#project 3

Proposal document:

So i did my proposal and i think it went okay... I don't think robyn said much about if the concept was good or bad, she just kinda agreed which i'll assume means keep doing what I'm doing.

Will showed me a work called Piece Mandala by Paul Sharits that also plays with opticality, flickering visuals. His work also has many Buddhist connections.

Also Juliette gave me a great word; Theophany, the manifestation of deities in a sensible form, which I'm interpreting in my work as the perception of divinity in a tangible form. I was also talking to tom about my work and they said that since the conceptual core of my work was about how humanity is so small and puny that it would be impossible and humorous for them to attempt to capture and depict the all-consuming divinity of god that it could only result in a human-tainted representation, that my work in making this project will ultimately be forever chasing a standard that i can never possibly reach, because I too, am just small and puny, and unable to perceive and release the full visage of god. Funny?

I have a new game plan in how to make my work. I am going to structure it around the idea of a god dating sim / video game, complete with disco elysium style dialogue and choices, whilst focusing on talking to god who is manifested as a universal mound with the voice of a bitchy girl. I think basing it around the videogame structure would be good, not only because its funny and a little stupid, but i think it really relates to this idea of construction i want to weave into the material of my work. Before I was debating what would a video game / lets play structure imply for the concept, since i want the material and form of my work to direct the meaning rather than vice versa. I think a game / mock-game / mock-lets-play format would speak well to construction. Of course in games you can make your own choices, its the most immersive of all media, you the player decide your experience, but ultimately you are still operating under the constructed world the game maker provided you, playing in the narrative made for you. And the lets play bit is just funny.

Anyways I figured how i want to structure the video.

The whole video will be a "let's-play" episode of this mock-god dating sim. I want to include the aesthetic of the face cam observing at the top left corner at all times. The narrative descriptive dialogue bits will happen on the screen, no video game ui and when actual dialogue and choices pop up, it will have the ui behind it. I also want to have 2 versions of god. The digital collage one i'll make by mashing up photos, and one that is a real puppet / ghillie suit costume i made and that I'll film in front of a green screen. I originally made it for a different project but I want to use it here.

I do want to make a new mask for this suit tho, the long face is too reminiscent of some sort of creature. Animal, demure.

I bought a battery controlled light switch and plan to attach it to the spiral mask to create an inhuman non-face.

The structure of the video will look something like this;

Narrative voice, describing of environments, dialogue to the self / any dialogue not to god.

Talking to god, chosing dialogue options, video game ui will appear.

They'll be the same font and same placement, as well as more complicated ui elements.

I started writing some of the dialogue

live stream let’s play presentation - god dating sim

fake kinda dating sim

still have cutscenes n shit

face cam in the corner of same clothes in lecture theatre

my live chat is sitting in the audience stands

live streaming from another room? live streaming from lecture theatre

face cam live reaction to not even a game just like melding psychedelic q

immersion ruining face cam

ad sponsorship “this god thing is great, but you know what’s better? square space”

thinking abt what this ultra o temporary immersion ruining gamer thing means for a artwork about god

god face cam reaction to my face cam

i fucking love youtube

love in the age youtube

youtube in the of god

god in the age of youtube

god in the digital age

collage like moving puppet (like porn bot zine)

videos of natural phenomena

baby cam footage

old man youtube channel reciting the illiad

beach boys performances?

data moshing and keying out

depressed news reporter with disco elysium music

horses running n shit

interpolation - diagrams ?

jesus interpolation video

pages of inferno

diagrams of inferno, diagram map of universe, (you are here)

playing with scale

video art techniques - time displacement, gradient maps for movement

keying out / using dating sim clips

coding a dating sim ( a little bit, just screen record it, doesnt have to be great)

3d model recording, cycles rendering - pixelation

video of diary entries

and more...

Identifying the key aesthetics that influence my visage of god and some references from robyn. I was particularly drawn to Paul McCarthy's CSSC Fredric Remington Charles Bronson

I adore the tactile and grotesque qualities of the sculpture. Dripping silicon? Mechanical forms mixed with gooey fluid substances. The title too, referencing charles bronson as a notable figure... I don't know much about that guy, I've only ever watched that movie where tom hardy gets his peewee out but i twink it means something...

Some more references, as well as a sharing activity where we talked about our ideas. Tom and I's work kind of fall similarly to each other, maybe because we talk to each other about our works so much and think about similar references which i think is a cool result of personal life impact on the art we make. Yeah. WHatever.

Some thoughts on the idea of a game format and maybe the inherent sillyness of having god as a npc. Thinking about the final form of the project...

Specially interested in Robyn's reference, Monty Python's Life of Brian. I am told it has a childish interpretation of god, and just generally of monty python as a whole.

Also realising a connecting through-line in my work, the idea of the manmade. Religion as a man made construct. puppets and props as works of artifice built to bend perceptions of reality. sets in child's plays occupying a suspension of disbelief because we all know these painted cardboard props are not real. the visage of god being man made - especially personally? Like, pretty much every religion has a god, or a figure of creation, and these representations differ from religion to religion. Special effects are manmade effects to construct / enhance / bend reality.

Some experiments I want to do, especially (I'll talk about this more later) focused on video and collage. I want to construct the visage of god in its materially universal form, of anatomy and goo and fabric and technology through a kind of digital collage that i experimented with when making my zine. (which can be read here)

Something like that! ^

Finally, I talked to David about my idea. The main concerns I had going in were just debating over which form the final project should take. Whether I should go all in on the video aspect in terms of visuals and dialogue, a video game spoof like project or a physical puppet sculpture performance kinda thing. We settled on going for the full digital techno-psychedlic video, with focus on dialogue and maybe small references to the video game influences? I aint coding an actual visual novel... I think this approach is better because I would have more time focusing on the bad tech visual effect meat grinder machine which I'm pretty confident in producing in, rather than building the actual puppet which is, kind of impossible. Also thinking of time. I think i will lose the aesthetic influences of puppetry and child's play but, eh.

Some lovely sentences David used:

"trash video effect meat grinder transcendence. Shove it through the digital prism. The beach boy's psychedelic utopia. "

Edited by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber

from: In Media Res: Global Religion, Public Spheres, and the Task of Contemporary Comparative Religion Studies by Hent de Vries

"The emergence of a supposedly enlightened and increasingly differentiated public sphere had gone hand in hand with the formulation of ideals of identity and self-determination, of individual autonomy and universalist cosmopolitanism, which seem at odds with heteronomy and particularism - the authoritarianism or even violence - commonly ascribed to religious doctrine and its practices"

"Though religion seems at odds with the secular consensus of modern liberal societies it also provides us with the cultural resources - the semantic, figural, and argumentative archives - from which different concepts of hospitality of understanding and welcoming the other as other - and thereby of friendship, cosmopolitanism and democracy - can be distilled, criticized, or imagined. "

"...for all its historical and local origins, religion has increasingly become a global... phenomenon: abstract and formal, ethereal or virtual, everywhere and nowhere."

In talking about technology and media:

"where a relationship between the phenomena is acknowledge at all, the assumed link is often an instrumentalization of one by the other as if media formed the mere vehicle or religion or as if the medium could ever succeed in creating religion in its own image. Yet the medium is not secondary, nor is the religious mere epiphenomenon,

"...Derrida observes that if religion was ever dead and overcome, in its resurrected form it is less predictable than ever before, most manifestly in the "cyberspatialized or cyberspaced wars of religion... or war of religions..." These wars may take on all the forms of radical evil and atrocity, and can mask themselves behind the most enlightened and universalist intentions."

"...What may be needed is a conceptual and empriical analysis of the multiple ways in which religion not only shapes the experience of possible tensions between collective and personal identities - and, perhaps, challenges the very concept of "identity"..."

Of miracles and special effects

bad tech / green screen, the literal material of special effects in warping perception and changing religion equating to the theological "event" of miracles, events of divine power and kindness