Video Art and Sleep Deprivation

Although I attended the 1st half of the video art symposium on merely 2 hours on sleep (Halloween was a long night-what can you do) and should have attended the 2nd half instead, I managed to process some information. Honestly, every time they dimmed the lights for a video projection, my eyelids closed accordingly, but, light and images still got in. I took these small glimpses of footage and evaluated their visual aesthetic; I entangled their motions and figured out patterns. From this sleep-deprived state of mind, there were some interesting observations.

 

Among them, I found Jonathan Binstock’s lecture pleasurable.  He played Jeremy Blake’s Winchester Redux and I found a new respect for video art not yet encountered. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, but somehow the meditation of imagery and flow and fade from one picture to the next stimulated my visual field. Navigating through shapes with overlays and converging layers, I sensed a slow and definitive process taking place. A remix. A Culture as we may speak about. Something technologically enhanced hit a button in my brain; the imagery was an explosion of color, and feeling. As if the tones (both visual and auditory) gave off a sense of emotion that seeped into my hallucinatory state and found comfort. Unfortunately I couldn’t relate so much to an intellectual reading of this work but by all means it depicted a transfusion of symbolic relationships between color, shape, photo and sound. Mixing such media with a dialogue between dream-like sources, I felt inclined to enter a realm of the eternal or maybe the realm entered into my sub-conscious state…who is to say.

Another video by Rick Silva titled, A Rough Mix, just stole my attention out of sleep mode. Genius. That was the first word that came to mind. I particularly celebrated the fact that he is playing with sound as much as video. Really, the per-formative nature of this work seems to be a fun-filled game of which nature plays with reality. Or the other way around maybe. Either way, its value becomes apparent at least in the innovative juxtapositions of sound and video. With that said, there is a curiosity involved with how he manipulates our expectations of certain sounds. We know what it sounds like when we scratch a rock, spin through sand, string some snow, but he creates new meanings of this reality through a remixing of audio output and of course the VJ aspect of the work as well. Through this action, a new aesthetic emerges of which I thought made for quite an interesting audio track. I couldn’t pinpoint one particular scene I liked more, but overall he is able to harness the natural world in an effort to create hyper real sounds. Perhaps, I took a liking to this fact the most. There were moments when he struck a harmonious cord that paralleled equilibrium between nature, video and sound. Somehow, I believe these moments are in line with Paul d Miller’s philosophy of rhythm science when the cosmos find solace in the creative spirit of mankind. When the audio meets the visual meets the senses meets the mind. Rhythm.

 

Liliana Porter’s video was amusing. Bizarre in many ways, but this isn’t a turn off. In fact, the simple settings add a flare of absence. Where could these little figurines exist? What situation do they create for themselves? This world of miniatures allows for the imagination to create the context of their survival. Based on association, I found the scene with the figures dancing to be most conceptually engaging and also deceptive. With metaphorical devices set in place, the figures dance like I do, or try to anyways. Human qualities are innately molded into the miniatures. Their personalities form from the viewers’ pre-exposure to associated images, references, experiences with such playful activities, relevant circumstances, and situations. Thus, remixing historical vantage points with found objects, we can assume that new roles are given to objects (figurines/toys) where human qualities take part in the process, especially when motion picturing blurs the boundary of the functionality of an object. Well done indeed.

So in my blurry state of mind, I found the videos to be quite fascinating though I barely made it through to lunch. Excuse my withdrawn behavior for one second to understand how my lucid viewing of such works was in itself an experiment in remixology. It becomes a different perspective in which to approach an interpretation of art, worthy of its own principles, a style of incoherency, misunderstandings perhaps, and child like qualities.