Seeing is Believing

“In terms of the constitution of the field, for example, the anxiety is not so much that
the borders will be invaded by inappropriate others (as with traditional disciplines), but that
the borders will themselves be inappropriate.” S. Ahmed

I think about using the genre/aesthetic of sci-fi because of its flexibility as a story telling device. It allows characters and elements to expand or contract at sometimes unintended junctures to serve some useless plot contrivance, other worldly “logic,” or allegorical precision. One thing that I have picked up on from certain works, is the ability for the external circumstances to become reflections/representations of the internal lives of the characters. I started with the prospect of communicating through electro-telepathy. That the characters would be able to freely enter whatever served as the imagination, memory, or emotional space of the others assuming that they knew where to look. A fascination with telepathy, portrayed as the ability to see into the minds of others, their “inner-most” parts, seems somewhat unremarkable with the proliferation of constant mediation; surveillance, reality, vlogs, social networking. Memories, desires, thoughts, are always already at least partially constructed by videos, films, images. What would it mean to “take back the airwaves?” To rethink/remake “sense”? To understand, manipulate, thrive and derive pleasure from affect.
I have chosen to focus on queer/trans-masculine people of color because coming to know myself using variations on these terms, rather than forming an identitarian entrapment has given me access to a queer sort of phenomenology.

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So I met with the folks who are, for the most part, going to be in front of the camera. I think that everyone is excited, but I still feel a little behind in terms of developing scenes or whatever. I'm trying hard not to push it because I know that I have a couple of ones that I really want to do already. One featuring St. Agatha. I am having the hardest time right now with what I have been thinking about as the "connective tissue" between my conceptual elements and the whole sci-fi metaphor, but I don't feel like I want to abandon it. I am trying to get comfortable with the idea that I can't solve these kinds of problems in one day. Blah blah wah.

Mystery

You can't really see what it is, and it is a long way from being finished. Meeting with the "cast" tomorrow. What am I going to tell them? I'm nervous, not so much about making a good impression, but seeming like I have my shit together enough for them to trust me.

BOO

The stop motion project was a total failure. I think it was a combination of neglecting to black the tape, and not having a camera that took still images. Really annoying.

Optical thermn

I made two of these. I am excited about building more sets. I just need stuff and $$. I'll be pondering a get rich quick scheme all day. I think that I have a lot of the conceptual work down. That you Hira for reminding me of that. I just need to figure out how to get some structure. It has to come.

HVD

Labial Cave

It is kind of hard to take a picture of this with my computer camera, but I built another of the miniature sets today. I definitely still need to make a couple more, and am feeling pretty excited to do so. I think that this one came out really well even though Knox is right, the box shape is a little awkward.





I also finally finished revising my DART application even though it is not due until like Feb. 25 or something. How will getting money in March even help me at all? Especially since they only pay you if you have receipts. Also, maybe I am just really incompetent, but I cannot get my camera to record?

One.day.at.a.time.

Pacing

"I am conveying stories about my personal experience based on other people’s stories. It is as though I am channeling community stories or collective experience-it is mine but it also belongs to other people and I can filter it through my creative lens."

-Pepón Osorio (La Bicicleta, above)

So I know that I still have so much to do, and I am continually going back and forth between feeling like I have absolutely nothing and trying to trust in "the process." I kind of feel lost about the best way to move forward right now, and I don't know if I actually have a reasonable schedule to work with. I haven't even really started shooting yet, I lost a camera that had a lot of stuff on it, and I am relying more on other people when I haven't even done that much yet. I really need to get moving on stuff, but wheeerreee/whaaaat. I keep losing either motivation or inspiration. They don't seem to be coming together much. I don't have any actors, no leads what so ever, and I don't know if it is because I actually prefer it to not be strangers or if I am just delusional? I feel like I am the only person with no footage right now, and I don't know why that is. Trying to stay positive and focus. I learned how to use InDesign. Ugh. I think I need to just write all my ideas down, even though I have been putting this off because I feel self-conscious about not doing something strictly "academic."
I just need to get over the privilege to be so languishy. Tomorrow I finally pick up a camera, and hopefully it will flow.

DLM

What do I really need to do to move forward with this project? Conceptual groundwork has been laid (I think), a more cogent description of what kinds of visuals/scenes/scenarios. There are a couple of things/images that I am drawn to right now, but I don't know for sure if they go with this particular project. I need to figure out what the future will look like. Concrete to do for Monday:
-contact QPOCalypse Western Mass
-begin compiling background footage/mostly abstract and color, the bottom of three layers (ugh I lost a camera!)
-start a list of locations to make/shoot.

It is hard to work without knowing exactly how many things are going to work together, who, where. So many questions, but luckily I don't feel overwhelmed yet. Work week begins soon.

TGIF

Today I picked up the wood for the screen which is going to be huge 8'x6'. Other than that I haven't accomplished a whole lot, materially or conceptually. The ideas for the characters are beginnign to bleed into one another. I'm hopeful that I will be able to put together something more amorphous and abstract then what I have done in the past. I'm really looking forward to having the screen to experiment with, and coming to terms with the fact that I won't have the imaginary actors that I thought would suddenly materialize. Apparently yesterday was a solar eclipse? I read over Magnetic North today, this book created for a Canadian experimental video show, and it was really uninspiring because video doesn't really work well with books, and it reminded me that there is such a lack of access!


Anyway one of the “characters” who are all melding into each other anyway, I guess if I thought about it that would have been obvious from the beginning, is going to be loosely based on Reed Erickson. He was a trans man who ran a successful lead smelting business or something, but then got involved in all sorts of new age stuff, built the “Love Joy Palace” in Mexico and had a pet leopard named Henry. Most of his biographers are interested in his philanthropy, but I'm more into his bizarre opulence. I think another character will be kind of bratty like Kim Deal.

I am starting to realize that most of this thought work is just preparing me emotionally/mentally and won't necessarily be readable on screen. Except for the jaguar.

“Paradoxically, science fiction is rarely about time. And it is almost never about space. It takes both as a given, infinitely extendable categories, pictured as almost wholly under human control-- and thus, almost wholly unproblematic, even invisible. (It is often about what you can find in them-the specifics of history-but that is something else.) What science fiction often is about is scale, and it uses that infinite fields of time and space to reimagine the past as well as the future.”
-Samuel R. Delany

Last night/today was semi-productive. I finally made the weird crystal enclosure I have been dreaming about. I am not even sure what it is quite for yet. One thing that I have been going back and forth on how to make is the “Oracle/orifice,” and I think the crystal is some kind of communication device. I promised myself that I would, as R. Crumb says, reveal things to myself. The oracle is hard to explain right now, but it has to do with realizing fantasy as integral to psychic development. I was watching Chris Marker's San Soleil which I had never seen before, and I really liked it. “I've been around the world several times now, and now only banality still interests me.” That's what his narrator was interested in, but that's not what mine is looking for. I can tell that this narrator is starting to take voice, even now. You are reading it.
I met with DN who is doing the sound compositions and he always asks me what I will be shooting, and,of course, I can never be straightforward. “Oh just some gay sex and other stuff.” I also met with Brian, who is helping with electronics. He'll be programming an Arduino to control 24 LEDs to blink alternately, and at different levels of brightness. I'll be using the LEDs to construct a light box to illuminate photo transfers.



Sans Soleil
The idea is to simulate the look of film, but without the same kind of movement. I think that Marker uses taxidermied animals as a metaphor for film and its manipulations of time; stuck and mysterious. His favorite animals are cats and owls, and his first name is actually Christian.
Still no actors.

Crystal Light

I still feel a little conflicted about this.

COLOR

I have been trying to work with the idea of visual and (pop) cultural run-off, what that would look like and how it shapes our internal lives. For the installation I was originally thinking that I wanted to include a lot of this run-off, detritus, playing with the idea of substituting object for memory, but recently I have been wanting to pare things down a lot more. I want to paint the walls of the gallery light, light teal. I also want the space to be really brightly illuminated with a light blue light. Like Carlos Cruz-Diez´s Cromosaturación.



It will almost be like living inside of a TV in outer space. Maybe I am getting too far ahead. I still have a lot of work to do (by that I mean start) the script and storyboard. I am also having a really hard time finding people that I want to be in it.

"I think that for many of us in childhood the ability to attach intently to a few cultural objects, objects of high culture or popular culture or both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to those codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival. We needed for there to be sites where the meaning didn't line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and love."

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick "Queer and Now"

I think that making this video is becoming more and more important to me as I look into the parts of it that I sometimes don't want to think about, don't want to put on paper, and really don't want other people to see. It is about finding the magical connection that queer people, not all of them, share between each other, because our insides are sometimes made to work differently. When I think about making a video with three characters, I know that for right now, they will all be different parts of me. When I talk about a magical connection I mean it in the dirtiest of ways too. Like to know what it means to be looked at like that, a hard glare flicked your way. And we know the angles to hold our heads sometimes when we are too tired. So there are lots of bad things that we learn to do to make up for it, and there is a special kind of vision in that. My video will be about the tools that we use, and the memories that we hold on to/make up to re-invent sense. Another thing that keeps getting brought up is pleasure, and how its being annihilated by “the world” but it doesn't want to be. What to do about that?