I keep doing this...

It was a snowy day last time this happened. Maybe clouds drive me to video art. Maybe I should move to Oregon.

Today it happened again, I sat down and lost hours, calories and possibly meaningful relationships through missed phone calls to my obsessive style of video art creation that I cannot pull myself away from. I just realized that it's evening and I 'm not sure if I've eaten or blinked recently.

I know that today we were supposed to write about the VJ sites that we read but instead I would like to post my project's progress instead. This is mostly because I just realized that the reading I have for my other classes (I have other classes?) is screaming at me to move away from the screen. Oh and I have some undergrads to teach poetry to tomorrow...

I will however make a brief comment about the many articles I read last week about VJ culture: I cannot wait to have a minute to try out MIDI poet. The link I have here to the download site for MIDI poet is in Spanish which I got through reading and then realized there is an English one too. When Eugenio Tisselly talks about wanting to be a text jockey, I am very curious to see how live text performance (with other medias) could potentially influence the shape of my writing overall. In my video project, I am remixing myself for the text portion and it always surprises me how a simple re-framing of one medium inside of another medium can change everything. What is language when it's taken off of the page? The words change. The meanings, even in an isolation seemingly equal to the page, changes.

So back to my project, basically I have been obsessed with elevators lately. The disorientation of space, the mechanization of movement, the involuntary intimacy, a room as a means of transportation and my reasons go on.

I have been writing with these ideas in mind lately and chose a prose poetry piece of mine to remix. I took the text and manipulated it in flash then inserted it into Premiere. The footage I have are a lot of stills taken from google images and the video is all from yourtube and the HD flip. One video from youtube is about the racism of elevator etiquette. In other words a man is talking to the camera about how white women are rude nonverbally to black men who enter an elevator. It's incredibly misogynistic and one form of discrimination is traded for another. I have removed the sound from this clip however, so that theme may or may not come through. This portion is not quite fleshed out yet and I must mention this clip is incredibly rough. There is a lot of polishing work to be done but I am excited about the direction it's heading:





Sorry (Mark) for my deviance (not following directions). Hopefully this project will be worth it!