The motions I make in picking up and throwing away have become automatic, however I never get used to the amount of time it requires of me. In my personal life as in my creative work, the work is never done; there is no finished state. Even an exhalation ends with a pause which leads back to the inhalation. Because I rarely or have yet to experience a finished state or a complete picture of ordered unity, I dwell in detail, one element within the entire image. This micro detail in a specific situation, imprints me. Similarly, in movement I have spent years integrating my limbs, torso and energy to be a coherent, moving body of fluidity and precision. Dancing requires connection to one’s core and out into space in every moving moment; a consistent yet inconstant dialogue between what happens inside one’s body and outside of it. Inside, my attention gets pulled to one muscle group or one joint or bone, one concentrated area of energetic impulse, one emerging memory which then releases that in movement into the immediate surrounding.
I realize that within the various steps leading to these (non-finished) film experiments, I begin with my intuition, the language of my embodied knowledge, and set up an image with the elements I have at my disposal; in this case a rope, a basement, a halogen spotlight, my body. I use the elements while I record; at times I watch what I am recording, and because I am watching what I am doing, I choose to record what interests me. The whole image which includes the parameters I’ve set up for myself is deduced to specific parts; body parts, close-ups of the rope, shadow. I combine these parts in different constellations which allow other details to emerge.
In the editing process, other aspects emerge that relate to my research, in particular randomness and spontaneous decision-making which results from distraction or from mistakes. In writing words on my body while facing the camera, they came out in the film as mirrored. I looked for an effect that could reverse that, but landed instead in an effect that kept the original image while mirroring it. I found this to be especially intriguing because it made a non-verbal image out of the word. But the bigger challenge I face which directly influenced my editing choices (and also gives a temporality and nomadic quality to my work) is distraction. How many times can a body get distracted when it sits in front of an editing screen (or even behind the camera) and still make artistic work? How often is my name called, how many overheard conversations, sudden peeps, rings, clangs, something important to remember, body aches interrupt not only this particular artistic process but my research in general? Can a process that is not completed in one go nor in consistent rows of moments or hours, decided upon by the artist when they begin and end, result in a creative work? I suspend the idea of consistency even though I long for it and instead hang in a state of distraction. My editing choices, including which videos I used, where I cut them, in which order I put them, were made in between interruptions. I chose not to use effects of dissolve or cross-fading because that seemed to me fake. There is no eloquent, gentle or subtle transition from image to image in my reality.
This film shows the editing style of distraction, using clips chronologically as they were made, filmed, re-filmed and re-filmed with effects. I consider this to be un-finished; the result informs how I would continue to research. For example, what is bad editing (is this particular way of editing bad enough? Can there be bad editing that still manages to bring the attention of the spectator to the clips and not to how bad the editing is? How would have arranging the clips non-chronologically effected the overall outcome? How to juxtapose the first and last images, what might that reveal, how would those beginning and ending images effect a spectator who does not know the in between? Could I adjust the last effect of "time lapse" to an irregular pulsing (are individual frames always the same size)?
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