Description

Wisconsin Air (2005) by Dan SennThis piece, like so many video works of mine, resulted from an unplanned moment. I was on a lecture-performance tour in the midwest and had a few days to visit my childhood home, in Watertown, Wisconsin, where both my parents were still living. And as explained in the spoken narrative for this piece, while having a breakfast in the kitchen of this old, tumbling down house, I noticed two objects lying in the back yard which, because of the context, I did not at first recognize. After going out and inspecting them, and finding them unusually beautiful in the autumn light and leaves, I decided to do a close up mapping of their textures and colors on video. Exactly how I would use the footage, I was not even sure. This quick decision was not without some hesitation as the backyards here are open and without fences, in this small conservative German immigrant community, and my parents would probably hear about it later on. Time, however, had jaded my sensitivity and so I spent several hours circling an old bathtub and sink with my camcorder in hand mostly oblivious to the social spectacle I was making of myself. Mapping structures on video, like buildings, cars, kids, crops, forests, and bathroom articles, is something I started in 1992 when I bought a HI-8 camera to document my sound sculpture work. This camera, however, also allowed me to manually start and stop videotaping with such speed that I could capture as little as 3 frames at a time on the fly. Realizing this, and without giving it much thought, I started to map objects using a rhythmic "still moving" technique which was directly informed by my music improvisation and still photography experience and then integrating this with my installation work. At the time, I had no editing equipment, could only edit in-camera and so there was a powerful real-time performance pressure added to capturing an object on video. Everything counted. It was also hopeless to use a tripod, because it restricted movement, but so long as the object remained still, I learned that my eye would tolerate an unsteady camera. For about 5 years I shot film this way. "Wisconsin Air" was captured using a Sony VX1000 and edited using Final Cut, and while the lickity-split characteristics of my in-camera HI8 pieces are not present, the piece was shot without a tripod with the rhythm, speed and direction of the piece reprocessed in the editing phase. Videotaped in 1998, with the experience well-recorded in my journal at the time, I put the piece together in the summer of 2005. More information about Dan Senn and this video is at: http://www.newsense-intermediu...

Channel: Music Uploaded: November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am Author: dansenn

Length: 02:14 Rating: 3.00 Views: 1288