In my first semester at Goddard, I hope to explore some of the issues of loss and confusion that many of us have been experiencing since the events of last fall, and at the same time confront some of the issues that brought me to Goddard in the first place.  It has always been my nature to sequester myself in times of emotional trauma and hide from the world, but suddenly I find myself interacting with a larger artistic community that I hope will inspire me to confront my own fears and create an artistic project that both satisfies my own desire to expose and deal with a certain emotional resonance within myself and perhaps helps others to question their own fears.

 This semester, I hope to assemble a video project from footage taken from several road trips to diverse locations across the nation.  Combined with voiceover commentary on events of the autumn of 2001 drawn from email correspondence, material submitted to and featured on the sites of my network of webpages, resurrender.net, and instant messenger dialogues, I hope to be able to create a visceral and engaging look at the reaction of the disenchanted twenty-something internet generation of which I am a part to such a confusing time.  Certain areas that I hope to include are initial response to the events of September 11, 2001, present reaction to the “war on terrorism” and the progress thusfar, the effects of these events on people’s interaction with friends, family, lovers.  Do others still feel as raw and wounded as I do?  Is this an issue that we can openly discuss, or is it something that we should bury within and attempt to move on?  Even if we did not lose a loved one on that day or in the subsequent time of declared war, why do so many feel this as a loss so dear?  Is this “our” “Pearl Harbor”?  I hope soon in this semester to make a trip to “ground zero” in New York, and hopefully footage from that trip will bring a cohesive sense to the written material that I have already collected and later reactions that I have not yet written or received from the group of authors with whom I work.  I do not plan to videotape any footage from the crash site itself; I am more interested in documenting the surrounding communities, which hopefully will act as a mirror or a lens to focus the emotional atmosphere of the area and perhaps the nation as a whole.

 When I last worked in video, I used the opportunity to explore the larger issues of coming to terms with loss and erecting a fragile peace with the past.  To me, the fusion of spoken word voiceovers drawn from the vast collection of correspondence and writing that I have acquired with a series of disconcerting, jarring video imagery and a musical soundtrack created by myself was an integral part of letting go and finding some sense of peace within myself.  The process is intense: hours spent editing together footage, tweaking sound files and arranging the music just right are not just busywork; difficult as it is to sit in front of a computer and work in this medium, the final product and the reaction of the audience is a reward that I’ve found is an indispensable part of the closure process.

 This semester, I want to move in a direction of mastery of the video production process.  In previous projects, I’ve only dabbled with the medium, never truly sitting down and gaining a firm grounding in the basic premises.  As such, I plan to do quite a bit of reading in the fundamentals of video production, new media, and the visual arts as a whole.  Since my network and the community of writers and artists who have grown around the creation of said network have been a primary source of written material for this project, I hope to begin to explore in a more academic setting the dynamics of online culture and the emerging digital world that I feel has such a promise of creating global lines of communication across cultural and demographic boundaries.  I plan to involve many members of the resurrender.net community directly in the assembly of my video project, since they were the first people with whom I interacted and discussed the events of September 2001 as they were happening.  I also plan to investigate the areas of documentary, conceptual art, installation art, and memoir, each arenas that I am quickly realizing are integral aspects of my own artistic practice, but areas in which I myself do not feel grounded or proficient.  An investigation of contemporary and past artists who have dealt with the same issues and practices will hopefully result in a more concrete sense of my own voice in respect to those areas.  Along with the books listed in my preliminary bibliography for this semester, I do plan to investigate the availability of video resources so that I might gain a better sense of what work is actually out there right now.  Hopefully immersing myself in contemporary art video will be both an informative and fulfilling way to gain a sense of where my work relates to my “peers.”

 I know that I am still in an emotionally-ambiguous place in terms of dealing with the events of the autumn.  Since I find such solace in the process of creating something that I consider beautiful out of something so horrible, I am hoping that this project will allow me to find a place within myself where I am not afraid to discuss my emotions and my reactions.  As [resurrender], my last video project, helped me confront those dark little areas that exist within me that I don’t want to talk about, I hope that this semester’s video project will be an effective medium with which to unravel everything that has been twisting within me for so long.
 
 

Paul Evan Hughes
MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts
Preliminary Resource List, Spring 2002
 

Books:

Bender, Gretchen and Druckrey, Timothy. Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology. Seattle: Bay Press, 1994.

Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.

Coyne, Richard. Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.

Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London; New York : Routledge, 2000.

Diedrich, John and Zierten, Jessica. 4 J: Writings on Jane Bowles, Joanne Kyger, Jack Kerouac, and Jack Spicer. Milwaukee, Wis.: Blue Canary Press, 1993

Druckrey, Timothy. Ars Electronica: Facing the Future. Cambridge, Mass. ; London : MIT, 2001.

Fifer, Sally Jo and Hall, Doug. Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art. New York, N.Y.: Aperture in association with the Bay Area Video Coalition, 1990.

Hanhardt, John G. Video Culture: A Critical Investigation. Rochester, N.Y. : Layton, Utah : Visual Studies Workshop Press ; Distributed by G.M. Smith/Peregrine Smith Books, 1990.

Harrison, Charles. Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art & Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.

Henderson, Bill. Minutes of the the [sic] Lead Pencil Club: Pulling the Plug on the Electronic Revolution. Wainscott, N.Y.: Pushcart, 1996.

Iles, Chrissie. and Zummer, Thomas. Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964-1977. New York: London : Harry N. Abrams, 2001.

Kaprow, Allan. and Kelley, Jeff. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Kerouac, Jack. Desolation Angels. New York: Bantam Books, 1966.

Lunenfeld, Peter. The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: London: MIT Press, 2000.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London; New York: Routledge, 1999.

O'Brien, John. and Cope, David. The Review of Contemporary Fiction: David Antin. Normal, Ill.: The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 2001.

Penny, Simon. Critical Issues in Electronic Media. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

Renov, Michael and Suderburg, Erika. Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Scholder, Amy and Crandall, Jordan. Interaction: Artistic Practice in the Network. New York, NY: Eyebeam Atelier : D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2001.

Singer, Irving. Reality Transformed: Film as Meaning and Technique. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998.

Swartz, Omar. The View from On the Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac. Carbondale, Ill.: [Great Britain] : Southern Illinois University Press, 2001.

Trend, David. Reading Digital Culture. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

Weibel, Peter and Druckrey, Timothy, eds. net_condition (Electronic Culture: History, Theory, and Practice). Graz, Austria: Karlsruhe, Germany: Cambridge, Mass.: Steirischer Herbst; ZKM/Center for ART and Media; MIT Press, 2001

Weiss, Allen S., ed. Experimental Sound and Radio. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.