User:Emily/Self-directed 03/03

Introduction

to be added

Methodology Text

In the text below, I will explain my recent research and works. By reflecting on them I will state my previous working method and also try to establish new working methodology in order to assist my later practices.

In last two trimester, I have been working on how manipulation of audiovisual content(mainly cinematic materials) could alter the way of seeing. My work started with a quite simple manner, in which films are utilised as input, producing books, videos, and browser-based work, and interactive installations. The idea derived from my previous experience of déjà vu, a sensation that you feel what you are experiencing at the moment, have been already experienced before. It may has complicated reasons about how our brain works, however that’s not what I want to address here. It actually arises my doubt on the ability of recognition, maybe 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 way. I start to research on the cut-up techniques through different times. I have looked at French Surrealists' game of Exquisite Corpse , Tristan Tzara's cut-up poems, the French literature group Oulipo, William S. Burroughs's and Brion Gysin's fold-in technique, etc. They were mainly used in literature creation and later on it had been extended to video making. All these works are more or less leave a space for the performativity of their own materials.

Review recent works

• One of my works reflects on this research is a photo book, which was produced using images and texts (subtitles) taken from the Roman Polanski's film, “The Tenant”. The images and texts are extracted at moments when characters say the word "know", and then the frames and texts are reassembled into the form of book. Some of the pages are designed to be shorter than the rest, which provides the opportunity for the reader to read across pages, and at different intervals. The repeated “know”s are situated in half-baked story (original film), and while reading readers can break the linear reading experience.

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How can an moment be altered when we view a narration from one point, and jumping to another, or starting from the middle, or if we were to then move the beginning to the end.

• I try to experiment with different ways of experiencing and perceiving. Later on I made a split-screen video work. The audiovisual content is extracted from the most dramatic part of the same film, The Tenant. The original shots play along with reversed each single shots. The beginning and the end of each shot can be viewed at the same time and go on playing to its end and beginning in a sequence.

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There are actually doubled contents but the work is in fact not aim to double the vision but arise a altered watching experience, different from linear watching. What I liked here is since in the work I used such a simple strategy, people could already get it straight away while watching. But they would still sense the altered experience, which I think will make people more aware of the manipulation of the content. The same data can be addressed to different experience and purpose.

I started to think about the content I worked with since I got a lot of question about why I used films within my work. At first sight, film may be considered as a closed system. I understand by closed system it means actually the director's choice of moving image sequences, the final result. But the media form itself rests on a database upon which choices can be made. I read an articlefrom writer, Daniel Coffeen, in which he states "a film is the product of a selection from different shots, hours of dailies and coverage – the film rests on a database." As he told the film, “what we end up seeing is only one possibility. Cut it again and there's a different movie.” Therefore, it is not hard to imagine a film has the potential to be treated as raw material. It is open-ended. The database of it is autonomous. The footage is related to themselves in one or other way, which makes the permutation more exciting. But in fact since the usage of this specific film, I seemed addressed something specific to it, that’s actually what I didn’t take consideration and in fact I am willing to expand.

• At the same period, with newly learnt coding technique, I tired to develop permutation with films. I wanted to make a chat-pot like Eliza which uses films as its database. The work will invite people go into a dialogue with different characters in films. Participants can lead the dialogue, cut it and reassemble them. But in fact only a vague topic bouncing back and forth. As we can know about Eliza effect, It was sometimes so convincing that there are many anecdotes about people becoming very emotionally caught up in dealing with doctor Eliza. Even though I haven’t managed to create my own algorithm, I resembled my film according to characters’ lines and made a video out of them.

• Besides that, I also made a browser-based work. <http://www.tangyuzhen.com/browser-based%20works/dialogue.html> People can interact with this piece by scrolling the webpage up and down. The movement/paying of each clip and the conversational text will be presented accordingly. The organisation of the materials also follows question and answer form, like André Breton developed Q&A form in Exquisite Corpse. Indeed there are more or less unpredictable randomness. But it is not randomness that I aim to create within them. On the contrary, in order to present its performantivity, they has to work with rules and conditions.

Research strands

It was a nice experience to explore different possibilities from the same material. After I took a look at my previous works as a whole, I would conclude that the cut-up technique (permutation) as a visualising strategy are used in my work to explore the performativity. However, within the text, I would more like to think about what is or will be the coherent interest leading me to where I will be in the near feature. Since I have been here, programming learning also provides me a different view. Not only writing the code or manipulating the data, but also I start to think in different mode. The language, the hierarchy within it, and the collaborative mode, those are under the coding, and more than just considering it as a tool.

The situated

I brought the question in the very beginning of my text, “what would be the situated cognition?” I am not sure I use the right words to address it. What I am trying to question here is the meaning-making without certain reference. Quite often we understand a phenomena, a thing in a certain circumstance, and it can be utilised in different manner, in different context, therefore other meaning can be made from the exactly same thing. However sometimes when we dive into the thing, we certainly cannot picture the whole. That’s exactly what Andrew Pickering stated about “seeing knowledge as situated (rather than transcendentally true) while continuing to take it seriously (and not as epiphenomenal froth).1” (Pickering, 380) when he read William James’s Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth. The “knowledge” talking here is quite a broad. If we frame it into media study, it is the same with what Marshall McLuhan said “the media is the message”. “The content of any medium is always another medium.” so in the end not the content study will be the central of media study but the characters of the “media”. How it is introduced into human affairs.

Like in Omer Fast’s work, The Casting(2007).