#mcmenamin

Patrick McMenamin

Video Is Receptivity/Capture Proposal

 I. Abstract Video provides narratives of openness and ‘access’ in both its production and viewing at the same time as it captures, arrests, and otherwise constricts both of these forms of openness. The artistic ideal of total openness, of spontaneous receptivity to the world and its meanings, finds in video a technological promise to the same, combining the indexicality of film and audio recording with absolute openness in post-production. I hope to explore the power and limits of this promise, engineering 2-3 situations where participants are confronted with this openness and their complicity in its promise, filming their interactions with the recording, processing, and viewing systems that mediate video’s promise to openness. In so doing, I hope to continue exploring ideas of situational openness and the factors that allow or prevent the extension of this promise, to implicate empathy, politics, and morality on the larger scale of things art promises access to.

 II. Project Narrative

A. I intend to engineer a set of situations where participants/people randomly encounter the stages of the video production process (i.e. setting up a situation of simulated and apparent surveillance, live-feeding video into projectors with editing software, closely filming people’s viewing attentions and social interactions while watching any of the above). While confronting filmed subjects and viewers with their attentions and challenging them has long been a concern of video production, I’m going to try to dynamically adapt to the expectations and situations I am filming, opening my own project to the ways people naturally try to latch onto ideas of openness or self-expression. I imagine this will be done mainly through mediated genre forms, such as the documentary style interview or social scenes of rooms, but want to work so that my built situations can be compiled and edited to meet the ideas of participants (which may include being guided in editing). The end product would ideally be a multi-channel installation of these different situations, each aiming for a different stage/kind of openness and exploring its index. In dynamically adapting to expectations of openness within constructed situations, I want to use video both as capturing/constricted technology of capture while also bringing out its ability to meet humans at the levels of their own needs/expectations (in response to the very constrictions video has constructed).

 B. The exploration of openness, its limits, and its regulating mechanisms has been central to my academic work in literature lately so most of what I’m drawing from comes from that realm. I’m particularly interested in the types of seeing art constructs and I’ve looked recently into the ideas of descending from a cultivated sight toward a more animal and stripped connection to bare life, as Leela Gandhi and Giorgio Agamben have written about in particular. Agamben also reads the Kafka parable “Before the Law” to show how absolute openness in fact paralyzes, already including the man from the countryside so that he may not in fact pass through the open gate. The construction of openness as totalizing plays directly into conversations in video art about engaging with surveillance, which aims for absolute capture and receptivity to make everywhere/everyone open (if only to particular forms of power/access). I want to work within/alter the bounds of this conversation by making the video/audio recording technology itself an actively human player in these situations, ideally even going as far to enact the sort of descent described by Gandhi as the means to a new mode of seeing.

 III. Process

A. I plan to construct 2-3 separate situations where recording equipment is already set up in the room when people enter, then manipulating that equipment according to the progress of the situation under way. At the same time, I will make it very clear what the goal and processes of this video production are, opening my own intentions so that the camera/production process becomes accessible to people within these situations.

 B. Monday/Tuesday: Find or book rooms for Wednesday, Friday, and/or Saturday, write situational scripts and find some of my participants

Wednesday: Set up room and film first situation

Friday: Film second situation (perhaps merely the editing/mutation of first)

Saturday: Film third situation, edit, or gather necessary auxiliary footage

Sunday: Edit final video pieces to be installed as multi-channel installation

 IV. Outcomes

A. For myself, this project will primarily extend my explorations of ideas of openness and art’s promises of them into new media, working my own theoretical and narrative concerns into technologies built in part to replicate those sorts of access/capture promises. Purely within video, I think this project will help define the sorts of claims—and barriers to those claims—that my own work can make, allowing me to think more intentionally about the structures and purposes of future projects.

B. I’m going to try to install the piece as a 2-3 channel projection but likely only in a semi-private context. Hopefully, the types of knowledge I explore in this project will carry through to more fully realized and publicly displayed works even if most people are not able to see this work in its multi-channeled installation.

 V. Supporting Materials