Pretty scary stuff -all bits and troubled visions thanks
-----Original Message-----
From: British & Irish poets [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Jim Andrews
Sent: 09 September 2012 20:52
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: self-portraits
I recently got a comission to create a couple of self-portraits for a visual
art show in Vancouver on self-portraiture. The curator saw an earlier
dbCinema piece I did called The Club that incinemates the faces of my
favorite North American politicians, business men, and psychopaths. He asked
me to do related work with photos of myself rather than Jeffrey Dahmer, Paul
Wolfowitz, Russell Williams, George Bush, and the rest of that psychotic,
murderous crew. Which seemed like a remarkably strong opportunity to at
least make an idiot of myself.
Let me show you the 'trailers' to the two resulting videos. What I'd like to
show you are slideshows made of screenshots from the two videos comissioned
by the Surrey Art Gallery in Vancouver. The videos are made of
dbCinemations/collages of 53 images of me from the day I was born to my
current grizzled state at 53 years of age. The Surrey show was called Scenes
of Selves, Occasions for Ruses. The show will run from September 15 (the
opening is from 7:30-9:30pm), 2012 till December 16, 2012. The show was
curated by Jordan Strom.
The first trailer is at
http://vispo.com/dbcinema/selfportrait2/index.htm?n=1 . The video of which
these screenshots are composed used two dbCinema brushes. One of the brushes
'paints' a letter from my name each frame. The other brush paints a circle
each frame. Each of the brushes (usually) paints a different photo. So we
see two simultaneous photos of me being drawn. The man and the baby. Etc. A
brush paints a given photo for several seconds and then paints a different
photo. The slideshow is composed of 47 still images.
The second trailer is at
http://vispo.com/dbcinema/selfportrait3/index.htm?n=1 . The video used one
dbCinema brush: a Flash brush. In other words, the brush was a SWF turned
into a mask. The shape of the brush was a curving, undulating, rotating,
translated line. Each frame of the video, dbCinema rendered one brush
stroke, one rendering of the brush image; the curving line's paint was
sampled from photos of me. The brush would sample from a photo for several
seconds before moving on to another photo. What we're looking at here is not
the video but 17 screenshots from the video.
In the main, the man does not cohere. No coherent person emerges from this
process of forcibly joining/collaging/synthesizing/remixing these 53 photos
of me. It doesn't magically tell me who I have always been. Or does it? Or
if not, what does it suggest? You could say "If you don't know who you've
always been, no piece of art is going to clue you in." Well I do kinda know.
On the other hand, I do seem to tell myself a lot of stories.
It seems what the self-portrait does for me mainly is to problematize the
notion of the existence of a person whom I have always been. The images in
the video are messy. Like birth mess. Perhaps that's part of our discomfort
in life. We're always in the midst of our own birth mess. And death stink.
ja
http://vispo.com
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