SPRING 2023
#1
My eyes are fake.
The camera is not.
I am not making.
Just captured the moment.
I explore two scan modes: My eyes and the eye of the smartphone.
One midnight in midtown, with my naked eyes, I watched people choreograph themselves on the ice rink. Maneuver their bodies between risk and fun. However, there was more than just a sports activity. Interestingly, I observe a person in the togetherness. A stranger between strangers. People love challenges, sensation, maneuvering, danger, risk, control, synchronized movement, fun experiences, self-care, etc. A meeting point itself over the alternative commercial space for gathering.
Furthermore, when my smartphone's camera opens its eyes, the machine learning model immediately catches the suspect gestures based on its recognition system. Although the device is always with me, I don't know our relationship. How do my eyes and the camera relate? They aren't connected, but the idea of catching moments makes it happen.
Are we have a fake in-love addiction?
Counting! how many bodies are on the rink?
Counting! how many people are on the screen?
Counting! how many individuals are wearing black or white?
Counting! how much happiness and fun are they gaining from ice skating?
Counting! how many suspects had been recognized by the technology?
Counting! How many resources have been spent before, during, and after the ice skating?
The final project would screen the black-and-white moment on the rink.
with ⛸️
darLane Litaay
-----
I would like to merge this video piece with my SPCUNY (social practice CUNY) project creating a dinner series with and for my friend and old trombone teacher Curtis. He recently spent some time in the hospital and has returned home, needing to gain some weight, strength, and social community that was lost during the first couple of years of the pandemic, which coincided with his divorce and health issues. Curtis and I will cook and dine together and occasionally invite friends to join us, I would like to make a short film of the dinners. I imagine shooting the footage directly down at the table so that the food and hands are the focus. I will need to experiment with this a bit but I prefer not to make a narrative piece but something a little less straight forward or abstract. In terms of the video presentation, I want to experiment with multiple channels and projection mapping. Curtis and I were connected when I was 12 or so through Roy, his best friend (of 1000 years) and my music teacher, and in an ideal world, this video would be screened during a (Roy+Curtis music) performance at the Sunview Luncheonette, where one of the meals from the video is served.
Lucy Hollier
_____
EXAMPLES:
#1
Using archival footage from interviews with psychiatric patients and a PSA film about mental health from the 50's - 60's I'll create a soundtrack to footage of my own from the past few years. My footage explores themes of otherness with costume, heightened landscapes of nature, femininity and gender. These will be put together in kind of collage style.
I'm looking to explore the tension in how mental health patients have traditionally been spoken to and treated and what notions and presumptions we still may have, especially towards female patients.
The film will be about 10 min long depending on how things go - single channel.
#2
My initial thoughts have been mostly formal. I'm interested in working on something multi-channel, 3-4 most likely. Additionally, I'd like to create a structure with multiple pictures within each channel, potentially moving within the single frame or between multiple frames/channels. I'm interested in exploring how the different channels can be in conversation with one another, creating a kind of shared video space.
I also want to construct a system that has a generative aspect, utilizing random (or quasi-random) processes, perhaps in choosing which video clips to play and how and where the videos move. Maybe even an interactive component.
As far as the content of the videos, my best idea so far is to record different people walking (maybe in different ways), probably in front of a green screen so that I can isolate just the bodies. I would like to record them in such a way so that I can use the clips in slow motion (need to research how best to do this). Finally, I'd like to find a way so that the moving bodies leave some kind of traces behind them.
The idea is to create an installation piece that presents the act of walking by different bodies and makes visible the route they have traveled. The act of walking, along with its components and potentials, is something that has been compelling me recently.
I would develop the project in the Max programming environment.
#3
My House- A Monument
A projection mapping installation using a model of my childhood home; video and photos to commemorate this structure of personal historical importance.
Materials:
Video projector, Mad Mapper Video Projection Software, Adobe Premiere, Cardboard/paint model of childhood home, video clips, photos
I propose to projection map various scenes on various facades on a model of my childhood home (actual home is in Breezy Point, NY). Story will begin with a young couple from the 60’s, Mike, an aspiring actor and gym teacher and Ursula, an immigrant and waitress. Their journey moves from a small studio in the warehouse district of Manhattan, to a move to a small insular beach town of Breezy Point. Mike and Ursula set up roots there based on their mutual love of the ocean and the want for space to rear a child. Mike was an avid spearfisherman, Ursula was an outdoor country girl. They journeyed through hurricanes, childrearing, Ponzi schemes, and having the police called on them constantly. They were disliked amongst some of the neighbors for their non-traditional outwardly appearance, non-affiliation with the church, and sometimes loud parties. Pariahs in their hometown, they still managed to raise a child who later returned to the neighborhood to raise her own children.
#4
Reading Specific Books in Specific Places
For my final video art project I propose to create a video series that will implicate my public performance practice, a broad swath of the western literary canon, selfie and live-stream culture, and the deeply personal experience of consuming and processing long-form text.
Reading Specific Books in Specific Places will be shot with a GoPro camera on a selfie stick. I will be quietly and simply reading a book, immersing myself in its literary landscape and doing my best to ignore the unique environmental context of each site of the reading performance. The title is pretty self-explanatory, so rather than belabour the point I’d like to provide examples of these book/place pairings:
-The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway - read on Brighton Beach (as the tide slowly comes in and overtakes me sitting in my folding chair and reading)
-Silent Spring by Rachel Carson - read floating in a canoe in the Gowanus canal
-Moby Dick by Herman Melville - read aboard the Staten Island Ferry
-Das Kapital by Karl Marx - read in on Wall Street, in front of the charging bull statue
-Orlando by Virginia Woolf - read in the Stonewall Inn
-Just Kids by Patti Smith - read at the Bethesda Terrace in Central Park
-Ida by Gertrude Stein - read in front of Yeshiva of Flatbush
-Art of War by Sun Tzu - read at the 9/11 Memorial
-Notes on “Camp” by Susan Sontag - read at a drag show at Bizarre Bar
-Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - read in front of Amazon NYC HQ
-All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks - read while riding the MTA
-Metaphysics by Aristotle - read in Times Square
All of these video pieces would be presented on individual monitors.
The unifying aesthetic would be the presence of my folding chair, matching costume of a formal black suit, and the warped, wide angle associated with family vacation videos.
In the final form the books would also be displayed below the monitor, as well as the wikipedia page for the location of the reading.
For the final project in class I will attempt to complete as many of these videos as I can. We’ll see how that goes...
#5
Empty Your Heart and Mind
I’m going to re-visit my India video for my final idea.
Using blending mode for video effects with live video, stills, text - journal entries, filters, music. Collage look. Compose music and record in Ableton using midi and audio as a bed for a live shehnai concert. The video, stills will be generated from one projector. A second projector will (aka William Kentridge) throw text from shehnai lessons on upstage scrim either on top of video and/or intermittently between the video so the scrim only shows text and if I can manage it augmented figures that are picked up by a dedicated projector light source that throws the shadows of everyone on stage (me and shehnai, sitar player, piano player).
Empty Your Heart and Mind. The project is based on my Tow Fellowship research and study of the shehnai, a North Indian Classical instrument (similar to the western oboe), and my relationship with my guru, Sanjeev Shankar (who tours and records with Anoushka Shankar), which took place over the period of one month in New Delhi, India from 21 December 2018 to 20 January 2019. The project performance is a meditation, and a tribute to the deep love and respect that I carry in my heart for my guru, his family, the shehnai, and my recent experience in India.
#6
MahJong Queens
About 15 years ago I got interested in film making. Armed with a video camera I set out to find something to film. I stumbled on a documentary about a group of elderly women living in a public housing complex in the Sheepshead Bay area of Brooklyn. The women gathered weekly to play Mahjong. For most of the women this game was becoming their only form of social interaction. The neighborhood around them was rapidly changing. Their children moved out many years ago and were fully engrossed in their own lives. The women felt like the last remnant of a robust past. I shot over 40 hours but unfortunately my ambition outweighed my skill. Most of the footage is unusable due to shoddy camera work and an undeveloped story line. However, I find the women compelling and think there might be just enough usable footage to create something compelling.
this is a little trailer/sample of the footage https://vimeo.com/319518838
#7
My proposal for my final project is for a performance that involves an Instagram Live performance that will be simultaneously projected to the back of the stage.
It begins with a video of my face projected instructing the audience to get out their phones, link to my Instagram Live though my stories. It’ll be a little sexy, a little tongue-in-cheek. Then somehow it will transition to me, facing my back to the audience, wearing a nude latex catsuit that makes my body look like a plastic barbie doll. In the back of the stage there is a tripod with a ring light attached to it, holding my cell phone. I perform a super strippery, cam girl-ish performance to my phone, ignoring the room full of human audience. I may make connection to them via my phone, and the projection of my phone on the back wall of the stage.
The song that I’ll be performing to I’m still deciding, but I’m thinking either Duran Duran’s Save a Prayer or Girls on Film or Bubble Gum by Rasheeda During the performance I zip off my latex top. And at the end, up close to the camera, I unzip my crotch zipper in the latex, expose a tampon string, pull it out to reveal it’s only bubble gum. Then I eat it and blow a bubble into the camera giggling.
I am working with the concept of unreal expectations of beauty and female bodies caused by social media and the increasing pressure to present yourself in some sort of super woman of femininity online.
#8 Anna Reid Proposal
An interview with my mom
This is inspired by the assignment you gave in one of your undergrad classes. I want to record an interview with my mom about grief. She is taking the first steps toward becoming a hospice care volunteer. Her transformative experiences with grief changed the course of her life. I want to talk with her about that. I want to talk about loss. Then, I want to animate or add visuals to it.
