March 31, 2015 - 09:42
For this web-event, I want to exercise my hand at trying some new genres/forms of visual imagery, particularly in experimenting with the presentation of “nature” through video. I want to combine the meditative and contemplative—being caught up in silences, in beauty, in ugliness, in “feeling ‘wren’” as Gary Snyder puts it *—as well as attempting break the dichotomy between words as a form of “culture” “versus” the non-human language of “nature”. To do this, I’m thinking of using sound (in the language of the trees and of humans, in the ) as the primary vehicle for the film’s narrative, which images then accompany (or feel disjointed from).
I know the video will likely be only a few minutes long, but I want to experiment with breaking away from the BBC Planet Earth-type “I explain nature to you”, or the near-nature/culture dichotomy posed by Baraka and Samsara to look for something more embedded in experience, something that challenges my own “otherizing” of nature outside myself, something that is also playful language (e.g. “it’s winging”). What can we learn by watching the leaves, by playing with twigs, by zooming in and zooming out of the campus ecosystems? There should be no single central character, no specific narrative arc.
If not a video, then maybe a juxtaposition between still photographs and audio…? Or maybe it would be interesting to focus solely on decay, death, and what we fear as "ugliness"?
I have too many big ideas that need to be brought back to the ground—anyone want to team up/help me?
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* Gary Snyder, A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds (1995, p. 179)