Artist Statement - Hyper-reality

(no my project does not have an actual title. they never do. ^^; I do not think in titles, only full lines.)

Whenever I am in an old building, a place that has been used for many years, I feel a very strong sense of time, and wonder what the lives lived within it were like, who the people were, what the places meant to them. For this project, I decided to take the opportunity to visually reveal what I would normally only feel or imagine. While I had initially considered various points of view of different people who had living in a space, I decided to pare it down to a single person, as it lends a more intimate, personal feeling. My good friend Haruna Tsuchiya danced as a ghost for a previous video project of mine, so my first thought was to ask her for a reprise of the role. I knew I did not want the standard sort of floating white sheet for my ghost, I wanted her to have more personality, to be more of an echo of one life lived in the place.
Various circumstances led to the setting of the video being inside and around the building that was formerly the Fredonia Normal School, built around 1900 and remodeled in the 1980s for apartment housing. Where once students roamed the halls with friends and worried over exams, eager and ambitious as myself, there are now placidly plastered walls and the tastefully muted decorations of tenants. Though I was unfortunately unable to gain access to the oldest, least remodeled portion of the building (due to structural safety issues), I was able to at least peer in the windows there. Also, having the bulk of the footage shot within the areas now lived in added an extra layer of history, allowing me to shift perceptions from how the place seems to lives there currently and seemed to lives passed.
I firmly believe that there is more to reality than what is seen, so it was by drawing on this that I created my hyper-reality, hoping to reveal clearly to others the glimpses of lives past that are usually only felt in vague emotions.

because everyone needs to see

cross-posted because it's amusing me ENDLESSLY right now.

CLICKIE!!!1!!!1!

lmfao.

revised proposal

Definitely doing ghosts, I'm really excited about the idea. Of course, it won't look much like what's currently in my head, but that's partly because the room in my head looks rather like the one I drew for capstone. XD Anywhichway..

Shooting footage of an old building - haven't decided exactly which yet, but currently thinking of the Opera House in town, or maybe (maybe!) the old campus building on Main St in town... Ideally, I'd like to use an old place that's still commonly used, that people walk through every day and continue to add layers of life and experience onto. (But, if there's a chance I can get into the chapel of the old college building..that'd beat out everything omg. <3 Wish the old movie theatre were still there, that would've been perfect...) As the video walks through/looks around the location, there would be faint glimpses of things which aren't currently there - an unfamiliar face reflected in a glass, someone fading quickly in and out of visibility, an object on a shelf that's not quite opaque... I want to give the sense of there being more within a place than we are usually able to see, to provide visual queues to what a place was in the past.

I also had suggestions to maybe show glimpses of what people once saw in the room, like them taking over your vision for a moment, a flash of how it used to look altogether maybe, and I like that too, I might do that as well.

I already have a volunteer among my friends to be a ghost, who danced in a video for me in the previous video class and was beautiful and perfect, so I'm really excited she's offered to help again. <3 (Tom's volunteering too, he just doesn't know it yet. XD ) The difficulty is in finding people that wouldn't look out of place in a past time period.. which's just as well, as I don't want to overdo it, either.
I have pleeenty of old objects sitting around (though I realise I should've grabbed a few more while home, hmm), antique shops are my friend.

Sound.. might actually be a first crack at what I've in mind for capstone - a bit of air movement, soft whispers, scraps of melody, or it might just be one of those elements, depends how the footage winds up looking and what's in my head while I'm shooting it.