Count--Midterm Video Project

I can't get the embed to be the proper size, so here's the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Mez2IXbIHo

Please watch in full screen!

I was inspired by Arnheim in particular to make this piece, although I would argue that the creative process is at the mercy of all the theorists we’ve read (and everything we know…).

“It is indeed a cancer which has destroyed the artistic life of film by distorting its ensemble form.”

Firstly, I’ve not included any sound with the piece. I actually did not record any sound or even have the mic hot on the camera while shooting. This new liberation was comforting and actually gave me a better grasp on the visuals. Also, I wanted this piece to work as a sensation in memory as well as in experience. Sound would’ve created a sense memory—too much information, too much chance for Arnheim’s feared “ambiguity as a liability.”

“Not merely our mind, but all our nervous centers create the world we live in by organizing it.”

Arnheim was among the Gestalt psychiatry camp, so I wanted to explore my own patterning of the world. Without trying to give an interpretation of my own work, I will say that this is how I see the world. This is how my mind patterns and counts many arbitrary things. For Arnheim, the greatest feat filmmakers could try to achieve would be to bring to light a pattern unforeseen through the film medium.

“A close rapport between the world and the mind.”

I wanted to film my process. This is how my brain, to the best of my introspection, organizes data. I achieve it, but I feel nothing. To me, the bridge between the world and the mind is the camera. Closely watch my last sequence—I attempt to make conspicuous my “mind’s eye”.

Arnheim’s 2 failures I attempted to conquer with this piece:

1. “The artist may fail at the level of the material he is supposed to pattern, satisfying himself with the mere reproduction of nature.”

Not that my patterns are incredibly unique, but I achieve the whole from the parts and synthesize my process onscreen. This mirrors Eisenstein’s machine vs. organism theory and is not a natural phenomenon implicit in film form.

2. “The artist may fail at the level of his abstractions, never achieve a singular appropriate pattern for the material.”

Here is where my mind already had the plans laid out. Without crossing into specifics (which would harm the pattern I present), my mind’s process course-corrects for me, even with abstractions. Everything in this piece achieves an arbitrary goal that has consumed my mind since its first dip into the self-aware stage—even down to my idiosyncratic editing loops.

I might not have followed all the explicit warnings and suggestions by Arnheim, but (and I believe Arnheim would agree with me here) I tried to link my pattern/artistic vision to the physical world.