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.