User:Kotryna Bu/Writing Methods

Exercises

Text on Practice V1

Template for draft text on practice, material description 
 Describe recent work, Describe current work, Describe the relation between the two, How are the works different? Future work. What do you want to do next? Who can help you and how can they help you? Which expertise?

My recent project “To Each Their Own” is a short fiction film about people from the neighbourhood who are hustling in different ways to get by. The main character Nova and her best friend Oliver are meeting their ends day-to-day by different means online, other people in the neighbourhood rely on the gig economy, they drive Ubers, freelance for Delivery..

The characters are introduced through the point of view of the main character Nova, who is a confident gen-Z’er and sells her worn panties online. Nova knows who’s buying her panties and is willing to increase her sales in order to pay her rent. Her friend Oliver, the master of “side-gigs”, recommends her to be more efficient. And Mo, the Moroccan Uber driver slightly has a crush for Nova,.. All of the characters are believable, typical contemporary types: on the one hand highly educated and privileged to a degree, on the other lacking the opportunities to find long-term housing, income, stability, etc. Precarity is here the key term. The characters have big dreams, but obviously the results in the long run are quite sad.

My current work is the one of text and syntax. I am researching the informal economies, reading about street vendors and other precarious, mostly illegal occupations. For now, while yet searching for the research topic I stumble upon the idea of philosophizing the hustle: can we dematerialize it and even phoethisize it? Can we think of the informal worker as an employee of a viable system, where the government doesn't monitor their activities and the award isn’t always monetary? I am thinking about the mushroom pickers and the berry sellers. Next to it I want to think of the importance of labour carried out by caretakers and maintenance workers. Practises like motherhood and cleaning the house, doesn’t pay much, but are essential to our existence. How do we relate to that? I am embarrassed to admit that cleaning makes me happy. And our society and economy constantly promise us progress, in a Neo-liberal paradise, but what are the ideas of progress for the informal worker?

My current ideas are related to the short film, as both of them are talking about the modes of getting by and the precarious worker.
The short film is set in an era of the internet, the gigs and the hustle are held online, everyone is self employed and has the freedom of working whenever. All of the characters have a slight illusion that they can and will make a lot of money, but in reality they won’t, just like street vendors and mushroom pickers .

Big dreams mediocre results, Although, the mushroom picker might be able to survive without his costumers, as he can cook dinner with his stakes, while the Uber driver and others are more dependant on the company they work for and many other circumstances.



What do you want to do next?

I’d like my next project to be more of a documentary style (photography or film) For that I want to go on a field research where I could meet street vendors or other hustlers, see how they live, whats their daily routine like, but also analyze what kind of importances these hustles carry; how do their business interact with social structures and economy streams of the place. 

And for now before I go, I want to continue writing. I want to write little stories, maybe fictionalized scripts and make small try outs. For now I will need to narrow down my interest to a specific group of people, and for now I’d need someone to guide me through my writing (and probably cut the clutter). I need to figure out what is it exactly that I am talking about, and I can use various methods for that. 

I’ve some ideas for small try outs to write small fiction stories about the ‘street employees; write and film small scenes . For this I’d need to delve deeper into character development, conflict and other dramatic points of a storytelling practice. I think this would be a good exercise to start with before I go on a field trip. 
(for the field research if need some docu knowledge but we are getting a seminar on it soon)

Who’s in your neighbourhood? Inspiration on texts: Olga Ravn - The Employees, Anne Boyer. A friend of mine sent me loads of theory from her anthropology studies on informal economy and undocumented workers, I still need to consume it.  Artists/Filmmakers: Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Ken Loach , Alina Lupu, Bertien Van Manen, Laure Prouvost

Add imago on each paragraph.

Notes On Writing

What kind of writing do you do on a day to day basis (texts, emails, essays, graffiti, notes on work &c)?

Most of my writing on a day to day basis is done in a note format, on my computer as well as on random sheets of paper. Time to time I rewrite and reorganize them in by sketch book. A lot of thoughts for these notes appear on random occasions, when I'm in the shower, bus, throwing out the trash etc. Besides this sort of scribbling with letters, I write a diary on Evernote, which I share with one of my best friends who used to live oversees. Now she lives in NL, but we keep the diary going. It's not a form of updating her with my days, it is often reflections of our experiences, poems and little chants. I love creative writing that is loose from formats. We also write about our work and research, but in a very informal way. Having someone read my writing gives me motivation to write. Recently I wrote a script, a bunch of emails and planning sheets.

Interview

this is gonnna be interview

What How Why

Exercise 29/09/21 note to self: Factual description for the imaginary sister ORIGINAL

Behold , 9 min 2017

Behold is a short experimental film that explores notions of voyeurism through a lens of a mysterious observer. The film is set in the 21st century, in a high building next to a park, where casual occurrences take place on an ordinary day. The zoomed-in and out view reveals what is happening in the neighbourhood and the park below, not so much from a surveillance perspective, but more from a personal point of view, it provides a quiet and curious environment. Hence the film explores a notion of scopophilia, S. Freud's theory about the (sexual) pleasure of looking at others. Firstly, the main inspiration to investigate the act of looking started by the accidental eye contacts with strangers encountered on the streets. To capture that moment I went on the streets with my cam corder, which ended up in reckless stalking sessions. By doing that I wanted to deconstruct voyeurism, explore the apparatus of the camera and my position as a maker. This empirical approach was later followed by literature research which included the male gaze theory by L. Mulvey and Freud. Through writing and practical experimentation I developed a particular film form which blends reality and fiction: a documentary based reproduction, a reenactment with a touch of fictive reality play. As individuals we are pre-programmed to be curious beings, and the explorations of these psychological human behaviours play an important role in this work. This particular investigation started from a fascination for strangers, the unknown people briefly met. As well as, often being a stranger myself, inhabiting different places. I believe that each individual is first and foremost a stranger to one another, and only later we can count bonds of togetherness and occurring alienations. These relations fascinate me as much as the act of looking, witnessing, beholding the image, ‘’stealing ‘the scene with your eyes’’. Try sitting by the window for half a day and you will notice a lot of absurd human behaviour too, as we take our behaviours for granted.

SMOKE MACHINE, video loop installation 1.31min

Smoke Machine is a collaborative video installation by Kotryna Buruckaite and Marika Vandekraats commissioned by Franc Gallery for a group exhibition In Over Our Heads. The exhibition was curated around the theme Tension, all brought together through the expressions of the pressures that both hold down and drive them. This concept became a central direction while making this work. The video installation explores our wants, our fears and the need to play as a maker. Once Kotryna and Marika were making smoke bombs with a little luck and an empty head they came up with this idea to vacuum clean the cigarettes in order to make a lot of smoke. This dull idea stayed with them for a while and they used it for the exhibition. The installation shows a vacuum cleaner with a bunch of cigarettes taped on the sucking tube. The sound reveals two beginning artists talking of what we want to, what’s precarious, and how to proceed. The video continuous with vacuuming the cigarettes for a brief moment and the everything turns to smoke. As we talk to our friends, our closest companions we tend to open up and give a permission to ask tricky questions.

1427, short film 5 min

1427 is a short film about a young man and his paranoid dream. The film takes place in a huge American-style student house, where odd things start to occur after the protagonist wakes up from a smoke alarm. Sleepy and confused he walks around the house trying to find the source of fire, but on his way around the house he keeps on meeting the same housemate. The housemate is wearing different clothes and partakes various activities, such as playing pc games and playing a guitar. The alarm in the kitchen is not there, thus the protagonist get even more confused and we follow him into this perplexing journey. First of all, while writing this film we decided to do a one take, just purely for the excitement of complexity of if and the realness. Later looking for a concept we’ve decided to use a common paranoia occurance. People tend to be paranoid about things at times, and in this situation, paranoid about your house burning down. Leaving a gas stove on, iron, your hair straightener. Driven by these experiences we wrote a script with a touch of absurd to it. Inspired by the one take films such as Victoria, Birdman etc we thought it was a great challenge to do it ourselves.

EDITED