alissapajer

It’s like a vacant lot with those little bits
of grass growing greener in the cracks in
the yellow sun. It’s the tiny bits of contrast;
grass on asphalt: the desperate attempt to create
something out of apparent nothing.

And the bottle smashed in the corner by
some kid who knows he’s better, knows
he’s more important, knows that his life
is like the pain of skin burned off on black road:
a line of red blood next to the yellow lines
that cars follow.

It’s the smell of the emptiness: the rotting
human garbage and the composting grapefruit
rinds the neighbor throws out her window
every morning because this lot is not her lot.

Streaks of color: oil spills like rainbows hint
at depth, but they are not deep.
They are want-to-be immensities.

There is a deflated ball with a yellow smiley-face,
cracked by the heat of the sun. Four-square was
yesterday’s game.

there once was moose in nebraska
that walked his way there from alaska
over mountains and rocks
past the plains of the ox
he journeyed on through to itasca*

*a lake in northern MN

This will be my last blog post for awhile. Tomorrow I leave Berlin and begin my wanderings around Europe. For the next few weeks I will have nothing electronic with me; I’ll just bring some clothes, my passport, my wallet, my train pass, a toothbrush, and of course a towel.

(”A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have… any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.” -Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)

In the beginning of this program I set two goals for myself: to consume and to create. I have done both, although I have consumed much more than I have created. This doesn’t bother me, though. I need to consume in order to create.

Often I have heard consumption referred to as an uncreative process: the dead brain sitting in front of the television. Consumption can be a brain-dead process, but it is not one if you think about that which you consume while you consume it. This way you are conscious of how you interpret and experience the world.

I believe in active consumption, not passive consumption.

Well, the end is here. I must go.

I went to a soccer game at the Olympic Stadium. The fans for the Berlin team cheered loudly for the entire game. I got to the game a couple minutes after kickoff, and I could hear the fans from outside the stadium. I felt like I was part of something grand while I was in that stadium. The stadium was so much bigger than I was, but I still felt important while I cheered for Berlin.

I have finished my final project titled Amsterdam. I’d recommend that you watch the video before reading the rest of this post. The video will play by itself, and there is no controller. The file is 25 MB, so it should load relatively quickly over most Internet connections. Also, while the video loads, the web page may look blank. This is normal. If that link fails, try this one.

Our class put on a show of all our work at Tesla this afternoon.

Amsterdam has no audio. When someone says, “I am going to watch a movie,” we assume that they are going to both watch the movie and listen to the audio track. Audio is an inherent part of commercial video, and I want to break that link between audio and video. Also, audio is all too good at masking over imperfect video. For example, if you put a loud noise over a bad edit, the average viewer will not notice that bad edit. I do not want to mask over my video. I want the viewer to see the video for what it is as a video, not for what it is as a video with an audio track. By creating a video with only audio, I create a sensory experience for the viewer that only uses one sense: vision. In life our experiences rarely involve only one sense. When we use more than one sense at the same time, they blend together. We hear what we see, and we smell what we taste. I want to remind us that each sense is unique.

Traditionally video is displayed in a rectangle. Although this rectangle has changed shapes over the years, and now it’s most popular form is known as “wide-screen,” video is still displayed primarily within the confines of a rectangle. I want to break video out of the box, quite literally. Amsterdam is meant to be shown either embedded in a white web page, as it is shown here, or projected onto a white wall. That way the edges of the video disappear into the surrounding area, and the video no longer exists in a box.

In the past all of the photo mosaics I had seen used photos of things other than the subject of the photo. In Amsterdam, all of the video in the mosaic is footage of exactly what it represents in the video. The water is water, the buildings are buildings, and the bicycle is a bicycle. When I take the video footage I deconstruct the world as we see it. I take apart the world rectangle by rectangle, video clip by video clip. Then, in post-production, I put that world back together. I reconstruct the world as it was, only now there are seams and imperfections. Even if the world looks perfectly fitted together, it is not. The world is not as solid as it seems; even concrete buildings will eventually crumble. Thus in Amsterdam the world I show does not perfectly fit together. The windows on the buildings do not light up exactly, and there are gaps between each video in the water at the bottom.

While I edited Amsterdam I could create whatever I wanted out of the video footage. In the final piece I used around two-hundred separate video tracks, and I could have put those tracks in any order on any place on the screen. The way I chose to arrange them is one of many. It is not the right way, and there is no wrong way. I could switch two video tracks and the piece would still work. I could switch around all the video tracks and find another way that works.

In my next series of pieces I would like to create four unique videos using the same footage in each video. That way each piece would contain the same elements, yet they would each be different. The sum of the parts would equal four different wholes.

Hollywood’s special effects have jaded me. When I watch an action movie with a high speed car chase or a sci-fi movie with aliens the special effects do not impress me. Since I am so used to seeing Hollywood effects, I need to remember that video art, avant garde cinema, and other non-Hollywood non-narrative genres should not be compared to or judged against Hollywood.

I have never consciously sat down and compared Brakhage’s work to Spielberg’s work, but if I am not careful then I will forget to take Brakhage’s film for what it is.

Hamburger Banhof has an exhibit up dedicated to video and film artists. None of the works I saw stood out as particularly exceptional, and I am not sure if this is because Hollywood has jaded me, because the work is meant to be understood in a historical context that I do not understand, or because I am simply a tough critic.

Or it could be because I have watched enough video art from the seventies and eighties. I want to see something fresh and new. I want to see what video artists are doing today. I do not know where the future of video art lies. Now anyone with a video camera and a computer can potentially make video art. Before video cameras and editing software became so cheap, it seems that you could just point a camera and something and call it art. But now everyone is pointing cameras at things, thus we must redefine the genre of video art.

Creating a beautiful video requires more that just pointing your camera at something beautiful. This is why I do not think that landscape photographs are beautiful. The scene they depict may be beautiful, but anyone can point a camera at landscape and take a picture. Thus the photo itself is not beautiful.

With today’s video editing software, the average person can create any effect with the click of a mouse. And now I am at a loss for what to write next. Really, I have no idea how to redefine the genre of video art. I just know that we cannot compare today’s video art to the video art of the past because both the qualities and the availability of video cameras and editing software has changed so dramatically over the past thirty years.

Berlin has a history that I find impossible to ignore. There is a line of bricks across the city that lies where the Berlin wall used to stand. There is a holocaust memorial that spreads out over a block. There are bullet holes in the buildings from the second world war. I cannot ignore these things, nor do I want to.

But I also feel like there is no way I can understand what it would have been like to live in Berlin during the second world war or while the wall was up. I can walk through museums, read first person accounts, watch video clips, and look at photos, but I still won’t really understand. The only way I could really understand would be if I lived through similar circumstances. I don’t want to wish for harsh and cruel events to happen to me, but I desperately want to understand. I suppose this is why I read books and watch movies: so for a few brief moments, I can feel what someone else feels and live how someone else lives.

Yesterday we heard a talk by Jan Edler of realities:united about urban screens. He discussed projects his company has realized. Today we heard a talk by Mirjam Struppek who studies urban screens. Both Edler and Struppek use urban screens for artistic purposes and not for advertising, although the majority of urban screens in the world are used solely for advertising purposes.

I have seen the most urban screens at one time in Times Square in New York. There are so many moving images there that when I stand still in the square I feel like I am moving as well.

Commercial urban screens are free entertainment with an agenda. Many people enjoy watching moving images, an thus almost everyone who walks by an urban screen will at least glance upwards when it flashes its message. Although video is used to create art, most often we associate video with entertainment. This is why the advertising on urban screens is successful: if the advertisement entertains the people who watch it, then they will associate the advertised product with entertainment and thus are more likely to purchase that product.

Urban screens make cities feel more electronic, more digital, and younger. They bring a youthful feeling to areas that otherwise would feel older. Yet I feel more comfortable in old areas of cities then I do in areas filled with lights and urban screens. Old areas of cities usually feel lived in and feel like someone’s home, even if they are not my home. But lit up areas feel like they belong to the advertisers and to the screens, and not to the people. Thus urban screens take the city away from the people and place it in the hands of corporations. But does this actually change a city? Do cities belong to the people who live there? the people who work there? the people who built it? the people who provided the money to build it? Or perhaps a city belongs to whoever claims that city as their own in their private mind. The facade of a city is public, but the heart and the life of a city lies in the hearts and the lives of its inhabitants and visitors.

As I flew to Berlin from Amsterdam, I saw Amsterdam from the airplane window.

Now I am in Berlin. It is so windy here that when I lean into the wind I don’t fall over. After spending one day here, three words come to mind: old, intricate, and oxidized.

Today I took a wonderful walk through the city. I found this huge cathedral and went inside. I wandered away from the main sanctuary and found this deserted staircase. I walked up three flights of stairs and then couldn’t go any higher. I tried to go into a room, but the doors were locked. I peered through the crack between the doors and saw into the room and then through to the outside. The doors perfectly framed a German flag flapping outside in the high winds. On the inside there was an organ keyboard lit from behind by the window.

I also found other cathedrals. In one of them a young woman played the most profound music that I have ever heard. But I couldn’t hear the music from outside the cathedral, so the second I walked outside the music ended. It didn’t slowly fade away as I walked away. It just ended.