Monomyth, Collage, 2018
Peepshow (film & installation)
Duration 00:07:23
Digital Video Projection
*Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey as a linear narrative strategy exploring the relationship between acoustic and tactile images, homogenous space, and fantasy.
My latest film project, based on the mono-myth, The Hero’s Journey, establishes a nearly hyper-linear narrative structure of visual time and space that coexists against another parallel yet incongruent linear acoustic image. A narrative resides within this image as well. However, the effect (and perhaps additionally affect) creates friction between the two images existing in time, but not space. The presence of one’s own body in this camera obscura (or peepshow) becomes enhanced, accentuated. Where cinema theaters of the 20th and 21st centuries create the sense of loss of body (static in time and then space), the body here is not possible to forget. The scale of body to screen, to tangible tactility in material (light and fur) is in such close physical proximity that it is impossible to ignore, one wants to touch, to feel the surrounding enclosure. The image on the screen within the box is nearly life-size, a comparative tool to measuring both scale and intensity of the bodies relationship with the visual image. The acoustic image asks about virtuality and the creation of tactile images. Quite simply does the body return an affect, or tactile quality within their body as a return feedback mechanism through the taking in (seeing) of the acoustic image? Like pornography, the input of the visual image tends to stimulate arousal - the act of seeing. While I’m less interested in creating or making pornography for pornographies sake, the experiment is an inquiry into the creation of image within the theater of the mind. Does arousal occur within the creative process - the creation of image, how is memory linked to physiological processes if the acoustic image here is meant to turn the body on, to activate?
In this world, the white, white (David Bartlett, Chromaphobia) of the mise-en-scene depicts a whitescape of normative space. It is here that the linear visual narrative aids the creation of a homogenous environment and calls into question the relationship between narrative structure more broadly and commodification of architectural space and environments through the way that we see.
It is the attempt to structurally relate the camera movement and perspective of the image to the architecture itself. Through the out/in penetration of each doorframe and the subsequent horizontal progression, the camera glides along the space like a hand would across its lovers bodily surface. The relationship between the camera and the architectural space it occupies reinforces the whitescape not necessarily through its technique per se, albeit arguable, but primarily through the congruency to the narrative and character engendered within the visual image. I see this as a problem for the film in general as if the issue is to push past normative space and ideas rather than to reinforce them. However, in light of the experimental quality one might contextualize the revealing of relationships that are naturally embedded in the social values of society. There exists a restraint, a reservation in both the visual image and the acoustic image.
For Descartes and later Heidegger, "standing in front of" is equated with a philosophical position, a Weltbild, or a worldview which transformed the world into a measurable object. (Virtual Window, A. Friedman) One questions what is being measured here both literally and figuratively. The video stands erect in a vertically rectangular position proportional to the 16:9 aspect ratio of a handheld cellular phone screen. The shot of the door frame is not proportionally exact but not at all dissimilar to the rectangular video. The space in between these frames is occupiable and places us between the real and the fantasy. It is here that our body becomes the standard of reference to measure all other objects. The senses take over and we feel the closeness of ourselves in the enclosure. The on screen body is not only a scalar reference against our own, but also an engendered reference.
Duration 00:07:23
Digital Video Projection
*Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey as a linear narrative strategy exploring the relationship between acoustic and tactile images, homogenous space, and fantasy.
My latest film project, based on the mono-myth, The Hero’s Journey, establishes a nearly hyper-linear narrative structure of visual time and space that coexists against another parallel yet incongruent linear acoustic image. A narrative resides within this image as well. However, the effect (and perhaps additionally affect) creates friction between the two images existing in time, but not space. The presence of one’s own body in this camera obscura (or peepshow) becomes enhanced, accentuated. Where cinema theaters of the 20th and 21st centuries create the sense of loss of body (static in time and then space), the body here is not possible to forget. The scale of body to screen, to tangible tactility in material (light and fur) is in such close physical proximity that it is impossible to ignore, one wants to touch, to feel the surrounding enclosure. The image on the screen within the box is nearly life-size, a comparative tool to measuring both scale and intensity of the bodies relationship with the visual image. The acoustic image asks about virtuality and the creation of tactile images. Quite simply does the body return an affect, or tactile quality within their body as a return feedback mechanism through the taking in (seeing) of the acoustic image? Like pornography, the input of the visual image tends to stimulate arousal - the act of seeing. While I’m less interested in creating or making pornography for pornographies sake, the experiment is an inquiry into the creation of image within the theater of the mind. Does arousal occur within the creative process - the creation of image, how is memory linked to physiological processes if the acoustic image here is meant to turn the body on, to activate?
In this world, the white, white (David Bartlett, Chromaphobia) of the mise-en-scene depicts a whitescape of normative space. It is here that the linear visual narrative aids the creation of a homogenous environment and calls into question the relationship between narrative structure more broadly and commodification of architectural space and environments through the way that we see.
It is the attempt to structurally relate the camera movement and perspective of the image to the architecture itself. Through the out/in penetration of each doorframe and the subsequent horizontal progression, the camera glides along the space like a hand would across its lovers bodily surface. The relationship between the camera and the architectural space it occupies reinforces the whitescape not necessarily through its technique per se, albeit arguable, but primarily through the congruency to the narrative and character engendered within the visual image. I see this as a problem for the film in general as if the issue is to push past normative space and ideas rather than to reinforce them. However, in light of the experimental quality one might contextualize the revealing of relationships that are naturally embedded in the social values of society. There exists a restraint, a reservation in both the visual image and the acoustic image.
For Descartes and later Heidegger, "standing in front of" is equated with a philosophical position, a Weltbild, or a worldview which transformed the world into a measurable object. (Virtual Window, A. Friedman) One questions what is being measured here both literally and figuratively. The video stands erect in a vertically rectangular position proportional to the 16:9 aspect ratio of a handheld cellular phone screen. The shot of the door frame is not proportionally exact but not at all dissimilar to the rectangular video. The space in between these frames is occupiable and places us between the real and the fantasy. It is here that our body becomes the standard of reference to measure all other objects. The senses take over and we feel the closeness of ourselves in the enclosure. The on screen body is not only a scalar reference against our own, but also an engendered reference.
