For my digital artefact I created a short art video, the decision to make a video was influenced by module 10 in Digital Creativity and especially the lecture delivered by Chris Clarke, “Curating IRL: net.art, new media and post-internet art.”
One of the things that particularly struck me was when he spoke about curating the exhibition Artists in the archive at the Glucksman Gallery (co-curated with Orla Murphy). Some of the initial research was in the Special Collection at the Boule Library. He was really surprised when talking with an archivist to be told that conserving old paper and micro-film etc. was not relevant to their work ‘no we don’t care about materials- we only care about information transmission.’ The material embodying the information was not important.
With my video I was very much thinking about this context of the materiality of mediums in particular the book. I also wanted to make something that was experimental and fun to make. I had no information to deliver just some play with different tools to produce a work.
The video I made How to Thrive in the Digital Age is the name of a book by Tom Chatfield, My partner bought it in a charity shop for €1. I cut individual lines from the book, I than cut these lines of text into smaller pieces and glued these down to make ‘cut-up’ poems. I only read the words once the poems were completed- they all ended up sounding like they were composed- the particular language of the book’s topic probably lent itself to this result. Also the fact that repetitions and bits of words sounded like glitches all contributed to this surprising coherence. I recorded my partner reading the poem on my phone- I used this as the audio for the video.
The visuals are very simple- I filmed my partner flicking through a book- I used a strong direct light source which gave strong shadows.
The book also has some pictures, which adds to the visual interest- this formed the main structure of the video. I edited the video on iMovie. It was straightforward to structure and the length was dictated by the audio track- and the visuals by flicking through the book.
The viewer relates what they see to the poems, it shows the propensity for people to create a narrative- as even though there are only a few different visual threads the tendency is to read a story into them, relating to the ‘story’ the narrator is telling through ‘his’ poems.
I was happy with the results and liked the mixing of digital tools and older techniques of making.
