The Memory of Space

Well I will start the progress of my video project by addressing my teammate Meg's request to discuss my experience with artistic collaboration. Although the logistics of meeting is somewhat of a challenge (we're all busy and highly interesting people) I think that my collaboration with Aaaron and Meg has (like the sound project) brought me to a place that I would have not nor could have not gotten to on my own. Meg really brought in an interesting perspective as our resident neuro science hobbyist which was a main inspiration for one of the channels we are constructing. Aaron's Hollywood cinematic acting overall badass background led us in a direction of experiments with video and narrative. I contributed the idea that I apologetically introduced as "new age touchy feely hippie" (which I hope it really isn't).

The idea started after sitting in a bar and wondering if people's conversations linger in those spaces, even after new people have replaced them in that space. Now you're probably understanding the touchy feely concern. Strangely enough, my team members thought it was an interesting enough idea to play around with in a video project.

From the beginning Meg and I wanted to do something with multiple channels and ultimately as a group we decided on three channels. The first channel starting from the left is going to be video or random (and not so random) neural connections that will be dictated by the images and conversation that occurs in the second channel (the center channel). This channel will contain video of one space occupied over time by several different people and is meant to embody this idea that space holds memory. We have not figured out whether or not we want to tell the people we are filming that they are on film. We also have thought about possibly straight up scripting the whole thing. Either way, this channel is going to occupy the space for space holding onto memory. For example, the lingering question for this channel that should arise is, if one group of people have a conversation on a subject in a given space, is it more likely that the same subject matter will come up in the same space among different people?

Finally, the third channel will contain text. This text is being as we speak collaboratively written in our shared google document and some of the language will be found (as from Pierre Nora-see below). We have been interested in some sort of loose narrative for the project and this is where the text of that narrative will unfold. Ideally, we also would like to have pop ups similar to Intervals by Peter Horvath.

During our last meeting, Meg also thought it would be interesting to layer a very transparent video over other video. This inspiration derived from Aaron using this technique in his sample project as we learned Final Cut last week. Currently we are collecting the footage and should be starting to put it all together shortly.


Works inspiring this video project:

Essays:

Pierre Nora - Between Memory and History

The following web cinema works by Peter Horvath:

TRIPTYCH: MOTION STILLNESS RESISTANCE

Boulevard

Intervals

....I will add more as I come to them!