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color, no audio, dv,
2003
Postcards is a series of 30 - 40 second segments which fuse
phenomenological video footage with texts appropriated from
livejournal.com to form an episodic communication in the form
of video postcards. This project was conceived of as a communication
with a long distance friend via video missives, taking up the
provocation from an earlier tape, “Dear Jim” 2003,
which stated: “Really, if it were nothing, why would me
eyes have become video cameras designed to show you things?”
In Postcards, video footage records phenomena in the world and
occupies the humanist position of perspectivism, where all phenomena
are viewed by a solitary source of human consciousness, but
to what end? To represent is to communicate. The footage stands
in dialectic with sometimes anomalous and sometimes appropriate
texts foraged from that part of the Internet where people express
themselves, throw their voices out into the unknown void. The
texts from livejournal.com reveal anonymous voices aching with
the desire to assert their identity, to have their understanding
of the world collide with the understanding of others.
The video Postcards aim to play subjectivity and technology
off each other. In these mediated communications where the screen
acts as an agent of both obscurity and revelation, “the
subject plays hide-and-go-seek, now you see it, now you don’t,”
(Sarah Hollenberg).
Technical Specifications:
Exhibition and screening format of Postcards is multiple and
flexible. Because there are a series of 25 thirty second ‘postcards’
they can be viewed all together (15 minutes), excerpted as singles
or more, interspersed between other videos in a screening, they
can be viewed in installation on a single monitor, or in installation
on several monitors.
Originally exhibited as collaboration with Tashia Friesen in
Ladyfest, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2003 where it was played in
conjuction with a tape made under the same premise by Tashia.
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