you be you artist commentary

Upon viewing “Material Witness Or a liquid cop”, a twenty minute film by Ed Atkin, I was quite riveted, for it evinced the typical collage of images emblematic of surreal art films while maintaining an ostensible sense of plot and cogency. Specifically, this was most salient when, as opposed to producing something akin to the verbal ejaculations of those with Wernicke’s aphasia, actual comprehensible paragraphs of speech were randomly distributed throughout the piece. Thus, a flavor of verbal poetry was provided that functioned to imbue the film with a slightly decreased ease of subjectivity; that is, it used the precept that we, being unable to prevent the drawing of associations between stimuli occurring simultaneously, automatically assume relation or synergy between elements. Indeed, perhaps the video was a commentary on this propensity, for after a few sensible monologues by the narrator or whatever, random phrases and inarticulate grunts would appear, thereby mocking the veracity and pertinence of anything previously stated.  Overall, In that it gave a bombardment of ambiguous sensory phantasmagoria,  it seemed to me a reflection of the difficulty we constantly face in parsing that which is meaningful and valuable in life from distractions and nonsense.

film/data bending commentary

The aims of the film and data bending portions of project three were oriented around depictions of mortality and the disintegration of friendships/relationships as a function of time, respectively. Regarding the latter, by copying large portions of the code and pasting them to areas where they shouldn't be, sizable, intact parts of the jpgs were superimposed/transposed elsewhere. This is most prominently exemplified by the floating outline in the photo that shows me gazing at a sunlit lake. Additionally, when looking at the pictures that I would later manipulate, I felt a stark discrepancy between their crispness and the comparatively poor quality of my memories of those times; thus, I felt compelled to show the images as they would be if they experienced a degree/rate of decay similar to that which my neuronal networks apparently do. In terms of the film part, I was attempting to provide an overarching tension between the beautiful aspects of life and the heavy harshness/oppression that can exist in the same demesne. Admittedly, however, I was focused less on the conceptual basis of the film and more on the technical procedures that went into editing it. As a side comment, the factory farming component of the film would likely make a large impression, but I didn't intend for it to; It just appeared because of my compromised timeline for obtaining footage.