GAPS AND OVERLAPS - COLLABORATIVE WORKS BY UCBA FACULTY
I currently have two video works on exhibition in the UCBA Gallery. They are both music video collaborations with singer/songer, friend, and colleague, Mike Roos.
This is my fourth musical détournement involving gender and the media. This one is a critique of television's active construction of female-female conflict as entertainment. Television, as a patriarchal apparatus, has historically taught women to fight one another in an attempt to keep them from realizing the potential of their collusion.
It's Dynasty catfights.
The images and sounds in this video are the properties of the copyright holders. I mean in no way to infringe on their rights. The content is used solely for the purposes of criticism.
I am pleased to share the work of talented pianist and eMedia artist, Alex Farren, who is graduating from our program this semester. This video pairs stunning time-lapse footage and an interview at a dharma center with his musical performance of a piece Philip Glass composed for the Dalai Lama. It's like a mini-Koyaanisqatsi, only beter.
That's a Wrap is a talkshow about the movie industry, produced by students in the Multi-Camera Video Production course at the University of Cincinnati, Blue Ash College.
Watch me look slightly insane and talk lots of smack about movies with host Kees Henskens (right) and Aaron Bates, Area Manager of Danbarry Cinemas (left).
Please enjoy The Unknown, a visually-arresting, meditative journey by graduating student, Lucas Ankney. His work is in the vein of Jodorowsky, Derek Jarman, and Matthew Barney.
It's nearly Spring and that means it's student film season around these parts. I am excited to share with you the work of Sam Laudner, a student graduating from our program this semester. His neo-noir, Cocaine Lane, is stunning.
That was my contribution to the Coulrophobia Détournement Double project orchestrated by Betty Wut and myself. It is no way meant to be a competition, but instead complementary visual explorations on the same theme. The guidelines on the project are at:
It's taken me long enough to complete. And not a moment too soon-- the original coulrophobia video, clips of which were required in our videos, has been yanked from YouTube. Also, I have exactly one day left on my Adobe Premiere trial. Freddy has volunteered to download another trial for me under his account, so I hope to finish the three other video projects I've started.
Betty Wut completed her contribution to the Coulrophobia Détournement Double video project some time ago. I only just convinced her to allow me to upload it to YouTube. I am still working on mine since I lost the original progress I had made in a VideoPad crash. I've been very insistent on using free/open-source video editing software, but I've broken down and used Adobe Premiere. I had to get the Airbrushed project out of my system before moving on, so I cut my teeth on the software for that.
Above is her compilation music video Yes...NO! constructed from found footage on YouTube. Enjoy!
This is my third musical détournement involving gender and the media. This one is a critique of advertising's role in manufacturing "standards" of feminine beauty and socializing children into them.
It's make-up ads and toy commercials from the 1950s through the 1980s.
The images and sounds in this video are the properties of the copyright holders. I mean in no way to infringe on them. The content is used solely for the purposes of criticism.
An archive that even Derrida would become feverish over.
I have begun to archive my series of soundtrack Facebook posts to Pinterest. These consist of a link to a music video on YouTube and a brief caption, generally in the same format each time: "Tonight's -blank- soundtrack" or "Today's -blank- soundtrack." The -blank- is whatever I am doing, thinking, or feeling at that moment.
I considered just building a YouTube playlist out of them and sharing it; but, the source material is from YouTube, and the channel of distribution is Facebook, so I feel strongly that the means of archival must be some other outlet of social media. Pinterest has generally been used to collect still images from the Web, so using it to "pin" video is in keeping with my interest in misusing social media. As I archive each soundtrack post, I delete the original from Facebook with all of its comments, defying Facebook's inborn archival characteristics and supporting my virtual enlightenment project.
This is my second musical détournement involving gender and the media. This one is a critique of irrational phallic fear, a field of responses developed in reaction to images of transgressive gender positions.
The images and sounds in this video are the properties of the copyright holders. I mean in no way to infringe upon them. The content is used solely for the purposes of criticism.
I've been thinking a lot about cartoons lately. So much so that I'm thinking in cartoons, a flickering parade of animated images, projected against opaque white thought bubbles.
And those images that dance before me are the ultimate examples of "Disneying" narrative, reducing every story to a moral duality of good versus evil, love conquering hate. Cartoons were Hanna(h) Montanaing children's entertainment long before Billy Ray ever had a glint of lust in his eyes. The white-washing typically occurred in story, with sanitized plots and simple situational comedy. The studios turned the occasional blind eye to cartoons tackling the real issues, like law enforcement's extended investigation into a string of pick-a-nick basket larcenies. These were, however, exceptional. For the most part, cartoons were a lesson in justice served and evil punished.
Perhaps the greatest dumbing down of material in childrens' entertainment occurred in character. Most of the cartoon characters from my childhood were nothing but stereotypes. Looney Toons was filled with them. Foghorn Leghorn was nothing but a good ol' ill-bred, poorly-educated, down-home country hick. Speedy Gonzalez, his own thick, Spanish accent and vocabulary presented for laughs, was accompanied by his lazy cousin, Slowpoke Rodriguez. And, clearly, Pepe Le Pew was a sexual harasser. That cat never wanted his advances.
Hanna(h) Barbera characters had even less subtlety. Huckleberry Hound, although a sheriff in the Old West, for some reason had the slow stigmatic drawl of the deep south. Honk Kong Fooey's every screen entrance was accompanied by a reverberating gong. Snagglepuss was pink, had a lisp, spent part of the day in a cage, and dressed like a Chippendales dancer. No, he wasn't gay.
Stop-motion animation has also been on my mind, but not because of a tendency toward indoctrinating the idea that the Other can be neatly divided into types and is here to entertain us. Animation is really a time-elimination operation. Not just any time is eliminated, however, but a specific kind of time: non-narrative time. This is the time unfolding in-between the key beats of narrative; this is a liminal time. Non-narrative time necessarily produces narrative time, which is nothing but a spine of sought-out and connected beats, key moments, form. Non-narrative time is real time, measurable in labor and production, and yet it is time that we discard, suppress, willingly forget, sacrifice to the narrative. It's time that exists, but that is literally obscene ("off-scene") in hopes that it will not attract our attention. We're complicit in this operation; we don't want to experience non-narrative time because it reveals the illusion and obscures the spectacle.
Narrative time is time made spectacular, cut down to the interesting and entertaining bits. It's time edited. It's the product of labor, the strip-mining of coal while looking for diamonds. All else is discarded because the only part that is of value to us is the diamond, the pleasurable illusion, the gem of story. And then, only valuable to us until the next diamond is brought to the surface, followed by the next, in a prescripted cause and effect chain, a diamond choker. It is an order imposed, and the result presented for our distracting entertainment.
The persistence of vision, the illusion upon which animation, and spectacle, is based, has its counterpart in narrative. While our mind blinks to obscure non-narrative time, the imprint of our last beat of narrative time remains there, a distraction from the labors of non-narrative time. It fades only slightly before we're presented with the next beat of narrative time to hold in mind and provide a distracting spectacle. We grasp onto the narrative image, forgetting that the flow of time continues until it becomes time to replace our current narrative image with the next.
We might, however, form our own connective patterns if we can survey the whole timeline. Searching from outside of time, we might find a natural pulse, organic, rather than one constructed and imposed. We, instead of ignoring non-narrative time, might examine it closely enough to recognize Aristotle's unity of time is characteristic of all time. All time is narrative. Not all narrative time has to be spectacular, however. Perhaps if we, as audience, choose for ourselves the key moments of time, the beats, the form, perhaps if we become our own narrators rather than accepting the narrative time that has been selected for us and presented to us as a distraction from the real, then, maybe then, we have the antidote to spectacular time.
To counteract spectacular time, we have to step out of time, in an off-rhythm, syncopated marching to Thoreau's drummer or a wild and spasmodic Butoh dance. We must play with all our being, and not accept leisure time as our time. We have to play and we have to laugh.
I've belabored over my second Musical Détournement for sleepless night after sleepless night and I am still only halfway through a 5 minute 45 second song. This one is a video rumination on phallic fears, both rational and irrational.
I'm a man obsessed and the slow progress is driving me mad.
