Bread & Ink

Thanks to the many dollars the UW is able to devote to undergrad research, I spent my summer working on an independent video project over the summer. Here's my speech and the video, oh boy oh boy.
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My name is Claire Fox and I’m from the Comparative History of Ideas and Comparative Literature programs. I’ve been in both departments for nearly a year now, so I’m pretty firmly rooted in the humanities and cultural studies. About this time last year, I was studying print journalism pretty seriously, but I was in the process of completing an intensive media studies and social change program in Portland that featured a strong video component. When working with video, I realized that there were a lot of artistic opportunities in journalism that I had yet to explore.

With that in mind, I’ve spent the past year caught between mediums; still working on my writing, but keeping an eye on other forms of artistic communication. So, since I’ve entered this Summer Institute, I’ve been trying to create a visual language that parallels the ideas I’m already articulating rooted in linguistic or theoretical traditions.

The name of this research project is “Amplified Present: The Delayed Beauty of a Bizarre Locale.” Toward the end of this presentation, I’ll show a video I made which was inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s short story, “Signs and Symbols.” This is my attempt at visual language-making.

“Signs and Symbols” essentially traces the relationship between an elderly Russian immigrant couple and their incurably deranged son on his birthday when the couple visits him in the sanatorium. I initially was attracted to this story because of the son’s condition, which in the story is termed “referential mania.” This condition is an acute form of paranoia where the son thinks that all inanimate objects and all of phenomenal nature are constantly engaged in a malicious commentary on his life. This sort of psychological condition seemed like an excellent set of images to unpack in video.

In video, I can approach the narrative through a phenomenological lens, by picking out individual gestures, moments, or objects in nature from Nabokov’s writing and meditating on those images to communicate a story instead of using traditional chronological narrative structure. This allows me to look at the interaction between phenomenal nature and artifacts on one hand with perception, imagination, and memory on the other, this all done without having to deal with words as a barrier, or even having to depend on them by default as an anchor.

In addition to my fascination with referential mania, there was one particular image in “Signs and Symbols” that held my attention. The structure of this story is shaped around the elderly couple’s routines, all which have complementary sets of gestures or sounds embedding them into our sensory memories. At one point in the story, however, the husband makes a sudden, incisive decision that launches the couple out of their routines into unknown lifestyle territory.

What was even more fascinating to me, though, was what happened immediately after this decision was made. As Nabokov writes, “They sat down to their unexpected festive midnight tea.” On my first read of this story, this sentence was unremarkable. It was only when I continued to re-read the story that the image of the “unexpected festive midnight tea” became a familiar space where two characters create a bizarre locale in the weary familiar. The space was also very present: the husband severed the couple from their past, but they hadn’t yet taken any steps to organize the future. This was another instance of perception worth addressing.

Yet again, video seemed like the prime medium for image interpretation. In addition to its ability to pull apart and meditate upon images, video allows the ability to choose one primary image as a plateau and have a structure that lends complementary images the importance of that primary image. That in mind, when I started planning this video, I wanted to create and decode my own fictional locale and unearth an image-based, psychological space from Nabokov’s linear narrative.

Before shooting the video material, however, I forced myself to choose another medium as a filter to interpret certain images further. The medium I chose was painting. Concentrating on sketching and painting allowed me to both engage with and detach from the images: as I painted, I had to think about very specific details in the gestures and phenomena I chose to represent, but I also had time to let the images pass through my memory and integrate more with my subjective perceptions of them. I displayed these paintings along with some notebook pages and rough storyboard sketches at the In-Progress exhibition at the Jake. I also took some photos that I ended up not displaying at the exhibition, but they still helped me further consider ideas in composition, just in more of an impulsive manner than painting.

When I finally started working on the actual video, I had a couple of goals in mind. I wanted to construct a world where artifacts and phenomenal nature are oppressive, and then make that feeling move. And, as I said before, I wanted to create my own fictional bizarre locale, and I wanted that locale to aid in deconstructing the wearying feeling of the artifacts and phenomenal nature sequencing. The resulting video works to create an environment rooted in the present, simultaneously engaging and challenging the viewer to appraise the value of a single moment.

I like to preface videos with a quotations, so here’s one from “Signs and Symbols”:

“He must always be on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things.”

amplified present from Claire Fox on Vimeo.

In inhabiting this boy’s perspective, I attempted to turn his subjective experience into something to be collectively experienced. Though I’m primarily approaching the work from his perspective, we as viewers have our own attachments to the images we see, so we struggle to integrate the two as we gaze at the images on the screen. In this way, I invite viewers to engage in that perspective along with me, and decide for themselves based on their interaction with the piece whether the presence of nature and artifacts is oppressive, or maybe liberating, relaxing, or something else completely. And, by way of the bizarre locale, I hope to engage viewers’ memories, allowing the images to linger and take on beauty later.

So, with that in mind, I want to leave you with one final quotation from Chris Marker’s gorgeous film, Sans Soleil:

“I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend.”