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In my final project I sought to expand on the theme of movement and juxtaposition. I had been experimenting and learning about these aesthetic concepts in video artwork, so in my final I wanted to employ them in a different way. An overarching theme in my final work is Human vs. Nature vs. Machine in terms of their similarities, differences and the intersectionality of the three. The elements I used to invite comparison were color, speed and movement.

The shots of the girls dancing and the boy playing guitar represent the human element of the video. These figures move about freely in an unpredictable way, most exemplified by the choreography. Humans have the power of choice and autonomy, they can chose to move about or be entirely still. Human bodies can create things, such as dance routines or music. They have subtle personalities that can be expressed in their movements and in their demeanor. This is displayed by the close ups on the boy showcasing his different moods and depicting him as a thoughtful creature. The girls moving around show how movement can be careful contrived as in a choreographed routine, or natural. This is showcased in the sequence that flips back and forth between dance and the girls standing still.

Shots of the street and the train are the machine elements of the work and the ocean and trees are the natural elements.

Intersectionality occurs in several places and is an important element to the work. The shot of the girl dancing against the sunrise, the waves layered over the dancing and the boy playing guitar, the man made soda can carelessly thrown on the ocean shore (most likely by a human) all show natural overlaps of person, nature and machine. The people moving on the street scene in time lapse also show an overlap of these three fields. Humans existing alongside the traffic of the city show how things like buildings and streets always remain stagnant while the people around them, especially in New York, are constantly in motion.

The splicing of the boy playing guitar against the train is meant to also illustrated a comparison as opposed to a contrast; both this machine and this boy are calmer and more still, likening man to machine, while the girls are more unpredictable and erratic in their movements, akin to the natural elements in the video like the ocean.

My final project Don’t Blink is a commentary on the public yet underground and fleeting nature of graffiti art and how many ignore it while some engage with it. I accomplish this by book-ending a graffiti art fan’s stop motion adventure into the Graffiti Hall of Fame with clips of people walking, riding, and driving right past it. Sound drives the hyper-kinetic nature of the stop motion video, with dizzying and energetic electronic beats serving as the soundtrack. I intentionally chose to include techno even though graffiti art is rooted in hip-hop culture. Hip-hop has become highly commercialized today but techno continues to remain underground, just like true graffiti art. While the Graffiti Hall of Fame is a commissioned public art space in a schoolyard, it was conceived in 1980 by New York graffiti artist, Ray Rodríguez (a.k.a. “Sting Ray”), as a site for local graffiti artists to display their skills without having to break the law. It is definitely an art space for and by the Harlem graffiti art community and not for tourists.

Furthermore, graffiti art has an ephemeral nature. Graffiti artists constantly retouch their work, tag over others work, or city workers remove their work. The Graffiti Hall of Fame represents this fleeting nature as the walls are redone by graffiti artists every six months or so. Thus, I incorporated the element of time into Don’t Blink. The title itself implies a warning to the viewer about the timing of the video. Due to the speed and stop motion animation, if you blink you might miss something. This creates the possibility that multiple viewers can perceive the video differently and want to go back and watch it again.

My intention of using the medium of video as a window to the perception of time is highlighted by Kate Horsfield in “Busting the Tube: A Brief History of Video Art” Horsfield describes how artists discovered the opportunity to utilize video as a means for aesthetic experimentation and how it could operate as a witness in the surveillance of observer and the observed. This idea is encapsulated in my video by the appearance random passersby juxtaposed with the graffiti art fan engaging with the subject matter of the video. By filming the fan engage with the graffiti art and the passersby not engage with it, the viewer is able to witness my surveillance of the observed. Finally, comparisons can be drawn between Don’t Blink and Omer Fast’s video installations at the James Cohan Gallery. In his latest installation Spring, Fast integrates different perceptions of the same event and shows them together instead of showing different scenes on each of the screens. Don’t Blink utilizes only one screen, however it does show both passive and active perceptions of the same event.

A well produced art project takes timing, software and a solid idea to focus on. Those are the key elements I hoped to use in order to complete my final project. I learned that with out them my video could not even begin. The idea was to recreate the final scene of the hit AMC show Mad Men. The scene would be shot at a beach with many people with the exclusion of my cast. At the beach I would portray Mad Men’s lead actor Don Draper. The setting in the show took place at a green and sunny field in California. Due to the lack of resources and my budget, the beach was one of my few options. I pictured myself laying in the sand over a towel with my hair gelled and my outfit resembling Draper’s. I would be wearing a white button down shirt representing a blank slate or a book that has yet to be written. As well as tan pants with a bottle of Coca-Cola next to my feet. For someone who has never seen the ending, Don Draper finally finds himself and no longer feels empty. He then has a new genius advertisement idea for Coke and the show ends off with the classic Coke commercial theme. This is how I originally envisioned my idea. Although I believed to have a clear idea and an easy outline, personal drama with my cast and the timing has forced me to scale down my idea. That is why I mentioned that I learned about these elements in the beginning with personal experience. Now I am thinking about using ideas from famous contemporary artists like Edward Ruscha. Ruscha is an older artist that is known for his involvement in the Pop Art movement. He is well known for paintings that incorporated words and phrases and for his many photographic books. Phrases like: “A particular kind of heaven” or “Not a bad world is it?” Those expressions are what I want to symbolize in my final. I think Don Draper finally finding happiness fits with what Ruscha is trying to explain in his art. Finding peace and the self realization of being content with what you have. My video is going to take a slight turn. More emphasis of peace and hopefulness with Mad Men resemblances than my original idea of just a recreation. In past videos I was too literal. I will try to make this final project not so literal and somber.

https://vimeo.com/168483614

For my final project, I decided to go back to basics. I initially started with grand goals and ideas that eventually proved inefficient and too ambitious on my end. Later on, I realized that going back to the roots of editing is my best way to go. Just like in my previous projects, I decided to focus more on the composition of each shots and the aesthetics of my final project as a whole. The pre- and post-strategies that I utilized touched on lighting and consistency of the movements in my shots. I didn’t use a tripod and did not use a lot of centering which Rosalind Krauss discussed in “The Aesthetics of Narcisissm.” However, I believe that my strategies worked out and gave elements of balance, regularity, and anticipation into my project. I didn’t actually plan to shoot a lot of walking scenes but I liked how they individually turned out (with still and well-composed backgrounds) so I decided to make them the main substance of my project – where anticipation roots from since they are so repetitive. In addition, I decided to mainly showcase the environment of my subjects. I believe that my official theme, “Hipster Streets,” definitely called for the views of my subjects’ settings. The shakiness of my shots also added grittiness to my work which relates to the hipster idea. To add justice to the theme, I also decided to pay significant amounts of attention to timing. It was my goal to focus on audio since I believe audio would effectively compliment the shots and ideas I have. Omar Fast inspired me to think about how audio can be utilized to drive emotions and set moods. I made sure that every transitioning frame falls on a beat in the music I used, which I believe gave my project good rhythm. In the end, I realized that enhancing the basic foundations of videos is most important.

In reference to my final project it relates to two of the 50 greatest works of video art. The first video by Pipilotti Rist named “I Couldn’t Agree with you More”. The overlay of images and video formed upon the basis of the main focus of the video is in correlation to my project. The woman in the video has an overlay of greenery on her forehead and in my video I used the different footage to overlay upon the “walk in my shoes” concept such as a fireplace, street views, or birds.
My video has a lot of elements and undertones of cliche associations. The beginning of the project has flowers as I wake up. This is to relate that when I wake up, I am “waking up and smelling the flowers”. The birds are a cliche because I’m up early to hear the birds chirping. The rest of the video has an overlay of footage to represent the hustle and bustle of city life while trying to maintain sanity and a steady work schedule.
I am also relating my project to “Three Transitions” by Peter Campus. Mr Campus has allowed video within video based on the green screen like paint on his face. I believe this to relate that there is more meaning in what we see; And I feel the same way. We can watch a video based in real life but there is more to what we see than just the picture. There are thoughts that are tied to memory, awareness, foresight, and objectives. This is exactly what I envisioned for this project.

My final project will include time-lapse footage of sleeping in a normal bedroom and walking in a haunted house. The footage of the house will be very fast-paced while the footage of sleep will be slower. In “Paying Attention”, Jonathan Beller mentioned that the film industry created image-commodities that “valorizes” certain images. The footage I have is similar to film from horror movies, as the fast-pace effect is commonly used to indicate a memory or illicit fear, anxiety, or anticipation due to the uncertainty of these images. Implying a memory or dream by altering time is also discussed in T.J Demo’s “A Matter of Time”. She states, “Modern psychology soon recognized that human beings may experience time’s flow variably; that the lived duration may be manipulated”. In other words, experience is defined by time, and the alteration of time can invoke different emotions. I am hoping that my time lapse will invoke a state of anxiety instead of humor, as a few of my previous time lapses have seemed more humorous than serious. By altering between images of someone sleeping and the perspective of someone walking through the house, I hope to portray a sense of being watched, as I have done this in my previous videos and I think it would be interesting to connect my final with my previous two video projects. Peter Weibel’s “Endless Sandwich” gives an example of this, although his video literally shows a man watching a video of him watching another video.