FRIDAY FILM AND VIDEO POEM: 'immersion /2' by Sheila Packa and Kathy McTavish

direct link: immersion /2

This week an immersive video experience for you. A collaborative music video poem by Sheila Packa and Kathy McTavish. The poem, Immersion, is Sheila's, and the voiceover is Sheila's reading; the cello is played by Kathy. While both Sheila and Kathy chose the images for the video, Kathy composed it.

The film and the cello work marvelously together. Kathy, to quote from her website, is "a composer/free-style cellist. she uses chance and generative/organic forms to create everything from sparse, minimalist spaces to dense, orchestral landscapes." immersion /2 manages to be both sparse and minimalist, while maintaining a density of a natural orchestral landscape in the background. My sense of the music is similar to the visual images, the way they are composed, layered with a sparse simplicity on the surface and yet we find representations of the elements densely underlaid - wind, water, light, bird, earth, fields in bloom.

Sheila's reading is liquid and silky and flows with the stark and sonorous sounds of the cello and the shifting lights and colours of the video itself. Nature and natural processes are everywhere in her writing and in her reading. We enter a Tao of living through water that is water. With our inner ears, we can hear the flowing tides and the birds in a profoundly open landscape. Sheila and Kathy live on Lake Superior, a lake I found deeply mystical when I travelled around it some years ago. Her poem is from her collection, Undertow. I quote from her poetry blog:

"(immersion)

water resists
breaks without breaking
flows along invisible scores
courses between continuous
ends, begins

doesn't resist
touches, touches, turns
over the same skin...."

While I could rhapsodize on this music video poem all day, let me close with mention of Kathy's video technique, which is likely an original interpretation of the Bokeh style.

Kathy has explored Bokeh photography techniques, and puts her knowledge of this Japanese art form to amazing results in her videos. She uses stop motion, and to my eye, layers photograph tracks so that they emerge and recede with the flow of the music. She likely has used a cut-out shape over the camera lense to make that bird/wave shape which permutates and shifts in changing light patterns throughout the video and is perfect for Sheila's poem; but I couldn't guess how she composed the weave of slow motion of brilliant colours towards the end. Unlike traditional Bokeh, there is no foreground subject. Rather we are immersed in an ever-shifting slow-moving background. It is as if she composes abstract expressionist artwork before our eyes, painting with light and colour. As Sheila writes in her blog:

The still motion images are created by the use of DSLR camera, a Canon EO5. Kathy has been exploring Bokeh effects. It is an artistic technique initially used by some Japanese photographers who enjoyed the aesthetics of blur. She comes to this work by way of music; in fact the images are created in the same way that she creates music in her studio. Her echo pedal and harmonics perhaps are a musical expression of blur. She likes the 'infinite between.' She began using images in her search for techniques of writing scores. The images evoke meaning; to her, they create a synesthesia and seem to have their own sounds.

Sheila Packa and Kathy McTavish are two brilliant, creative women making, in my estimation, collaborative masterpieces.
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I have a Videopoetry group at Vimeo - if you are a videopoet, and are on Vimeo, please join. Love to see your work there. Also I feed all videos posted through to Facebook, and will to Google+  as soon as that feature is added: http://vimeo.com/groups/videopoetry.

                              

Dream: October 17, 2011 (the co-narcissist)

I am in a man's house; he is quite wealthy, an official. A small group of 60s style secret agents - sort of KGB-like, swarm about. The agents warn me about the man, "He's dangerous." I counter, "But he's always been nice to me." They caution, "You've only been to Level I with him, you've no idea what happens at Level II."

While he is an 'important' man he seems a classic narcissist, and perhaps even worse than that. In the dream he is hypnotic, and like a snake, dangerous, and I don't know why I don't heed caution.

The man asks me to go away with him for a night or two. I agree, despite the consternation of the agents. The man doesn't seem to notice the agents, or, if he does, thinks them unimportant.

We, the man and I, are sitting in the back seat of a car, a chauffeur ready to drive us.

An agent in a dark coat appears suddenly at the open car window, and despite the attempts of the other agents to stop him, plunges a hypodermic needle into the man's stomach - only I put my hand in front to protect him and receive the shot instead.

The agents outside the car don't know what has happened. I try to speak. There is some chaos. I can feel the poison overtaking my nervous system. The man barely notices, clearly doesn't care. I can hardly move, and then I go completely blind. In the darkness, I try to whisper that I am dying but my lips no longer move.

                              

A Dance Videopoem: Shadow Cave

direct link: Shadow Cave.  [The video is subtitled, so you can read along if you like, or have Google automatically translate the text into one of 25 languages. The option appears after you press play. If the cc in the play bar is red, the subtitle track is on; if black, it's not. Mouse click to toggle. Click on this image to see the steps to opening the subtitle/caption file:


This videopoem is a postmodern fairy tale. Sort of Jungian. Integrating the shadow into the self. I re-wrote a piece I'd written many years ago of an inner journey though a land of strange figures representing repressed selves.

And I did everything in this video. What a lot of work! Shot the clips with a tripod. Edited the footage so many times that it's like a Samurai sword, beaten, and wrapped onto itself, over and over again. At one point I so overloaded my video editing software that it crashed every few minutes. But I pushed it, until the effects I was seeking emerged.

That she becomes quite pixelated in it is fine - it's all reflection, image, celluloid, burned light, a digitally composed moving image.

As an artist, I cannot help but think of the screen as a canvas, and so I expect that some of the all-over appearance is influenced by Color Field Painting, like a Larry Poons, has an abstract art quality to it. Meaning, while there were probably 50 cuts, I didn't do any zooming or duplicating or other fascinating video possibilities.

Also the tribal influence is strong. That's my childhood in an African jungle in Zambia, it comes out from time to time. This is the first video that I've attempted to create a sound track for. I used rattles, a singing bowl, a bell, two different drums. Since it's all quite primitive, the story, the dance, even the reading has a colloquial quality to it, I wasn't too worried about melody. My postmodern fairytale needed a strange and primitive soundscape, which it certainly has. ::smiles::

The dance footage was shot for my forthcoming videopoem, a triptych, Tangled Garden. (Which I have been working on for 5 months and hopefully will one day finish.) But, see, I had this abstract pastel clip that emerged from another project... oh, background, I thought, so went looking among my clips for something that might work with it. That's how it goes...

I enjoy the stills, too. Crazy, how'd I create those scenes? Seriously, it's like it creates itself. Magic behind and magic in front. Movie magic, that is!