#to get through the dense imagery that h uses

[thisiskatsblog]

Making this a separate post so as not to hijack yours but thanks for answering this question about Matilda @dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram and for putting to words a few things I had trouble pinning down.

My feelings about Matilda are more conflicted – I don’t hate it at all, I really love parts of it as they resonate strongly with some of my personal experiences growing up in a very conservative environment and finding my voice and family in creating my own space for it, and there’s some great lines in the song about the importance of found family. But then there are also elements of it that completely run counter to some other experiences I’ve had with abusive situations, both first hand and from working with others on a professional level. And then indeed there are the parts that sit very uncomfortably, if you read the song from a generalised perspective as a song about surviving abuse.

I think part of the problem is that the song is, in fact, a covert message to someone in particular that he knows but whom he says (in an interview the link of which I am having trouble finding for a minute)  he somehow couldn’t speak to directly, and to whom - interestingly - he didn’t even play the song to before putting it out. Personally I think some of the narrowness of the experience described and some of the more confusing contradictions may come from this being about a particular person’s situation.  

Framing it as a song about surviving abuse in general, and then packaging it in the imagery of a children’s book, does not make the song any easier to read and I would agree that it contributes to painting an idealised picture of what it can look like to extract oneself from a situation of abuse - a picture that may be comforting (to me in some senses it really is because some of my experiences are like that - and I know I’m privileged in that), and a picture people may like to adopt from an idealistic point of view, but which may indeed not realistically apply to most situations of abuse, and which is not necessarily helpful to people currently in such a situation.

Whichever way you read it, as a general song about surviving abuse or as a covert message to a friend, I would agree that the line “I know they won’t hurt you anymore as long as you can let them go” is the line that sits most uncomfortably, because letting go comes at a price, always, and it would seem to me, only the person in that particular situation can put everything in the balance and weigh up the harm against the benefits of letting go. It raises so many questions I’d like to ask H. What do you know more than the person you’re writing this for? Why is your perspective on this so important? Do you realize that saying “as long as you can let them go” IS victim blaming – is indeed saying that “if you could only just let go, you’d stop getting hurt” - and how do you think that is fair to say?  

What frustrates me most about it, is that I think H would know better. He himself is in a situation that some would consider abusive – the music industry in general is abusive as we know, H himself has started opening up about how he feels about parts of the contracts he signed as a young person under very unequal power relations, the cleanliness clauses, and there’s of course the closeting he can still not talk about - all of that. H himself is deliberately choosing to not let certain things go (his dream of being a big popstar, his big label) and staying in that situation. And he surely knows that there’s a significant part of his following that spends their days sighing about how awful it all is and that would like to see him break free of those restrictions. Yet, his assessment of his own situation is clearly that it’s in his interest to stay in it, and stay closeted (for now). At least that’s the story I’m telling myself about H’s situation. So yeah, highly interesting that he does think he has the better insight into someone else’s abusive situation. 

Back to reading Matilda as a story H is telling about the unidentified friends’ situation - there are actually lines that do display a level of self-awareness and understanding of his limited insight into the other person’s situation  “it’s none of my business” and  “I know that time won’t change your mind”. In the interview he also says something about how he wanted to write something from that person’s perspective, not his own, but it IS very much his own perspective he is offering. It’s so strange, he didn’t pick up the phone, he didn’t play the song to the person. And I am having trouble understanding the immediate turn it then takes from “I know time won’t change your mind” to “in other words, I know that they won’t hurt you anymore as long as you can let them go”. There is a lot we are missing here to make his choices about this song understandable to me.

In short - I would agree with the assessment made another post that “With Harry (…) most of his songs are about something very specific that he’s not telling us.”  I think that’s very true of this song and he’s shared some of what that specificity is and there’s a lot he is not telling us. And I think that some of the frustrations I have with this song relate to the fact that it is written about a very specific situation in which Harry feels he cannot offer concrete support to the person, cannot call them on the phone, or even play the song to them, but his views are still important - which is all very possible, but that, sadly, framing it as a general song about surviving abuse, it perpetuates some harmful misconceptions, and offers no support at all but instead blames the person for not letting go. I’m trying to reconcile that with what he says about this being a song about self care and “not feeling guilty”, and I’m really having difficulty.  

If anything, I’d recommend H to pick up the phone and call his friend, really.  

[eastertag]

@photowizard17 gift for @avengedbiologist

Hide And Seek

Prompt: hide and seek, adventure around the island, Alan making jokes with Gordon

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Although somewhat cloudy, midday at Tracy Island saw the sun peeking through the cloud cover on occasion and the breeze that came with it, lightly tossed the palm trees and rustled the bushes. Even the seagulls screaming in the background couldn’t drown out Gordon as he searched for his brother.

“ALAN!” Gordon yelled as he cupped his hands around his mouth. “Dude come on, it has been three hours!” He groaned, not receiving a response.

“Play hide and seek, he said. It’ll be fun, he said. Meanwhile it has been three hours, I have searched the entire island, twice, and can’t find the runt. We should have just stuck to exploring around.” Gordon mumbled to himself as he jumped over a fallen tree.

He and Alan had the day off so they decided to explore around the parts of the island that until then had remained virtually ignored. They spent the morning climbing the mountain on the far east side, standing at its beautiful peak, overlooking the blue ocean beneath them. Then they explored the south side of the island, taking in the beautiful sight of some turtles off the cliff base at the south. It was when they were walking through the more dense part of the island that Alan suggested hide and seek. That was hours ago.

The sun was setting and, if Gordon were telling the truth, he was getting a little worried. While they had lived on the island for years, parts were still vastly unexplored. That, and Scott was riding him for basically losing their brother… on a secluded island.

“Alan!”

This was taking too long. “Tracy Island to Thunderbird 5,” Gordon summoned.

“Hey Gordon, how’s your adventure going?” John’s ginger figure hovered above Gordon’s wrist.

“You know how it’s going John. I know you always listen.”

“If you mean, Do I know you lost Alan, then… yeah I know.” John said, a smug look plastered on his face.

“Does that also mean you know where he is?” Gordon inquired.

“Yup.”

“Are you going to tell me?”

“Nope. But I’ll listen while you struggle to find him,” John said crossing his arms in amusement. “Maybe Virgil will help you, he’s in the hangar.”

Gordon mockingly replied “Maybe Virgil will help you,” as he trudged his way back to the villa.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Virgil? Virgil!” Gordon called out once he entered the lab. Nothing. All of Virgil’s tools were out and the lights were on, but no one was home. “Yo Virg!” Gordon called out, but was only met with the echoing silence of the hangar.

“John, I thought you said Virgil was here?” Gordon said as he walked around Thunderbird 2 looking for his brother.

A floating figure appears once again, “He is there Gordon, you must be missing him.”

Gordon took another quick look around the hangar calling for both Alan and Virgil. Exasperated Gordon trudged out of the hangar, “I’ve already spent three hours looking for one brother, I’m not looking for two. Is Brains in his lab?”

“Yes, last I heard he and MAX were working on some new camo tech.”John replied, waiting to see if Gordon caught on.

“FAB John.” Gordon responded. “To the lab!”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Brains? Are you here?” Gordon said as he entered the lab. Over near the workbench he saw MAX.

“MAX, do you know where Brains is?” Of course MAX responded with his signature robot noises and Gordon had no idea what that meant. MAX did put his arms up in a shrugging motion though, so he took that as a sign that the robot didn’t know.

“Nevermind…” he said defeatedly. Gordon made his way towards the workbench. There were a bunch of open notebooks in Brains’ illegible handwriting. A drawing of a small silver box was on one page, and the word Thunderbirds was written with a question mark. Whatever it was he didn’t know.

Soon after Gordon left the lab and headed towards the pool. Sighing, he placed his hands on his hips and looked out to the vast ocean just off the shore. He couldn’t find Alan, or Virgil, or Brains. What the hell was going on?

Taking a deep breath he closed his eyes. When he opened them all he saw was the way the pink sky was reflecting off the ocean. The sound of lapping waves could be heard in the distance.

Gordon made his way to the far side of the pool. There was a small rock face that provided shade at specific times of the day. He approached the rock face and made his way to sit down, thinking he could take a minute and think things through.

As he made his way to sit down though, he went to brace his hand on the rock and the rock crumbled under his hand, sending him falling backwards.

“Ouch,” a young voice cried out.

“Alan?” Gordon responded. Looking around he discovered he was laying on top of his brother and the rock hadn’t crumbled under his hand, the rock was now in front of him, his legs disappearing underneath. “What is going on?”

Alan simply laughed as he pushed his brother off of him. “Brains and Virgil made some new tech.” Alan said, picking up a small square box turning it off. The rock face was a hologram. “The rocks were never here. Virg and Brains made tech that would scan the area and use projection imagery to give the illusion something was there. They are hoping to make it on a bigger scale so one day we could possibly hide a Thunderbird behind it, but this was the trial. They gave it to me and said to test it.”

“That’s why you suggested hide and seek,” Gordon replied. “So the reason I couldn’t find Brains and Virgil when John told me where they were…”

“Was because we were also hiding behind the projection,” Virgil said as he and Brains approached.

“And when John said that Brains was in his lab working on new camo tech,” Gordon continued.

“I was giving you a giant hint.” John appeared, finishing his brother’s thought.

“Ugh,” Gordon said as he laid on the ground, defeated.

“Ok, so Scott riding me on losing Alan?”

“O-oh, he doesn’t k-know yet. H-he is our next test sub-subject.” Brains answered.

“He really does think you lost Alan.” Virgil added. “When the technology gets to the point where it can camouflage a Thunderbird, we were going to test Scott.”

“I want in on that one!” Gordon responded sitting up.

“Fair enough,” Virgil said, putting his hand out to help Gordon get up. “Now, let’s go get some food, I bet Alan is hungry.”

“Starving! If Gordon hadn’t taken so long…” Alan said grinning madly at Gordon.

“Yeah, yeah whatever squirt.” Gordon said, ruffling Alan’s hair. As the four began to walk Gordon added, “Oh Alan?”

“Yeah?” Suddenly a giant splash was heard and Virgil and Brains quickly turned around to see Alan in the pool.

“That’s for making me waste three hours of my young, precious life.” Gordon said with a giant smile plastered on his face.

Hoppy Easter

PW17 :3

[oscopelabs]

Moving: On the Cinema of Kate Bush by Willow Maclay

“Experimenting with film is exciting to me. It feels like it has purpose.” -Kate Bush, Egos and Icons, 1993

Kate Bush has always been more than your average musical artist. It’s not ordinary to have a chart-topping single when you’re 19-years-old, let alone a number-one hit about a classic literary text of all things. From the onset, she was more than hooks. She was a wizard of merging artistic interests, folded together into a stunning presentation of everything she could offer as an artist. Bush is never satisfied, but geniuses so rarely are, and when she masters one art form, she moves onto another with a ravenous appetite for perfection. In her art she has combined music, dance, mime, literature, fashion, and cinema into one. Her art is overwhelmingly dense and, from the beginning, few could truly reckon with her talent. Her music videos and concert television specials, in particular, are the purest distillation of her skills, and in cinematic terms, share a kinship with the likes of Maya Deren, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut, and Terence Fisher.

In an interview with a British Television station from 1978, Bush recalled a moment in her childhood which would have a lasting effect on her psyche and her engagement with art. She was struck by an image from a television adaptation of Wuthering Heights. She caught the last five minutes of it and, without context, the image of a ghostly Kathy (the protagonist of the novel) haunted her. It was an extreme close-up, with Kathy begging for a window to be opened so she could enter her old house. From her earliest inclinations as an artist, she was first and foremost interested in visual imagery. Bush would also say in this interview that she wanted to write a song about the image that had stuck with her, but she needed to read the book first so she could “have context and get the tone right.” What would become of this collision course of image, text, and music is her first number one single in Britain, “Wuthering Heights.” The music video that followed would be one of the best the genre has ever seen.

There are numerous videos for the “Wuthering Heights” single, but two are widely recognized as the canonical examples in Bush’s oeuvre: The red dress video and the white dress video. Both present different formal takes on the single, and both are altogether dynamic in their connection to the song. The first of these, the white dress video, is shot on a sound stage with golden, harsh lighting, emanating from Bush’s body as she does her interpretive dance of the song. She makes big, swooping gestures with her limbs and has wide Clara Bow-like eyes. The image is split into two separate sections to create one fluid image—one a close-up so you can see her facial reactions to the song, the other with a wider scope so you can see the gestures she’s making to emphasize certain lyrics and passages of the song. Occasionally time-lapse photography is used to give off the illusion that Bush’s body is splitting into parts as she moves like Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man.” Cinematically, this video shares DNA with some of the earliest short films, more specifically the Serpentine Dance experiments that many different directors used to showcase how images could move in a certain way, but updated to aesthetics that would be more commonly used in early experimental music videos. These techniques were used to better capture singular movement and siren, ghostly feminine images, like in Bruce Conner’s groundbreaking video for “Breakaway,” starring Toni Basil. It would be startling in its own right if it were the only video for “Wuthering Heights,” but Kate Bush did one better when she donned the red dress.

The red dress video is overwhelming, shot in 4:3 and comprised almost entirely of medium shots to accentuate the visual language coming from the entirety of Bush’s body. Where the white dress video uses flashier techniques to evoke a very specific luminescent feeling, here the cinema is coming completely from her interpretive dance, as she uses the entirety of her body as sign language to emphasize the lyrical and tonal content of the song. The dance is note for note the same as the one in the white dress video, but the camera almost never pulls away here beyond the occasional close-up shot of Bush’s own facial acting, which in and of itself is also presenting the narrative of the song through her expressive, maximalist acting. The video evokes an almost mythic, idealized England of deep greens, where ghosts and ghouls roamed the land alongside the living. It’s a land of beautiful old gardens, and cottages (much like the one she grew up in), but the beauty is unnerved by a cerebral pull towards death, and in “Wuthering Heights,” that very nature is in the soul of the video. It’s set in an old forest, intensely green, but beset with fog, and Bush breaks the image with her stark, loud crimson dress. The wider framing allows us to see exactly what she’s wearing and how she moves. The medium lensing is reminiscent of many of Jacques Rivette’s high fashion pictures like Duelle, Noroit, and ironically enough his own adaptation of Wuthering Heights, where the outfit was always presented in full from head to toe and worked as an extension of the characters. In this video, the red dress is worn as a means of seduction. “Let me into your window,” Bush beckons, pulling her arms in closer. She’s speaking for the ghost of Kathy, begging to get out from the cold, but in addition to the narrative conceit of the song, it also works as a device of temptation for an introductory single.  “Let me into your window” could just as easily be “Let me into your lives,” and after “Wuthering Heights,” England and the rest of the world obliged.

The zenith of Kate Bush’s music video career was between 1978 and 1980, when her videos were barebones soundstage productions, for the most part, capitalizing on her ability to dance. “Them Heavy People” was the follow-up music video single to “Wuthering Heights,” and again the video didn’t disappoint. Shot in one continuous take on a sound stage, Bush is projected as a Humphrey Bogart figure if Humphrey Bogart were a pendulum of hips. Bush wears a tilted fedora with bravado, and pairs that up with a magenta knee-length skirt. She’s accompanied by two back-up dancers who follow her throughout the narrative of the song. Here, the music is about Bush learning to dance. (“They break down my body. I feel like it’s killing me. What a lovely feeling.”) Throughout, these two back-up dancers engage Bush in a dance of combat before getting Laurel and Hardy-esque or WWF by bashing chairs into each other before the song concludes. Bush’s greatest skill as a choreographer is interpreting the lyrical content of her own songs and painting a picture with her body on top of the image we are already seeing, creating a kaleidoscope effect in which different cinematic gestures are moving in and out of one another to create a full unified statement. Bush’s auteurism, if you will, is how she moves her body in a way to create a narrative surrounding the song she’s already written. With enough time, she would soon move behind the camera as well, but director Keith “Keef” MacMillian gave her earliest dance videos the space necessary to let Bush tell the story.

Her video for “Hammer Horror” works for the same reasons that “Wuthering Heights” and “Them Heavy People” do, but with the additional context of moving into genre cinema through dance. This time, her soundstage is shrouded in darkness with a blue spotlight on Bush and a masked man in an an all-black body suit that renders everything but his uncovered arms nearly invisible. Bush is wearing a low-cut, slinky, sequined black dress, complete with the vampiric cleavage of the eponymous studio vixen. It’s equal parts vampire film and a dance exhibition, as Bush taps into the recently bankrupt Hammer Pictures’ ethos of blood, boobs, and gothic chills. The man who dances with Kate acts as a pseudo-villain, always lurking behind Bush’s frail damsel-in-distress in the verse stanzas before she erupts into a violent demoness herself in the loud, plunging chords of the chorus. Bush rarely had time for hard rock, let alone heavy metal, but this could easily be described as such, with its horror-movie lyrical content and killer riffage. This video, like much of her earliest videography, is shot in one take, but here the camera moves with Bush to create movement alongside her body, making it one of the more visually ambitious works “Keef” did in collaboration with Bush. In particular, when the camera idles side to side in an extreme close-up on Bush’s back as she alludes to running, it gives off the illusion that we’re sprinting too. When Bush turns and the camera captures her cold, horrified glare, it moves us into the third act of the horror film where the dance centers entirely around choreography of her neck. The neck is an essential image in any horror film involving vampires, but it was practically one of the Ten Commandments in Hammer cinema. The closing image of the video is Bush dangling in the arms of her faceless villain, head tilted back, with her neck exposed completely. She’s faceless at this point, and the man takes his seemingly gigantic left arm and runs it down the nape of her neck slowly before clamping down completely. The camera zooms in a little and a perfect horror-movie image closes the video before cutting to black. It’s an image both sexual and horrific, the lifeblood of vampire cinema.

It was around this time, 1980, when Kate Bush started shifting her ideas of what she wanted to convey in music videos into something more traditionally narrative-based, with a less heavy reliance on interpretive dance and pantomime. In this period, she made “The Wedding List,” as an homage to the Truffaut film The Bride Wore Black, about a wronged bride who sought revenge for the desecration of her romantic life. Additionally, there was the Jean-Luc Godard-influenced experimental video for “Another Day,” with Peter Gabriel, which showed the unravelling of a couple by using frame-within-a-frame imagery to convey two separate stories of past and present simultaneously. Bush’s best video of this time period, however—and one that births a new period of her music video career—is her apocalyptic science fiction short for the song “Breathing.” The song saw a shift in Bush’s interests from her pop-inflected, piano-based dance music to something harder and altogether more experimental. It was a shift that would characterize her career for the next 30 years.

In the video for “Breathing,” Bush represents a fetus, begging and pleading to be given a chance to live and be with her mother in the outside world in the wake of nuclear annihilation. It’s a song that has deep ties to maternity, childbirth, and pregnancy, and when compared with the majority macho considerations of science fiction, it becomes something complex and unique within the genre. The video is matter-of-fact in its simplicity, but deeply moving in what the images convey about the lyrics. Once again, it’s mostly shot on a soundstage, where Bush is inside of a plastic orb, with deep amber lighting underneath her frail frame. She’s wearing a sheer outfit with white trim to portray the relative innocence of the fetus, and she spends the majority of the video either in the fetal position or pushing the orb back and forth to represent the kicking or pushing a mother may feel while pregnant. The words “Breathing my mother in” are a gently affecting and deeply harrowing sentiment when set against the context of nuclear war, and the video becomes a barrage of dissonant images. Our greatest possibility for love (giving someone life) and our greatest possible evil (the nuclear weapon) collide to create a pure statement on the human condition. When the mother’s water eventually breaks and Bush leaves the womb, what follows is a slow-motion dip into experimental imagery of one girl, bathed in shadow, peaking out from underneath a cloudy image reaching towards the reds, oranges, and bright lights of what she hopes will be a welcoming world. Only here she’s greeted with an atomic explosion that sinks into the earth in the shape of Kate Bush’s silhouette. This is a woman’s story of creation caught in the crossfire of what man creates and mourning the death of a world she knows will inevitably fall. It’s a complicated, resonant question for any time, but made even more evocative by the terror of a supposedly inevitable nuclear war between the United States and Russia in the 1980s. In terms of cinema, it’s probably the greatest exhibition of pregnancy and childbirth this side of Stan Brakhage’s “Window Water Baby Moving.”

In an interview for British Television series, Egos and Icons, Kate Bush stated that her music video for “Running Up that Hill” was her way of saying goodbye to the pantomimed, interpretative dance of her earlier music career in favor of dancing that was more serious and elegant. The choreography of the video would be a pure dance, stripped of theatricality, with its footing in a bolder narrative sophistication. For this video, she brought in choreographer Diane Grey to take the reigns in constructing a dance around the narrative of the song, about a woman who wishes her partner could see things through her eyes, because it would fix their problems. Bush’s work has always been heavily gendered in a feminine context, but there’s a deliberate decision here to present two bodies working in jarring competition with one another while being punctuated with bursts of synchronicity, as Bush and her male partner move in and out of one another’s grasp and bodies with a fluid grace. The dance is the most complicated and daring of her music video work, while still gravitating toward a narrative interest in reflecting the lyrics of the song. But what follows in all of its beautiful lifts, cradles, and slides is a dance of two people starkly different from one another finding occasional momentary symbiosis. It’s a melding of both the masculine and the feminine into one perfect image, only for it to slip away.

Bush’s work has always highlighted the female form, with real emphasis on her body as it relates to its present state in the world of the song. It’s reminiscent of the work of Maya Deren, whose work frequently foregrounded womanhood in the deep waters of experimental cinema. Deren’s “At Land” bears stark similarities to “Running Up that Hill” in this regard, where Deren’s body is more like a curving liquid at one with an elemental earth rather than in man’s creation. In the Deren short, the ocean moves in and out, which is a dance in and of itself, and the woman (played by Deren) enters into a chess game that’s representative of her own push-and-pull conflict with being a woman in a man’s world. Her body, ever present and always in frame, sometimes looking toward the sea as if the murky deep would offer a tranquility, and in Bush’s video, she reaches toward a sun, maybe even to God, to bring her closer to understanding the conflict within her own life. Fittingly, Deren’s short ends with her running up a hill.

Kate Bush continued to stray more and more towards cinema as she raced through the ‘80s and become close friends with Terry Gilliam, who introduced her to many people in the industry who helped her put together the funding needed to make her first feature, 1993’s 50-minute The Line, The Cross and the Curve. The film is a riff on The Red Shoes (she made an album of the same name), and even includes a thank you to Michael Powell. It’s a shaggy affair, with all of her eccentricities, strengths, and weaknesses laid bare. It’s most apt comparison point is probably Prince’s Graffiti Bridge in the sense that it is both the most Kate Bush a project could possibly be, full of quirks that are very take-it-or-leave-it depending on how big of a fan you are of the music. Bush’s most base filmic interests are Gilliam with a dash of Jean Cocteau and Twin Peaks-era David Lynch. Much of the visual imagery in the film is reminiscent of the Black Lodge, with an obsession over red curtains, flames and mirrors. The greatest weakness of the film is that it would obviously draw unfair comparisons to Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 masterpiece and no film under any circumstances could live up to those lofty expectations. But that’s Kate Bush: She’ll aim for heaven even if it means her own hell. Nevertheless, The Line, The Cross and the Curve is not without some truly breathtaking moments, such as the callback to her earlier soundstage videos of the late 70s in the yo-yo’ing “Rubberband Girl.” In that segment, a man dances behind Bush, serving as her shadow, bobbing her back and forth to create a dance where Bush’s body personifies a rubber band. The title track features a breathtaking choreographed moment between her and the man who taught her to dance, Lindsay Kemp, while dazzling sequins splash all over the screen as Bush and Kemp dance around floating multi-colored fabrics. The sequence, set to “Moments of Pleasure” is the film’s absolute high point, with Bush merely twirling, as if wound up from her back like a music box ballerina. Throughout this sequence she’s covered in falling snow, but it looks more like bursting starlight and against all this black, she’s adorned in hellfire red, singing her heart out. It’s a startling image, one that takes its time and is deeply moving in its straight-forward theatricality. Bush considers the film a major disappointment, but underneath her own perfectionist tendencies, anything less than equaling Powell and Pressburger would have been a failure.

Kate Bush’s music video library is epochal, constantly rewarding in its zealous fusion of artistic forms, and her fundamental understanding that cinema, movement and dance are intertwined. When watching feature films, we tend to point out whenever a scene has great music accompanying it, whether it’s Claire Denis’ use of “The Rhythm of the Night” in the disco denouement of Beau Travail or the montage set to “Layla” in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, but why are music videos so vastly ignored when we canonize movies? If there’s to be a music video canon, then it’s important to understand what makes a music video cinema in the first place. Through dance, rhythm, and movement, music videos truly find their identity in the lexicon of cinema, and with Kate Bush in particular, she immerses her entire body into that very idea. Stop Making Sense is widely considered the greatest concert film of all time, thanks in part to Jonathan Demme’s understanding of rhythm and how he captured the jittery quality of David Byrne’s dancing. If the same can be extended to the work of music videos, then the entire world of images bursting out of Bush’s body time and time again must be holy and it must be considered cinema.

[timespakistan]

Meaning in making: Artist Rabeya Jalil’s paintings are about the triumph of ‘chance’ | Art & Culture | thenews.com.pk Language is the skeleton of Rabeya Jalil’s paintings, currently on display at Canvas Gallery. A viewer, however, hardly gets into letters, words, or phrases. Like bones in a body, language makes these paintings move, stand, and survive. These works are executed with an energy and urgency that we can easily associate with the artist, besides other characteristics. Rabeya Jalil is from that small – but significant tribe of artists who have mastered two tracks of expression. Along with her practice as an image-maker, she excels in her writing, and teaching – occasionally theory related courses. She studied printmaking at National College of Arts (2005) but for her – like several others with similar training – printmaking is now a distant, though not a discarded memory. In her recent paintings, some residue of printmaking sporadically seeps in, but primarily these are extensions of the artist, who while at her studio, also entered into the domain of language. There is an unforgettable line in a poem by Afzaal Ahmed Syed, translated as: “Only minor poets inscribe names of their lovers in their verses”. This brands as overtly ambitious artists that infuse theory in their works. There is a long list of them, from the top order to graduating students, who feel the compulsion of embellishing their visuals with grand narratives, complex philosophies, and murky content, so that their pictorial output can be read intellectually and intelligently. This does not happen though. On the other hand, there are those involved in reading and writing (a singular act, because a writer is the first reader of his/her text; and a reader rewrites the content of what is deciphered, on the blank sheets of his/her memory) but not held back by the yoke of theory. Their images breathe freely and independently. Perhaps the best example is Barnett Newman, who contributed to various magazines and catalogues on art, but produced canvases, which do not have any recognisable imagery or quickly grasped ideology. His paintings do not describe; they initiate (and accompany) a journey outside of one’s physical reality. Sublime is their intent and meaning. For Rabeya Jalil, too, paint is not a tool to communicate something obvious, but a means to write a text – kind of abstraction. To all of us, who have learnt a script, at schools, the nature or manifestations of abstraction should not come as a surprise. We scan a word, say, ‘apple’ and immediately conjure up that roundish, juicy, fibrous substance in our mind’s mouth. A long procedure; from the marks of different size, shapes, and arrangement (word) to physical fruit (from one’s kitchen, grocery store, back-garden) is summed up in miniscule sections of a second. The passage from signifier to signified is through a code, which is not universal, hence the multitude of tongues. To an artist who investigated reading, meanings are not bound to visual forms and or pictures are not tied to meanings. For him/her, objects are like shapes for words, which vary their content with each cultural encounter. Like language, Rabeya Jalil’s art is multifaceted. This is mainly due to her approach (evident in most paintings) in which a number of identifiable entities, i.e., walls, flowerpots, sewing machines, cars, human faces and figures, crabs, carts, beds etc, are placed not in a spatial order, but reverberate as open-ended words, so a viewer (like a reader) can make out any narrative if he/she wishes so. Akin to children’s amusement in picking single and separate items and constructing new stories. Language operates in other ways, too, in the art of Rabeya Jalil. A few of her images refer to identity: private, societal and national. For instance, the triptych House Tree Person, suggests the layout of Pakistan’s national flag due to its components and construction. Along with the ‘open’ structure of picture plane, Jalil’s choice of a peculiar mode of depiction, child-like, is rooted in how we perceive the world around us. As a child babbles about his/her observations, a way of speaking that is not clear or formed yet indicates the intended matter; in the same ‘unformed’ scheme he/she draws pictures of things from his/her surroundings. Visuals that are not clear, precise, or mimetic, yet convey what was aimed and transcribed by the maker. Rabeya Jalil negotiates with this aspect – through the abstraction of language and the abstraction of a child’s expression, to create works, which allude to children’s drawings and the scrawled lines of some ‘forgotten’ script. Her content? Probably the artist’s continuing association with ‘writing’ has led to different positions towards ‘meaning’. In a number of canvases different elements: details of a room, furniture, machinery, animals, emerge more like signs than cogs of a solid/static subject. She confirms “there is meaning, but there is no subject matter”. You can guess these segments to be things, but they are also marks of a brush, erased areas, and layers of paint, which have their presence and significance as records of an artist’s utterance. Language operates in other ways, too, in the art of Rabeya Jalil. A few of her images refer to identity: private, societal and national. For instance, the triptych House Tree Person, due to its components and construction suggests the layout of Pakistan’s national flag. In other works, one can identify traces of writing, paintings resembling pages of a notebook (Twenty Days, Scribble I, II, and Crossword) as well as the illusion of some uncanny, though private/possible space. All rendered in tones that suggest somebody talking casually. Possibly that sense of casualness is the inherent content, since Jalil mentions the ‘joy of painting and mark making’. She settles that pleasure through her tactile, and sensitive surfaces, scribbles, scrawls, smudges, which occasionally recall the old master of casualness and spontaneity, Cy Twombly. “A canvas by Cy Twombly is only”, notes Roland Barthes, “what we might call the allusive field of writing”. Jalil’s paintings testify to the presence of ‘allusive’ or the triumph of ‘chance’ (which in reality is planned, though it looks random, accidental and thus natural). Her surfaces are dense, blotchy, scratchy, scraped (echoing the processes of printmaking), and apart from a few, are largely dominated by subtle and modulated hues. A trait that distinguishes her creations from a child’s attempts, and affirms the artist’s sophistication in building her imagery. Her true subject. Jalil confides that “there is no subject matter, the method, paint, and mark-making, and its infinite possibilities are the subject” of her work. A viewer realises however that “it has its subject”: in the words of William H Gass, “memory, desire, the imagination that makes art”. Art becomes an easily graspable theme, in three paintings, of identical imagery, composition and title (Painting I, II, and III). In these, a girl is facing a canvas on an easel or stand, and making a drawing or painting. This can be a self-portrait – not of the artist, but of her art, and reminds us, that as writing comes from writing (language), art is also about art; at least her art. The solo show, Marks and Meaning, is being held November 3-12, at Canvas Gallery, Karachi. The writer is an art critic based in Lahore. https://timespakistan.com/meaning-in-making-artist-rabeya-jalils-paintings-are-about-the-triumph-of-chance-art-culture-thenews-com-pk/5167/

[empty-movement]

And Get Involved XD

Hey everyone, so here are the issues that were raised with the translation of the last arc! Please remember, not every suggestion will be followed, and we may end up with translations that are not on this list because of trying to reword to fit both the accuracy of lines and everyone’s preferences.

Once again pleading for reblogs even if you don’t fill out the survey, I want this to be as fair as possible and the best way to do that is to get as many eyes on it as possible. So please, please reblog! Everyone who reblogs gets an imaginary hug, provided they want it ❤

This is all replicated in the attached survey, I’m just including it here for everyone’s perusal and you can literally skip this post and go right to the survey if you want XD

1. Episode 25 - Touga’s line, “That wasn’t a fair proposal, Mr. Chairman.” In previous translations it, has been something more like, “That was an indecent proposal Mr. Chairman.” We are asking for clarification of the accuracy of this line,but what do y’all prefer? The one that’s there currently, “fair proposal”, or the “indecent proposal” version?

2. Episode 25 - Akio’s line, “What must it think as it shines in the sky...?” He’s talking about the Venus/Lucifer comparison, and how the star can’t shine when the sun is up. In fan translations, the line has always been more like “What must it think when it does shine?” Again, we are asking for clarification on the accuracy, but the difference here is that the second line invokes more of his envy than the first. What do you all like better?

3. Episode 25 onward - The Akio Car Summoning Speech. There are a few problems with this one, but the major issue is that we’re trying to find a way to reword “the sound that races through the End of the World” to make it more evident that it is a border they are talking about and not an apocalypse. Does anyone have any suggestions?

4. Episode 25 onward - same speech-- what do you all think about not capitalizing End of the World in there to accent the border imagery? The line would then read something like “the sound that races through the end of the world”. This one may get vetoed for consistency issues, but I’m asking what you think anyway-- caps or no caps?

5. Episode 25 onward - same speech-- Touga’s last line currently reads, “Come! Come with us! Follow us to the world you seek!” This is a bit inaccurate-- more directly translated, the line reads “ Come... Join us! The world you desire beckons!“ And, you guys, either way it’s like hella awkward. In past translation, it has been things like “ Then come, journey with us, to the world which you desire!“ and “Now, allow us to invite you to the world you desire!” What is your preference, guys? One of these lines, or a combination of them? How can we make this sound less awkward?

6. Episode 25 - Akio’s line at the end of his discussion with Touga is “Be kind to your friends.” Touga has just said Saionji is his only friend, so this doesn’t make a lot of sense. What do you think, should it be reworded, or is it fine as-is, or just drop the “s” to make it “friend?”

7. Episode 26 - Utena’s line about Akio being tolerant, translated directly as “Akio seems so tolerant about everything.“ She’s talking about how he’s accepted her into the “family” so easily, but tolerant is a weird word to use for that. Also, it translates to something more like “broad-minded.” Another suggestion has been “open-minded.” Does anyone have a preference for any of these, or a suggestion?

8. Episode 26 - Nanami’s line calling Akio a “Daddy Long Legs” - This isn’t a question so much as an explanation. This is a reference to a novel called “Daddy Long-Legs”, a story about a poor orphan girl who is sent to college by a mysterious benefactor (that she calls "Daddy Long-Legs") who only asks that she "writes him letters" in return. The line in question is directly translated as  "That's right. He just might be a 'Daddy Long Legs' sort of person for all we know." Is that good as-is? Does it make it clear that it’s a reference? Can you think of a better way to put it?

9. Episode 26 - this is a confirmation of a mistranslation. Nanami’s line is currently translated as “ Sounds like you don't trust End of the World “ when the actual translation is more like “That's a motion of no-confidence towards the Ends of the World, isn't it?“ She actually does raise a motion of no-confidence, and this will be fixed.

10. Episode 28 - In the duel song, the suggestion was "Dios Croix" should actually be translated as "Dioscuri" here. I don’t really have much more information on this for the moment, as I don’t know where the forum post explaining it was-- can someone explain this or find it so I know why?

11.  Episode 37 - When Akio tells Utena "you seem girlish tonight," is this awkward? It does lead into Anthy's "in the end, all girls are like the Rose Bride" and the suggestion for a change was "you really seem like a girl tonight" on the basis that Akio probably wouldn’t use the word girlish. What do y’all think, change it, or not?

12. All duel songs - the suggestion is that they should all be given another look for translation errors. I’m gonna say it right out here-- I know that if possible, Nozomi will do so, but they are on a schedule and the dialogue takes precedence. I have seen people say that none of the translations of the duel songs are accurate anywhere on the net, and I agree that probably there are a lot of problems, but in the time limit it may not be possible to do a full retranslation of all the songs, and that’s pretty much what it would take. Seazer’s lyrics are fucking dense. Anything you guys can point out would be helpful, of course, and definitely welcome!

Again, here’s the survey, which basically just repeats everything here XD

One thing I want to say about this whole process... it’s been a great learning experience for me to get a peek into how and why things are translated the way they are. One of the things I noticed is that this section is super villain-heavy in the translation issues, and we thought this was a little odd, so we gave everything another rewatch-- it’s actually legit. Utena uses language that’s very simple and easy to translate. Akio and Touga... do not. It’s the same with most of the other characters-- they use language that’s way less ambiguous, way more straightforward. I thought that was really cool to know, because that plays into the characters so much!

Edit: oh hey I forgot to mention, later on I'm going to make a post about the changes that were implemented in the Black Rose Saga so stay tuned for your impact, folks!

[how2to18]

EXCEPT FOR SOME steamy pages of Leaves of Grass, sex is probably the last thing that comes to mind when thinking about the 19th-century United States. The bloody Civil War, the opulent Gilded Age, the railroads and smoke-belching factories don’t seem to allow much room in the imagination for eroticism, much less anything as blatant and gleefully shameless as pornography. Yet those phenomena did coexist, of course. Even Mark Twain wrote (anonymously) a few scraps of comical and downright forensic porn that would likely shock you.

Amy Werbel’s Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock is the biography of a self-appointed champion of moral “purity,” a man who fought against such unwholesome horrors as Old Master paintings of naked women. Comstock was the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) and chief architect of the Comstock Act of 1873, a federal law that made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd and/or lascivious” material or “any drug or medicine […] for the prevention of conception” through the US mail. Lust on Trial conveys the amazing hold that Comstock, “chief if not sole arbiter of obscenity in the country,” had on the United States’s culture and laws, from the NYSSV’s founding in the late 1870s until roughly the end of World War I, when such Victorian-era absurdities were finally overthrown by an exhausted nation.

Comstock was that most unfortunate freak of nature, a born censor. His religiously warped hatred of the human body was so extreme that a nude statue could send him into paroxysms of rage. He was, in other words, a sick-minded son of a bitch. The hell of it is that this anti-humanist zealot was given legal authority to personally search out and destroy printers’ stocks of “lewd” material, to literally burn “offensive” books by the thousands, to enter galleries and demand that “obscene” artworks be taken down under threat of prosecution (Comstock once issued such an order to a New York barbershop for displaying a picture of a ballerina in tights).

Reading Werbel’s dense and enjoyable book, one gets the feeling that this deeply twisted man wanted the United States reduced to the cultural level of a kindergarten. Thankfully, the author shows that, although Comstock had many followers (religious folks, mostly), he also faced numerous detractors and enemies at all levels of society. As with a shrewish spouse, the general public initially put up with the dictatorial censor, until finally realizing that they couldn’t stand him. By the 1890s, Comstock was subjected to constant, mocking ridicule by The New York Times.

Werbel details the NYSSV’s overbearing censorship campaigns, directed against purveyors of anything that smacked of lust, “vice,” or any overly revealing imagery likely to “inflame the passions.” These campaigns could be sickening in their cruelty, but it’s gratifying to learn of the increasing resistance to Comstock, especially when the condemnations came from prominent persons. In a chapter entitled “Artists, Libertarians, and Lawyers Unite: The Rise of the Resistance, 1884-1895,” Werbel notes that the American Impressionist painter William Merritt Chase

supported a proposal to raise money to send Comstock to Europe for a “careful tour of the great galleries” that would improve his “taste and judgment.” [Sculptor] Augustus Saint-Gaudens also chimed in, insisting that “the decision as to the morality of a work of art should not be left to a man like Comstock.”

After a while, Werbel adds, “the Times dropped any pretense of neutrality and concurred […] that Comstock exemplified ‘persons of a low grade of intelligence and a prurient turn of mind.’” The Springfield Daily Republican called Comstock “the most preposterous ass that walks on two legs,” while the Chicago Tribune surmised that the “utterly hopeless task of regulating the morals of New York” had rendered him “insane.” There’s no doubt H. L. Mencken had Comstock in mind when he wrote his famous essay “Puritanism As a Literary Force,” in which he commented on “the astoundingly ferocious and uncompromising vice-crusading of today. […] The new Puritanism,” he wrote, “is not ascetic, but militant. Its aim is not to lift up saints but to knock down sinners.” Mencken praised so-called “immoral” American novelists like Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser as exemplars of artistic freedom, realism, and art-for-art’s-sake.

“At middle age,” according to Werbel, “Anthony Comstock was one of the most unpopular men in America.” And why not? He helped to jail publishers, printers, gallery owners, and merchants by testifying against them in court. He ruined lives for nothing. He was a scourge and a terror, backed by the narrow-minded and feared by the timid, a kind of Joe McCarthy of his day.

Lust on Trial has its fun side, documenting the long-forgotten netherworld of post–Civil War erotica, both artistic and literary, and the surprising underground popularity of “rubber goods” such as condoms, sex toys, dildos, S&M devices, and other carnal amusements. These objects served a no doubt good-humored, snickering, perhaps guilt-ridden clientele, both male and female. We learn too the names of purveyors of risqué items, like the printer Thomas Scroggy, “whom Comstock relentlessly pursued between 1874 and 1884” for sending obscene materials through the mail. This unsung pioneer of what we would now call “gags” advertised his funny joke items in the Grand Fancy Bijou Catalogue of the Sporting Man’s Emporium (“sporting” was a euphemism back then for horny). The Catalogue sold adult sex toys side-by-side with joy-buzzers, sneeze powders, and whoopee cushions; over time, the sex aids fell away from the more easily marketable “gag gifts,” which ended up in crime magazines and comic books. Unearthing this history is an amazing feat of pop-cultural scholarship.

In the end, Comstock reaped the whirlwind. Werbel documents “the eagerness of (male) reporters to call him out as an unwelcome brother.” He received a constant stream of hate mail, including “a collection of smallpox scabs, labelled as such,” which sent him off panicking to the doctor. He was “unwelcome in male spheres that embraced exactly the type of humor and culture he spent his […] life trying to suppress and even eradicate,” Werbel writes, adding that “[u]nlike most of the men he worked with and prosecuted, Comstock had no obvious circle in which to fraternize.” It’s hard to sympathize with the man since he brought this well-deserved isolation upon himself through his sheer bloody-mindedness.

Not surprisingly, he was also a horrible husband. A neighbor of the Comstocks in Summit, New Jersey, reported that his wife Maggie “worried about her husband, that her life [was] a tense and protracted agony of anxiety. […] He was always provoking quarrels, this mad, obstinate husband of hers, always running his opinionated head into something that was not his affair.”

Upon his death in 1915, The New York Times noted with sly accuracy: “Where public opinion and the courts held that Mr. Comstock had been wrong in finding evil in what purported to be art, the controversy was the finest of advertising.” “[D]espite Comstock’s best efforts,” Werbel writes, “American lust did not diminish.” (Thank God for that or we wouldn’t be here!) Werbel’s research into the life of this flesh-hating, statue-draping, cross-bearing, book-burning zealot should serve as a warning against fanaticism of any kind, especially in this age of ideological extremes. “[W]hile it is certainly possible to put lust on trial,” Werbel notes, “the effort is ultimately fruitless.”

¤

Anthony Mostrom is a journalist living in Los Angeles. He was formerly a Los Angeles Times columnist and is a book reviewer and travel writer for the LA Weekly.

The post An Unwelcome Brother appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[theseplastics-blog]

First new painting

Beginning with the general theme of play in digital spaces that I identified as having been the main undercurrent of most of my work this year, I sat down to draw up some ideas through working spontaneously onto some paper and a canvas panel. I knew only that I wanted to explore the general imagery of interfaces of digital communication in combination with the digital textures of virtual forms and spaces, such as objects from video games. I have been considering how different forms of communication on different social media relate to their respective online cultures, and how each form of digital communication might have its own space and intangible atmosphere. I wanted to try and realise my own perceptions of each of these interfaces into tangible spaces that real people shape and colour with their collective behaviour; this is a fairly abstract goal that I feel will underpin my exploration of the subject of dangerous play online through painting. For this reason I picked out heavily textural media – focusing on oil paint and pastels - to begin recreating digital scenes with. This is an element of my work which I have been tentatively experimenting with in ways that I have found to be quite successful. I have so far received feedback from a handful of crit sessions that my experimentation with mixed media such as photo transfers, layering of semi-transparent surfaces for paint or drawing, and use of gloss have helped in the past to draw the viewer into the tiny images I have been creating by appealing to the sense of touch. I have started to consider these very tactile imaginary worlds I have been building as potential mirror-image versions of the screens many of us virtually build our second lives into. By producing images framed by surfaces on a consistently small scale, I am working with a kind of visual that is familiar to me through its similarity to the imaginary spaces – behind phone screens, computer screens, or game console screens -  I have potentially spent a thousand or more hours on in the last year alone – considering that I spend around 3 hours a day online, which is seemingly a fairly average figure for people my age. If I were to continue to make reference to the huge amount of digital imagery I surround myself with on a daily basis while responding to it in a way that is viscerally textural, I feel I might be able to explore the idea of online and offline communication about the common anxieties created by and the needs for nuanced human connection that may not be met by online communication.

I find this idea very engaging, probably because it pertains to my own sense of identity, which I have cultivated in part from immersing myself in communities online made up of people for whom real-life communication is inconvenient – such as for people facing social stigma, like closeted gay women or for mentally ill people - or impossible due to distance. I am not at all certain of my specific subject matter yet, but I am very occupied with my own fears about the impermanence of digital spaces of safety that people have built, and know that I want to “play” with this fear using mixed media. I intend to refine this idea into something physical – imagery that validates this digital sense of safety that is projected up at us through screens by translating it into unique and hand-made marks that cannot be switched out of existence with the blink of a light or the failure of some obscure electrical component thousands of miles away, as a line of text or a photograph or a person’s entire presence online potentially could be.

I had not fully considered this idea of digital transience when I sat down to work, and had brought mixed media to the studio only with the idea of channelling my own appreciation for the ability to share a childlike openness to play – such as through sharing absurd memes borrowing artwork from 1990s kids’ cartoons, or playing videogames with friends, which are both sometimes seen as embarrassing and time-wasting activities – that can come with online freedom to observe and communicate anonymously. I wanted to use cheap or cheap-looking materials like crayons or magazine cutouts or lumps of brightly coloured polymer clay to recreate peaceful recognizably digital scenes in a slightly loose and naïve way, referencing the physical and emotional experiences of navigating online spaces. To counteract the fact that these experiences are completely coldly immaterial, I began to draw the words from a text from a friend I met online and communicate with almost exclusively in this way. I began with the colours of the hugely popular messaging interface – Whatsapp - that we maintain our friendship through, and tried especially to reference the exact shade of green that all Whatsapp users are familiar with as the background colour for texts sent from their own device.

However, I found did not want to include the ‘bubble’ shape of a normal text message; I wanted to try and remove this frame for communication and produce an image that makes reference to this unreal depthless interface while also clearly presenting a re-imagining of it as an actual plane of some sort, through use of bulky forms and perspective. To imply in an implausible and slightly ridiculous but symbolically obvious way that this space is a homely and inviting one that friends might share, I included the forms of a chair, a table and a picnic blanket in a rounded and pixelated ‘low polygon’ style by grating a pastel at an angle against the panel board surface so that raised grains of canvas would be coloured while blank canvas would show through where my pastel had not touched. I thought that this looked almost like a digital texture glitch. I worked around this, smoothing areas of pastel colour with white spirit to imply some depth, marking out the ‘glitched’ areas as a kind of negative space and drawing on the idea of digital objects clipping in and out of existence. I tried to give a slightly eerie atmosphere to the image by creating a seemingly huge space in sickly colours with no discernable boundaries –emphasising this by drawing a recognizable picket fence around the objects in the foreground, but using few other signifiers of depth or landscape forms - but with some kind of energy of its own, adding clouds blowing across its sky at a sharp angle.

I produced this painting fairly intuitively, and was intrigued by the outcome. Overall, I think I find the image to be oddly humourous. The forms standing in a neatly fenced grassy field are almost like crude farm animals in a child’s peaceful drawing; this is contrasted with the fact that they are slightly grotesque as written letters made bulky and highly textured, that they are almost threatening as things that may or may not be implied to be alive, since they are the only forms around to be interacting with the people’s furniture in the foreground, and that they are in an ominous-feeling environment in rich but unappealing colours. I find this a fairly accurate representation of the way I think about digital spaces for communication; they can be extremely comforting as places to maintain contact with others without any of the stress of leaving the house or being seen, and places where any kind of media is made accessible and there can be a great deal of creative energy and play. However, this is also a form of communication where some of the participants’ identities are inevitably lost or poorly translated through a lack of physical presence, and where language as a result seems literally disembodied in an alarming way. The lumpy word-forms and strange colours and hay painting technique I used here seem quite fitting to me for this reason.

However, without first hearing my explanation in words of my process arriving at this image, I’m not sure what a viewer might be able to draw from it. By giving a fair amount of definition to the letter forms, I believe I may have made it too difficult to tell that these are actually the characters ‘w’ and ‘h’, and the clue of the blues and greens in the background probably isn’t enough on its own to make it clear that this is a response to digital imagery. For this reason I don’t think that this is necessarily a good piece of work, since it probably wouldn’t encourage any kind of conversation about the topics I wanted to draw into it. However, as a first test of scale and mixed media, I found this to be very useful; the combination of a small surface and the dense and easily blendable paints and pastels allowed me to immediately get stuck into making painted images about painting. I could see this kind of painting method being used to explore the ways we respond differently to painted work seen in person in relation to the ways we respond to art that is based online, such as video streamed performance or interactive digital images.