giveMeASec_thoughts

Introduction:
A seagull wanders by a lake, thinking to take off in the next second but it hesitates.
The work describes a daily panic in the flow of time caused by the paradox between our internal and external self.

Description:
With a rhythmic repetitive chant of a list of phrases descriptive of states of individuals pondering before taking actions with an awareness of the flowing time, a video shows a seagull facing a lake, hesitating to fly away. And in the next scene, the seagull stands in the middle of the lake, although there’re other birds swimming/flying around, it still stops there. Suddenly its reflection in the lake flies away, leaving the still entity there. Then after a while, the seagull entity disappears in the middle of the lake.
The flowing lake is a representation of time. The states of the seagull and its reflection represent the paradox between our external and internal beings. Sounds are live-manipulated by the performer’s mouth and a rotating clear vessel with water in it. The mouth responds to the state of ‘speaking with hesitation’ and the spinning water responds to a flowing time.

The videos and sound environments are coded and amplified in Max, while receiving messages from an openFramework faceOSC and a phone GyrOSC.

What could be further developed:
1. Who is the performer? Where is the stage (performance)?
In this performance, I didn’t sophisticatedly consider the relationship between me and the projection. In fact, both of the video projection and me(with my mouth and the spinning vessel) were the performers, which meant we were supposed to watch by the audience. But I set up as me sitting by side of the projection. So during the performance, I found that the audience was a bit distracted jumping between the two ‘stages’. When they were watching me, they might miss the part of the video that I wanted them to watch, vice versa when they chose to watch the video. So next time I reckon I’ll change the set up as me sitting in front of the projection, facing the audience so that they could see both.
2.
And because I wasn’t able to see the performing video when I performing, the part to find the right position during the performance to overlap the pre-filmed video and the live webcam video of my mouth became an issue. So as suggested, next time I would use a small camcorder as a mirror to monitor the video projection behind me.
3.
Comparing with the others performance, I felt like the ‘liveness’ part in my performance was not quite enough. (As it was like half pre-edited, half live-manipulated.) I meant I still like the narrative I created, but I felt like watching a ‘finished film’ in a live performance, the audience might not as engaged/focused as to watch live generated visuals? Actually, this is quite a significant question raised after I started doing this project. Can a film really be fitted in a live performance? What’s the proper form to do it?
Through doing this project, I realized that although they both are moving images, the cinematic film and the visual of audio-visual are different things. The cinematic film makes sense by the relationship among the contents, the signifier-signified in it. Whereas like Kandinsky’s drawing, the moving image of audio-visual is abstract, and it makes sense by the arrangement of the elements’ position, shape, color, texture, form, to affect viewers’ perception. (Like notes in music)
And many of the functions in Max Jitter, blending, changing scales, positions, colors, frame-dividing, twisting, etc, obviously work for the latter. So the question is, can these variations of forms bring variation to the meanings in narrative films? After the experiments in this project, my answer is that they can, sometimes, but not much. But then after the performance, I was also thinking, How many/ how strong narrative I need for the videos in a live performance? Giving too much weight on the cinematic narrative would make the thing more like a film in a cinema, rather than a live performance. So then where is the balance, between cognition and perception?

I’m going to keep exploring these questions. More than welcome if anyone has any thoughts or suggestion to share!