“Like those birds that lay their eggs only in other species’ nests, memory produces in a place that does not belong to it…
Memory comes from somewhere else, it is outside of itself, it moves things about.”
Michel de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life, pp. 86-87
“Man is nostalgia and a search for communion.
Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.”
Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, p.196
As I develop a firm grounding for the rural digital exploration centers I am planning, and work with several rural communities on a range of digital and analog storytelling projects, it’s important to push my own creative work as well, experimenting and developing more skill with image and text and sound and how they crash up against one another. I definitely need to return to FinalCutPro even for the drafts of digital stories. I’m interested in playing around with a somewhat transparent, interactive process, learning from Oliver Luker’s experiments over at dispatx, an online art collective I have followed for a while now, and the work of Camille Utterback, which I am just getting to know.
While I was teaching, I kept a blog for my creative work, bgexperiments, so as to differentiate between art and commentary. Now I’m going to muddy the waters by pulling pieces of creative works onto bgblogging, entangling them with theory, reflection and commentary. I’m hoping to learn more, to write better, to think better as a result. I’m eager to see what will happen.
The first experiment is a large, multi-strand, multimedia (sculpture, photography, video, interactive sound capture) installation, an exploration of the relationship between nostalgia and art, memory and creativity, identity and desire. I won’t reveal the full overview of how I envision the installation to work and what it will encompass; suffice it to say that it will be composed of different kinds of fragments intended to stand on their own as well as interfere with other fragments. Its working title is (dis)locations and (contra)dictions.
I’m interested in what posting drafts of pieces and inviting commentary-in-process will teach me. And how lacing through other posts that might touch on themes swirling about the pieces might influence the outcome. Will it be useful to anyone else? Will readers feel comfortable telling me straight about my creative work, the way they do about my critical? How will seeing these fragments influence the way readers see my reflective blogging? Will the conversation be able to draw from both or will this experiment fail?
Anyway, here goes with a draft-fragment:
I’ve also posted it to the Internet Archive and to blip.tv searching for improved viewing quality. For me, at least, the Internet Archive version is superior though smaller.
Filed under: creativity, Digital Storytelling, Projects, Restory Process Experiment, Storytelling, visual art | Tagged: creativity memory nostalgia bgexperiments restory |
(the new) bgblogging 
Some wonderful images there, particularly around the smoke – perfumey, sighing.
I was led to the blog and the story via “edupunk”. I don’t have the words to describe how grateful I am for having stumbled upon this story. I am going to share it with a group tonight at a storytelling public event at WiZiQ.
Thank you.
[…] A Process Experiment […]
Thanks Ed and Nellie, for the feedback. although I know that people don’t feel as comfortable responding to someone’s creative endeavors as to their rambling on about ideas and reflections, I see great promise for the blogging space to situate creative processes , too. I want to encourage people to move beyond the expected text, text, text. What can an image do, our voice, the tension between the two?
These experiments are flawed, yes, just as my ideas-based posts. And that’s important I think–to put the inklings out there and see what happens.
edupunk as intensely playful.