Why New Media moves me to new heights of visceral, theoretical and personal expression...
New Media social networking strategies such as blogging and tagging, and technologies such as arduinos that allow us to communicate through authorship/parameters/feedback and repeatability of actions in a room -- or half-way around the world, have taken over my days and nights. I look forward to blogging. I am thrilled to be working on a new media project with a group of student friends. We will present our installation tomorrow (see invite above and come if you can!). Our group is working with surveillance, multiple cameras, random narrative structure, MaxMSP, arduino circuits with a sensor activator, AV projection of an interactive audience participation movement and a soundscape that includes soundhacking some of our video clips into audio samples to replicate nature (Elaine being the lead mother nature soundhacker). And as awesome as all this knowledge and taskmaking is, it's not even this part that moves my spirit to the euphoric place that I speak of.
My imagine has been called upon in order to work with New Media tools. For almost six weeks of learning I've been imagining the world as a better, kinder, more caring, loving place, and wondering how best to express this through intangibles like cyberspace and electric circuitry. The friction of tangible and intangible have forced me to open to potential, to look and listen, and to pry open the sometimes lax recesses of my imagination. My feet are on the ground but my head is so high in the sky I can feel my skin breathing. The aliveness of breath fueling imagination, ahh... what a wonderful time for creativity.
While this process of becoming new media((ed) - educated) is taking place, I have also delved deeper into my thesis topic which opens me to the pain and suffering of innocent people who were murdered primarily because of their vulnerable lifestyle. I have also thought about overcoming pain and suffering from losses in my own life through my determination to succeed. And I have mourned for the fifth day now -- (but what feels like much longer) -- the lives of two young men shot last Friday in Toronto, all the more affecting because one of them is the relative of a dear friend. Loss of any kind is simply that, it disrupts the movement of life, and begs the question why is the world this way?
Is there an answer to pain and suffering and the loss of innocent lives? I rather doubt it. The most obvious one -- a world where only acts of kindness take place and we don't treat people as disposable and we turn away if we feel anger -- feels far, far away. Our role as artists, communicators and citizens is not to judge people, but rather to imagine, through new media and other practices, how to make the world a more equitable place for everyone. I'm talking for myself here, but with my usual dose of idealism, what can I say.
I was sent a beautiful poem last night, "Fallen Angels", a tribute to the missing women in Vancouver and a gift for a mother who lost her daughter. Today I'm carrying the words of this poem with me and I'm seeking out acts of kindness that mirror my thoughts, imagination, dreams, hopes, expressions and artworks for a safer, gentler, kinder world of imagination fueled by breath.
2 comments:
Wow. This is the most poetic blog I've read.
I'm glad that you combine high intellectuality with deep emotional feeling, moving fluidly within one blog. Too true about the role the artist has to take heeding events that take place.
Hi Janis,
"...to pry open the sometimes lax recesses of my imagination. My feet are on the ground but my head is so high in the sky I can feel my skin breathing. The aliveness of breath fueling imagination, ahh... "
Beautifully said!
Who'd have ever thought a tiny little arduino could inspire such ardour? Awaken the spirit? Yet I understand the excitement of so much potential and new connectivity. And it's not all electronic either, though it may be electric, of sorts.
I'm almost embarrassed to admit how unbelievably excited I felt when we turned that little LED light around on the breadboard and it finally lit up. How can such a small inanimate thing seem like such a miracle? How can getting it to work open so many doors in the brain?
The real miracle is not the LED, the arduino, the breadboard or the blog. It is the reaching, and as you so beautifully put it, the breathing in of new possibilities and new ideas, along with new friends and a healthy dose of dark chocolate, that sets creativity
soaring.
I'm sorry that you have experienced this tragic loss, and worse, that these kind of things happen at all. It's interesting that you mention the exhilerating rush and the pain and sadness in the same post. In a way, they are one and the same - 2 sides of living and feeling deeply, which I know you do. It's who you are.
So feel it all, and fly!
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