Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Dream - a sense of losing space and time


"The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past" ---- Marshall Mcluhan

as I read the part where Mcluhan talked about time and space, this was the sentence that I related to the most. It is so true, that every time when I am dealing with something or someone new, I always got so attached to it, and just put everything behind. And ONLY when the new "thing" came to me, I could really let bygones be bygones. But this is just a very personal interpretation of what Mcluhan said.

As for the video, I tried hard to approach the sense of losing track of space and time visually in the first place. I used video camera in a completely dark space and then added the smoke and lightening aside, then filmed how the smoke goes around in the air. I named it dream because that was how I came up with the idea. Whenever I tried to recall a dream, I got this dizzy and smoky image of the scenes, and the pieces of images were usually not as vivid as the actual world, more grey and white. I used smoke as my primary medium because it really gives me that sense of dreamy feeling. How I achieved this is by using a lightening diffuser. I also added one of my all-time favorite "weird" song to the background, because it evokes the same sort of dreamy and dizzy feeling out of me. Also I added the sound of waters flowing and tides waving to the video, so it feels like something is going on in this " dream", but because it is so blurry and dark one just could not tell what it is. And that is exactly what happened to me when I recall a dream that's so distant to me. And I deliberately made the music stop all of sudden, leaving only the smoke floating and the sound of water, for me that is the moment when one wakes up, just one second and the dream world is gone, but our thoughts still linger on it.

How the video relates to this particular assignment is a bit complicated. When we dream, our senses get distorted. there is no sense of time, sometimes people dream for 5 minutes but when they wake up, they would feel like just had a long day. Of course there is no track of space either, because everything was not real.

Hope this video makes whomever's watching feel the same way!  And I hope you like the sound too!


1 comment:

  1. This film gives me an idea of vastness which for me is beyond time and emphasizes space. I think that this is an excellent portrayal of the things left inside and unsaid. I feel you capture the idea of the dream quite well and would challenge you to use different color choices when exploring this alternate reality.

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