Astridvan Nimwegen trimester4 2nd year

Project plan Practical steps

Currently I am working on a series of 'Garagedoor videos' in which a garagedoor opens first as if the curtains of a stage open. An isolated, Dutch polderlandscape becomes visible and after two minutes the garagedoor closes again. I collected around twenty videos of the same garagedoor on different days till so far. With the last three videos I recorded the sound on a separate device; first I used one microphone with a boom but monosound from one direction (outside the barn) is not so exciting; since the barn functions as a kind of resonance box. So the next step was record stereo. Since every little detail in the shot needs attention I am also busy arranging a red-camera to record the shot technical perfect and as precise as possible. I think if the shot is captured as sharp as possible on a red-camera, all little movements and reflections in the small puddles of water in the frame, becomes even more convincing. The same thus counts for the sound. Last week I watched the video in a cinema-setting and there I was amazed by the stereosound, but it was only coming from the front of the space, so for the last video I captured the sound on four channels in order to create surround sound in the same cinemaspace to see if I can create a more total experience in the environment. The scale of the video is an important matter. I not only watched it in a cinema but also in the 'Sub-urban videolounge' because there it is possible to project wall-filling. And that as well made a big difference from watching just a projected frame on a wall(like in our project space). I think the work will be amazing if installed in a big room with four videos on four big walls with surround sound. The room is dark and then suddenly one garagedoor opens. After closing again the room will be dark for a few minutes again and then a garagedoor on one of the other walls will open.

Visual overview Work in Progress trimester 4

Series of Garage-door Videos

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[1]

Try-outs Different contexts to install/view my work:

Projection in a film theater:

Projection in a landscape:

Research Bird Spotting Houses:

A different project I am working on next to the garagedoor-videos is a series of videos of bird-spotting-houses. The work speaks the same language as my other videoworks and consists of multiple birdspotting houses that I find in the landscape. I capture the inside as well as the outside of the houses in which I try different angels of recording, looking for symmetry and stages. In the first birdhouse it appeared that in one shot, the house takes in almost the same space as the garagedoor does in its frame, only the house refers more to the language of sculpture while the garagedoor becomes more a theatre or is speaking the language of cinema. The house is very solid while the garagedoor is transparent. I am wondering what will happen if those two are projected opposite to eachother in the same space.

When I opened the first birdhouse I visited, the inside of the place really surprised me, I had never expect to find so much connection to my garagedoor-videos when I discovered the viewing-windows. So I started to search for more houses, in the last one I find, a flock of loud chattering geese fly over (again) in the deserted landscape seen from out of the viewing-windows. Interesting because a couple of weeks earlier I made 'Vertical Slice of Landscape' in which the geeze also flew by.

Video 'A Vertical Slice of Landscape':

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Video 'Horses with Birds':

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[3]

Other Experiments on Framing/Staging

The difference in these photos is that the left one is just a tractor in a field and the right one becomes a tractor on a stage due to the framing.

Graduation proposal

Link to my proposal: Astrid Graduation proposal

Keywords

• Single fixed wide shots
• Time
• Landscape
• Light
• Humans
• Vulnerability
• Contradiction
• Absurdism
• The drama is in the staging itself
• Strict constraints
• Performance
• Ordinary life / the everyday
• Descriptions
• Surrealistic
• Make the complex simple
• Meaning of existence
• Awareness / conciousness
• Truth
• Literal
• Perception
• Circle
• Physical
• Psychological
• Documentary
• Film

Context/Other works

• [4]

(Bas Jan Ader – Nightfall)

• [5]

(Marina Abramovic – Confession)

• [6]

(Photo’s ‘Confession’)

• [7]

(Roy Andersson – Songs from the second floor)

• [8]

(Peter Greenaway – Drowning by numbers)

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(Allan Kaprow's book - Essays on the blurring of Art and Life) http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520240797

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(Tarkovsky's book - Sculpting in time) http://avaxhome.ws/ebooks/sculpting_in_time_tarkovsky_the_great_russian_filmaker_discusse.html