In the trenches

Or... Finals time. 


In Art School we don't have final exams we have final art projects and final essays. Part of me is pretty happy about this expectation, another part of me would like a few tests just to get the damn business over with. I, ever so cleverly, managed to swing my three finals requiring art works into one final project - this is cool, they let us do this, but "It has be good".  Two of my classes are animation, but have different outcomes the other is a critical theory class - that I get to make art for this class is astonishing in and of itself. The piece I'm working on I also applied for (and received) a grant for. While most of the work is due next week, the actual fully completed piece is due at the end of July and because of this I will not be sharing my work until after the piece has been fully debuted. This alone makes me a little giddy-anxious. The piece is really dang cool! 

The Department of Community Monitoring

The projects hopes to point out that we are always being watched. Almost our every move in public space is being observed, both by official agencies and an increasingly watchful public. People wantonly post films of themselves and their friends to the Internet, some of illegal behavior, others simply funny or tragic in addition to legitimate surveillance footage. While ‘We’ may complain about the ever-watchful eyes of official agency, ‘We’ are participating in the panopticon. In William Gibson’s book Pattern Recognition, a mysterious character produces art-films assembled from found (on the Internet) surveillance footage, making art from the public realm. Foucault’s in depth explanation of panopticon reveals the depth of the system we are participating in, willingly or not.  The whole installation is comprised of the sculptural pieces (object description withheld), a bank of video monitors that display multi-channel video of surveillance footage that is made from found movies from the Internet, that is then manipulated through animation techniques to render the subjects anonymous, out of context and hopefully creates a very loose narrative that the viewer might be inclined to project themselves into.

So far I have three shorts animated and am working on a fourth, while building animatics descriptive of video work I'll be doing later to help support the piece.  I am now the not so proud owner of a pile of 13" television monitors and one 26" monster monitor, five DVD players and modulators, a million coaxial cables and a few power strips - there will be a live computer and monitor involved as well.   

That is all. Oh, and I have to move out two weeks after school is out. YAY!