Here is my project 3 which I finally managed to upload.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Saturday, March 14, 2009
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?
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.
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.
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.
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