Monday, June 4, 2018

étais


To give some context about this final project, I made this from being emotionally spent. As I’ve mentioned in my proposal, I’ve experienced an excess of emotional turbulence in the past year, and as I’m finishing up my last few days as an undergraduate, I can’t help but reflect on the journey I’ve chosen. I look at this video, and I see it as a result of all of the things I have actively chosen to do - putting myself through risk, augmented responsibility, repetitive self-disgust, the cyclical process of over-analysis and letting go, outputting a vulnerability that continues to shape every new thought and action I have towards myself and towards the people I surround myself with.

These conversations - the part said in French, actual things that have been said to me, and the part said in English , things I wish I had said - is a fragile catharsis of my psychological state and reality. I look at it, and I see it, and there’s a part of me that understands it as a way of reaffirming that these things happened. That these conversations, thoughts, and feelings were real and true. And I think there’s also another part of me that wants to refuse that they existed. In my French literature class this term, the tension between remembering and forgetting is something that must be actively addressed by an individual who has undergone traumatic events. (Hiroshima, Mon Amour)

"Here comes the time of the great Culture of tactile communication, under the sign of the technico-luminous cinematic space of total spatio- dynamic theatre.This is a completely imaginary contactworld of sensorial mimetics and tactile mysticism; it is essentially an entire ecology that is grafted on this universe of operational simulation, multistimulation and multiresponse."(139-140)

My use of video and audio effects constitutes a communication that works in tandem with the dialogue/monologue, which can be seen as a graft upon something, myself, that has been badly burned. I can view this accumulation as a “completely imaginary contact world”, but, as mentioned, I can also see it as a very real imprint that influences the person I am today. 



Sunday, June 3, 2018

Progress report

Hi everyone, I forgot to upload a blog post for my project in progress and I kept saving my project over so I guess I’d just like to share a little bit of my inspiration for slightly changing my direction and a few visual snippets as well. I decided to change because I felt like when I was pitching my project proposal, I kept thinking about how it was specifically my conversations with certain people that were making me feel a certain way. It came down to the fact that I was strongly impacted by particular words and sentences, that severely altered the way I felt about the person that was saying them, and severely altered the way I continue to look at them and myself today. Here are a few other sketches I was doing when thinking about this project.




tu étais très belle aujourd’hui

yes

why don’t you want to do the symposium

because i can’t convey how i feel through formal academic restrictions

she might be the most attractive american i’ve seen since i’ve been here

elle est probablement la plus belle américaine que j’ai vu depuis je suis arrivé.

am i not american

why do you want to work for us?

because you are my back up plan.


she’s so stupid i hate being in the same room with her

but you haven’t even talked to her



why do they stare so much
pourquoi ils regardent tellement fixement. 

why do you care you so much



will i see you in new york?

Practice of movement


Hi Johnny, I don’t know if you’ll accept this but for my second reflection post I’d like to write about my yoga teacher. I don’t know much about her – teaching yoga in Esch-Hurvis Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11:10am-12pm is one (her only?) of her side jobs, because she changes into a pant-suit like attire after, and walks across the bridge from Warch, to her parked car? Or her other job? My friends and I think she might be involved in PR, some kind of desk job.

I went to yoga at the beginning of spring term to improve my performance in my dance class, forging a few connections/lessons to my art practice.

1.     She’s unknowingly rushed.
She moves onto the next pose too fast, preventing us from getting the whole stretch. It irritates me, but it’s made me realize the importance of space. For me, that space could be the brief silence in the middle of a narrative, the pause between sentences in a monologue, the steady, unspeaking and un-reacting facial expression. If one is not cognizant of being rushed, then the audience will probably miss out on something you (the artist) wanted to convey.

2.     She forgets the other side.
Most of the time, if not all the time, she’ll forget to do the same exercises on the other side of our body. This has made me think about balance, and how the pull of my artwork is mostly inward. I think it’s important for artists to be cognizant of the inward and outward elements in their work, in terms of how it might speak to others and not just ourselves. This goes back to how I think artists must be very educated and aware about all potential audiences and reactions that their work might elicit.

3.     She doesn’t say enough for each exercise.
I think a major part of yoga is mindfulness, making us aware of each physical gesture and thought that crosses our minds as we move. If we are not fully aware of all of the elements that we put into our work, even if it’s just a few seconds in a video, then is it really our work? While the interpretations of any artwork are definitely not static, I think it’s really important to be aware of the intent behind each element and how it is outputted in order to really own up to the work as a whole.

To be honest Johnny, I did go to Joan’s talk, I just find myself a lot more compelled to write about people that make me think because they have thoroughly engaged me. Not that I didn’t find her talk significant or not interesting, it’s just going to yoga often enough has made me think more critically through the practice of physical movement.

Mary Overlie's Six Viewpoints
https://sixviewpoints.com/thesstems/

The Power of the Doodle
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-power-of-the-doodle-improve-your-focus-and-memory-1406675744