User:Aitantv/j o u r n a l

30.12.22

What about the travel film from Bibi and Bobo - shot in 1952 - was accompanied by a voiceover describing in exact detail the goings on of the movie - or directing the movie. Then in a second uncreative writing experiment a screenplay accompanies the film of Talia's wedding. What would the text be adding? What is omitted in the process of screenplay becoming film? The frame holds all that information we take for granted. The video could have a side panel detailing exactly what is happening on screen. I see it as green text on a black backdrop. It rolls in time with the action. This is all to make clear that the documentary is at every point an exercise in framing and directing. Nothing can be taken for granted.

I'm back home now after the christmas family trip. It was an intense ride. I welled up while scanning through the family archives. I photographed pictures of the pictures for fear of losing the special ones in the heaps of celluloid negatives and large glossy prints from the 90s.

There's also an interest in transcripting the interviews i made with mum, bellz, sapir, and dad. these could interact with the thesis. i want the thesis to be an interactive document - not just text running from a > z. The chapter i just read in Kenneth Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing is especially helpful in engaging with different modes of address, contrasting writing conventions such as transcritpion, subtitling, screenwriting, prose, essay.

I want to get the zoom 8Qn but I'm afraid of the poor image quality. Yet the superior sound quality will surely pay off. & the freedom it will give this project is undeniable. Freedom v image quality. Freedom v 'cinematic'look.

13.01/22

Yesterday I had a meeting with Tingyi to discuss a transdisciplinary collaboration on a performance art-meets-film project and watched an Ed Atkins interview. Both centered around the role of representation. The camera only gives a partial view, where as theatre is exposed (at leats the audience-facing side). With a long lens the director edits what the audience can see effectively cropping and zooming in on elements of the action. Theatre audiences, in contrast, choose their own focal point. CGI and Cinema hold the promise of making dreams become a reality. Atkins, by making melancholic figures in desperately abject worlds - he describes his figues void of life - sees his animations process as a rebellion against blockbuster image making economies. This explains his video of the rolling credits with animated 3D figures stumbling into eachother. He's defacing the slick, productive, narrative-driven moving image we're saturated with.

I'm becoming more interested in the form over the content. How can the form itself deal with this research into food, identity, diaspora? It could be so simple and totally void of content as we're used to experiencing it.

I'm going on a social media detox right now. I couldn't delete instagram. I could only intervene with some artificial barriers to entry like storing the app buried within several sub-folders and blocking the app from operating with mobile data. We use gastronomic language to speak about content platforms - feed, consumption, ingestion, digestion. There's something in this. The consumption of banal imagery, the quotidian, the superficial avatars that represent us in social media spaces.

Recently I wrote screenplays of three of my video works: OOO (2020), Commander (2020), and Third Rock (2022). It felt oddly pleasing to concisely describe the blow-by-blow happenings in each scene. It also felt like a futile pointless exercise. The films already exist so why bother writing a screenplay post-release? The exercise seemed to suggest that even casual accidents can seem causal and intentional if provided with a convincing enough framework. The solidity of how a scene is structured can capture those accidents and make them seem designed. Alternatively accidents can be built into the design in order to perforate the solidity or control of the frame.