Key artist insights

Carolee Schneemann 16mm film Viet-Flakes (1965)

- Extensive archive of Vietnam War atrocity images

- Collected obsessively over 5-year period from foreign newspapers and magazines

- 16mm camera with close-up lenses and magnifying glasses to visually enter the photographs

- Imagery forms a volatile, unsettling animation -> exposes the violence embedded in the images

- Format: 

+ Projection onto circular white disc at the rear of the stage

+ Dual projectors rotating 360 degrees -> activate entire surrounding space (Duncan White, p.25)

- Filming technique intensifies distortion -> heightening emotional impact and forcing confrontation with horrors of war

- Disturbing and shocking viewers' affective response 

- Strong anti-war intent => challenge media representation of conflict

Dirk de Bruyn 

- Not someone we talked about in class but is the artist whom I did research for my personal artist research

- His work draws from themes of migration, trauma, family history

- Intimate memories expressed through highly experimental visual language

- Immersive environments that confront viewers; intense visual and auditory experiences

- Highlights the physicality of medium: film stock, grain, flicker, afterimages

- Uses destruction, distortion, repetition -> evoke memory erosion 

- His works inspired me with my approach when doing the final major production of Wind is Time when doing group discussion, I suggested that we can do materials to emphasize the physicality like what Bruyn did, as well as doing grains in the afterimages

- I was very inspired by his works Homecomings (1987) and Conversations with my mother (1990), as they both took on the theme that our group chose for our project: memories and childhood, while distorted by migration, trauma and other events, his works took "distortment" into experimentation where he plays with different storytelling forms, different setups from documentary to non-linear sequences