One Kilometer (of noticing)
I took a 1km section of my usual walk to campus and took note of everything that I noticed; any small detail or passing thought that caught my attention for any amount of time was recorded in this notebook.
In the end I’m left with a kilometer, or the remnants of one, represented only through what one noticed and thought about while walking it.
Katja Heitmann article response:
1.
In choreographer Katja Heitmann’s project “Motus Mori”, she sets out with the aim of creating a kind of physical archive of people’s personal and specific gestures. These gestures are “donated” by individuals, observed and practiced by trained dancers, and then reinterpreted as choreography to be performed. The dancers, no matter how skilled in the art of body movement, will never get a gesture exactly right; even aside from the countless influences on movement like body type and proportions, imitation is an inherently imperfect art. So Heitmann and her dancers turn the archive into a dance instead. Archived are the choreographed essences of each movement in an ephemeral live performance.
Though, in this positive embracing of imperfection, equally, there arises challenges. In prioritizing the interpretation of the movement over the direct replication of it, the performance partially fails in being an archive, as it is asserted to be. Yes, the essence of each movement is preserved, but the movement itself in its original form, how it exists in the original donor’s body will still die with the person it belongs to. If this project were to be an archive, I feel the arbitrator of choreography sullies the effort. Viewed primarily as an art project instead, is where it truly shines, and is a very interesting idea. The endeavor to preserve personal gestures in any form is remarkable regardless.
This project holds the possibility for many unexpected gifts. With the unique opportunity of showing someone what their body movements look like from the outside, fascinating things start happening. As a few donors remarks, feeling like one “owns” their gesture after seeing it be something to personalized, or seeing through a performer how they skirt attention with their body language and wanting to make a change in that for the better. For others, this project holds the gestures of people dear to them, some of them now passed. Parts of them live on through this performance, and their loved ones have the chance to visit the exhibition as a form of remembrance, or a farewell.
2.
The most striking example of movement in this article was that of the dancer imitating the young boy. It stood out to me firstly because of the vast difference in body size and proportions between a young child and a fully grown adult. The longer I watched, however, the more I thought on the fact that the movements the child makes are incredibly rare to see adults do. With more practice with their motor function, adults walk more gracefully than children, and with far different (and more rigid) societal expectations, most adults don’t hold themselves nearly as loose and carefree as children. There is some poetry to be found in an adult performing actions she likely has not done for many years, and in a sense, the dancer returns to her own childhood through repeating these movements. The archive of this young boy holds not only his movements but also distinctly his developmental stage, he is held (for as long as this project lasts) in time at an age before experiencing many of what will be his most defining life achievements and experiences.
3.
When my partner is really focusing on schoolwork, he often ends up sitting on the bed, knees to his chest, crunched up as tight as possible. His feet push against the bed to set himself rocking gently, and his face usually goes blank, eyes resting wider than normal. One hand uses his laptop and the other rests on one of his knees as he chews his nails, sometimes contorting his entire arm to get at a nail at a better angle. Being young and limber lead to this being an uncommon position to see older people take when working.
My mother always wears her curly hair up in a bun, and when it’s down it seems she always has a hand in it. She fidgets a lot, and when her hair is down it becomes a focal point of her fidgets. When she wears it down it’s usually because she’s styled it to go out somewhere, so many of her interactions with it tend to do with its appearance. She’s constantly fluffing it from behind, sweeping it over a shoulder, tucking it and immediately untucking it behind her ears, or idly running her fingers down its length catching and undoing all the knots of hairspray.
Only a couple years ago my sibling started growing out, painting, and caring more for their nails. Though it doesn’t feel like its been very long, visiting home its interesting to already see how they’re accustomed to moving around and interacting with the world like they have long nails, even when they’re cut short for the moment. They continue to type on their phone and keyboard with the flats of their fingers, they very delicately pinch at their eyelashes with their thumb and forefinger with their hand turned inwards so their nails are pointed away from their open eye. Their entire grip on things like utensils is adjusted to accommodate long nails, even in their absence. The rest of their body movements are unaffected, but their hands additionally move slower and more precisely, learned after too many times jamming or breaking off a fingernail with quick movements.
Field Trip Notes
I love artworks that are explained or take on a new/further meaning after reading the title and exhibit label, so I found the piece of gold chains hung on a black background in the shape of the African Diaspora very intriguing. Its simplistic design was very clever (contextless on its own, but possibly recognizable to some before they even read the exhibit label) and chock-full of metaphor. The piece depicting a refurbished cop car cut in half, suspended on cinderblocks, and graffitied, was also one that developed new meaning after reading the exhibit label. The person I visited the exhibit with even partially brushed past it until I relayed the accompanying description, and they were likewise intrigued by it. The meaning of the piece I thought was beautiful—as many memorial artworks are—and each aspect held striking symbolism for the overall meaning of the piece.
Similarly, it seems I’m also drawn to artworks that take figuring out, and/or evolve the longer you look at it. The piece “RID UM” by Wilmer Wilson IV was one I was mildly interested in until I read the exhibit label and got to look at it again in new light. Initially I didn’t look too closely and thought it was an image made of sequins or some similar material, I was surprised to read that instead, it was a printed image densely covered in staples, evocative of telephone poles holding the remnants of countless posters over many years.
Shirt’s piece “Don’t Talk To Me About No Significance Of Art” was also one I found myself thinking about a lot. This was a piece that was also heightened by reading the background context provided by the exhibit label. The part on opinions on photography gathered from mainly non-photographers was thought-provoking, and adapted further into the meaning of this piece, provocative and relevant.
I took away more from this exhibition than I thought I would and (as one usually more partial to classical art) I enjoyed it more than expected. I took away many peeks into many more perspectives than my own, as well as some new understandings of hip-hop culture and some of the things influential to it. There were many artists I took note of as I walked through the exhibit to find later on and follow the rest of their works.
This exhibition showcased an impressively wide variety of mediums and got me thinking about the flexibility of contemporary art, and the many possible utilizations of its nonconformity; ideas of which I can then incorporate into my own practice.
One feat, Three ways: Censor
The jumping off point for this project was a question of “how difficult can we make a single simple task?”. From here we developed it into an idea of inhibiting a simple task (like reading) in as many ways as possible. This idea of inhibiting transformed into specifically censoring, and the rest of the project follows.
One-shot:
Our single shot video for this project primarily showcases auditory censoring; reading each book over another voice also doing the same makes it nearly impossible to discern the words of either novel, creating a wall of noise. For the performers, we are both inhibited by the other holding the book we’re reading from: lines and words are often skipped, and paragraphs are abandoned when the sentences are blocked by a hand in the way. The initial concept shines through here in us both having to work around another person to do something as simple as turn a page.
Loop:
The selective censoring makes it slightly more interesting for the viewer than simply running the marker across each line fully. This shot is filmed close enough to the book that the viewer can easily read the words on the page, but in trying to do so it becomes clear that the censoring is also often too fast to get through a full sentence if one were reading just ahead of the marker. Initially, the words being censored tend to be the more controversial words (referring to a prostitute, profanity, conversations about age gaps before sex) but it quickly develops into censoring arbitrary words. We wanted to lean into the nonsensical censoring to mirror the equally nonsensical reasons many books become banned.
Sequence:
Our sequence consists of various ways to visually censor words on a page, or otherwise destroy the pages themselves and render them unreadable. This further explores our point of heavy-handed censoring, this time focusing more on the censoring of entire books that only contain controversial aspects in small parts, as well as the destructive nature of censoring. This sequence is also a kind of loop, with a calm page turn separating each act of destruction, effectively moving past the parts lost and spreading open a new attempt each time.
My Crops Art Dying but my Body Persists
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1 Minute Audio
The specific feeling of grief I’ve been experiencing since our family pet died is something I’ve been trying to communicate through both art and film, and this project was an attempt to relay it through audio alone.
The first half of this is audio from a video taken last summer of my sibling, my partner, and I in the living room with him, getting him to talk back to us and laughing each time he does. At 35 seconds, the audio abruptly cuts to a new clip, this one recorded in the exact same spot, this year, without him in it. The only sounds the second time around are the ambiance of the house and my mother muttering to herself across the room.
Being such a talkative (and generally loud) cat, I wanted to highlight how, even through only a single sense, his absence is tangible; and through that absence the remaining ambiance of the same room (like the ticking of a clock) is more noticeable, and even seems louder.
MFA Open Studios
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