i’m going to combine 2 posts from my other web space . . . to catch up anyone who’s been reading. i’ts a massive, lazy merge (i’m beat from all that stop motion work).
here you go:
i spent the entire day yesterday editing my film (image recurrence for subliminal suggestion — you. will. love. it). i had hoped for more useable footage but ended up doing some fun things w/ what i had (discovering the available means of persuasion). then, my husband watched and said he didn’t get it. $%#%^^#@!!! i said, “did you enjoy it?” . . . “did it do anything for you?” . . . but he was confused. maybe it’s because the film is no good. but NOOoooooooo. maybe it’s because he expects something different for an academic occasion. but these occasions shift, right? i like that i do most of my experimental rhetorical work at a “convention.” thank the fates for resurfacing our investments in live performance.
today, i will play w/ different tracks; as of now, i’ve used a track from My Bloody Valentine, but i’m toying w/ a Dandy Warhols track as an alternative; it will give a completely different sound. at a different convention, i’d love to screen both versions and then think about sound and image, Chion’s “audio-visions(s)” and how film experience is about more than image but synchresis, an immediate association between a sound and an image . . . the sound almost always a simulation (i.e., dropping steak in foley work “means” a punch in the gut) — thus, you are creating a new image or expression-event (in Massumi’s terms), a new way of experiencing a particular set of images. i want to think about this because it is fun and because it is rhetorically powerful work, synching sounds to images (D & G and “trumpets” . . . the infamous comment). but, for me, synchretic work is most interesting because it speaks of the “unassimilable” nature of affect w/r/t an “image-event” (i’m channeling Massumi) . . . when you add our “find” the right sound for your image, when you shape a pleasant, provocative, eery, ethereal, or otherwise moving synchretic effect (usage?), there is a transcendent joy that escapes articulation. sports afficianados will talk “zone” . . . this is similiar, i imagine . . . it’s also what we’ve been doing forever in our rhetorical work (but maybe on a much smaller or less complicated scale, which is not to say that our work w/ writtten discourse is not complex because it is; i am thinking of how language, up against the intensity of/within a multimodal image- or expression-event is, via Massumi, “subtractive.” as for workign beyond the single track (written discourse) we are “prepared” . . . it is that we now have more tools w/which to do it that is exciting for rhetoric.
it’s probably a bad thing that i’ve been toying around w/ something like stop motion animation . . . it can throw some pretty trippy effects that look like, well, effects-for-effects’-sake (which i loathe but am beginning to see the seduction of). but it’s interesting to see how effects create alternate realities, manipulated or constructed realities, so i’m thinking that this is not only valuable for me as a creative tool but that it could be an interesting practice for the classroom: create a stop motion animation scheme that reflects motion of a kind you imagine but have not witnessed (but for your mind’s eye). i’m toying with an image (above) of DalÃ’s “The Little Theater” (1934) superimposed upon a scene of an empty public newspaper box. w/ stop motion animation (it takes forever, and mine is jumpy, but i sort of like it like that, a little bit crude) “liberate” it from the container only to then capture it inside a quivering silver frame (using stop motion to “shake” a frame from an earlier image, of wall-hung installation, that appears in the film). while i am mostly “finding” this sequence by toying around, if pressed to “make sense” of it, i suppose i could say that i am hoping w/ this tiny sequence to say something about our desires for liberating concepts from contexts (excavating “art” from the everyday) despite our recognition of the reality and potential value of those contexts in terms of how they expose and venerate an image/concept/text. it’s all so precious . . .
 all is well w/ the PSU situation. i’m peaceful and happy (don’t act surprised). a nice woman at the hotel worked it out, and the conference organizers were also busy making arrangements for me (thanks Stuart, John and Matt). i feel silly for the drama. more on all of this at 
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