01 November 2010

Lorne's Media Poetics probe-- Cat Journal





Music -- Tekitek, "Je parle aux chats" http://www.myspace.com/tekitek
Photos-- Lorne Roberts
Video and editing-- Sean De Coste


This video is for my Media Poetics class.

It's about cutting and pasting, collage, randomness, about the right to use the images of others (in this case, taking thousands of pictures of my cats without their expressed consent via a model release form), and about borrowing ideas from the projects people have done before me (in this case, the people in my class).

And mostly it's about cats.

My friend Sean did the editing which turned these photos into a video, which raises other questions for me about art and its production, both historically and today-- questions about who "owns" art or gets to have their name attached to it as creator when, as in this case, multiple people were involved in it from me to Sean to the people who made my camera or the computer programs we used to process and edit the photos, to the people who made lovely architecture and furniture in my apartments, and who made the art that hangs on the wall in some shots. Without those creators, this video wouldn't exist, or else would exist very differently.

Or should this be Tekitek's video, since I've only just now emailed his management to ask permission to use the song "Je parle aux chats". (If they say no, the video stays up, but with no sound or with some other song perhaps.)

10 comments:

cara said...

this made my day.

cara said...

and since I'm not an English type...is this intertextuality?

micro said...

I'm in a video class now, and am just starting to see how this all works. It's pretty fun. Hope to see more from you and your video buddy. Did you do one with the tree/bridge photos as well? I can't remember =(.

Anyhow, fun media. Good luck.

Lorne Roberts said...

i dunno what intertextuality is. but maybe it is.

i find video neat for lots of reasons, partly because it's 100% dependent on technology and electricity as an art form (and therefore is actually quite temporal).

the trees/bridges/west broadway ones are still to come, plus maybe a few others, now that sean has his video editing stuff up and running again.

Lorne Roberts said...

and i'm excited about some of the ones to come, because they were more planned than this one was (i.e. specific scenes/framing, etc, vs. these mostly random cat shots taken over a few years), and so i hope/expect they'll have a different look.

c-dog said...

Relative to the tonnes of images you had to wade through, cool to see.

Funny how I also thought, heh, you could create the same choppy effect digitally, and that took away from it.

I think the fact that you took it from many images makes a point, don't know.

jc said...

I hope you're allowed to use the sound, the song makes the piece way stronger IMO, with the cat heads bouncing along to the beat. good job Sean. Was this grouply directed and produced then?

And I hope your cats forgive you wolf.. You didn't get them to sign a kitty waiver of some sort? a paw print perhaps.


I posted the video above because it's very similar...borrowed images and remixed, but even stranger still is the remix of the soundtrack into a new song.

Anyways, keep it coming, I like to see people who can smoothly move from medium to medium.

Lorne Roberts said...

grouply...? yeah, i guess. the cats did their thing, i photographed 'em a bajillion times, and then a few years later sean made the video while i consulted with him and checked football scores.

here's some thoughts after presenting on this in class tonight--

damien hirst and donald judd-- or rodin, with his sculptures being cast 40 years after his death.

who gets to claim "guild" art? how does one person get to attach their name to a work? it's now generally accepted that shakespeare worked at least somewhat collaboratively with other actors and writers.

was the label, then alfa, now beta, in some ways "guild" art?

what about the poor people?

cara said...

HA!indeed.
what about the poor people?
it trumps everything!

jc said...

designer/director takes all