Simple Truth

An old project--made it circa December 2008 for a video course at MIT (my first experience doing video). Collaged images, collaged words. I used mostly found footage--much of it from films I was watching for other classes at the time and some of it from random online sources, but if you know me you'll also recognize the shots of ME throughout.

The watery looking image near the beginning comes from a very unwise impromptu shoot in my car whilst driving from Bellingham to Seattle on a very rainy night over Thanksgiving break 2008. At one point the camera slid clear across my dashboard as I turned off the highway. I'm quite glad that I survived this evening of overly-optimistic multitasking, not to mention the narrowly avoided deaths of other drivers and the camera (which I would have owed the MIT Visual Arts Dept. a hefty sum for).

Other abstract images shot while walking around Boston are overlaid with the found images throughout to add some texture and create a new and (somewhat?) unified aesthetic.

I'm not sure what it all means, but it pretty well sums up what was on my mind at the time. The whole thing was very experimental and unconsciously produced. What I ended up "achieving" though, has largely inspired the work I'm doing now on a video installation piece that I will present at the end of April as the capstone of my undergraduate studies (aka senior thesis). More on that to come.

Script mostly by me, but also including excerpts from Heart of Darkness (Conrad), The Politics of Experience (Laing), Elevation (Baudelaire), The Simulacra (Baudrillard), and Travels in Hyperreality (Eco). Original collaboration below:


I don't care to be explicit.
Disguised by your expectations
and distracted by my own conversations
Speaking pictures,
Hearing motion.
Confusion,
Sensation,
Symptomatic of humanity.

Wisdom offers simplicity
that truth will never be.
Oh how we love our deception,
getting off on getting answers.

Here are my scribbles,
my hedonistic questioning.

"I had no point of contact,
the oily and languid sea,
the uniform somberness of the coast,
seemed to keep me away from the truth of things,
within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion.” (1)

The word.
It doesn't matter.
We're drowning in things being said
from everywhere and all at once.
The sea of everything, lost differences,
leveled attempts to think, speak and know.
"Happy is he who hovers over life
and understands with ease
The language of flowers and silent things!

Fly far, far away, my soul!" (2)
But when I Am,
I am a liar
I'm not righteous
I'm believable
because I have to be.
I don't mean to.
I don't try.
It doesn't matter,
so don't mind.
It's only being,
only seeing,
and my eyes are always mine.

There is something rather than nothing.
So I think...
So I recall...
So that something becomes something
even more than what was or wasn't nothing
more than something
into something else
And I'll tell you about it
so you think something
remember something
say something
But what would all this mean?!

Knowing less than knowing
Real less than real
But what's more
Disorder resolves the mystery.
Reason is in crisis.

I'm an imitation of someone imitating me,
a game of dress-up played out again.
In the mirror is already history
Frame around what I was.
What there is, is what there was
and what there was, never was at all.
"The image is reflection,
is perversion,
masks the absence
and bears no relation--
The Truth which conceals
that there is none." (3)

"They are playing a game.
They are playing at not playing a game." (4)
"Art played consciously with Illusion
and admitted the vanity of images
through the image of an image.
And the industry of the Absolute Fake
didn't dare venture to copy,
because it would have come too close
to the revelation of its own falsehood." (5)

Am I crazy and you're not?
Damn this sickness we've all got.
There isn't a sound if you hear it,
the point we all forgot.

too much color makes white
too much noise makes a hum
too much saying, too much feeling
too much knowing makes us numb.

Freezing and forgetting
Falling asleep while life's at stake.
Shivering, crystallizing.
Wake. Wake. Wake!

A mind moving clockwise to nowhere over and over.
Until nothing becomes something
and distortion turns the ticking into a heartbeat,
thoughts pumping faster than words can bleed,
bleeding for truth
bleeding for nothing
bleeding for everything
until we die.

1) Joseph Conrad, 2) Baudelaire, 3) Baudrillard, 4) R.D. Laing, 5) Umberto Eco