lost without time

I haven’t blogged in too long I guess. I’ve been writing down point form ideas to talk about in length here but have not had the opportunity to actually sit down and flesh them out.

I’m in calgary at present with a short film a made a few years ago. It’s screening at the queer film fest here and I’m speaking on a panel on Sunday.

Tori and I are also working endlessly on this pride commission. All of these things are exciting but they have definitely taken an extreme amount of time and energy and I’m having trouble channeling what’s left into my school work.

I definitely don’t feel like I have had enough time to digest anything really. Even to contemplate a reading for more than 10 minutes has been difficult.

So all this to say that I’m stressed at the moment and feel totally lost in terms of what i’m supposed to be getting out of this semester.

I’ve been inspired by the new media course that’s for sure but i’m not so sure i’m ready to push that inspiration into action.

real-time real

As Alex referred to in her blog, “Virilio says that to some extent the lesson of the new technologies is that reality has never been given, it has always been acquired or generated. Our images never really duplicated reality, they always gave it shape. The difference is that previously a functional distinction could still be made on more solid grounds.” alxbal.wordpress.com

I find it easy to align myself with such ideologies, I am in a constant battle with myself to deconstruct every societal or even meaningless construct but at the same time am invested in a feminist practices which deconstruct forms and ideas with the hope of accounting for new ways of seeing. I have spent many years deconstructing the label of ‘documentary’ but am still as interested in naming what that is for myself. I can say that the meanings I have ever held on to have been in constant flux and I can’t say that I see myself aligned to any one meaning for any long period of time.

It’s interesting to me that Kac mentions that new technologies have made us doubt what we previously thought of as reality when in actuality, I somehow think new technologies maybe affirm our sense of reality by providing an anti-thesis to reality. As a media savvy culture, questions such has “how was that edited”, or “how much alterations were done” become common place. While our knowledge of new technologies expands, our desire for something ‘more real’, or more tangible continues to grow.

I’ve never thought of documentary as solely documenting the past, or revealing something that has already happened, but I can understand how perhaps society is moving towards a desire for media that allows our access into the ‘real’ to grow by doubting those images that have existed previously. So while the transition in how we experience time does change notions of documentary, I think it merely moves our perceptions into the categories of more or less real. And perhaps towards time-based documenting that views solely those moments which are being experienced in ‘real-time’ as ‘real’.

Non-linearity

I thought a lot about how to subvert linearity through non-linear art forms. I’m interested in prescribed notions of linearity within Western society – I guess the obvious ones being time and lifetimes- but moving beyond there into examinations of routines, repetitive movements or activities, societal expectations and even merely walking the distance from one destination to the next.

Heather and I enjoyed an awesome evening of rockclimbing while we joked about this exact subversion of linearity when the goal is to climb the rigid but strictly straight wall all the way to the top.

I think for this video exercise then, I may take the most banal or obvious gesture, movement, action and begin to repeat it in order to subvert the linearity of it only when it is placed out of order or a logical, linear time sequence.

This seems like a simple way of beginning this experimentation.

In regards to the class discussion that ended the class yesterday, I think we have been taught to understand documentary as a way of ordering in order to understand some things that may be beyond our understanding in the first place. Through the last 2 semesters, that was through photo and video and the theory we were engaged in was quite biased along those lines. I don’t feel like I’ve been pushed in any way to think of documentary as anything but what society has prescribed, or at least accepted it to be. In that way, I can understand how people are having trouble grasping new media concepts. If documentary is used as a tool for understanding, what happens when you subvert the act of understanding itself in order to merely question, or ponder new ideas? Is this still documentary? I would definitely say it is, but I understand how this may be out of some people’s realms of understanding.

I’ve never been one for linearity in life in general – perhaps that’s something that divides us.