User:Emily/Self-Evaluation

updated 20151006

Possible Outcome

A two-channel video installation, in which a "MacGuffin" is being told/described by A narrator/narrators. This MacGuffin will drive the characters in both channels to take opposite actions(for example, wait/chase). A MacGuffin is said as a plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues and moves the plot forward. The name "MacGuffin" appears to originate in 20th-century filmmaking, and was popularized by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s. He also pointed out the nothingness of the MacGuffin itself. But it is the nounsense or nothingness that provides the motives and drives the image narrative(narrative in a broad way). I made the link of comment culture with MacGuffin, becuase "users nolonger contribute merely to correct the author, or to contribute to the general interllect, they want to have an effect". This phenomen will be translate to a video appreance just as what MacGuffin does as a plot device.

Practical steps

The moving images can be shoot by myself or exacted from found materials. First test with found moving images gattering according to narrative.
I have ideas about where to gather the describtion of the MacGuffin, first comes out from its orgin films(but have concern about remixing material by sort of scripts); I found comments from online shopping platform are quite interesting, they are describing goods but full of deails from their lives.(For this decriptions the name or categories of the goods will be replaced by pronoun.) Or news reports.

20150930

Introduction

The mechansim of moving-image production has been proliferated. From classical cinematic languge to computational processing, the theories and tools applied to realise/fulfil the transition from one state to another have been changed. If we consider the editing as syntax of the language of cinema, then the syntax has been enlarged hugely, from the thoery of continuity and montage to intensifed continuity, chaos cinema and post-continuity. In parallel with it, the theme of digital cinema faded away from computer modeling, simulating reality, to visualizing codes of complex digital structure. As Deleuze put, "Cinema does not give us an image to which movemnt is added, it immediately gives us a movement-image"(Deleuze, Movement-Image 2). The movment is automatic, and autonomous.

My practice will focus on examine those transition in moving-image production, and try to visualize/represent the transition by reverse its process. The automatic movement in classical cinema is generally visible apllying camera movement together with cuts and assembly. If considering computation and algorithm generated moving-images like slice and morphing techiques applied in it, the transition cannot be perceive easily for human and it is also complicated for spectators to reasoning how and why they see it. "However the breakdown of logical ans senso-motorial(action-reaction) connections between images does not mean that there aren't any connections any more but give rise to new kinds of connections."(Huygens,I. Image[&]Narrative[e-journal], 18(2007).

Relation to previous practice

In last two trimesters, I have been working on how manipulation of audiovisual content (mainly cinematic materials) could alter the way of seeing. My work started in a quite simple manner, in which films are utilised as input which produces books, videos, and browser-based work, and interactive installations. For me through these works, doubts are raised about the ability of recognition - namely the recognition to time-space, to real fact, to personality, etc. Because of my interests in video editing, it brought me back to think about montage, but in a more broad and free sense. I started to research the cut-up techniques through different times. All these works are more or less leave a space for the performativity of their own materials.

This leads me to broaden view also on digital cinema or artistic cinema, and the 'cut', which I mean the transitions within those works. What they would affect on cognition, on both human level and machine level.

Relation to a larger context

In the last academic year, I researched mainly on the methods of recombination/permutation/cut-up. Firstly being used in literature then in video works. André Breton, Tristan Tzara, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, are main figures I looked at. Like for example fold-in technique from Wiiliam Burroughs, taking two sheets of linear text (with the same linespacing), folding each sheet in half vertically and combining with the other, then reading across the resulting page. Gysin created digital poetry I am that I am. In his 1960 essay entitled Cut-Ups Self-Explained, he put forwards "The permutated poems set the words spinning off on their own; echoing out as the words of a potent phrase are permutated into an expanding ripple of meanings which they did not seem to be capable of when they were struck into that phrase. The poets are supposed to liberate the words – not to chain them in phrases. Who told poets they were supposed to think? Poets are meant to sing and to make words sing."

Deprived from Gysin's notion of 'liberating words', I am embracing the idea of 'cinema has to free us from what he calls the representative image of thought'.

Collecting Refference

movement(camera)+editing(cut+assembling) --> using custom program to --> the process of transition representd as moving-image(e.g. Slice by George Legrady; morphing by lev manovich)

cinema as annalogous to the human mind(Hugo Münsterberg)

thinking as machinic(deleuze)something in the world forces us to think

Page for accumulating reference and notes