Last Friday's event was a surprising, exuberant showcase of mediated poetry and varied video samples that added up to a culminating picture of how to invert the making of an artwork or social message, given a reflexive culture of equipped creators. Following our screening of accidentally made films, we heard excellent readings by Candy Shue, who contextualized her lyric work in the recent philosophy of Ken Wilbur; Monica Mody, whose moving opening statement about how chance-made art relates to composition and social order left a rife impression on her visceral poetic voice; and Alli Warren, who delivered a singular transcription of textual screen shots that were sourced by her own complex series of constraints (look here!). Next came our compiled raw videos of various #OWS happenings and a reading/provocation-fest by Greg McGarry. Paul Ebenkamp delivered the evening's final oral staging with a copious elucidation of the forms, pains, obsessions and ruins at work in a Dickinson poem. We closed with a composed series of videos that re-frame the Occupy movement, either with ambivalence, flippancy or gravitas.
Look below for some text that was in our program/claim-to-ethos for the event! The three video sequences that were screened will be here soon.
If propaganda is an aesthetic that refuses to be critical of itself, raw footage purports to be its opposite, an unmolested documentation of the real. But what is being represented? Consider the issue of framing: documentation ceases to be objective. We’d like to present a progression of footage with increasingly controlled (and controlling) frame structures.
Here we examine the proliferation of personal media-making. Personal recording devices are empowering aids to an increasingly visual reality, made rich and frenzied by its viewers and by its makers equally. This accessibility blurs the definition between producer and recipient, enabling a culture of immediacy and communicability. Due to this proliferation, digital recording has become tantamount to its predecessor in personal, reproducible communication technology: writing. This evening is an ecosystem of leveled realities.
Look below for some text that was in our program/claim-to-ethos for the event! The three video sequences that were screened will be here soon.
If propaganda is an aesthetic that refuses to be critical of itself, raw footage purports to be its opposite, an unmolested documentation of the real. But what is being represented? Consider the issue of framing: documentation ceases to be objective. We’d like to present a progression of footage with increasingly controlled (and controlling) frame structures.
Here we examine the proliferation of personal media-making. Personal recording devices are empowering aids to an increasingly visual reality, made rich and frenzied by its viewers and by its makers equally. This accessibility blurs the definition between producer and recipient, enabling a culture of immediacy and communicability. Due to this proliferation, digital recording has become tantamount to its predecessor in personal, reproducible communication technology: writing. This evening is an ecosystem of leveled realities.
