Another journal

I’m taking classes at the Conceptual Oregon Performance School this summer and I’m a huge nerd. Here are my notes from class and related links. This is a video based class so the majority of the links are videos.

Class notes/discussion topics:

• Initial aspects of endurance: impressing others, consistently topping oneself or others.
• Endurance as viewer: How long will you watch?
  • Once you’ve seen/watched it, you “get” it.
  • Question of the necessity of watching a long form piece in entirety.
    • [see Andy Warhol's “Sleep”, from the YouTube comments: “imagine this 10 minute clip lasting 5 hours, yeah, crazy shit"]
• Watched the San Diego Zoo’s Polar Cam while class read “A Hunger Artist” aloud.
  • [apparently the live cams at night are soothing/interesting, just barely seen waterfalls, abstract night vision]
  • Shift from initial interest in spectacle to boredom.
  • Longer work looses you from finite time frames, allowing you to come and go.
• Everybody can smash a guitar on their head. (Chunky smashes guitar on head) So why do/imitate it?
  • Documenting assholery.
    • Bas Jan Ader, Fall 1 [watched last class]
    • CKY Roof Fall [not a good example, but their early work does reference the masculine body work of folks like Ader]
  • Public interest hasn’t waned, but the bar has risen.
  • Memetic ability
  • Cover band: take a piece of something that is popular/powerful
• Why watch it?
  • Atrocity tourism: this is terrible, do you see how terrible.
  • Why else?
• Günter Brus: Vienese Actionists, 1965 action
• Documenting the challenge, the dare, Guinness Book of World Records
  • John Evans balancing 237 pints on his head
• Japanese game show, “Pass the Critter”
• Sidebar: Shepard Fairey Obey Giant Mayday Jeffrey Deitch
• Criss Angel Mindfreak
  • Beach Trick
  • Buried Alive [this has bonus of my fave California dad, Rob Zombie]

Miscellany:

• During the guitar smash video it was remarked that the room “was perfect” and agreed that to create that same space on purpose for use in a video piece would be difficult. Set dressing is, like costuming, a surprisingly detailed and involved process. It takes work to make something have natural looking detail that informs the piece. Note the falconry (and “avian control” van in the foreground pint-balancing video. You can’t make that shit up.
• WTF video source: Found Footage Festival
• WTF video and edited video source: Everything is Terrible
• WTF edited video source: Four four
  • Video re-edits
  • Terrible hunting
  • Supercuts
  • Random Youtubes
• Supercuts can be definite viewer endurance, due to repetitiveness

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

You can find all the sections here.

Emily reached the thing glinting on the horizon in the afternoon of her third day in the fields. It was closer than she expected. What she’d taken as foreshortening, the buildings sitting small in the distance, had been a trick of the eye. The buildings were just small. The castle, all five stories, was just a touch taller than Emily.

She stood awkwardly at the village’s boundary line, where the tall grass stood like a swaying forest. The villagers, all about as big as dolls, paid little attention to her. Based on outward appearances, this was a village stuck somewhere between the medieval and renaissance era, though there was something going on at the mill that looked Jules Verne-y. She watched the people going about their daily feudal business for a while and finally cleared her throat.

“Hello?” She tried to make eye contact with some of the villagers, like she’d learned in public speaking at school. “I’m here on a mission of great import and would like to speak with your leader.” Emily frowned at herself. Nice, mix your medievalesque and alien interaction cliches. She’d started off better with the grasshopers.

Before she could get fidgety, a voice hailed her from somewhere below her knees.

“What do you want then?” Emily looked down at a regal, if bored, woman squinting up at her. She began to squat down so they could talk more or less face to face, but the woman held up a hand. “Don’t bother.” With a soft hum, wings fanned out from her shoulders and she brought herself up to Emily’s eye level, hovering effortlessly.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.