Category: Reading-TwoCuts

I’m honestly not very good at interpreting readings like this, so I may be completely misunderstanding this… but from what I gather…

In my typology project, my two cuts were the following:

Opening cut: The observer is asked to come into a room and open a box. They agree to these conditions and open the box. (Setup)

Closing cut: The camera inside captures the reaction of the observer once they realize what is inside the box. (Capture)

I guess my two cuts would be:

1. creating the work and then
2. the responses input into the game

Cut one: Setting up the claw machine and displaying the prize.

Cut two: The footage captured from multiple cameras of the participants’ facial expressions.

My understanding of two cuts from the reading is that there’s one cut (opening cut) of setting the situation and another cut (closing cut) of recording the process.

In the upcoming person in time project, my opening cut would be the setup of projectors and leapmotion that invites people to present their hands in front of the projector to generate their own butterfly, and the closing cut would be the experience of seeing an animated butterfly flying towards the group and joins the collection.

I understand the reading to be saying that the cuts are separations between the result and the process of experimentation. Result referring to the sight of something, the quiddity, the theory. Process referring to learning and connection, what parameters of motion I create. Without either, I would be just capturing a person moving without meaning.

For my Person in Time project, I want to capture expressive /theatrical movement through motion capture and in formal forms of dance, a sort of full range of motion in myself. I’ve been thinking about Chinese classical dance and its fundamentals lately and how they were introduced to me really messily but also how they are as rigid as the western ballet fundamentals (just less,… square seeming). The cuts, as they would be applicable to my proposed project, would have a display of an animated skeleton as a result and be about learning cultural dance movements as a process.

Opening cut: the setup of my polarization capture system the scene being captured

Closing cut: the collected footage

My typology machine leans more towards “experimentality” rather than “laboratoriality”, since my opening cut is not often archived to be traced and involves many failed attempts.

I resonate with the concept of “two cuts”: when making the typology machine, I found myself designing the machine by determining a set of working procedures; learning the tool, getting better at it and deciding which steps and parts to keep and leave out; and finally, generating knowledge/ product from it.

I also agree that when planning and designing my typology machine, the complex indeterminate relationship between the opening and closing cuts gives space to the possibility of creating.

The opening cut refers to “what was done” or the act of “trying out,” and the closing cut is the observation of “what happened.”

In my Typology Machine project (interactive disclosure of audio-visual discrepancy), users trying out the VR prototype (removing black bubbles one by one) would be the opening cut. Their response to the act, involving their feelings and perception, would be “what happened” as a result.

From the reading, one cut separates the “object of observation” from the technical condition that produces it, which would render the data meaningless.  It should be two cuts that create a “gap”, and the object appears between two different sets of instruments. One cut as the “opening cut”, generates the situation/object of interest; one cut as the “closing cut”, where manifestation is measured.

My current idea for Person in Time is to interpret a person through their hands only by recording their hand movements, and specifically their ambidexterity, throughout the day performing different tasks and responding to different conditions. In this case, the recording of the hand-movement footage would be the
“opening cut”, while the deliberate interpretation of the hand-movement footage would be the “closing cut”.