In bed with a bad back and consuming the archives of Mark Amerika aka Professor VJ. He is making cinema and modeling a spontaneous, intuitive way of working through his blog. Mysterious, body-centered, "not-me" explorations with actors, landscapes, camera and editing tools – nutritious fodder for ambitious art vloggers. And not to mention an important way to "market" a work-in-progress. Drawing in like-minded practitioners with almost tribal pulses of thought.
"As a VJ performer, net artist, metafictional novelist, and newly reconfigured HDV composer, it seems to me like we are now quite capable of moving well beyond film (as film) while at the same time inventing spontaneous, multi-layered towers of digital babble to play our (life's) work in. At this stage of the game, we can no longer oversimplify our experience by saying "My life is like a movie." To me, it feels as if I am a reality hacker, remixing levels of (un)conscious opacities / capacities, creating customized artist-apparatus filters so that I can better manipulate the data that passes through me as I process my immediate life experience which, it ends up, is always (already) foreign." -
Professor VJ
Khing, the master carver, made a bell stand
Of precious wood. When it was finished,
All who saw it were astounded. They said it must be
The work of spirits.
The Prince of Lu said to the master carver:
“What is your secret?”
Khing replied: “I am only a workman:
I have no secret. There is only this:
When I began to think about the work you commanded
I guarded my spirit, did not expend it
On trifles, that were not to the point.
I fasted in order to set
My heart at rest.
After three days fasting,
I had forgotten gain and success.
After five days
I had forgotten praise or criticism.
After seven days
I had forgotten my body
With all its limbs.
“By this time all thought of your Highness
And of the court had faded away.
All that might distract me from the work
Had vanished.
I was collected in the single thought
Of the bell stand.
“Then I went to the forest
To see the trees in their own natural state.
When the right tree appeared before my eyes,
The bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond doubt.
All I had to do was to put forth my hand
and begin.
“If I had not met this particular tree
There would have been
No bell stand at all.
“What happened?
My own collected thought
Encountered the hidden potential in the wood;
From this live encounter came the work
Which you ascribe to the spirits.”
- Chuang Tzu
from The Way of Chuang Tzu by Thomas Merton
Walking through the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, borrowing spirits conjured by Erik and Charlene
Order yours from Randy at the Birdhouse Factory PO Box 649 Girabaldi, OR 97118.