Reflective Statement
Concerned with the temporal and strange, I have occupied myself with deep diving into the past via the internet. Through digital archives, I investigate historical moments and cultural phenomenon. The parental figure of the internet passes down information to me in an inconsistent and non-chronological manor, through both oversaturated or poorly documented and hard to find images. I welcome this break from the conventional historical timeline and play in the imbalance and digital grain.
Within my work this term I have investigated two events, at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of how well documented they were. The death of Princess Diana in the work ‘Borsalino 1AM’ and The My Way Killings, a social phenomenon referring to the number of deaths in the Philippines which arose from the singing of ‘My Way’ by Frank Sinatra on karaoke, in the work ‘Number 1 in the Funeral Music Chart’. Whilst both involve death, the intention of my work is not gothic. Moreso, it relates to endurance post-death and the legacy of a moment within history and the media.
Tensions emerge within the context of ‘Number 1 in the Funeral Music Chart’. The lives of the victims of the killings as well as those who use it as a funeral song came to an end, however the lifespan of Sinatra’s legacy prevails post-death. The permanence of ‘My Way’ and its resonance within culture is undeniable. This was the main motivation behind making the work 40 minutes long and on a continuous loop. There is an irony to the lyrics ‘the end is near’ being repeated to the audience, when in fact the end of the video is very much in the distance.
I learned After Effects to animate the karaoke lyric video. The first iteration involved the animation repeated for the length of the visuals, unsynced. However, after presenting this in crits, I decided the work would look more intentional to sync up the two. This meant animating the ball to bounce on every word of the 40-minute audio. To achieve this, I animated each repetition individually to ensure each keyframe lined up with each word. Each repetition consisted of 3 layers, which led to the project having over 200 layers and caused the software to fail. To solve this problem, I animated the project in two parts and stitched them together in Premiere Pro. I then used a BrightSign media player to sync up the two projected videos which required me to learn the BrightAuthor software.
Most beginnings of work start with the stumbling across and subsequent collection of material from the past. I then spend time with the archive, allowing my relationship to and understanding of it grow. Due to having a heavily research-based practice, my process of collecting, digging, and drawing links is essential in producing a synthesised and impactful outcome that can be understood by an audience that hasn’t been on my research journey with me. I’ve become more aware of how much I allow the audience to know about the context behind the work. I have grown from wanting to give the audience every piece of information I’ve learned, to pairing back and being selective over how much and the method in which information is given. For example, in the piece ‘Number One in the Funeral Music Chart’, there is no mention of the My Way Killings except hints within the accompanying zine through a news article and headlines. This leads to an organic piecing together of the context by the viewer, mirroring my research process.
The idea of the ‘post-memory’ has been the backbone to my work throughout my final year. The term, coined by Marienne Hirsch, refers to the relationship subsequent generations have to the trauma of their forbearers only through stories, archives, and behaviours. I have expanded this, encompassing the concept of hauntology, to include the media’s ability to cause us to forge a relationship to the past without living through it. This is achieved through remediation, the capitalisation of nostalgia and the archive of the internet. These are the conditions in which I encounter the found footage I use in my work.
Remediation is a theme explored in Pierre Huyghe’s ‘The Third Memory’, a work highly influential to my practice. The film uses footage of original news broadcasts of a 70s bank robbery, the fictionalisation of the event in Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and a recreation using the man involved. My piece ‘Borsalino 1AM’ builds on this. In an accompanying video, I stitched together clips of actresses from multiple films about Diana. The looping of her simulacrum on a CRT tv when installed, harks back to the remediation of her story and the cyclical nature of time within the media.
Research into methods of display has been at the forefront whilst making decisions about my own work. In particular, the MoMa exhibition ‘Signals: How Video Changed the World’ and the ways in which the type and number of screens, size, height, and sound effect the work. My degree show set up involved two large projected videos meeting in a corner. It was important to use the architecture of the room to surround the viewer whilst stood between the two, whilst matching the size to the grandiosity of the lyrics of the song. This was paired with disco lighting like that in karaoke bars to activate the space, as well as a spotlit microphone to invite performance into the work.
I visited artist Louise Adkins in her studio which was seminal in honing the motivations behind my work and broadening my understanding of the contexts it sits in. We discussed the idea of historical re-enactment, which in my case takes the form of karaoke, and its role in restaging the public within the performance, highlighting the cyclical nature of time.
Throughout my final year I have I was involved in co-running MSOA Screenings. This took the form of weekly screenings of curated video art paired with group discussions which culminated in a 3-day film festival. Our aim was to foster a greater moving image community within the art school as well as encourage insightful dialogue about contemporary video art and its themes. Through this I gained essential experience in event planning and deepened my understanding of moving image which in turn fed into my personal practice.