IN CLASS
Viewing Making Strange exercise.
Discussion of strategies that will be involved in the third project.
EXERCISE: MAKING STRANGE
Video / sound, 2 minutes.
Perform operations on a piece of video that fascinates you, that you want to know more about.
Alternately, perform operations on a piece of video you know really well, in order to change your relationship to/with it.
The video you are working with has been made by someone other than you.
Possible operations (among many others):
Removals: removing part of the image or sound to un-do the structure of the video (cf. Martha Rosler’s If it’s too bad to be true, it could be DISINFORMATION, made with a malfunctioning VCR. Also, see “laugh track removals”).
Super-cuts (multiples): cutting together similar details from different contexts gives these details another kind of importance (cf. Cory Arcangel’s Paganini Caprice No. 5, Christian Marclay’s Telephones)
Re-edit: switching around scenes and shots, changing soundtracks, can have the effect of changing the emotional tenor of a video (cf. “trailer re-edits”, and Martin Arnold’s Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy)
Repetition/looping: repetition displaces an image sequence from its context, allowing it to resonate on its own, making you attend to it differently (see Peter Roehr’s commercial loops, Dara Birnbaum’s Technology Transformation Wonder Woman)
Mash-up: heterogeneous sources are brought together in order to redefine their meaning, create other image and sound affinities, and tell another kind of story, often a hidden one (see Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message; The Message is Death; Arthur Lipsett Fluxes (week 9 folder); Pierre Huyghe The Third Memory)
ALL EXAMPLES IN THE DRIVE
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