Lingering - Video Art, which lead to a Masters Thesis in Visual Art
For those who don't know, I have a Masters Degree in Visual Art and Design. My Masters Project focused on the representation of death in art. Early in my development as an artist (and even now) - I was (and am) fascinated by the fragility and ephemeral nature of human life.
lingering was a piece of work I put together to try and capture that fragility. Its designed to loop, and was projected in a pitch black room for exhibit. Probably doesn't work as well on a computer monitor. Its a silent video, no sound is required.
The video was produced using Particle Illusion, Adobe After Effects, and Final Cut Pro.
I found it both soothing and disturbing at the same time, I particularly liked the transition from the blue to the black and white - the spectral figure at 2:00 was very nice touch at the end!
Those few seconds of spectral figure took hours and hours and hours to create, so I'm glad that you enjoyed that! :)
It was interesting to see people reacting to the work without context, other than the word 'lingering'; however the appaling thing about video art as a media is that on average, people spend about about 14 seconds looking at it. You don't know which fourteen seconds they're going to look at; either. Makes it difficult.
Maybe there should be a 14 second version of this on loop... :D
14 seconds is still 6 seconds more than the average attention span these days... I generally try to watch video installations all the way through 1 loop, though admittedly if they don't capture my interest in a few minutes, I get restless. Yours struck just the right balance I think.
It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.
There's the communal memory of a thing as well. Let's say you and I both know about a vase. We can describe it, we know what it looks like.
It breaks. That vase lives on only in memory, of you, and I. To anyone else, ignorant of its existence, it was just a 'vase', to us, it was 'that vase'; and people we tell about it will have that same communal memory.
As long as the essence of that memory continues to exist, does the vase also, if its physical form is no more?
Death frightens and intrigues me, it is the one thing that we all have to face and yet it is something that we don't talk a lot about. As I get older it does come into my mind that wee bit more and I try to find some meaning to life and some kind of belief system in death.
In the end, it doesn't matter what you believe (or maybe it does) you will either be right or wrong, there will either some form of altered existence or just nothing, no matter what it is, it is going to happen and we have no choice or say in the matter!
As for your video, really haunting and at times beautiful, I'm assuming that you passed with honors :-)