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Notebook
Reading, Writing, Research Methodologies
What How Why
1. “Sweet little flower,” is a short video that begins with a flower in the sun, bobbing with the breeze. A hand enters the frame and touches the bright flower slowly in circular motions, gently entering and massaging the center/pistil of the flower and then exits the frame. In other shots the hand is seen touching other flowers, massaging, nudging hanging petals off and fondling the pistil, and the video ends with a violent gesture ripping petals off of a widely splayed pink flower. There are background sounds of people chatting cheerily, oblivious to these violations. The video was made on impulse during a visit to a public garden. It was shot on my phone in short clips, and pieced together with no other editing. I saw the flowers and wanted to touch their delicate petals, they were so beautiful and soft and fragrant. I also wanted to crush them and rip them and violate them - do things that I shouldn’t do to them. They yielded so easily. I related to the flowers - at the time I felt similarly defenseless and taken advantage of. I wanted to control and exploit these flowers, in a sense reenacting what I had felt, while taking the position of power. The piece also explores the power dynamics inherent in the relationship between humans and the natural environment - the way humans attempt to exert control over a so-called ‘defenseless’ environs.
2. “Next to but not touching” is a video beginning with shots following a flock of birds in NYC, flying high in the sky, small and black and moving like an abstract object. Their movements swirl and shift, and the white underside of their wings reflect back glittering light. The mass morphs, expanding and contracting as some birds split off and others join. A single bird can be heard leading with a long clear call through the swirls. At times the flock is foreboding, darkening the sky. The birds perch on the same buildings and lamp posts at different times of day and with different movements. Seated in trees before dusk, they chatter and call, filling up several trees with fluttering and commotion. Later the video gets closer, following two pigeons as they strut across parallel beams of a subway station. They gaze over the ledge and the first bird turns and flicks its tail, dropping a shit down into the street. The other follows suit. At one point the camera confronts the birds, walking into the flock. They fly towards the camera in a hostile mass. The video ends back in a distant point of view, admiring the birds through a car window as they fly in formation at the same pace, and as they drift away like specks or stars floating in the sky. The piece was shot over two years of the birds encountered on my commute to my 9-5 job almost everyday. I wanted to direct my attention to the natural world within the urban environment, as a way to counter human “species loneliness”, or the melancholy alienation of humans from other living beings. Once I began paying attention to the birds I became interested in the way their sophisticated daily commutes mirrored my own - the way they travel as a mass each day, aware of those around but never colliding. From a distance their movements as a group are glittering and sublime, yet up close they each have their own personalities and their own shit. It struck me that their lives were so rich and dynamic, and existed right alongside, parallel to my own, yet they had eluded my attention until now.
Interview
I’m working on a video essay on interconnectedness, involving ideas that I've encountered from the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and from the way that people interact with the environment. Like how birds poop on my balcony table and then the acid from the poop eats away at the wood - very small examples of permeability that blur the separation between beings, objects, etc. And in an emotional sense as well - if you are suffering and confide in your friend, they will feel your suffering too and it transfers and enters them. We organize the world into separate objects but in reality the boundaries are less clear.
The images are from my time locked-down in Williamstown, Massachusetts this past spring and summer. Full of anxiety, I found refuge in the plants and trees in the area, and many of the images engage nature. Once I came to Rotterdam, the photos then took on another dimension of longing - I missed being immersed in that environment.
The video shows my hands going through these images from the past. The narration transitions, at first drawing from my experience in Williamstown, and then narrating from my time here in Rotterdam. The work touches on permeability, the lives of plants, memory, and longing.
Remembering that everything is permeable, and part of something else, helps me to deal with my own anxieties and struggles in my transition to living in Rotterdam at this time. It’s a way for me to cope with feeling alone, and to remind myself that I don’t have to bear everything on my own. Things seep into me and I seep into things.
I had a dream where I was in a precarious situation - I was being chased and I ran through what I thought was a doorway, but was actually a window of a 10-story building. Once I realized it was a window, it was too late to stop myself - I was already propelling forwards. I panicked briefly, then let myself accept that it was happening, and carefully scaled down the side of the building to arrive safely at the bottom. I was surprised by my capability.
After the dream I began thinking about accepting and surrendering to intuition, and to things outside of my control, as a way to trust in this interconnectedness.
When I’m confused or overwhelmed, I start to make or write something. It's a way to organize and explore how the various ideas I’m thinking about are related. When I find myself drawn to many things that don't tie together at first, writing about it clarifies the ties.
Oftentimes my writing stems from ideas that arise from journaling. This writing is pulling together a lot of different parts that I’ve collected in my notes - about pigeons on my balcony, about a dream, about my parent’s journey to the U.S., and about plants and the ways they live. It draws on very personal experiences and also plain, ordinary phenomena, which are areas that I often work with.
Here I am working with an overarching idea of ‘interconnectedness’ to frame the work. I haven’t worked with such a clearly stated position and overarching framework before - usually the work does not have a conscious intention or subject until it is finished. But it could be that this work will arrive at other unintended subject matter by the end of it.
The most significant decision I made recently was to make a video, versus a book or otherwise, and to use this method of going through printed images while narrating. While leafing through these images from the past, the narration shifts from memories to present reflections. I wanted to use the still images in a rhythmic way combined with the writing, to add another formal layer engaging themes of memory. I chose to interact with the images while I spoke about them, to include emotive gestures and evoke a sense of intimacy.
Lately I have been thinking about Ellie Ga, Roni Horn, and Sophie Calle, specifically their works involving both images and writing. I was inspired by Ga’s method of making a video/performance with an overhead projector, narrating her research around particular objects, places, and intertwining themes. I was struggling with ways to present images alongside writing - I felt a book was too static so was looking for solutions that involve a time-based or video aspect.
Horn’s Another Water project attributes footnotes to different parts of the image, and creates a new way to look at images. She directs our gaze in a certain path, and provides notes to consider for each point on the image, making a narrative process to engage with the image.
Calle’s Take Care of Yourself takes a breakup email, and brings in 107 female experts from different fields (including a lawyer, a ballerina, a proofreader, a parrot) to analyze the letter from the perspective of their profession. I am interested in the way in which Calle makes the highly personal visible, and uses the exercise perhaps as a way to work through her own feelings surrounding the letter and the end of the relationship.
I have been reading James Baldwin, Sheila Heti, and Jenny Offil. I’m drawn to literary fiction writers, and am interested in ways that a narrative can be built from small moments, how pain, awe, and drama unfold from some of the most common and ubiquitous experiences. I am also interested in writing that has a plain, non-judgmental, and cutting style.
Some next questions I am considering:
What is it I’m longing for?
What is the scope of the work? How long should the piece be and what topics do I want to cover?
Do I want to address the shift in time and tense, of images vs narration?
How should I arrange the setting where I’m going through the images - what should be on the table? How should the lighting be?
If I choreograph and polish more, will I overwork the piece - will it lose its rawness?
(THEMES: interconnectedness, permeability, the lives of plants, memory, longing, loneliness, intuition, Buddhism, dreams, surrender, migration, the mundane/ordinary, pigeons, writing in a journal, quarantine, time: past vs present, working with multiple unrelated topics that come together)
Synopsis
Braiding Sweetgrass
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass: “Learning the Grammar of Animacy”, explores the effect of language on our perception of nature. English is a noun-based language - only 30% of the words are verbs. In the Potawatomi indigenous language, 70% of the words are verb - and nouns and verbs are both animate and inanimate. You hear a person with a word that is different from the one with which you hear a train. In Potawatomi, there are verbs “to be a Saturday,” “to be red,” “to be a long sandy stretch of beach,” “to be a bay.” The verb form “to be a bay” holds the idea that the living water has decided to shelter itself between the shores. It could do otherwise - become an ocean, a waterfall, or a spring. These verbs are possible when water, land, color, a day, are all alive - “the language sees the animacy of the world.” Places, songs, medicines, and stories are all animate in Potawatomi. The inanimate are mostly objects made by humans - “for a table, the language says “What is it?” For an apple “Who is that being?”” The same words used to address family, are used to address the living world. In English, all non-humans are called “it,” reduced to an object - “it” denies all other living beings “the right to be persons...worthy of respect and moral concern”. Kimmerer suggests that “a grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world...a world with a democracy of species, not a tyranny of one.”
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
The film, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, follows a search for the buried body of a murder victim following the perpetrator's confession to the crime. He claims not to remember the exact location, and the police convoy including the commissioner, prosecutor, and a doctor drive through the night in rural Anatolia, searching for the spot. In the darkness, which rolls over the stark hills, the lights of the cars draw long fiery lines in the night. As the search drags on, and daylight begins to come, we learn bit by bit about each member of the search party - about the police commissioner's impatience and quick temper, the chip on his shoulder; the prosecutor's image of calm and control, controverted by an inconsistency in examining a previous case; the doctor's fraught history with women and existential struggles. Subverting traditional narrative structures, the film focuses on how the examination of the crime brings to light more about the investigators, than about the victim or the perpetrator - telling the story through the surroundings.