Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Artist Statement – “Untitled”

Brooke Bolding and Jackie Rosen

Our video explores societal attitudes towards mental health, and how those attitudes inform our relationships to people with radically different ideologies.  Othering and mental health were our collaborative focus, both of which pertain to themes of justice.  We collaborated through all aspects of our process, thinking to with a way to represent our topics.  We decided to integrate a newsreel style into our video in order to historicize the treatment and misrepresentation of people with mental disorders.  By then shifting to a more experimental approach, we hope to call attention to the way attitudes about mental health, while seemingly evolved, are still out of date.  The attitudes about mental health inform the language people use all the time when describing people who think very differently from them.  Our video is a radical adaptation of our combined essay.  The modes of representation we employed are primarily performative and reflexive.  We call upon the cultural icon of Nurse Ratched to establish a frame of reference for our audience, which we later challenge.  The most challenging aspect of this project was representing our message visually.

We met because Albert told Steve his old North Face backpack was really fresh.

“Fresh?  You mean like it smells bad?”

“No man, it’s cool.”

Steve looked it up on the web.  Origin: 1980’s NY hip hop, “highly approved by someone”.   Cool, if outdated.

We talked.  Albert’s a 20 year old Muslim who grew up in Yakima.  Steve’s an agnostic who grew up in Ellensburg.  He’s turning 70 a couple weeks after we write this Artists Statement and post it with our video on the blog.  Neither one of us knows jack about blogging, but we guess we’ll learn, as with so much else in this class.

We asked ourselves:  How can a committed Muslim and a committed agnostic work toward mutual understanding?  The question wasn’t “Can we?”  But “How?”   The answer was:  Make a film together about our beliefs.  Do it with good will and respect and we’ll be working toward mutual understanding in the world.

Albert told Steve about Islam, took him to the Mosque, showed him how to pray, talked about heaven and hell.  Steve told Albert about agnosticism—not always easy, because despite being one, he doesn’t often try to explain it in detail.

Our styles are very different.  Steve’s a writer, Albert is a texter.  Albert jumps right in, Steve gets nervous if he doesn’t have a plan.  Albert doesn’t give a rip about recycling; Steve does.  Steve doesn’t give a rip about Hell; Albert does.

But we both do art, we both make music, and we both try to follow the Golden Rule.  We learned a lot making the video, about each other and ourselves.  We spoke openly and listened closely, gradually fading out the debate impulse, cranking up the dialog.  We’re not expecting any big conversions, in ourselves or in the other person, but we’re seeing changes we like.

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Artist Statement

Laberinto

Topic: Our short film Laberinto deals with issues of consumerism, over production, commercialism, and the resulting waste.

How we Addressed S and J: Our film mainly addresses the theme of sustainability. We paralleled this them with images of consumerism and commercialism.

Group Process: Using scripts and location scouting, we determined where we would gather most of our footage, but we hit our stride during digital editing.

Nature of Adaptation: Radical/Experimental

Mode of Representation: Reflexive, Poetic, and Participatory

Stylistic Approach: We decided to experiment with vertical montage, using both dialogue and music, to weave together a cohesive piece of video.

Biggest Challenge: Finding ways to work around time constraints and planning for the unexpected. Also, creating a final piece that makes sense and flows.

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Brian Pizzi
Mellisa Funk

Our topic involves how a binary gender system is presented to us, and how this shapes our societal concept of a default gender.

In the terms of sustainability and justice, acknowledging that as a culture we have adopted a  binary gender system in which males are portrayed as the most normal begins a process in which we can acknowledge individuals disenfranchised by that binary gender system.

The adaptation of our essay intends to present instances in which being given an assigned gender negatively impacts our emotional development as humans. In many ways, the disenfranchised become powerless toys for a society that does not care to acknowledge systematic abuses that might inconvenience day to day life.

The primary mode of representation we used were performative. We talked a lot about how to represent what we were feeling about our own involvement in sustaining a binary gender system, and we also talked about how to record the concepts of isolation, powerlessness, and compassion without taking advantage of anyone. We tried to incorporate instances of reflexivity to acknowledge our role as filmmakers, knowing that a lot of the rules we learn about gender are taught through media. Taking a more poetic license with the piece gave us leeway to experiment with video editing and conceptualizing the piece, which turned out quite different from our film adaptation.

The most challenging aspect of this collaboration was trying to pare down what we wanted to say, and figuring out how to say it with moving images. Finding a voice and learning how to use it effectively are two separate things.

Click here to view the embedded video.

From its beginning, we wanted it to be about Evergreen as an institution where supposedly we as students and faculty aim to, put simply, embody the “Five Foci” in our attempt to learn in ways that allow us to self-determine apart from the social structures and institutions that arrange our behavior into complicity. We also wanted it to be specifically about exercising our freedom to educate ourselves collaboratively. We were asking ourselves a lot of questions. Realizing that the idea of accountability itself can be taken in a lots of ways – the most common seeming to be about spending money ethically or voting – and that the issue of how to work towards ‘social change’ is complex and confusing, we wanted to reflect the need to really think about it both in our writing and our adaptation.

Footage for the video was largely taken while we were actually hanging out and walking, talking about these issues, which was nice because we wanted our video to reflect the practice of discussing, the general plurality of perspectives, and our time spent at both Evergreen and the places where we continue our learning experiences everyday. Spontaneity kind of took precedence over scripting. Only half of what we wrote ended up in our piece, unfortunately, and we also had to omit recordings of conversations and footage from an interview we had last week with activist/writer Kenyon Farrow due to the 7 minute limit.

Nonfiction Media

October 24th, 2012

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Artist Statement:

Korbin and I are both very dedicated filmmakers, because of this our topic focused on the responsibilities and ethics of filmmaking.  We feel this applies to both topics since the representation of humans on screen is an issue of justice and the hegemonic implications derivative media has on society chiefly is a dilemma of how to sustain growth of cultural identity. The two of us spent a large amount of time simply discussing these issues to find a level of understanding between us, and afterward used key terms and emotions we wanted to express in this piece as a guide for our brainstorming.

Our adaptation is heavily radical – we essentially threw the paper out the window and started fresh with all the research and personal insight gained in the backs of our minds.

The piece aimed for poetic, reflexive, performative, and expository modes.

Since we made a film about filmmaking, we wanted to experiment and expand the uses of the medium as much as possible for the sake of the messages we were getting across.

Getting on the same level, and learning to disagree and respect the other’s views of the end product were the biggest challenges.

A film by Joel Nelson and Sean Neagle

Watch a Donkey Fight an Elephant Artist’s Statement

            For our film, Watch a Donkey Fight an Elephant, we focused on the two party system and how it has lead to an un-democratic system of government, which in turn, has lead to greater voter apathy. Our video focuses more on the justice aspect of the program, particularly the idea of just government. Our essay changed a lot based on feedback from our PODS, who helped us clarify our ideas, and address the issues of culpability and what we can do to help. We used our AV script more as a general outline when shooting, leaving plenty of room for improvisation. We were fortunate in that Green Party candidate Jill Stein was speaking on campus while we were shooting, lending more voice to our ideas. Our essay was literal, but we took a more performative route with the video itself. The video also contains some elements of advocacy as well. In general, we tried to make an informative, performative, black comedy with our video. The most challenging aspect for us was writing our AV script. We worked long and hard on it to make our ideas clear, and come up with interesting visuals to go with our text.

ARTIST STATEMENT

The message we were trying to communicate is how only through understanding the repercussions of our actions can we facilitate change, for we cannot care for anything of which we do not know.  The process of creating this piece was a little unorthodox because we disregarded the visuals while writing the script, and disregarded the written script while creating the visuals. The method of adjusting the collaborative essay into a script followed in suit, drastically different, the video hosts a radical adaptation. Despite a somewhat haphazard conception, in the end, things melded together cohesively. The piece predominantly uses the reflexive and poetic modes of representation, with a small element of performative mode. The video is comprised of many shots regarding the environment, and human interaction within it. There are also supplemental moments of abstract representation. The most challenging thing about this project was creating a pre production plan, and following through with it. Additionally, we ran into many technological issues when transferring media, from one workstation, to the next. Ultimately, the project was a success.