a gift.






5. SHOE COLLECTION

This is my shoe collection. I have been hoarding shoes since I was about fifteen and my feet stopped growing. Shoes are just utilitarian objects for a lot of people, but I can track different stages of my life by which pairs of shoes I liked to wear. I never get rid of any shoes because I always end up coming back to them.





6. MY CAMERAS

My cameras are probably my favourite belongings. Some of them are from high school and earlier and some of them are more recent acquisitions. I love photographs, but I particularly love producing them myself. I love the possibilities involved in taking a photograph and the element of chance. I use a camera almost every single day.




7. MY OLD TYPEWRITER



8. MY COLLECTION OF FOUND SLIDES

There are a lot of strange things in this slide collection, There is a wedding that takes place in China in the 60's I think, there is a 1970's thanksgiving day parade in New York, and all of these things are from a fairly specific timeframe because they are all captured on the same brand of kodak slides. There is a nostalgia in the colouring and often in the choice of subject matter. I also find it interesting how these whole collections of carefully taken chosen slides have been discarded because the technoglogy became obsolete.



9. MY MOTHER'S TOY

This monkey toy belonged to my mother when she was small. It's amazing because it is one of those toys that used to be normal for children but comes off as incredibly creepy now in a really charming sort of way. It's probably too simple for a child to enjoy now. It also reminds me of everything that my mother has been through since she was young enough to enjoy this mechanical monkey.



10. MY BOOKS

I think I would be really different if I hadn't read all these books. I also love books as objects.