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Cornelis van Haarlem  (1562–1638)

The Fall of the Titans.(1588,1590)

Details.

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Seeing how last year's work looks when projected.

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Seeing how last year's work looks when projected.

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Seeing how last year's piece works as a projection. 

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One of the intersections between popular culture and video art came with Psychic TV’s use of the medium as a part of their multimedia project (being both a rock band and a platform for video).

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During the writing process, reading other academic writing on experimental film and video made it clear that I didn’t have the breadth of knowledge to fully grasp such a vast and intricate subject within the limits of this project. This led to me feeling a lot of my work was somewhat surface level compared to the other work done on similar areas I was reading, and I felt I wasn’t engaging with the full extent of many of the concepts and terms broadly used within the field (for instance structural/materialist film). This coupled with my confusion over the myriad of other media theory texts I was looking into made my theoretical framework slightly confused, and I feel that if I had started out by defining key areas relevant to the subject then developing the ideas and building arguments from there, the work would have been stronger. Since I was looking into concepts of medium specificity, new media and experimental cinema, I could have broken these down to specific areas that would be explored through the texts I was pulling from. I did attempt this approach in the rough draft of the lit review, though it appeared fairly muddled, reflecting the confusion about the project I had at the time. However, this put me in the right direction in eventually building up a coherent literature review for the next draft.

After understanding that my next steps were the draft literature review and introduction, I began bringing together everything I had gathered up to that point, which was fairly challenging. While I did not fully grasp many of the ideas I was putting down, the act of making connections and building an argument helped give me a broader understanding of them given I had to actively make the connections myself and articulate the meaning of the ideas and their relevance to the project. If I had been as invested in the project’s core concepts from the start I feel as though a more straightforward development could have led to a much more cohesive whole, and I don’t think I started to see the project this way until I had already completed a good portion of the work.

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While improvisation is something I cherish and thrive in through my own practice, academic research such as this requires a much more regimented approach to practice, and in future I aim to give myself space for improvisation through careful pre-planning. Exploring theoretical concepts through creative practice rather than written work was something I have only brief experience with (through a module I had completed in my third year), and required a fresh set of skills I don’t think I had anticipated. The act of marrying experimental video production and academic research proved both challenging and freeing, as it provided a space to experiment practically in finding solutions to the concepts I was addressing, as opposed to bringing together previously established ideas from other resources. This opened up more room for failure, as my project leans so heavily on the quality of the practical work which had no tangible basis, being down to me alone. This has led to a more fulfilling project overall, as while I am unsure how successfully I am responding to my brief, it is affording me creative freedom in looking at an area I have great interest in.

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The creation of the third piece proved to be very problematic, as I felt I had ran out of ideas and had to scramble at the last minute to put something together. I had painted myself into a conceptual corner for this output due to my choice of David Hall’s Tap Piece as a video case study. This led to me to trying to explore ideas surrounding the screen, something I found myself unprepared for, especially given my draft submission date was only several days away, on the 22nd of March. The production was rushed and the analysis halfhearted, and at the moment I feel this piece may let the project down overall, as it fails to both put forward any interesting concepts and explore the concepts laid out from the research. While I am still waiting on feedback for my draft submission, I do have time to fix this piece and finish it properly. Upon my supervisor’s advice, I am returning to key pieces of work that have been inspiring in the past, both on this project and my own practice to try and open myself to new ideas for the piece, as well as reading through other theory. Hopefully I can fix this piece in time for the submission. 

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While not as smooth as the first, the second piece still had a fairly straightforward production. Its shooting was the most simple of the project, and was again made up of trial and error experimentation, moving a camera around various light sources improvisationally to see what worked. The editing required a lot more work however, as testing out the intricacies of each colour and exposure setting proved time consuming in comparison to the other aspects of each production. The structure and pacing too took a lot of effort to bring to a satisfactory level, as I had gathered a large volume of raw material to work from, and condensing everything down to something which both explored the concepts fully and felt engaging to the eye was challenging due to how many options I had. I am still quite pleased with how this turned out, although while it was always part of the conceptual thought process behind it, I do feel it is fairly bare bones and one-note in its presentation and ideas, and could have used more recorded material to explore rather than just the light sources. The colour palette too was not as varied and expressive as it could have been, as all of the light sources I recorded from (both natural and artificial) always gave the same pink/red hues when edited, and it took many small variations to make each segment different enough from the last. Often I would find myself cutting out portions of material which repeated certain colours or movements which had been shown previously, and I feel as though I mostly accomplished a piece which feels alive and progressive in its visual ideas (despite repeating the same basic visual concept).

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After handing in the first draft of the paperwork on the 15th of February I felt I had built up enough ideas from the research to begin work on the first practical piece in earnest (although I had already conducted a handful of camera tests). This production went very smoothly, outlining concepts from the research and shooting and editing around these concepts through trial and error led to an output which slowly presented itself through practice and didn’t require much tinkering afterwords. I should have reshot some of the footage I displayed on the LCD screen, as especially towards the end it appears as though it is purposefully shaky and sped up (slightly derivative of Brakhage, which was not my intention), and disrupts the pace of the piece up until that point, adding an unnecessarily chaotic element to its movement. I feel this piece is the best out of what I produced, due in part to how fresh and exciting the ideas seemed to me. I possibly threw too many techniques into this, not leaving much room to explore all of them in the other pieces, and I should have taken a step back to consider and roughly plan out all of my practical work rather than jumping in to complete this one alone. I could have better developed both the practical output and the written work had I given myself a clear plan and set clear goals.

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Engaging with the ideas of Malcolm Le Grice has been a very important aspect of the writing process, and Le Grice has become incredibly influential throughout the whole project. While I was already familiar with a few of his films (Berlin Horse, Threshold), his large body of written work on experimental cinema and its relationship to technology was something I kept returning to, and I feel I haven’t fully utilised as many of the concepts it put forward as I could have. I also couldn’t find a place to look into the connection of Le Grice’s film work and his digital work, which would have made for an interesting and very relevant case study. I had considered this but had difficulty trying to fit it into my already oversized essay. 

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While I tried to take in as much as was available for free online, the practitioners I looked into at the early stages of the project included Marie Menken, Peter Gidal, Lis Rhodes, Hans Richter, Malcolm Le Grice, Scott Barley, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and Maya Deren (although Deren’s work is concerned less with the abstract than creative use of reality compared to the other practitioners, and thus I mostly used her theoretical work in relation to building ideas for this project).  “Yet, slow motion ia not simply slowness of speed. It is, in fact something, which exists in our minds, not on the screen, and can be created only in conjunction with the identifiable reality of the photographic image. (...) It cannot occur in an abstract film, where a triangle, for instance may go fast or slow, but, having no necessary pulse, cannot go in slow motion.” (Deren 1960)

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This was the recording of my third piece. A makeshift tripod was created from balancing the camera under some clothes on an armchair in order to get the tilted angle. 

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I submitted a draft version of the project on 22/3/19, which I am still unsure about. My main issues came about from my third video output, as I struggled a lot to find a cohesive angle to take the piece in, and ultimately submitted unfinished work (which I made note of). Hopefully from the feedback I can work out a suitable way forward, and I am taking this time to refine my ideas and make the third piece suitable.