development of breathing video

An image of beauty.
A sound of living.
A motion of being.
An influx of insecurity.

A dyamo.
A childhood story,
A light in the distance,
A Ferris wheel.

A part of the body.
A sound in the distance
An attack on the senses.
An illusion of time.

When re-working this video I realised I needed something more in my creative thought process. I felt it necessary to draw on experiences as well as the literal translation from the body. I found thinking literally I was able to find the set aesthetic but not a piece of video work with many layers.
The question for me was how I was I was going to do this keeping clear to my intention of space in the lungs, breathing and the emotional qualities that come out exploration of these. The more and more I watched over the footage it was clear to me that, although I thought I was tackling these qualities I wasn’t. This is where the layering of sound became important to me. The use of sound I feel is so necessary to drawing a viewer in. But what sound? How do I layer the sound? Do I just use non-diegetic or diegetic sound or both at the same time?
These questions I found very off putting when approaching the subject. I eventually found CocoRosie’s song “Candy Land”. This song is very beautiful and relates very strongly with the comfort you can feel while exploring the lungs. I also kept it in place the diegetic sounds to remind the reality of the situation. At first I placed the song over all the parts the body wasn’t in to expose the silence to the viewer so that they could hear there own breath, to relate them to the picture. However this linear episode made everything in the video very obvious, “the bike moves, oh the music fades out, ah yes the body comes in” and so on. Everything was very plain and simple. The viewer knows what is to happen throughout the whole piece from the first 30secs.
I found this out when watching my video in a work in progress showing at the BAT theatre. The clarity of things you need to change became clear when it was on a big screen in front of you and you have a captive audience. I needed to mess it up. The sound and later when working on the sound I realised I needed to do something to the editing … add something new. Through feedback I realised it missed something. It was too clean. Everything is so beautiful. I want to challenge the viewer’s perception.
I played with the sound… trial and error kinda way. Video footage wise I decided to take a subject that tangents from my initial thought. I wanted to think back to a key memory in my childhood and work with that. A song came into my head “Bank Robber” by the clash. I put this song on and moved with the first thing that came into my head while holding the camera in my hand to film it. I moved pretending to be in a shoot up (it was really fun to do). I really like the footage and began to splice it into the video. Let me know if you think it works or not.

the illusion of breathing.

BMC is very provocative to my thought process at the moment as it is my main training at the moment. I had a very intense experience with it the other week.. which has left me continually thinking about it and thus I wanting to explore it further. It can make you connect very closely to emotions that are firmly placed (sometimes very hidden) within your body. It can also really open your imagination and possibilities the body contains. When exploring BMC you are made to visualise and try and connect with the body on a level that is real yet illusionary. What I am finding very relevant at the moment to my project is how much it relies on the mind's imagination and feeling. I am intrigued to see how this creative imagery can be translated in a frame.. the captured frame of the video camera. I find that even though BMC is so inherit to understanding the organic body it comes from an abstract thought process. It is this abstraction that I find relates to the illusion of a cameras frame because it is a set vision, composition and focus, which is a similar concept as exploration in BMC.

Below is my first attempt at achieving this quality between aesthetic and feeling of dance and BMC exploration.

telling stories with my eyes...

"Evolutionarily, the visual system was developed to see,
not to be a perceptor of how it sees.
And if everything was working well,
there probably wouldn't be any need for such self-consciousness."

The Living Anatomy Of Vision, a manual-in-process researched and compiled by The School for Body-Mind-Centering-in-process, and is reprinted from Contact Quarterly, vol 6 no. 2, Winter1981 cited in "SENSING,FEELING, AND ACTION" Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen.

how do you tell your journey through your eyes? what comes into your mind when different lights fall onto your face? what happened this morning? last night? How does thinking about this make your eyes engage to discover new angles of sight? Can the frame of the camera depict the situation? What is the issue if the role of the eye is just to see?

the idea of working with telling story through your eyes came out of working with an artist called Irene. i was going through my ideas with her in relation to the lungs and breathing and trying to engage with to explore movement in relation to exploring illusionary, representative framings while filming. This came across to her in a very abstract manner and therefore was really hard to fully comprehend and think of ways of working with it. Because of this i had to question my approach to expressing my ideas... how can you relate internal creative thoughts to inspiring another collaborator who is not going through the same process as you are?
what ended up being clearer to us both is thinking of a story and telling it through different parts of the body. This worked well because we both were working with the same intention. i particularly liked working with the eyes so planned to make the film above.

The Land of CEP

In and out. lungs expanding and deflating. The new and the old. The present and past. The taking in and letting go. Experiences held and let go off. The tension captured and released… maybe in a moment or trapped in time amongst the rib like cage, solid and comforting. Security of the ignorance… the ability to not look further amongst the fleshy mass. To look and confront, engage with the dimensions and space. Weightless, comforting knowing a body so tainted by its surroundings.

Hundreds of people past me… bright lights surround me… a bustle at its own pace. I plod on, different heats of body mass flow past. Colour explodes on every wall. Grey skies prevail above me. I hear conversations of languages. I wait to grasp the moments that make sense to me. Where the body language is not the only form amongst the frame surrounding me. I think, I imagine, I play.

What happens when you play a game of Ludo? What does the dice inform you to do? You want to win. You want to stop the other person from moving. All in the name of fun. The communication is the fight to the finishing line. The elation of showing your worth through a game of chance. The freedom of letting fate choose your path. No responsibly other than the choice to take part. Setting yourself up to fall or reign.

Imagine a land so full of spectacle. Everywhere you look there is something that changes your view on reality. Suddenly a stream of gigantic gold frogs pass you by, the sky remains grey, never transforming continually consistent. Your speech is uncomprehendable it does not always communicate what it needs too. It is a land that is so confusing but the intrigue is what excites you. Everything you imagine could be possible.

This is my land of CEP.