Vivre Sa Vie (1962), Jean Luc Godard
The class will meet on Tuesday, October 27th, at 5 pm, at LIB 1038 in the library.
The topic will be Video and Documentary conducted by Aras Ozgun via video conferencing.
Aras Ozgun is a media artist/scholar living and working in New York. He currently teaches digital media and media theory related graduate courses at the Media Studies Department of the New School University. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Media Studies program of the Sociology Department of New School for Social Research, and he will be completing his Ph.D dissertation on the political economy of contemporary cultural production in the Fall of 2009. His artistic production includes documentary filmmaking, video art, experimental videos, podcasting, etc.
His experimental videos can be found in this website
Individual work to watch, include Still-Life (1999-2000) , White Room
The Man With the Video Camera (1999) and DISTANCE (2003).
Other works are available at Voice of Antartika
If you would like to comment on Aras Ozgun's works, feel free to post your comments on the blog.
“White Room” provides a gradual revelation of space and its context, which contribute to an ambiguous, suggested narrative. Initially presented with details of the white room’s architecture, I found myself attempting to piece together the physical space. As more details were revealed, I was forced to reorient myself in the space. The inclusion of particular details such as the key moving in the door and the view of the man’s legs from a suggested first-person perspective provided glimpses of an implied but unknown narrative. The video opens and closes with the camera steadily surveying the white surfaces of the walls/ceiling of the space with a movement that seems to me to be very natural, like a person looking around his or her surroundings. This, in addition to the inclusion of the man’s legs in the bed give a sense of bodily presence.
ReplyDeleteThrough the scenes and objects shown in “Still-Life,” I felt I was able to begin to assemble fragments of a person’s identity through the intimate spaces of his desk and bathroom, and glimpses of his surroundings. The images themselves, while relatively still (fly paper, faucet with decelerated dripping, a television set), suggest to me the passage of time. For example, the fly paper with its substantial accumulation of dead flies documents an amount of time during which flies were caught. I found that the inclusion of the whispering voice and rhythmic breathing contributed a sense of human presence. The disembodied voice, almost inaudible at times, gives a greater sense of intimacy and introversion. Additionally, the movement of the frame which suggests that the film was recorded on a handheld video camera functions much like the breathing sounds, creating an awareness of a physical presence in the time and place of the images.
In "White Room" video, i felt that i am watching a living scene through the combination between the white room’s architecture, the view of the man’s body and the voice of people talking; the video made a significant progress in filtering the information we receive to create images rather than simply receiving images as we are seeing them, then the video let me live the situation by showing the source of this voice of peolpe dealing with each other.
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