As one of the final activities of the course (gulp!) we have to present a 5-minute-long video about our practice. This builds (conceptually) on the three-minute video we did previously for Unit 2.
For the three-minute video, I turned it into a sort of artwork, featuring a conversation between Tomgos and Tathos. In some ways, this worked well as it made it more engaging, and alleviated some awkwardness of presenting. It was also quite a lot of fun, and drew-on (and bolstered) my technical skills making video.
However, it also distracted quite a lot from the details of my actual practice. While Tomgos and Tathos have been useful tools to develop a more fluid approach to my work, I don't consider them core parts of my practice - I occasionally use them as 'thinking hats', but they are not directly relevant. A lesson-learnt therefore was that people will focus on the video-format, not the contents, unless the format really 'gets out of the way', and I'm not ready to do that.
I recently attended the "Play Dead" symposium at CSM. In practice it was more like a pop-up workshop relating to some of the PhD students work, but either way, I really enjoyed it and found it really interesting. In particular, I enjoyed a piece on archiving by Bill Howard that included a short film, which really got me thinking about video again. The video featured a jumble of shots of a walk down a canal path, together with a poetic non-stop narrative in the form of semi-random jumbles of words related to what was happening on screen. It was hypnotically beautiful.
Inspired by Bill's video, and extending some thinking I have been doing under the umbrella of 'rivers of silver', I think I should go 'all in' for the five-minute video, and try to produce an artwork that both extends and encapsulates my practice. A little like I am doing for the final show, I want to make a video that documents the last two years, whilst also being a piece related to my study statement (remember that?) in it's own right.
After following my practice where it leads for almost two years, I think a key part of my 'answer' to my study statement is trying to produce work that helps people find joy through confronting the inevitability of death. As I put it in my submission to the (apparently defunct) student book - "As evening darkens, and night draws in, how will we wish we had spent the day?". I want to create a five-minute video that metaphorically asks the same question. (Should I incorporate written words too?)
For some time now, I've been using the broad tag of 'rivers of silver' to describe the work I am doing with my face cast. What I really like about this 'project' is that it isn't a project - it's more like a theme... A sort of constantly evolving source of material, broadly held together by the fact that it uses my face cast. I am wondering it if it also the place from which my five-minute video will emerge, since I have been doing some experiments with casting my face in ice, and then leaving it in the garden to melt over the course of a day.
The idea was to make a video featuring the face melting over the course of a day, as an allegory for life. I think I should extend this idea to make the five-minute video, dividing the five minutes up into the eighty years that I can reasonably be expected to live (if I'm lucky). Doing so actually comes out quite neatly:
1st minute: 0-16 - childhood
2nd minute: 16-32 - early adulthood, marriage, parenthood
3rd minute: 32-48 - late adulthood, up to the present
4th minute: 48-64 - the near future
5th minute: 64-80 - the far future, old age, and death
That said, I think death should stalk every stage, but in doing so, celebrate life. I'd like to create a semi-abstract 'landscape' of sound and images, overlaying video, but also using voices and words as important elements. I'd like to put-together a rough 'script' of what each section focuses on, and use the footage of the melting face as a sort of subliminal marker between each. Broadly the 'script' will be a set of moods/themes/key-events for each section - perhaps more like a 'musical score' than a film script.
For each section, I'd like to collate a set of words or phrases, and ask volunteers to read them out. I'll then put all the different voices into the video - hopefully bringing more universality, but also representing the participatory element that seems to crop up regularly in my work. I want to choose the phrases carefully so they represent the sections but do so in a non-obvious way - for instance, I think for the last section I might have someone saying insistently "do you want the door open? or closed?" to represent the helplessness of old age.
The video IS supposed to describing my art practice as well, so I'll work different artworks and projects into each section. I'm not exactly sure how I'll do this yet, but my thinking is that once I have a 'script' then I'll better understand what pieces are relevant, and how I might bring them in.
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