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.