trying to get my feet off the ground…

I have tried to get started again somehow on the video side of this project. This is not easy because i am increasingly finding it difficult to stay in the right mindset in order to think carefully. Taking the individual sections that made up one of the Dallmeyer camera images, i converted them to quicktime files with an equal amount of black space. My idea was to see how they would appear when placed in DVD Studio pro within a menu setting. This way, i hoped the image would appear and disappear constantly. It worked, however, with the image fragment being only a a still image, there was this sense that there should be more. Why did i opt to switch the image on and off? The main reason for this was to draw awareness to permission. With the digital photo frames, viewing was limited by the device itself and its programs and te viewer had no control over this. Instead of viewing a constant fragmented video image, i thought it might be interesting to switch off the image in the overall image so that holes appeared. This then, would give the sense that you are not entitled to see the image at any one time. This ‘trick’ is not new and would ordinarily be used in quiz games for the participant to guess what the picture is of. But isn’t that how art is devleoping? Shouldn’t there be this much needed element of mystery and curiosity to make an image appeal? Perhaps, and this is rather cynical of me, but perhaps the only reason why abstract art ever kicked off was because in taking away representation, it allowed the viewer some participation in what that image was. It alloweed guesswork to some degree. In a sense, this could be labelled as mind games but it is a fair assessment of art work if one is allowed to freely question the system and the norm. Cynicism is one thing; nihilism, it could be but such statements would only be taken seriously if someone were to read that from my work as opposed to me saying it. i’m not saying that my work is cynical. It is for the most part, playful with the idea of what something represents, but isn’t that all art anyway? With the fragments of the image switching on and off, we have ourselves a slowed down version of TV, where the illusion of the screen is broken up into its parts and the holes revealed. After all, TV is merely a refreshed image with the equivalent of a shutter refreshing the signal. However, the problem here is that all moving images are succeptible to this refresh rate and is therefore difficult to criticize. Its the same as saying, why do i do something i don’t like. its subconcious to some degree and for a video to draw attention to its own make up and question its validity and poignancy, well, its bordering on madness. Madness if you believe an artwork can begin to suffer from madness. I’m ranting. The time-image element of the DVD menu concepts is very interesting from a visual point of view but i am concerned as to whether it stands up critically. Each segment of the fragmented video image would in affect be individual from the others and not connected sequentially. They would therefore play random for a duration that the DVD allows. But this is only a simulation of randomness. It is randomness wth a deadline. Due to the limitations of the DVD, the image would be random up until the DVD finished, so maybe an hour. Because of this constraint, the ONLY way that the fragments of the image could be entirely random from each other is if they are projected separately, or presented on monitors separately. Whether this is acceptable or not, is really down to your persepctive of REAL TIME as opposed to PRESENT TIME.