By tapping into a visual curiosity and desire for novelty, attractions draw upon what Augustine, at the beginning of the fifth century, called curiositas in his catalogue of “the lust of the eyes.” In contrast to visual voluptas (pleasure), curiositas avoids the beautiful and goes after its exact opposite “simply because of the lust to find out and to know.” Curiositas draws the viewer towards unbeautiful sights, such as a mangled corpse, and “because of this disease of curiosity monsters and anything out of the ordinary are put on show in our theatres.”
– Tom Gunning, An Aesthetic of Astonishment, p. 124.
My Spring quarter project, Corporeal Composition, will take the form of an experimental music video, employing the technique of exacting sound and image synchronization through matching the motion, cuts, and content of the image to the rhythmic, melodic, and emotive attributes of the electronic music soundtrack. It will be shot and edited in 24p to emulate a film look, and will combine stop-motion animation with live action footage. The music will be developed in tandem with the video. Stylistically, it will appropriate attributes and techniques from three areas of avant-garde cinema: Surrealism, Structuralist-Materialism, and Soviet Montage.
Montage will be evident in the method of juxtaposing shots in a dynamic and psuedo-discontinuous manner to create new implications of meaning. On a surface level, the juxtapositions between shots will defy rational expectations and logical explanation. This surrealistic montage will take on an associational form, which will suggest thematic trends, and emotional sensations and implications across shots. Though I will use some of the precepts of Structuralist-Materialist film theory, my project will not be a like Structuralist-Materialist film in the predominantly formalistic sense of minimizing content and distancing the viewer, allowing the film to ‘exist’ exclusively in a dialectic between the viewer and each film moment. I will instead employ content premeditated to suggest certain themes and associations, leaving the construction ambiguous enough so as to allow the viewer to draw their own conclusions about the significance and meaning of the content. In this sense, the viewer will be the producer of ideas. This ambiguity will come about partly by allowing procedure to determine form to some extent, letting intuitional improvisations and nonlinear free-association occur during the process of creation within the thematic and stylistic framework that I have established. This is another Structualist-Materialist principle. Using reflexive techniques characteristic of some montage film and some structuralist-materialist film, I also hope to make the viewer aware of the illusionist and representational nature of the work they are watching. For example, during the stop-motion animation, I plan to leave in frames that contain my hand manipulating the armatures.
Because the nature of my piece will be primarily ambiguous in meaning, I will provide a discussion of the themes I intend to evoke. The primary thematic focus of Corporeal Composition will be the evolution of corporeality: birth, procreation, consumption, death, and decay. From this base will come more implications, such as the the interrelationship between living and dead flesh, and the true concealed animalistic nature of human beings. These themes will be explored through a variety of subject-matter. A few examples are: a stop-motion animation of a clay blob being ‘born’ from a pond of mud, an animation scene of a male and female Barbie doll procreating and giving birth, raw meat both signified as lifeless and given personification through animation and situation, a stop motion animation of a clay being personifying innocence and wonder, and horror. All of these elements (and more!) will be inter-spliced to suggest these themes. Throughout the entire piece, there will be a decay from representation to materialistic abstraction. As the piece progresses, there will be an increase in abstract indecipherable shapes and motion. I hope to end it with the video medium being comprised of its own data, and being influenced in form by the soundtrack (accomplished with Max/MSP/Jitter).
By confronting these issues of the body directly and blatantly (with a sense of morbid curiosity), I hope to subvert and bring light to the often tastelessly indecent portrayal of the human body as a sexual or aesthetic object in the popular music video. This project will be created to further the legitimate, intelligent, worthwhile, and evocatively expressive capabilities of the music video. In its current popular form (e.g., MTV), most music videos are superficial and vapid, adding to the delusion and distraction of pop-culture. By accentuating morbidity, the perceptions of the audience will hopefully be challenged in a way that might open dialog about these themes. Inspired by works of this form and of these themes that have come before, such as Dziga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Camera, Jan Svankmajer’s Meat Love, Chris Cunningham‘s Flex, Rubber Johnny, and other work, as well as the experimental animations of David Firth, I will contribute to the furtherance of these goals. My target audience will be anyone who is a victim of popular culture and is willing to engage with the work I create.
This project will be constructed in the digital realm, in order to allow for the great deal of manual manipulation that will occur to sync the audio and video. It will emulate a film “look,” despite being video. The live action footage will hopefully be shot in 24p on the Panasonic DVX100A, the increased resolution of the progressive frames being highly beneficial considering the large amount of digital video effects and compositing I will be doing. The more film-like motion possible with the 24p advanced pulldown capabilities of the DVX100A will contribute to the aesthetic of blurred movement on film, and will be essential to the achievement of my goal of a “film look” for the project. The stop-motion animation will be captured with digital images (either using a digital still camera or a frame-grabber and camcorder), and will be imported into After Effects for construction and synthesis into the rest of the 24p workflow. Editing will be accomplished in Premiere Pro and Avid XPress Pro. The musical soundtrack will be influenced by the IDM genre of electronic music, and will feature both ambient and rhythmic/melodic sections, which will be given an organic feel by means of the technique of sampling real sounds and interweaving them with the electronic components of the music.
4 Comments
This sounds like a very Jeddy project. And by Jeddy, I mean the new adjective I just invented which means, roughly, “possessing a macabre quirkiness combined with frenetic technical virtuosity.”
I’m a sucker for matching things to music. I’d like to do a project like this for fun sometime, but I can’t really do my own music. This looks like it is very well researched stylistically, and I don’t think you need to worry too much about how the piece will evolve over time. It’s not unusual for artists to sort of dialoge with their work, and sometimes the work will tell YOU what it’s about instead of the other way around. I doubt Sally will have many criticisms.
The barbie scene could definitely carry implicit concepts of gender roles and the like, if you’re looking for somewhere to wedge that in.
[sent by Morgan to me by email on 2006-03-13]
I have very few comments because, as always, you are very thourough (sp) and complete. You need not worry about being singled out for making formalism the majority of your approach. The few comments I have are:
Julia informed me that she expects the treatments to be no more then 1 page single spaced. You might want to make your treatment more consise by smashing paragraphs together and taking out some non neccessary technical information. Also, you want to be careful about the content that you do put into the video. Ask yourself: Why am I adding that? How self indulgent is that? Is that going to be just like everything else I have ever done? In what ways and in what direction am I expanding? How did I engage with the content of this class and in what ways is this peice engaging with that? We both have been known to add offensive content without thinking about it. Not that adding offensive content is neccessarily bad, it just needs to be intentional, deliberate, and transparent. We are the masters of both the form and the content and everything wether it was supposed to be there or not belongs to us…
The reason that most peole are focusing on content, and politicising their work is becasue of the extensive political content of this program. I knew that I wanted to make engaging work coming in, but the extent to which I now include politics (implict or explicit) is now greatly expanding. Not to say that everyones work has to be explicitly political. On the contrary, we find that the politics of most work are implicit in their creation and distribution. Your work is no exception. You have in intrest in these things (the content of your work) for a reason, and you want to express them for a reason. Art for you is a vehicle for (please fill in the blank) and that stament itself is a political statment.
Regardless of all that, it was expressed from the beggining that you can focus on form and content at your own discression. Since you have directly and clearly stated your focus for the content, and solidly connected this content with your form you are totally on point.
Don’t worry too much. You will not let any of your projects be bad, and you are ahead of the curve in alot of ways concerning the rest of the class (and indeed, the rest of the world). But, as always, you should be open to surprising yourself, and letting yourself be changed by the world, and your work.
If you need anything else during the coarse of the next 13 weeks (or ever) please don’t hesitate to ask me first….
Morgan
[ sent by email Mar 14, 2006 1:40 AM ]
I have a feeling Sally is going to ask you to narrow your scrope if that’s what she sees. I understand the resistance to providing specific content based on what you’re going for, but giving examples of the theoretical assertions your talking about, even if you say it’s just for example, might be really beneficial. At the moment, I feel the treatment might be too heady and lacking a real stability in terms of what the end result is to be envisioned as. If you care to glance at mine, I met with her today and she said for the most part she felt good about what I had done. Her criticism for me however was that she wanted me to broaden my scope, which she said was curious, because she’s been having to tell everyone to narrow it. Basically my main advice is to approach maybe slightly differently. A treatment exists as an excercise in envisioning a project so that others can see what you’re going for. I feel like I get a loose feel for that, but sometimes overly wordiness (
this passage is especially confusing – the use of the comma in the first stance could be indicatory of continued “not this”, but it could also be a supposition, or contrary phrase in relation to the previous negated statement. This is then also hampered by the however in the next sentence, because there’s a possible double meaning in intentionality. I’m pretty sure I know what you mean, but it should probably be cleaned up – anytime you put in a comma, bear in mind, it can construed as supplementary, contrary, or complimentary. Sorry to say so much in parenthesis… that phrase just irked me) hampers more than aids the presentation. And now that I read the last two paragraphs of your treatment I see you do give solidified content, though then my advice would be to try to incorporate those earlier in the treatment, or spread them out throughout when they particularly emphasize a certain theoretical device. It’s also wholly optional to seperate the technical specs from the rest of the piece. It may just be a preference to personal taste in that I see you have all the information there, I just feel like it’s organized oddly (theoretical, content, technical) rather than say, organized linearly as the film might progress (what the viewer might see first, what is your intention, what is yout percieved audience reaction – what the viewer sees next, etc.). This doesn’t mean laying it out as if it were a storyboard, but I think it could use some help in letting the reader know more about the form this is going to take and how it will progress. A good thing to bear in mind is that these pieces aren’t static, and unless doing a solid loop, have a definite beginning and end, at least technically speaking. As a result, you might want to put in information about how you plan to mature the concepts over time, how the piece will build up, or if it will be built up. Anyhow, it took me awhile, but I think I finally figured out what might be missing from your treatment, that sense of linear progression. Again, nothing terribly specific, but it would probably be good to lay out an example or idealized progression of events (from low content to high content, etc.). Anyway, good luck! Sorry to be a blabbermouth.
damn some deep shit…content and exploration of form. im excited…this is complex or sound so. hmm how do you make slowing blurring thing in video to look like film. im really interest you address popular culture in this format. its interesting that your tech generation can relate to this kind of work but thing about the information gap and how our parents could even understand or experience this project….im telling you its like from dos to windows…omg mind fuck for hella folks crazy but yeah damn you got your shit down
amanda