In my first semester at Goddard, I produced a video project that explored my emotional and psychological reaction to several traumatic events, including the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001 and the departure from my life of the woman I intended to marry.  The video project acted as both a form of therapy through creation and an intensely personal view into my life for the audience.  I explored issues such as the conflict between the “real” and “online” worlds, public and private spaces, formation of a distinct voice in both my digital video and writing practices, and the situation of myself within the greater artistic community.  This semester, I intend to continue this exploration, hopefully branching out more into the areas of writing and musical composition while still maintaining firm ties to my digital video and webdesign commitments.

I am very interested in documenting and exploring my reaction to loss.  Just over a month ago, my best friend Jacob Pete hung himself with his own guitar string.  In the wake of that trauma, I have begun to develop a webpage devoted to the celebration of his life and music, his chief form of expression.  Jacob was a key figure in the Central and Northern New York punk music scene, and I have been highly involved in this community after his death, lending my support during the grieving process to many young people.  My interaction with this community has inspired me to begin the complicated and involved process of constructing thestillness.com, which will hopefully in the end feature an entire catalogue of his music, online projects, video projects, and written and musical reactions from his friends and family to this tragedy.  I hope to also incorporate this site into my existing resurrender.net community, bringing his music to a wider audience than he ever experienced in his lifetime through providing downloadable mp3 files of alternate and rare tracks of music he recorded.  I have been given a most precious parting gift in the form of twenty-five to thirty audio cassettes that he gave me through the years.  I will begin the process of converting the analog audio to digital music files and uploading them in mp3 format to thestillness.com.

Because I have been so involved in digital video for the past two years, I would very much like to continue my video learning process by creating a project that incorporates Jacob’s music with still and video images taken from my own collection and that of his friends and family.  He once gave me an album titled simply “Soundtrack,” which I never knew at the time, but he intended for me to create a video track to accompany his project.  So, in essence, he made a soundtrack for a movie I never made.  I intend to make the video segment of this project now.  To me, this creative process is an indispensable part of my healing and closure.

I intend to continue my exploration of current and classic video artists by becoming involved in a video series that is being shown in the Spark Gallery below my apartment.  I also intend to begin utilizing the vast video resources of the Syracuse University library, which is only blocks from where I currently live.  I hope by becoming more involved and open to actually watching other artists to more-firmly situate myself in the video community and draw inspiration from the works I see.

In terms of reading, I will continue to immerse myself in a mixture of books dealing with the fundamentals of new media and atypical speculative/science fiction, my personal writing passion.  I drew much inspiration last semester from reading Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren, so I intend to read much more of Delany’s work, specifically in the areas of autobiography and his writings about New York City.  Delany is the author who has most-directly influenced my personal writing style, so I hope to continue to develop my own distinct voice while both scrutinizing and appreciating his unique voice, which I regard as a brilliant exercise in remediation: fusing prose and poetry, pop-culture references and lyrics.

This semester will be a continuation of the goals I set in my first semester: to situate myself and my work within the broader artistic community while developing my own distinct style and voice, learning about the fundamentals of new media while pushing the boundaries with my own art, delving into the real/illusion and public/private dichotomies, using this entire process to create a form of closure and healing with the very disturbing and difficult events of my personal life.  I hope to achieve the same level of success with my thestillness.com and Soundtrack projects that I achieved with To Wound.
 

 
Paul Evan Hughes
MFA-IA, G2
Preliminary Resource List: Fall 2002.
 

Books:

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

Butler, Octavia. Xenogenesis. New York: Guild America Books, 1987.

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

Delany, Samuel R. The Motion of Light In Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village. 1957-1965. New York: Arbor House/W. Morrow, 1988.

Delany, Samuel R. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

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

Russ, Joanna.  The Female Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986, 1975.

Schaffner, Ingrid.; Winzen, Matthias., et alii. Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art. Munich; New York: Prestel, 1998.

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.