I really thought the Virtual Window reading was perfectly timed for where we were at and perhaps where I am specifically as far as creating video projects goes. As I said in class, the word 'ventilation' really made a connection for me. It could be that it is a metaphor that works for me, but I also think it allowed me to think about how the screen can be more than just a 2-D plane on which to slap visuals upon. The idea of ventilation is to make that visual plane more than just 2-D by letting things transfer in and out and possibly touching or interacting with the person on the inside of the window. The virtual window for video is not merely a photo or mirror, it is a series of well-crafted paintings that are accompanied by the construction of the frame and sound to fully envelope the viewer into another time/space.
How this applies to this class is finding ways in which we can realize this virtual window into our projects. Trying to remove the frame of the camera by use of light and dark and arranging these images within the rectangular shape of the screen so that while the frame remains rectangular, the images that the viewer is seeing may not necessarily be rectangular. I don't know if I described that too well, but it is something I have tried in my latest project and am hoping to allow the shape of the shot be determined by the blackness of the frame and the light and dark of the shot.
Yes, your most recent piece definitely integrates the idea of different windows within one another. I really do like the presence of the Iphone in the piece, and as I said it was the first time I saw a smartphone device that did not look trite on screen. The dream sequence of the shed was spectacular. You should consider making a whole piece based on that one idea. A man trapped in a surreal shed, feebly contemplating whether or not he should tear his way out with a humble garden claw...the placement of one frame towards the lower right corner was brilliant, had a fine composition within a black frame, that it the smaller rectangle was very well placed. Virtual window as a reading was indeed very well timed!
ReplyDelete-Nick
"Ventilation" points to the window's mediating job between interior and exterior: one space and another. You write, "The virtual window for video is not merely a photo or mirror, it is a series of well-crafted paintings that are accompanied by the construction of the frame and sound to fully envelope the viewer into another time/space."
ReplyDeleteI've read a number of times that the manipulations offered by electronic and digital video has turned the cinema into a more painterly medium than its celluloid predecessor. I think we need to trouble that analogy, but there's something in it here.
A question we might ask for the final project: what are the current stakes of the virtual window? What two spaces is it mediating between in its digital iteration? What kind of ventilation can we have when the exterior is the blunt, dumb stuff of digital information rather than the physical, material flesh that we and the world have?