User:Astrid van Nimwegen/draft gradproposal

Project proposal draft - Astrid van Nimwegen

Tentative Title

Ordinary life in an extra-ordinary context

General Introduction

My strength is to recognize purity and melancholy in the images and frames that I record. I want to collect long shots that can be seen as a collection of moving classical paintings. Those frames will be the landscape or scenes for all kind of meaningless actions and thus become the stage of performance. The endurance of the shots is important in order to give as much attention as possible to every element in the frame. How the footage will form a totality by putting them in a sequence or in an installation is not clear yet. The only thing that I want to reach with my work at the moment is creating context. In a collection, the different shots will give each other hopefully the context that is fitting for my work and concept. So the island where I live will become the stage of ordinary actions which will become extra-ordinary by how and where I let them take place. The question what is staged and what not is an important one but more important is the portrait of living that I want to display and the search for truth/purity and meaning in this living.

A brief general introduction or abstract laying out the field you wish to research, possible key questions driving what you want to explore and how you will test these questions through practice.

Relation to previous practice

I always choose a particular 'frame' to record, the atmosphere of the frame can be described as Melancholic and refers very often to classical painting. That frame is carefully constructed with attention for composition and light and the sphere is used as a metaphor in order to create the melancholic, transient feeling. The frame becomes the stage for all sort of meaningless actions. In the past those actions were performed by me but now I mostly work with weird characters which I pick out of the people from the island where I live. Mostly these characters have already a typical way of living and are quite often 'outsiders' themselves. My intention is to mirror the viewers behavior and let him/her reflect on their way of living and the meaning of this living. In my older works I can see my own struggle with the meaning(lessness) of life but I my recent works I see that I have changed also and I see more and more the joy of the living and also the joy of giving meaning by what you do, but I am still very sceptic about it all and that is why there is a lot of contradiction in my videoworks. The How does your research connect to previous projects you have done? Remember to briefly explain or describe related projects as the external is not familiar with your work.

Relation to a larger context

Meaning practices or ideas that go beyond the scope of your personal work. Write briefly about other projects or theoretical material which share an affinity with your project. For example, if you are researching urban interventions, you might talk about Situationist approaches to psychogeography, urban tactical media and activist strategies of reclaiming the streets. Or, if you want to explore the way data is tracked, you might touch upon the politics of data mining by referencing concerns laid out by the Electronic Frontier or highlight theoretical questions raised by Wendy Chun or others. (Keep in mind that we are *not* expecting well formulated conclusions or persuasive arguments in the proposal phase. At this juncture, it's simply about showing an awareness of a broader context, which you will later build upon as your research progresses.)

Practical steps

Describe how you will go about conducting your research through reading, writing and practice. In other words, through a combination of these approaches, you will explore questions or interests you have laid out in your general introduction. In this section you can help us understand how your project will come together on a practical level and talk about possible outcome(s). Of course, the outcome(s) may change as your research evolves, but it's important to have some idea of how your project might come together as a whole.

References

A list of references (Remember that dictionaries, encyclopedias and wikipedia are not references to be listed. These are starting points which should lead to more substantial texts and practices.) As with your previous essays, the references need to be formatted according to the Harvard method.) See: http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/wiki/A_Guide_to_Essay_Writing#The_Harvard_System_of_referencing

Feel free to include any visual material to substantiate, illustrate or elucidate your proposal. For example use images to reference your work or that of others.