Story Tour Day 2

So yesterday I did a second recording session. Unfortunately my recorder SD card refused to work but, fortunately I still have the audio from the video camera (which is pretty good). Here are some snippets from the four individuals that I have recorded so far (all Maltese stories will be subtitled):

Story tour Day 1

So today I managed to record around 6 different stories from 3 different people. I also took some video footage to record the event which I will upload sometime this week. Wednesday I have another recording planned and I need to try and find one for tomorrow. When I get the camera in about two weeks I will try and get some video footage and do the first tests. This is an important step because I can see what results I'm getting from my project.

Testing video

Experiment with randomisation

This is a quick test I did yesterday just to see how a random video, a random story and a random piece of music would look together, and whether I would try to find some sense in them once I see them together. The story was found randomly on youtube when I typed 'man telling a story' the footage is from an old project I had done, and the music was picked randomly from my computer (from album folders that I had  never listened to). I feel the result is quite boring mostly because of the videos & the formal style of the story. I think the storytelling needs to be more raw & the videos much more interesting visually & conceptually.

I have come up with various points I need to think about:

1. The length of the story
2. The length of the video
3. The genre of the music
4. Most of the stories will be in Maltese (subtitles will have to be included) is this acceptable?
5. How to include extra visualisations (if at all - will have to try this to see if it adds anything to the project) and will this be a separate layer?
6. The quality of the sound (stories)
7. Contextualising shots rather than literal 
8. Edited or raw footage
9. Is it possible to have an instance where there is a video and a story but no sound, a video with sound but no story, sound and a story but no video - so they don't necessarily have to be there at all times.
10. Interaction - I still want to have some interaction from the viewer, whether it is simply clicking or tapping on a screen and getting a new random story, or something more elaborate. I think this engages them much more.
11. Response from the viewer & what to do with it: I want to see if the viewers will try and make some sense and link the randomised media. What do I do with this information? How do I record it and will it be a part of the project?

I have already contacted some individuals who have agreed to be interviewed for their stories; I will start the collection of stories during the Easter Holidays and will start seeing which ones I can keep as recordings, and which ones can become conceptual videos.

It is now quite clear that my proposal has changed substantially, but I'm happy to say that I have kept the elements that I was enjoying - randomisation - my initial concept of the Cosmic Kitchen of mixing different medias together, the best way to achieve something unexpected & unintentional is of course to randomise it & having no control over it, having a project about the viewers rather than myself, surreal elements in the videos & visuals.

I got rid of other elements that I felt where bringing the project down: the idea of trying to get the viewers to 'experience' something; this was clashing with the idea of the 'coexisting artist' as explained by Shultis in 'Silencing the Sounded Self'. I also got rid of the idea of having a linear structure for the project; this was restricting my experiments and as such, wasn't really needed in the end.

Overall I'm quite happy with how the project has been evolving & my next steps are to start gathering material; both media as well as new books and links to formulate a new, more appropriate title.

Open-ended is exciting.

100 stories.

50 stories will be recorded.
50 will be translated into videos / pictures & visuals.

One of my colleagues who teaches Fine Arts just came by my flat and we were discussing this idea about getting people to tell me their stories; traumatic, funny, happy, sad... my problem was - what will my visuals be about?

I came to the conclusion that half of my stories will be used as inspirations for the visuals. The other half will be used as sound. What I will be doing now is start gathering stories through various people and start deciding which ones I'm going to keep as sound, and which ones will become videos (not literal, but more as inspiration). I will also be looking for some different contexts - artists who have worked with similar themes.

The end result will be a random story recording + a random video/visual + random music (music will be tackled after september)

open-ended is exciting but scary

Every since I've been threading on this open-ended path on my project, it has been changing immensely. I'm not sure if it's good or bad but every time I go back to previous pages on my sketchbook, they start to make less and less sense, so I guess it's good.

I have been looking at one of the exhibits at 'Touch me' specifically Touch me I and II, Yoko Ono's April 2008 exhibition in New York.

Below are the instructions taken from Yoko Ono - Touch me (Charta, 2008)

touch me I

Take a photo of your body part reaching out from the openings.
Make a choice:
1.keep the photo
2.discard the photo
3.pin the photo up on touch me II
4.put a message underneath your photo
5.ask a friend to put a message underneath your photo.

y.o. '08

touch me II

touch me I

touch me II

touch me I

I like how something so simple triggered such a response and such a interesting result on touch me II.

In my last post I said I wanted to show some videos to people and see their response regarding the video. What I didn't like about this idea is that it was centred too much around the video, and less around the people. Today I was thinking about putting the focus more on the people and their stories. Should their stories to connected or separate from the video/visuals? Separating them from the video makes the whole project even more randomised than it already is, connecting them obviously provides a clearer link to whoever is watching, which could be nice - but misses the point of the whole project.

So now I'm left with two things to do.

1. Find these individuals and start collecting stories.

2. Think about what the content of the videos / visuals is going to be.

My idea at the moment is to just get abstract shots through video & connect with the visualisations, but perhaps to include some shots of people searching for meaning / doing meaningless things in everyday life . Anyway, whatever I do - I need to start testing these things out next week.

I think now I'll go make myself some coffee.

-------------------

(10 minutes later)

Slightly more ambitious (because I'm bad at programming) I've been thinking about this idea but avoiding it, but here goes: what I really want to do is to have the project online so that more people can include their stories via a database which then updates the stories to include the new ones. I will try to find someone who understands these applications and see if this is at all feasible. 

Processing

Breaking the Polystar

Updates

So busy at the moment, I'm teaching evening classes so I have little time for my project, but thankfully, I have around 10 days off for Easter, which will give me plenty of time to catch up. My tutor has suggested that I start testing out some footage by showing it to individuals and get them to categorise it. He also expressed that it's going to be quite difficult to do what I'm trying to do.

I'm writing some shots which will be easy for me to get during the holidays using just a mobile camera (unfortunately for this month, this will have to do). I'm afraid that none of these shots will evoke any strong emotions from anybody, however I've been reading articles recently about the link between music and depression. A few days ago I had seen an article about the fact that music can sometimes cause depression in teenagers. I was looking for it today but instead I found an article which suggests the opposite: This got me thinking about showing the clips without audio/ music first, and then with audio/music (or the other way round. I feel this will hugely influence what people are going to associate with these clips.

Experiment with solid watercolour

These experiments are getting old very quickly, I must find something new.

I've been looking at Yoko Ono's 'Touch me' exhibition. Will post reflections soon.