joana with one n [has a thesis blog]

I’m sorry, I’ve been bad.

I haven’t updated in a long time, which is bad because a lot happened in December.

First of all, let me show you the Viva videos I made using Processing (see below), which I completely omitted in November. I really enjoyed making the videos, and even though I didn’t consider the first one as part of thesis, it spawned the second video, which eventually spawned Monitors.

Viva Laptop:

A time lapse video using photos taken with my laptop every one to two minutes. The program to take the photos was written in Processing.

Viva Faces:

I asked several other DT grad colleagues to run the Viva Laptop code during their daily, and this the time lapse video using only the pictures in which a face is being touched.

Monitors:
I’d like to post the various videos I took of folks, but uploading them to vimeo is going to take several days. Stay tuned for those.

In essence, Monitors is a video installation that explores portraiture, expectation, and control. The audience is faced with a horizontal screens, showing video portraits of people between 23 and 34 years in age. Each person has been asked to check his email, or watch a video of the prior person checking his email, or watch a video of himself previously filmed while checking his email.

It’s a bit confusing, but pretty to look at, and that’s where I ended the semester. There was an interactive component, but I realized that I’m not interested in creating an interactive component for my thesis.

So where am I now?
I want to curate a series of portraits. Why? Being young and inexperienced, the unknown life that lies ahead of me after school makes me nervous. It’s exciting, but I don’t know what kind of person I’ll become. I got a really great response from Ted about this:

A “career” is, among other things, a technique that a deeply oppressive society uses to keep you firmly in line. It’s akin to the kind of double-bind that our society uses by extending lunatic levels of credit to kids and then cudgeling them about the head with their “credit rating”: the obvious ‘rational’ solution would be to incrementally extend sensibly growing amounts of credit to kids to teach them about finances, right? Wrong: the point of this whole exercise is to train huge numbers of young people to feel like complete losers who deserve to be relentlessly reamed out of every penny they’ll ever earn — sort of an information-age version of low self-esteem. Careers, mortgages, investments, none of this shite is freedom, it’s all slavery. And you’ve been trained very well, so instead of doing what you should do — taking the opportunity of your thesis to (in the words of the French poet Rene Char) “cultivate your legitimate strangeness” — you’re DREADING NOT HAVING A FUTURE. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the world has gone absolutely insane, and by the time you get out there won’t BE any careers. So, please, spare yourself the needless hassle of wandering around like a dog in search of a master who, shall we say, came to an untimely end sometime last year. Be your own master. Hint: a career will come out of it — after the fact. It’ll be much more fun if you invent your own ‘career’ than if you do the equivalent of looking through some lifestyle catalog for one that looks like it’ll fit.

Tangents aside, not knowing what my thesis was really about only made me feel less sure of myself. By snapping self-portraits and portraits of others, I found a way to document what people are like when nobody’s looking (more or less). I wanted to sneak up on myself, take a picture, and say “Ha! There you are!” and maybe I’d learn something new and figure out the rest of my life in an instant. Obviously these things don’t quite work that way. My subjects are always a little self-conscious if not completely self-conscious, and there’s only so much you can glean from such stark portraits.

The automatic quality of the Viva series and the very controlled situation of Monitors was a nice way for me to “act out” and get a grip – more or less. With that in mind, I’ve moved on to better things…

Did I mention that my thesis has changed COMPLETELY again?

It has.
Anyway, before I explain myself for posterity, let me note the following:

Attaching a DV cam to a coke bottle (via Boing Boing).

Thanks to Dan for a link to Jeff Lovett’s work. Third Person Pack Thoughts is killer and now in the back of mind at all times. Some video:

Awesome, awesome, awesome.

Also:

I’ve been doing a lot of work with that Auto Photo stuff I was doing before. I made a little video (below), and I’m working on a new one with some folks from school. It’s looking good so far…

Viva Laptop! from Joana Kelly on Vimeo.