As I enter my G4 semester at Goddard, I feel fortunate that I’ve been given the opportunity to once again work with advisor Pam Hall.  My G3 semester was frustrating in that technological breakdowns hampered my desire to engage in rigorous play with the medium of digital video.  In retrospect, I do value the paths down which the loss of my camera led me; I recognize that often, artists become obsessed with the tools that they use to create instead of forging ahead and exploring the many possibilities for creative exploration and growth not tied to a technology or medium.

 In my fourth semester at Goddard, I intend to step away from the rigid and somewhat limiting production of lengthy narrative digital videos and instead focus on advisor Pam Hall’s concept of “rigorous play.”  Since I first began working in digital video, my artistic practice has always been fundamentally rooted in the production of end products.  This semester, I intend to produce several dozen shorter pieces that instead of consciously dealing with a particular issue, as several of my previous projects explored loss, suicide, resignation, and surrender, return to the playful exploration of the digital medium itself.  I feel that this is a critical part of new media that I never truly recognized or approached in much of my previous work.  I am in essence taking a creative step backwards to “play” with the medium so that I might incorporate what I find during this less-structured exploration of digital video into future projects.

 I envision this playful spirit as a series of much-shorter works that do not directly confront narrative, time constraints, or my prior creative motifs.  This will be a conscious departure from my earlier darker themes in favor of simple explorations of what the digital video medium can accomplish.  I would like to explore animation, both two-dimensional and three-dimensional, with graphics, objects, sculpted figures, etc.  And this semester, I feel confident that I can work around any technological troubles with the support and resources provided by the Goddard community.  Where once I felt a certain helplessness, a certain excision of my creativity because of a dead digital camera, now I can acknowledge that loss can bring with it opportunities and unforeseen avenues of exploration.

 I am prepared this semester to not only engage in the creation side of video art, but also I intend to begin a thorough exploration of the history of the medium so that I might better contextualize my own practice within the larger community of video artists.  I intend to accomplish this not only by reading and viewing, but reaching out to my fellow Goddard video artists and drawing from them the resources and inspiration that I will require to begin to see my own video art as but a small part of a thriving community.  The history and theory of video art is an arena that I intend to explore in depth.  This exploration will help me to not only to play with the medium, explore more depth in my own video work, become familiar with other artists, and learn the critical and historical vocabularies of video art.

 I intend to continue to build upon the resurrender.net online network, a virtual community I first built in 1996.  In February of 2003, I facilitated the resurrenderNOLA03 conference in New Orleans, where members of my network finally gathered to meet in the offline world.  For my practicum, I had community members videotape and interview each other.  This semester, I hope to begin editing together the documentation of that event.  The practicum itself ushered in resurrender: phase two, a series of offline gatherings hosted around the world for members of the community.  The practicum has been the focus of my interest in the transgression of worlds: What happens when the virtual and physical worlds collide?  What happens when the line between public and private space blurs?  Those are only two of the central occupations of my art.

 I would like to begin exploring the ethics of my artistic practice this semester.  Many of my projects involve found audio, photographs, and text drawn from chat and instant message dialogues and emails.  I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I am perfectly willing to incorporate just about any electronic communication between myself and others into my video and online projects.  What I’d like to do is engage in an intensely-intro- and retrospective analysis of the implications of this use of private exchange in a public domain, and the ethical and legal ramifications of such usage.  I find this line of exploration particularly meaningful in these awkward times ruled by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the intense debate over intellectual property copyright.

 While continuing my study and research of Samuel Delany, I intend to broaden my reading of speculative fiction to many other acclaimed and emerging authors in the field.  At the same time, I will continue to write the third and final book of my silver series of sf novels, Broken.

 Last semester, I began creating a series of interactive experimental web pages that incorporated text, audio, video, still images, and manipulated code into an audience-manipulated new media experience.  I would like to continue working on that series of pages and expand it into a lattice of experience through which viewers can explore at their own paces and on their own paths.  I am very intrigued with the idea of creating interactive sites that are viewer-specific experiences, never once being exactly the same for anyone.

 I realize that the goals I’ve set for myself this semester won’t be easily-attained.  I am energized and confident that I can successfully engage in both rigorous play and rigorous work.  This semester offers me the opportunity to not only intensely explore my own practice, but also those of others, in an attempt to synthesize the often-diverging strands of my own talents and interests and contextualize my own practice within the vibrant and vital video art community.
 
 

Paul Evan Hughes
MFA-IA, G4
Preliminary Resource List: Fall 2003.
 

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

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

Berners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web. San Francisco: Harper, 2000.

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

Delahanty, Suzanne, ed. Video Art. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1975.

Dertouzos, Michael L. The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do For Us. San Francisco: Harper Business, 2001.

Dertouzos, Michael L. What Will Be : How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives. San Francisco: Harper, 1998.

Deutsch, David. The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes-And Its Implications. New York: Penguin, 1998.

DiMattia, Joseph. The Self: American Video Art Concerning Identity: Psychological, Sexual, and Ethnic. Helsinki: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992.

Hafner, Katie. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

Helfrich, Mark. Naked Pictures of My Ex-Girlfriends. New York: Consafos Press, 2000.

Huffman, Kathy. Video, A Retrospective, 1974-84. Long Beach, CA: Long Beach Museum of Art, 1984.

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

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media.  Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002.

Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.

Price, Huw. Time's Arrow & Archimedes' Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time. London: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Scholder, Amy, ed. Interaction: Artistic Practice in the Network. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2001.

Tapscott, Don. Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation.  New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999.

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.