Loris Gréaud’s Nothing is True Everything is Permitted, Stairway Edit (2007)

The Bridge To Next Semester

Self-evaluation

1) What is it that I am trying to investigate in my practice?  What am I most passionate about?

For me the question revolves around the fundamentals to aesthetics.  I’m fascinated with understanding how aesthetics work and how we can use them to interpret and transform the world.  In the changing media landscape the barriers for entry are being removed on a daily basis.  However, the aesthetic questions are timeless.  What makes good art?  What makes good practice?  I think this is what I’m most passionate in regards to production.  How can my aesthetic enquires lead to developing something I can trust is worthwhile and have enough understanding to know when something isn’t.  Specifically, I’d like to develop interactive design skills to compliment my theory-based academic curriculum.  

2)  What are my strengths and weaknesses?

I tend to put my heart into what I do.  I really want to stand by anything I produce because I don’t see the sense in not giving something my undivided attention.  One thing I’m trying to improve upon is to take more risks and not be afraid if something seems really difficult.  Shooting in New York can be extremely arduous and time consuming but it’s important to not be intimidated.  Really following through on a vision is key, but it’s equally important to allow that vision to get sidetracked.  A point well taken from Lars Van Trier’s “The Five Obstructions.”

3) What are the core elements missing from my practice?  How will I obtain them?

I feel generally comfortable at this point with a number of media making practices (very basic video, audio, photoshop).  I’m now at a critical precipice where I need to push forward and gain an unwavering confidence and understanding in what I do.  I think taking the production design course next term will definitely be a step in the right direction.  

4)  What was my preferred medium before the course?  After the course?

I’ve never fancied myself much of a production person but I would say my preferred medium before the course was likely video production.  Now, I’m less sure but I’m much more intrigued by photoshop and perhaps even audio.

5.  What is the next topic, theme, or question I would like to investigate in my next project?

I hope to do a photo production project this summer.  It would be a photo-documentary of Baptist churches.  I’m interested in really looking at how a place so seemingly ambivalent and aesthetically neutral on the outside can be a gathering place for such heated ritual and controversy inside.  I was inspired when I was just observing some of the Baptist churches in Park Slope.  They seem so calm and elegant on the outside but it’s a mask for so many conflicting meanings that go on inside.  Whether you associate the church with fear and prejudices or spiritual truth and meaning, these are places exploding with conflicting negative and positive energies.  I’m not interested in judging the Baptist church or Christianity per se, I’m more interested in using aesthetics to foreground conflicting, ambiguous or completely dissolved interpretations instead of anything dialectical or didactic.  And then going the extra step and really blatantly asking what do these images mean?  How do they make meaning?  Trying to capture the essence of controversy without judgments and letting it breathe.  Letting it be but also antagonizing.  

6.  What is something I learned in this class that I can teach someone else?

Oh man, so much.  Biggest takeaway has been the photoshop stuff.  I feel like I could give a basic primer on using photoshop now, where before I was pretty in the dark.

7.  What is something I will try to do next semester that I have never done before?

Submit some production work to a festival, conference, gallery, something.  It would be awesome to be a part of an art show.  

8.  What is something I will try to do every day or every week that I did not do before this course?

Be meticulously organized when it comes to production.  It helps so much in the long run.  Source, Development and Output folders!

9.  What is a creative project that I would do with a budget of $150 million?

Hire a real production crew, actors, etc. and shoot my fictional TV series “Truckers.”  I’m thinking 10 episodes, cross-country shoot.  Need a couple of years of heavy research before production would begin though.

10.  How could I do the same project with a budget of $150?

Much more intimate and toned down.  Might actually be better even.  Just shoot interiors and make it more  of a close-up character study.