Sala’s works usually appeal to sensations. The sound is so powerful in her videos. Most of the time she uses sound to explain the main theme. Also the visual elements used in the videos obviously support the themes in the videos. For example, I don’t like the blurry vision and I always think it looks like made by mistake however in those videos it was intentionally shifting your focus and makes you think about it. I think her works are experimental compared to Donegan’s. I liked Donegan’s work more because it deals with mass culture and it is easier to perceive that feelings for me. The more colorful, textured and detailed visuals were used in the videos. Rather than being dramatic, humor is more enjoyable for me considering the short videos.
In the ‘A matter of time’ by T.J.Demos I am very interested in the first passage because that was the one that made me imagine the scene very properly. More than that the time is compared to or referred to aging with observable details.
“Tacita Dean’s moving film Presentation Sisters 2005, which portrays the quiet daily rituals of elderly nuns living in the South Presentation Convent in Cork, Ireland, unfolds gradually, tracing a gentle slowness. Their routine comprises communal meals, domestic labour, recreation and devotional prayer, each of which Dean spent months observing. One shot shows a nun ironing sheets, pressing out wrinkles with a determined focus and concentrated thoroughness unknown in the frenetic modern world outside. Used to our culture of light-speed pace and miniscule attention spans, multi-tasked distraction and attention-deficit disorders, one discovers an oasis of clarity in the darkened environment where Dean’s film plays. Capturing the unhurried cyclical time of Catholic spirituality, the piece emphasises the sense of prolonged duration through its anamorphic widescreen format, which widens the 16 mm colour film’s image. Time stretches out.”
The reason that I chose this one is the part that says ‘One shot shows a nun ironing sheets, pressing out wrinkles with a determined focus and concentrated thoroughness unknown in the frenetic modern world outside.’ I am fascinated by the idea to show an elderly while ironing the wrinkles because I thought those wrinkles as his/her skin. That’s why this scene is the most powerful for me and I felt like I am actually watching it. I found it too dramatic and so wise. The elderly’s time is another time. The time is separated from the other world outside.
In the “Paying Attention” by Jonathan Beller I chose a part that generally explains the society’s situation with the technological revolution. How much we live in the reality and how much of it is actually constructed for profit. The values are shifted towards the imaginary.
“This new machine-body interface known as the cinema acted directly on the imagination to harness attention as a force of social production. The visible world and the Imaginary (the unconscious) became technologically linked and constantly retooled to create an industrial technologization of the Imaginary that today has become generalized. Moving images, the utilization of which valorizes their media as well as modifies spectators, result in the continuous modification of a collective, variegated operating platform that images the world and its relations in exchange for pleasure, social “know-how,” what-have-you. Thus “the image” creates the techno-social modifications necessary to engineer the adaptive forms of social cooperation that have become the pre-requisites for the preservation of capital and capitalist hierarchy.”
I think we are all lost in the composition of linkage between the visible world and the imaginary. All those exchanges are building the hierarchy. Sometimes I feel so blind with this modification and get mad at me because I can’t make the distinction.