Images and their context - Tyanna Buie artist lecture response - The frame is everything

Tyanna Buie's portraits were consistently striking, but the ones that held the most power, in my mind, were the side-of-face mug shots of her family members that she touched up and placed in ornate, gilded frames. The profile in the gold oblong frame, so consistently associated with the European bourgeoisie and royalty, lends a very direct and elevating power to these profiles that otherwise are associated strongly with their original context - the world of the prison industrial complex.

Buie has not, however, stripped these images of their original context, nor has she stripped the elite, wealthy associations from the frames she uses; instead, they become part of the same symbolic item that commemorates the lives of these black (mostly) men who are photographed carelessly in the same position the wealthy elites were painted in centuries ago, before they (the contemporary men) are locked up, part of the ongoing narrative of their lives that otherwise have little in common with those old European aristocrats.

Advanced New Media: Project 1 proposal

Inspired by the older trend of mood rings and powered by the more recent trend of Facebook live videos that track user's reactions (reaction button presses) to the live video, I will create a 3D-modeled mood ring on hand -- the color of which is informed by the reactions users have selected to the live video.

I'll record the live video; that recording will be the final product of the interaction-oriented piece.

Learn to Skate with NG

Learn to Skate follows a set path; a clear narrative, but at the same time is an attempt to subvert the narrative structure and even the documentary structure, if you want to take it further.
Whether or not Learn to Skate successfully subverts two very established structural pillars of film culture is not necessarily important, but hopefully it at least leaves a viewer wondering what the point was, and why they watched it, and what the pretty parts were supposed to mean. Documentaries, narratives, they do something, but they're not always much to do with a life. Learn to Skate is -- it's about disappointment, struggle, ephemerality, vapidness -- it has some of what's really going on in it.

"Technology moves towards the functionalist distinction and in that way transforms everything and transforms itself as well". De Certau is talking, to some extent, about the practice of writing in the passage -- writing as a self-containing technology, which separates increasingly from reality as it is practiced. Learn to Skate, if anything, is not separate from reality, despite my acting, despite the way people react to the camera. Everything in Learn to Skate really happened.

Stroszek:  a life of crime

Werner Herzog's Stroszek communicates, through a series of increasingly terrible events, the criminality of the quiet life. Stroszek is punished in Germany, for what, we aren't sure (I don't mean the prison system here; that element is more abstract -- I'm talking about the pimps who destroy his home and beat him up). Maybe it is because he is small, or because he's a little weird, or because the girl moves back in with him -- but I'd like to posit that it's only because he's there that he receives such brutal treatment -- because he doesn't do anything, and that's the worst thing someone can do.

We see this again when he moves to the united states. His home is repossessed by a banker who couldn't be, on the surface, farther from the pimps who destroyed Stroszek's life in Germany, yet plays essentially the same part -- he won't leave Stroszek alone, he invades his home, and eventually drives him out of it (or, in a more literal phrasing, drives Stroszek's home away from him). All because Stroszek is doing nothing -- he has nothing, he attempts to do nothings, he is floating in a sea of happening remaining unchanging.

My last thoughts of this brief post on Stroszek are on the cyclical nature of the film -- our static hero is released from captivity at the beginning of the film, reluctantly so, and by the end he is almost captured again, although this time he escapes with his life (this isn't meant to be a joke -- I've never understood that stupid expression, and I think it makes more sense to say "he escaped with his life" about a man who died). This implies a cyclical nature to Stroszek's life that is only concluded by his (probable) death.

Some videos I did for Clee McCracken's recent voice recital

 

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