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We''ll Find Ourselves Not So Far Away

    With an assignment asked to respond to the notion of time becoming the new space, and of a society where we “march backwards to our own death” (McLuhan 63), it was inevitable I present a video portraying a fragmented journey. 



    I was fascinated by what McLuhan was saying, and just how well it holds up to this day. What we as a global society face, the consequences of our own actions—it’s doomed to implode through our self-designed, structural failures. We can’t build more with fixed materials available while remaining sturdy. We began as tribal worlds established from the here and now, to the fixed individual developed through printed literature and the vanishing point of visual representations. We’re facing a global return to a tribal culture, and the interaction of human-created media upon the discord of this transition is something that fascinates me personally. Modern media has erased the vanishing point that furthered the perspective of the individual, and brought the entirety of reality to our immediate attention—making everything our entire world. 
    
    The video is a journey through being real in this world marching backwards—a world trapped in the print media’s 2D, self-centered perspectives trying to cope with the 3D/acoustic space. One of my favorite visual inclusions that portray this well can be seen in the transition from the painting clip to a shadow interrupting a rainbow against a column, as if seeing a call-and-response between the Vanishing Point Perspective and the new Real World made of interactions such as these. The Parthenon recreation set against not just an urban downtown, but dumpsters, is another interesting juxtaposition of these discordant realities.


    The beginning features other people interrupting a window view, introducing others as interacting features in the film. Their taking up of the liminal frame space centers Us, the viewer, in the story. It cuts to a shadow walking up the stairs, fading from an illustration into a closer facsimile of a real figure—a shadow. These cuts repeat throughout a series of vignettes, the subject walking ever so slowly closer and closer to a real person, their Real Self—always back to the stairs. I as the fade of the scenes creating an atmosphere as if it’s a process for the subject to cut/separate cleanly from the world around them, filtering it through the designed perspectives of the past until they emerge, as if walking upstairs to be by themselves.

 
    The audio was carefully chosen to highlight specific intentions of my approach to the narrative. The video begins leaving for Nashville from Milwaukee to the audio sounds of the frozen pipes waiting for us the last night of our stay, cutting briefly to the actual event, the pilot. I like that this feels like it acknowledges the existence of other people in our immediate world, yet also as clear background characters (pure environmental development) as we examine the old perspectives against a new world. The shadow returns to the sounds of my cat sleeping in our little world at home just a few days before we left, and as we hopefully assume, remains in such as state Now. The departure is set to the noise of the refrigerator at the AirBnB we stayed at, with my response to McLuhan.   

  • To recap the response aspect? I’m hoping a work echoing his sentiments in agreement is enough.
  • Genevieve


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