Clarahunterlatham's Weblog

Self Portrait

clarahunterlatham — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:09:59 +0000

This is a portrait of me about 5 years ago. The footage was taken in the fall of 2003, but never used in a project. The process by which I took all this video was kind of involved. Working with a couple of classmates at Oberlin college, I shot myself being dressed up, made up, etc. Then we projected that video and took stop motion footage of the projection. Finally, we printed out stills from the video and taped them on top of one another, which we later cut apart. At the time of the project I couldn’t find a way to put all this imagery together, but in this revisited form I found the editing process natural. I cut up the first half of the footage to accompany the rhythmic patterns in the music. Then I sped up the footage of the cutting up of images at the songs’ climax. The music is a live recording from the same time period of an improvising rock band I was in called Information Night. The show was a halloween party, and I was dressed as Jonbennet Ramsey.

Group Project – Futuristic Antique

clarahunterlatham — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 20:35:36 +0000

Our group has decided to reinterpret a totem pole for our project.

Here are some examples of totem poles we will base our project on:

Our totem pole will consist of a multichannel projection, made of a composite of many moving images. Following from traditional totem pole imagery, we will use footage of multiple heads atop one another, seamlessly connected to one another with collaged human, animal, and environmental footage.

For example, here are some eyes that might be interpreted by human eyes. In order to connect the different parts of the totem pole to one another we will use montage footage of similar tone body parts, and possibly other environmental images.

As an example of our “modern” interpretation of a totem pole, here is a piece by Gilbert and George that has some totemic qualities.

Futurist Manifesto

clarahunterlatham — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:07:48 +0000

The futurist manifesto argues for a diffedrent approach to the representation of life in art. They describe a vibrancy of things that they want to capture in painting. Essentially they are demanding a way to capture movement in painting. I’m sympathetic to their request. As a composer I deal with the problems of depicting movement on paper. Sound is movement, or it is experienced as movement, while paper is experienced as a static object. This is even true with static sounds, such as constant, unchanging textures. As a means of communicating my ideas, I usually write them down on paper before giving them to a performer to realize. Conceptualizing movement visually is however, very hard! I use many different methods of trying to do this, but so far the resulting sound is never exactly as I imagined. The challenge of depicting movement on paper is really stimulating because of its fundamental impossibility. The futurists seem overly dogmatic and zealous to their claims about what such painting can do. They seem convinced there is a correct way of drawing movement, which is where I take issue with their arguement. The results of the argument, manifest in the Futurist paintings, are more interesting than the text of the manifesto, but this is usually the case with artist statements.

Hello world!

clarahunterlatham — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:29:09 +0000

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