Katherine WHWD
A being in touch is a single channel video intended to be projected in a dark space with the sound on speakers and soft seating. The soundtrack is my own voice reading an essay I wrote, which begins by describing the experience of having a conversation on Skype. It develops into a meditation on embodied communication, the mediation of intimacy through technology and the limits of language. The video consists of close up images of reflective and transparent materials and surfaces such as water, soap and steam.
The text was developed through a process of daily writing as a method for reflecting on and materialising research and experience from life in order to be able to work with it in the studio. It was recorded in the studio as a straightforward reading of the written text. The video was made by working experimentally with layered projections and transparent materials in front of the camera. It was an exploration in making a single channel work and developed existing techniques further in the video. It marks a shift in approach for me to audio as it is only the second video that I have used my own voice and a text that I have written without appropriating other sources.
The work was made as an attempt to materialise and give form to my thinking about interpersonal relations. This was a useful exercise in developing a form that I can show to others that integrates my current formal and theoretical concerns with brevity. I have gone on to use the video as a work in its own right and as a form of visual proposal for further research.
I intend to make more videos using similar methods - I see this as the beginning of a series of works that develop a particular visual language using reflective and transparent materials to talk about aspects of feeling that are not verbalised. These intuitively describe something like the concept of shimmer that Brian Massumi speaks about in his writings on affect theory. I would like to develop the techniques I use for recording the audio and the performance of the reading.
Con-sensual was a performance made for the Open Studios event. I read with a microphone from the front of the space a text about the experience of having depression and taking anti-depressants. The audience were seated facing me. The text was scored into sections that were picked up and placed on the floor as they were read. Two fellow performers - Angharad and Natalia -moved round the audience blowing bubbles throughout the performance until the final section when they scattered confetti over the room. The three of us wore white baseball caps. A silent video of a bath draining, me applying lipstick repeatedly and footage from the woods round the Teufelsberg listening station in Berlin was projected on the front wall behind the microphone.
The text was developed through a process of daily writing as a method for reflecting on and materialising research and experience from life in order to be able to work with it in the studio. I decided to make the text into a performance in order to give the material an emotional charge as it was transmitted via my embodied reading to the audience. The video was made once the text was edited and laid out as a script for performing. The fellow performers were students I had worked in a study group for the performativity seminar with - this study group and its supportive structure had encouraged us to think about taking risks and being vulnerable in our work. Performing with them was a way of being vulnerable while also being supported.
The performance was written to bring together material about the way wellbeing, illness and cure are categorised and understood with personal experience. I wrote it to understand my somewhat ambivalent position of having a critical professional awareness of psychopharmacological research paradigms and their limits and problems while also using the results of this paradigm in order to cope and feel well.
I am considering developing the text into a video work. By putting the same text to work in a different form I am attempting to bring a rigorous methodology to the question of whether the text or the form that I use to present it with are the crucial factor in the eventual work.
My research into mental health and wellbeing is ongoing. I have considered how to activate similar concerns through experiential group work. The exploration of the use of personal experience as material for writing is ongoing. I am continuing to read writing that integrates personal, fictional and theoretical as a way of thinking about how to develop this further. I recently visited a video archive to think about artists moving image work that addressed this in the 70s and 80s.
I am currently working on a video. The material was developed at a shoot with four actors and a two person camera crew. The actors were filmed in an empty theatre space as they rehearsed and workshopped the script. This work uses a script based on an exchange between a family on a bus. The point of the script is that there is a shift in the group from being in conflict over the competing needs of individuals to being in cooperation with everyone’s needs being adequately enough met.
During the shoot I was perhaps trying to do too many things and as a result there are a lot of decisions to be made during the editing process. I need to decide whether to focus on representing the workshopping and the actors methods or the narrative of the script itself.
The script is coming from a research question around the generation of empathy - if empathy is most easily felt towards experiences that are closest to one’s own, can role play function as a tool for widening the possible field of felt empathy? I need to answer questions about why making a film that represents the emotional experience of others on screen as they represent the emotional experience of a character has anything to do with this background research question.
Following the shoot I am left with material that I will edit into a work. Through my mistakes I am also left with a better understanding of how I would approach working with a script and actors again differently. I perhaps need to explore this method again in order to know if it is a good method for me to represent what I am trying to say through my work.