Dearest Pam,

First of all, I have to report that my apartment is trying to kill me.  One of my friends reported a suspicious natural gas smell coming from the kitchen, which I had apparently been breathing for days and hadn’t noticed.  Upon inspection of the gas line, I found a nicely-frayed wrap of ancient electrical tape that was covering a tiny crack in the line.  I’ve now sealed it with duct tape.  Tonight, as I was dutifully defrosting my refrigerator for the first time ever (it was indeed a liminal experience; there aren’t many things that I can honestly say I’ve never done before, and defrosting a refrigerator is one of them), I just accidentally happened to steak-knife a hole in the freezer compartment, and I was blasted in the face with freon.  Given my chain-smoking habit, I’m surprised that I haven’t blown myself up, and unlike previous semesters, this time, I don’t really want to die.  I need to get out of here before my apartment succeeds.  I just saw a commercial for a bidet…  What is the world coming to?  Isn’t toilet paper good enough anymore?  Now I’m afraid of what my toilet will do to me.

Anyhoo, I feel this packet isn’t nearly as glamorous as my first packet, but there’s still a significant amount of reading and watching and making.  Watching!!!  Yes, finally, Interlibrary Loan has worked for me.  It’s only taken four fucking semesters, but I’ve started to get Video Data Bank videos in the mail from ILL.  Excellent.  So I’ve fallen in love with Bill Viola.  And I’m watching and re-watching “I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like” over and over again.  There’s less in this packet, but I think that’s a combination of a week less spent in its creation than I spent on the first one and my desire to start to dig in with some of the material, hence the new version of the “consumed” video and its accompanying soundtrack.  In terms of the reading, I’ve burned through the short books and now am digging in with the big video history bastards, hitting my head against some walls, trying to take in as much as I can without the temptation to go read some Delany instead.  Fun part is, I’ve now read every novel Delany’s published, so I can’t really dilly-dally with that anymore.  My own writing has come to a screeching halt, not because I have no desire to write, but because the new novel is in a precarious position of transgression right now, a place that I don’t really want to play with for a while.  Play…  I played with the bear again this time and made a short video that online viewers are already writing to me about.  Fun fun fun.

I’m babbling.  I’ll stop.  The point is, I’m still trying to impress the pants off of you, but in places where that makes me feel a little scattered and decentralized, I’ve started to pull myself back and focus instead of barreling through with half-assed glances.  This whole “teach myself the history of the internet and the history of video art in one semester” thing is daunting.  Fun, but hard work.  Hard fun.  I like that.

On to the big showwwwww!

with much love,
Paul.

THIS IS A GREAT PACKET !!!!!

I think that might be the nicest thing anyone at Goddard has ever said to me.  ;)

I want and need to comment on your voice in these pages. Stronger, more persistent, confident, less “apologetic”. And most exciting to a passion-hungry, work-preoccupied, cut-to-the-chase kinda girl like me… the CLEAN, SURE, PASSION that sings here for what you are WORKING ON, is WONDERFUL !!!  I know that the pain of anniversaries and “same-old-shit-edness” do not fade forever, and might indeed devour you (as they do all of us) from time to time again, but God, Paul, it is so GOOD to hear your breathing through the pain of those “calluses and scars.”

I’ve passed through layers of morning and mourning, and now I’ve emerged the unmedicated no-bullshit Paul who has the ability to exhibit emotion and passion and drive.  I’ve realized that this is the final stretch of Goddard life for me, so I’d best buckle down and get my shit together if I want that degree on time.  It’s fun!  I’m trying to take as big a breath with each inhalation as I can.

You HAVE been busy !!!! (and yes, I too am glad you didn’t get that job!)

Some money would be nice, but I know I’ll be in a better position with this work and a degree under my belt.

Videos: 

Watched all three twice… and yes, can see you playing. That’s GOOD… and now we look to see what might be learned from the ground explored, yes? (Of course you will remember about me that I will “use” the work to interrogate technical and conceptual stuff, without in any way implying or suggesting that you ought to re-cut, or “make them” into something that they aren’t, right?) (Unless of course you want to…)

I’ll certainly do what I want to with these videos, but you have to realize that you’re this great big video art resource wrapped up in this tight little package, and if I get the sense that you’d like to see more done to a project, I’m going to play with it some more, because I want to use your mind and eyes while I still have the chance.  But yes, I understand that your observations and suggestions aren’t directions, and that’s a-ok by me.

The Fun We Can Have with Our Very Own Bodies IS funny and sweet in its way. Also, as you noted yourself, it might be “read” as more than boys playing around with a camera and a sunburn. Could be read… If you wanted it read that way, (and I am not suggesting you should) how would you change it, sharpen it, focus it more intentionally towards drawing out the “political” thread you identify there in the representation of the male body? Would you change the framing? Pull the live sound out? Add perhaps a VO track with “authoritative” voices discussing the “construction of masculinity?” What would happen if you had shot it on a tripod, rather than handheld? What would “shift” in the way it reads, if there was NO sound, or sound which perhaps suggested more invasive touch? Or a better “rendering” of the cock drawn on the body? Or a female hand entering the frame? Or not knowing the fleshy surface was male right away, from tighter framing then a slow zoom out? 

I’m starting to see how a spontaneous moment caught on tape can lead to a whole spectrum of possibilities for new projects.  The chances of those people being in that place under those conditions happening ever again are pretty much nil, but I can see that I could manipulate the situation to make a reasonable facsimile happen.  Would that sabotage some of the hangover fun and sweetness of the concept?  Maybe.  But I love the idea of playing with the gender of the drawn-upon person.  I could use a female voiceover for a male body, a male voiceover for a female body, never revealing until the unexpected zoom out.  I could play with the gender of the marking fingers.  How does a man’s finger marking a woman’s body compare to a woman’s finger marking a man’s body, woman marking woman, man marking man, stick marking human, metal claw marking human, feather duster marking human?  Hell, I think it would be great to sunburn a whole series of men and women of all shapes and sizes and draw things on their bellies.  This is material I can use!  Why have an authoritative voiceover discussing just the construction of masculinity?  I could have an authority speak about the construction of femininity as well, or even speak of the construction of humanity.  As the great DVDA once sang: “What makes a man, a manny manny man?”  I want people of all shapes and sizes and colors.  I’m definitely secreting this idea away in my vast funhouse of future projects.

This brings me to the questions you address to yourself re: the cat/dog piece…those about “quality, experimentation, good composition, and interesting aesthetic”. And yes, I think playing around is GOOD… I also suspect that it is from such wild and “witless” play (by witless I mean not burdened by intention beyond that one to “see what happens if…) that emerges those other “works” we make where we have both the looking and the “making” language to move toward “craft”. 

I’ve already found elements of the unexpected in the six-ish projects I’ve made so far this semester while just “playing” that I intend to explore deeper and use in subsequent works.  Just from the first packet to this second packet, I’ve done so much more with “consumed” than I’d ever intended for the video.  I can definitely see myself playing with that one for quite a while.  This semester is such a marked contrast from my previous three semesters (discounting last semester’s two videos) in that I don’t have some gigantic project already in mind that I feel a need to complete by the end of the term.  There’s nothing like “To Wound” or “The Stillness” on my burners right now, and it’s a peculiar kind of freedom.  I really never know where my inspiration for my next project will come.  I couldn’t have told you a month ago that I’d be sending you a video about cows, a video about stuffed animals, and a re-working of “consumed” for this packet.  It feels good to have not planned it all out.  At the same time, I’d feared that such freedom would be a great big creative stumbling block, because I’d assumed that I’m the kind of person who needs structure, needs an end goal and a deadline to work effectively.  I’m having a blast with these little projects, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I can see some pretty awesome things emerging from what might at first seem innocuous little projects.  I’m not afraid to play anymore.

This is muscle-building for the “eyes” as well as for the “hands”. Language building, skill building, the building of “desire” for a tight/refined/best practice object which is graced with both a looseness and a lightness of touch. Does this make any sense? 

It makes perfect sense to me, and I’m reminded of a concept Negroponte discusses in his “Being Digital”(see Resources): “hard fun.”  I think that bastard’s stolen your concept of “rigorous play,” Ms. Hall.

Consumed…It is CLEAR you are making decisions about focus…. Using it to explore something, rather than allowing whatever kisses the lens to “be itself”. This piece has some agonizingly beautiful shots in it, Paul. The water line creeping slowly towards your eye, quite took my breath away.  And of course, here I WANTED MORE… more focus, so that when you pulled to “out of”, we could “remember” the clarity of that image…
MORE time… longer sequences… to hold the tremulous intimacy of that “drowning” …
That open fragile eye, inviting … The shots with the glasses worked less effectively for me (she shouts RE-SHOOT, RE-SHOOT) But I can smell how powerful a combination they might be with the “naked” eye shots in the water. Are you pulling focus in the camera or in post? Do you have it all in perfect focus? My god, this one is worth working on or from or longer …. Quite “profound” terrain … the eye, the lens, the vision, the “seeing”, being seen, of it.

As stated above (or maybe below, I tend to write these things back and forth), I intend to play with “consumed” much more, including the second version I’ve included in this packet and at least a third I’ve already begun piecing together in my brain.  Focus, focus, focus…  Yes.  Focus was the main motif of this project, if only because it was hard to focus the camera while holding it above my head in the bathtub.  The results on tape were unexpected but appreciated.  The glasses shots are more problematic and less effective, I agree, but I think they’d be less so for you if you could see the pure source that is far too big to upload, which exhibits a striking clarity in the in-focus moments.  I took those shots to play around with the wrinkles around my eyes.  The camera was on a tripod, and I moved closer and farther away, playing with both the focus through the camera lens and through the glasses lens. The skin behind the glasses goes from a blurry sort of flesh-colored mud to a hyper-focused expanse of pores and wrinkle ridges and eyelashes.  For the next packet, I’ll try to burn you all of my projects so far to dvd and send it so that you can really see what I’m seeing.  None of the focus stuff was created in post.  In the new version of “consumed,” I’ve made more of a concerted effort to play with the speed of each shot and their alignment to preceding and successive shots.  I think there’s some awesome moments of unintentional synchronicity happening in some of those images.

And the voice thing is wonderful, though frankly I cannot remember the “content”…the imagery blew me so deeply. Nice to hear a voice not yours… and YES, that site sounds fabulous to have at your disposal… like a cast of actors to play with.

I hope you find the audio side of “consumed” version two just as interesting.  The Text-To-Speech engine is an amazing little digital toy to play with, just one of many I’ve been stumbling upon as I look around dataspace.

So… video??? ROCK ON, you excellent thing! Play obviously suits you.

Thanks.  You’re neat.  Wanna dance?

Folds:

It took me awhile to “see” the vulva, even looking for it. Fingers are in many ways far more “recognizable” than this other part of the female body. The writing also “calls” both the eye and then the mind of the viewer/reader “away” from the image, what it is, and what the “slicing up” of it might be “about.”  Once “pulled” into the writing, the images seemed superfluous to me. Unlinked in many ways to those, yes often brutal, words. I must ask… How do YOU see these images as “connected” to that writing? What is the intention of such juxtaposition (soft images, hard language)? You say “included along with the images” (to describe the writing from the new novel )But don’t say WHY. As counter-point? As a second layer of transgression? As a way to reduce the images to illustration? 

As the viewer “reads” the folds project, the text on the right of the screen becomes increasingly brutal, bare, honest, yet disjointed, painful, disturbing.  The puzzle-pieces to the left become increasingly “whole,” that is, more and more of the underlying image is revealed.  I’m playing with two opposing layers of transgressive fragments, one visual, one textual.  The vulva imagery is included not only because of the sexual nature of the text, but because each piece as a stand-alone image is intended to be visually interesting, aesthetically pleasing, a study of texture and depth.  As the visual pieces collect and overlap, the eye is drawn into both their arrangement but the slivers of flesh within the images themselves.  That pull into the writing you describe is part of the basic conflict of the piece…  Does the eye want to focus on the images in disarray or the jarring, stomach-churning text?  It was my intention to force the audience to choose between one or the other, the text or the images, yet I know most eyes will be drawn back and forth as successive pages load and more of the visual side is revealed.  Yet as more of the visual comes into play, the text becomes more graphic, more brutal.  In feedback from my online community, more than one viewer has reported that she couldn’t finish “watching” the page; the words were too overwhelming.  Yes, one could argue that the underlying image itself is a form of brutality: the commodification of women within the amateur porn industry, the violent male gaze, the voiding of the feminine interior through the spreading of that most secret and sacred of spaces.  I do hope that some viewers can see beyond the traditional sexuality of the image to the beauty of the colors, textures, the composition of the segments I’ve chosen.  Formalism vs. realism.  It’s an objectification, yes.

As for your “right” to work with vulva images, or write sexually explicit fiction, do you think it is more a question of “rights”, than of intention? Can only women play with vulva imagery and men with penises and testicles? All we makers of meaning “exploit” (yes, USE, manipulate, MASTER in some way… harsh words, eh, from a little bit of thing like me?) the material we work with…trespass on ideas and traditions and assumptions and regulations. I work with vulva imagery; does the fact that I own one mean I have more of a “right” to “go there”? Does it mean I am any less likely to “abuse” or exploit the voyeuristic and sometimes pornographic “potential” in how this culture views female genitalia? (And is it only “okay” for me to “do” vulvas if they are based exclusively on my own?)What are the rights of the “model”? The “responsibilities” of the artist who works with models? (Or with appropriated publicly-accessible vulvas on the web?) Have you thought about doing some reading around this idea of the model, the artist, the pulled from porn image, the ethics?

I remember a reader once told me that he was amazed that chapter two of my second novel, which was written almost exclusively from the viewpoint of a five-year-old girl, was so well-written, because he knew that I hated children and couldn’t imagine that I could ever successfully emulate a child's mind.  That ties in with this idea of ownership; I personally think I have the right to work with any imagery that I might choose, with the realization that yes, intention plays strongly into that.  But it seems at Goddard in my interactions with many students that as a young white heterosexual male at the beginning of the twenty-first century, I’d better watch my fucking step if I want to explore anything beyond my own demographic experience, since I am, of course, to blame for all the world’s ills.  I don’t buy into that namby-pamby bullshit any more than I believe that as an artist I have any more responsibility to work for social change than, say, a plumber.

The extent of my reading in the ethics of this area is in criticism and reviews of Natacha Merritt’s “Digital Diaries” and Mark Helfrich’s “Naked Pictures of My Ex-Girlfriends,” each work in itself an in-your-face depiction of sexuality, although certainly with different intentions and modus operandi.

The “place” that made me most “uncomfortable” with this work, Paul, is the writing of the rape. (And I confess this is neither an “advisor” nor an “artist” response; they both understand well the use and “reporting” of such brutality. It is the [...passage excised...] woman who is both moved and yes, angered, by that passage.)

Anger is most certainly a valid and intended response to that passage.  Want to know what inspired much of that motif?  [...passage excised...]  There’s something that breaks in a moment like that, a heart so flooded with anger, no, fury, blind fury.  Interesting how the heart pounds even now and I can feel my heartbeat in my neck.  I’ve been filled with little moments of over-emotion, and I vented a fraction of that into that passage, attempting to describe the horror of the situation, albeit in a cold, fact-filled narrative.  I realize now that passage would be the worst to try to read taken out of context from the rest of the novel within which it appears.  The victim of that scene is the antagonist of the trilogy, and I’m attempting to depict the backstory that created her present form, perhaps giving the reader some understanding as to how she became who she is, perhaps offering a modicum of empathy for her.  All I strive for in life is for my words to enact the most poignant of emotions, and I know that passage will anger, infuriate, disgust.  It’s unlike anything I’ve written before.

Perhaps if it was not so overpowering, I might have paused long enough to consider what you were “trying to say” by coupling such brutality with such a tender image of such a tender place.  Some “readers” I fear, would find such brutality arousing…would see the renting asunder beside that fragile pinkness as a “turn on”. As a woman, honestly, that frightens me. 

Some readers would certainly react as such, but one would hope no more readers would find this particularly arousing than would attempt to fellate Michelangelo’s David.

As an artist and yes, advisor, I want to know what you were “hoping for”. Yes, your intention.

It is my intention to transgress without apology or recompense.  I say this not because I am uncaring or lack empathy; my heart breaks more reading your response to this than I can ever type.  I say this because the book is called “broken” and it’s written by a broken person attempting to shatter things a little more before attempting repair.

And finally, the READING !!!!! My GOD what READING.

It sounds so engaging and as if it EXCITES you to be discovering all this ground and history and yes, “context” for what you have been doing kind of “alone”! Isn’t it fabulous to discover yourself IN a conversation that began before you were born? Am so glad you are dancing with Bill Viola… and just ordered that book for myself today, based on your enthusiasm for it. 

The book was excellent, made even more excellent now that I’ve seen and have fallen in love with “I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like.”  I have to admit, I feel like some might see my work as a rip-off or a fraud, because I see so much in Viola’s work that I’ve been trying to do for so long, without ever even having heard of him.  I’m definitely not saying my work is on par with his, but damn, there’s so many shots and motifs that I always work with that I see reflected through his eyes.

This is incredibly strong work, Paul, which has moved you substantially towards that “contextualizing your practice” piece in the degree criteria/portfolio. 
This IS such a GREAT packet!!!! I haven’t gone back into my files, but think I can recall last semester at some point saying to you (hoping I would encourage you to “greatness”) “Come on, IMPRESS me.”

Well, you have. (Of course now you have set your own bar a little higher… right?)

Again, I thank you for the compliments.  I’m still trying to contextualize, but I’m feeling more and more confident as I read, see, do.  I’m trying my damnedest to impress you.

Video:

• consumed. (v.2)
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/consumedwmv01.wmv
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/consumedmpg01.mpg
• This new version is a re-working of the original.  I’ve lengthened it by half again, and I’ve really tried to focus on extending certain shots and playing with the focus.  I have even more footage to work with in the defocused/focused eyes vein, and I intend to keep reworking this project for each packet.  I’ve never before really played like this, just pushing the images and not settling on one version.  It’s uncomfortable; I don’t like my body, my face especially, and this playing heightens that dislike.
• moo.
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/moompgweb01.mpg
• Having grown up on a farm and worked long hours there for the last seventeen years, I know all about cows.  When I took my camera back to the farm and got some footage of two heifers standing outside the back gate of the barn, I knew I had to use it for something different when one, and then the other licked the lens of the camera.  This video is a repetitive, loopy kind of exploration of bovine texture.  I wanted to show an up-close and personal side of cows that most people have never seen.  I know the tangibles of those animals: the pebbled noses, rough, prickly tongues, the soft hair of the chin and the place behind the bone ridge where they just love to be scratched.  I wanted to make something that could attempt to depict those textures for people who’ll never be within miles of cows.
• The Lonely Bear: Knocked Up!
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/ostrichwebmpg01.mpg
• There’s not really a whole hell of a lot to discuss with this project…  People seemed to like “The Lonely Bear,” so I made another in what I see as a series of Lonely Bear videos.  This is a different kind of video because the creativity lies not in the arrangement of interesting images and sounds, but in the storyline.  I’m not used to working with such an exposed narrative.  The images become secondary, hence the shoddy camera work and visible fingers as I manipulate the stars of the show.  The soundtrack was assembled from clips I found on a public-domain audio site (http://wavcentral.com/) and the snooty-sounding narrator is a TTS construct.  I can’t think of much to say about this video except for that it was fun to play, like a return to an old friend, whom the Lonely Bear of course is.

Audio:

• moo.
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/moomp301.mp3
• I wanted to create a soundtrack for the “moo” video that would highlight the placid nature of the animals yet still offer enough aural excitement to keep the audience listening.  This track started off with the good old AT&T TTS (Text-To-Speech) voice engine online (http://www.research.att.com/projects/tts/demo.html), which I used to create the human voice segments.  I’ve been playing around with a multi-track loop processor, Ableton Live 2.0.1, and I used it to assemble the rest of the tracks.  I recorded the musical elements into a *.wav and mixed it down with the vocal tracks in CoolEdit Pro.  The end result is a fast-paced little techno number that I suspect no one would associate with cows. 
• consumed.(v.2)
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/denialconsumed01.mp3
• There are two surviving elements to the soundtrack to the first version of “consumed” from last packet (http://www.offensemechanism.com/consumesmp301.mp3), the TTS track of the British-sounding lady, and the recording of myself.  This new version is a deceptively-simple re-working of the original.  I dropped out the altered guitar tracks and a bunch of the vocals and added in a segment of a choral track from the “American History X” soundtrack, looped and merged and overlapped into a shifting, shimmery aether.  The whale sounds are actually my voice slowed way the fudge down.  I took three identical Paul-voice tracks, kept one pure, altered one to exhibit incremental speed-up, and altered the other to exhibit incremental slow-down.  Place them all on top of each other where they overlapped.  Mixed all of that down into a soundtrack that I feel is far more effective given the visual element of the “consumed” project.

• http://www.paulevanhughes.com:
• I’ve begun incorporating some new elements into my old pages, little visual elements that I’ve found in my searches for digital art and elements that I’ve found as references in the various digital media texts I’ve been reading.  On the new index page of paulevanhughes.com, I’ve replaced the static images of myself that once were there with the fading picture slideshow from last semester’s “faces” digital project.  The new background image of the page is a self-portrait constructed of zeros and ones.  I created that image (http://www.paulevanhughes.com/paulfront07.jpg) using an online ASCII-to-html conversion program located at: http://www.text-image.com/convert/.  I think it’s fascinating that this program can take visual information and translate it into html code, which can then be pasted into any editor, or copied directly as an image into a graphics program, as I did.  Another new element of the page is a scrolling highlighter that I half-assed re-coded from javascript taken from another page.  All these elements are just experimental right now, and I intend to use them in stand-alone digital visual projects in later packets, especially the ASCII/html translator.

• No significant editing progress to report at this time.  Other things beckon.

Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

• Finished the book.  Highly recommend it if you’re at all interested in seeing one vision of a future where technology and genetic manipulation have merged into an omnipresence, a cultural phenomenon that begins to echo religion.  Atwood exhibits a playfulness with her writing that I really appreciate.  I know a lot of readers can’t stand it when an author takes the time to really use words.  “Use words…”  Does that make sense?  To me, if words only have one arrangement or meaning, that’s pretty boring.

• Right now, I’m reading Diedre Boyle’s essay on the history of documentary video.  She’s focusing on the early experimentation in the medium that resulted in street video, community video, guerrilla video, alternative television and video essay, remarking that documentary video has always “tended toward a radical pluralism.”  I can appreciate that early documentary video artists embraced the medium as a comparatively cost-effective way to get right into the middle of the action and subvert the dominant television culture from within.  What I don’t really understand and always have trouble with is the implication that any artistic medium (in this case, video) has an innate ability to expose social injustices and an inherent responsibility to work for social responsibility.  Just because I own a video camera, is it my duty to use it to undermine The System or The Man?  I don’t think I have any more obligation to work for social change than anyone else, say, a painter or a plumber or a milkman.  I think that tying a medium to a socio-political viewpoint is bullshit.  Perhaps the part of this essay that I enjoyed the most was the admission that many video artists, once the government-mandated free cable broadcast time dried up in the mid-1970s, decided to instead join The System and work for television stations themselves.  It’s that sellout mentality that really makes me smile: as long as The Man is paying for it, I can feel free to bitch openly, but when the money dries up, I might as well work for him.  Anyways, I’m finding this book helpful in not only providing a historical reference in terms of video art developments, but in the development of the technology that allows video art.  I love that stuff, and reading about the development of various cameras and video stock really puts my present digital video practice into perspective.

• There was a moment when I first picked up Chip Delany’s “Dhalgren” and I realized that his writing style was everything that I’d been aspiring to.  It was a moment of utter appreciation and inspiration.  I felt that same exact way when I first watched Viola’s “I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like.”  It’s a feeling of home, a great big slap on my forehead, a realization that oh, this is what I’ve been trying to do, and this man did it decades ago.  I’m finding it difficult to put into words just how powerfully this video moved me.  Critics could remark that Viola’s five-chapter project is far too self-indulgent, spends too long lingering over still images, almost to the point that it can be confused with still photography.  It’s gorgeous!  Every chapter just drips with Viola’s eye.  It’s tangible, overpowering, maddening.  I’ve never seen a video like this, something that’s helped me to take a closer look at my older projects, that desire to linger over texture, to seek stillness, to illuminate the beauty of the mundane, the sublime, the profane.  It was one thing for me to read Viola’s “Reasons For Knocking At An Empty House” for the last packet.  Finally seeing it was unbelievable.  I’m gushing like a schoolgirl who’s just been kissed by the members of N’Sync, but Jesus Fuck, this video is everything I’ve been trying to create!  Memorable images: the birds, the birds!  The eyes of the birds.  Viola reflected in the owl’s eye.  The spatial confusion of the opening shot: water reflected, entered, reflected.  The tender dismemberment and consumption of a fish for dinner.  The elephant grabbing the teacup: ha!  My visceral reaction to scenes of ritual body mutilation and fire-walking.  Each shot is striking in its composition, the purity of the video signal, Viola’s aesthetic choices.  It’s hard for me to imagine that such a crisp image could come from a video camera in 1986.  Humbles me.  Maybe that’s one of the main issues…  I’m in awe of this artist because of the technology he had available and the way he used it because it definitely puts every “crisp” digital video I’ve seen to shame.  Anyways, I love him and that’s that, and now I have a video hero.  I can only hope I’ll find more artists just as inspiring as I continue this survey.

• I’ve now finished this book, which although I didn’t find particularly interesting or helpful, I can appreciate the way Negroponte was looking forward at the possibilities of a digital world, and how his prescience came to light in many areas.  The most interesting part of reading the book and the paperback-edition updated afterword is comparing Negroponte’s vision with What Actually Happened.  I don’t think anyone could have anticipated the late-1990s internet boom and bust.  His focus is on high-definition television, virtual reality, and computerized homes where toasterovens, refrigerators and entertainment systems will operate under an integrated artificial intelligence to make life easier for everyone.  This was a good read because Negroponte works with the MIT Media Lab, and when read in contrast to Tim Berners-Lee’s account of his invention of the internet, it gave me an excellent handle on the atmosphere within the circles that created the digital world within which I operate daily.  All in all, this book would be an excellent primer for someone who’s been living in a cave (specifically, a cave without internet access) for the last twenty years.

• Video Data Bank’s summary: “Three nuns in dark sunglasses sit at a table playing cards while a nurse is interviewed about "what death looks like” on the soundtrack. As the nurse speaks, in medical detail, of death as a natural process, the nuns sit with party hats on their heads and lit birthday candles stuck in bananas. On Death and Dying is a mocking and macabre look at the institutions of death—how hospitals and religions “manage” death. The tape resolves in the conclusion that “death is a job that you do by yourself.””
• Paul Hughes’s summary: I’ve watched the tape three times now, and for the most part I feel I’ve just lost a little hour of my life that I can’t ever get back.  I went into the viewing process with high hopes, given Montano’s “Mitchell’s Death,” but I left severely disappointed, and I’m not sure if it’s because 1.) the copy of the video I watched was of horrible quality, 2.) the visual content of the video just pissed me off or 3.) I just didn’t “get it.”  So let’s see…  What did I see?  Three nuns playing cards at a kitchen table.  On the table: three bananas with birthday cake candles stuck into them.  After the card game was over, the nuns put on paper hats and set the candles on fire as the lights dimmed.  By far, the most visually-interesting part of the entire video was the way Montano played with the light of the candles, swirling the camera around and letting the flames create a circular afterimage on the screen.  Then a fade to black, which made me happy.  I must report that the soundtrack was by far the best part of the experience for me, an interview with an elderly woman who had spent fifty years as a nurse recounting her experiences with death and dying, from the moribund body to the moment of death to the immediate and longer-term effects of death on that body.  It was this voiceover that kept me watching and ultimately led me to disregard the images on the screen.  I read the VDB description of this video and I just don’t see it.  “Mocking and macabre?”  I’m doing my best and trying my hardest to watch this video with an open mind, but I have to acknowledge the fact that I’m having a hard time connecting the images of card-playing nuns to the poignant voiceover.  The visual became a distraction, made me angry, made me turn away.  I think it’s safe to say that death and dying are a recurring motif in my own video art, i.e. To Wound and The Stillness.  I don’t find anything interesting about the juxtaposition of nuns playing cards and wearing paper hats and setting banana candles on fire to the voiceover of an old ex-nurse talking about the moment of death.  I don’t know what Montano’s trying to say.  Something about traditional Christian views of the dying process and the post-death experience?  A rebirth via banana candles?  Are the cards a trivialization of our own fears of dying?  I don’t like the trivialization of death.  I’ve had far too many deaths in my life these last two years to take this project seriously at all.  Maybe that was the intent: to get me all worked up.  Another thing that I disliked was the seeming lack of any technical proficiency with the medium.  Perhaps this was a stylistic choice on Montano’s part, but twenty minutes of unfocused zooms and pans, bad edits, static on the screen just doesn’t interest me.  It’s interesting to see how far the medium’s come, though.  I know I’ve been accused of self-indulgent and lingering imagery, but this is imagery I wish she’d not lingered upon.  I just don’t get it, and I’m not afraid to admit that.

• An interesting essay I found through hippocrit.com from the creator of newmediaghetto.org.  Hippocrit.com itself has some amazingly immersive and innovative digital projects up, things you could conceivable spend hours exploring, projects I aspire to.  In his essay, Swanson laments the current state of digital art as one of fetishized, overly-self-referential masturbation.  He focuses almost explicitly on software art instead of digital multimedia art, comparing and contrasting current software art to the “process” art that emerged in the 1960s that shifted focus from end products to the production of the art itself.  Swanson argues that current software art (using examples such as spider programs that pull content from user-definable search forms or traffic tracking programs that visually re-present the distribution of traffic on a web page) isn’t innovative and in fact represents a redundant exploration of processes that have been in place since the birth of ARPAnet.  Succinct, filled with theory buoyed by humor, Swanson does an excellent job for arguing against the boring process-oriented current trend of dataspace visualization in digital art.  He also makes an excellent point that “new media” should be referred to as “digital media,” since at the turn of the last century, “new media” referred to photography, and it’s not really a good idea to incorporate a temporal locator into the defining term for a medium that will itself define the art of this century and all to come.