Author: rnav00-572

Final Project

Video

A few weeks ago, I was roaming around Hunt Library (I think I was angry at something and tried to escape the MFA hallway). I then came across this worn-out massage chair, in the quiet work zone on the third floor. One of my cohort members once enthusiastically told me about one of those, located at Mellon Institute, so I was eager to try. I put on the “full body” program. It was very thorough, almost aggressive. I almost couldn’t believe this machine is massaging my butt while I’m sitting in a public space. Nobody around seemed to care. I was amused and fascinated, I felt like I had a secret. I wasn’t angry anymore.

There are some dualities to this chair that pulled me in and made me want to engage with it: it’s performing an intimate act, but casually installed in a public workspace. It’s a choreographed machine, directed for physical sensation, designed to release physical tension. There is something sensual about it, almost perverse, and deeply comical and paradoxical.

I went out to film a person wearing a green screen bodysuit while getting a full-body massage from the chair. I was afraid that my friend, who agreed to help me and wear the suit, will feel suffocated, so I told him he can stop at any time, and that I only need a few seconds of footage. But he actually enjoyed the massage, said that the suit is surprisingly breathable, and asked for another full-body round.

In a classic idiotic moment, that perhaps had something to do with the fact that I didn’t ask for permission to film in Hunt and I kept waiting for a staff member to walk by and see what we were doing, I forgot the most basic rule of shooting with a green screen suit – and I moved my cameras between shots. After my friend left, I did my best to reposition them as close to the shots with him, but the footage don’t exactly align. Choosing to start filming at 1 pm was another mistake, because by the time I filled the last shots, the outside light, well viewed due to the chair’s position against big windows, has already changed.

I think of this project as a primal experiment, that surprisingly (to me) relates to themes I have worked around in my practice before (like a blind participant in an impressive experience as a performer). It is not precise or whole at the moment, but I did find some significant points of interest in the process and in the resulting footage.

A bit from behind the scenes:

Behind the scenes

Person in Time

A few months ago, I encountered this 2-min monologue while randomly browsing youtube. I was first convinced it was an interview because of its tone and cinematic expression, as well as its content since I knew the person talking is an actor and she is talking about what made her want to become an actor. However, this monologue is actually taken from the 1995 fiction film “Last Summer in the Hamptons” which revolves around a family of theatre actors. Once I learned it’s a fictional piece, it’s ts deceptive and reflexive qualities became even more compelling to me – an actor acting an actor talking about what is it to be an actor.

For my Person-in-Time experiment, I created a sort of “broken telephone” game of acting: I asked 4 actors (all students at CMU school of drama) to improvise the mentioned short monologue while seeing and hearing it in real-time, without having any prior knowledge about it. Moreover, one by one, each of the actors was watching and hearing the person before them performing the monologue while improvising (so only the first actor in the chain actually watched the original). For this purpose, I arranged a small set containing a teleprompter and wireless earphones. I manually updated the file for the teleprompter between each session, so that the next actor in the chain will watch the performance of the one that acted before them (I’m aware that there’s a way to automate this process, but since I don’t have any prior experience with the needed tools or coding I preferred to stick to a manual process for this time frame).

All actors performed the monologue twice, and I used their second takes since I wanted my broken telephone experiment to center around their acting choices, rather than the disruption or accuracy of the text. In a sense, this experiment is more of a typology machine than a person in time.

The final video result 

After sharing my conceptual framework with a friend, they immediately brought up the Fibonacci Sequence as a reference. I found the Fibonacci spiral relevant to my experiment since it can be correlated as a loose metaphor for how the actors’ performances are built on top of one another. I, therefore, chose to use the Fibonacci spiral as a loose guide for “blocking” the footage within the frame:

Another version of the editing following the crit.

A short behind-the-scenes of the chain

The setup:

Person-in-Time project proposal

For my Person-in-Time, I’m currently debating between two ideas, both taking the form of video:

1. As part of my existing long-term project, capturing another perhaps hopeless attempt: my trying to use high-definition sound recording in the hope to trigger Dudu’s libido. My plan is to go film at rabbits breeders’ shows and find a person that will agree to let me come record their rabbits while mating. I will then create a casting of my legs, find a way to keep those warm from within (perhaps by using an electronic blanket) and have the sound playback to Dudu with the goal of arousing him. The process will be documented and presented in video. My original idea was to specifically focus on ultrasonic sounds, since rabbits can hear on average, between 96Hz-49,000Hz, but obtaining an ultrasonic playback will be a complex and expensive endeavor, and perhaps should be a later step to this chapter.

2. Setting a specific setting for filming – static camera, same shot, controlled background, and lightning (should maybe look like an audition setting?). I will then invite students-actors from the drama department, one at a time, to read a short text. Each encounter will start with me asking the participating actor one fixed question (like “what is acting/playing?”), and then ask them to play the answer the previous actor gave (all of them except the first participant), thus creating a sort of reflexive chain of text. The way I imagine it, I will then have footage containing repetitive texts, some are authentic and some performed, and I’m curious if I’ll find an interesting tension and/or illusion to play with when editing.

The Female Voice-Over Supercut

This project stemmed from my continual interest in a common artistic choice of some of my favorite directors, who happen to be male: they chose to use a female voice to narrate their essay films. I’m curious about that choice, especially in the context of the essay film being a highly reflexive medium.

I focused on three films by three directors, which I choose because they are among my favorites:

I was loosely inspired by Omer Fast’s “CNN Concatenated” and used Sam Lavigne’s Videogrep  – a python-based tool that allows to automatically create supercuts, based on associated subtitles files. I also used the transcript software Descript to make sure Videogrep doesn’t miss any excerpts since I knew the amateurish subtitles files I’m using might include some glitches.

My rule was to only use supercuts of words that appeared in all three films (not including conjunctions). As a result, I had to let go of several words and supercuts I desperately wanted to use, since they only appeared in one or two of the films.

I edited out clips where Videogrep mistakenly included words that sound similar to those I searched for (although I left the mistakes in if the words were of the same root).

Here are the results arranged by four chosen words from all three films into one sequence:

Here are the results arranged separately for each film:

I see those as primal experimentations, both in terms of the technical framework and the thematic inquiry involved.

List of the (62) words I searched:

mirror, represent, object, subject, visible, she, light, her, his, real, see, transparent, picture, quote, true, film, essay, layer, through, image, voice, story, fantasy, women, woman, history, cut, fake, montage, silence, hide, site, perhaps, me, over, most, hidden, hear, vision, mask, direct, name, divided, body, reflexive, human, reflection, capture, female, male, ones, manipulation, lose, lost, director, direct, memory, window, camera, observe, afraid, disguise.

Looking Outwards – Inbar Hagai

One of my all-time favorite experimental documentaries is Leviathan (2012) by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, which was produced as part of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. Its 87 minutes were shot on an industrial shipping vessel at open sea (200 miles off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts) using GoPro cameras, which often seem to be mounted on top of different parts of the ship. It’s one of the most potent texts about the food industry I’ve ever seen, yet the entire film has barely one sentence of text spoken throughout it.

Leviathan retains a highly meditative and beautiful watching experience, yet that beauty is created out of a somewhat abstract representation of an extremely cruel and violent reality (of both humans and non-humans). In that aspect, a potential criticism of the film would be that it transforms violence into a visual pleasure to such an extent that it weakens any activist potential that could possibly have arisen. As Harun Farocki suggests in his film “Inextinguishable Fire” (1969), the question of how to represent reality in a way that will lead to its disclosure and understanding, in a way that will lead the viewer to action, is a paradoxical one, since a violent image can also mask or lead to not seeing, to oblivion and numbness.

That being said, from my perception of what art is, this film is an extraordinary example of poetic precision between form and content. It does not preach or impose a meaning, there is no trace of pedagogy or didacticism, yet it holds it all within it and allows for in-depth observation and examination of a distant reality of labor and death that the average person relies on in their day-to-day life without giving it any thought. I would argue that this context, along with the potent visual imagery of the film, which is unbelievably mesmerizing, and the very clever almost hidden soundtrack treatment, elevate Leviathan to a masterpiece.

(A side note: other than Leviathan, Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab is the home of some more pretty amazing experimental explorations – https://sel.fas.harvard.edu/)