Make Me Care

Last year I remember watching the bird installation of Chris Milk and being fascinated by it, how it had a meaning behind it but it didn't try to confuse the audience it involved the audience. Using the Microsoft Kinect the camera tracks the audience and gives them the power to control the projection, immersing the audience and making them into birds.

Set up as three separate screens the first screen represents the birth of an idea, the initial conception, the lightning in a bottle.

The second the critical response to the idea, the people tearing it down, showing it's limitations.

Then finally you have the third screen showing the freedom of collaboration between the work and the artist making the idea work.

This is the kind of work I enjoy because it leaves the audience in awe of the creation, they go away talking about the idea and the technology behind it they don't leave feeling uncomfortable or stupid, they leave having enjoyed themselves.

I say this because when I am procrastinating from doing work like this unlike most people who play games, or look at cat videos apparently I watch TED Talks. I love TED Talks the idea that all of these people coming together with different fields of interesting but a collective intrigue to learn. Today I found the playlist 'The Power of Film' and I set it running.

The first video that came up was this, Andrew Stanton: The clues to a Great Story.

In the video he goes through his own work and pinpoints the moments he now realises he learnt something about story telling.
 Something that stuck with me was the 'Unifying theory of 2 + 2', a theory in which he suggests that the audience like working for the story, but they don't like knowing they are working for it. I think that's why I had such a hard time understanding the appeal of the videos we saw last week was because these artists didn't just make the audience work to understand, they didn't give them the puzzle pieces to begin to understand.  They also didn't 'make me care', they didn't give me a reason to be attached to what was happening nor the person involved, as an audience member I felt obsolete.

The next video was by Rob Legato: The Art of Creating Awe, this is what I want to do. I want to create the illusion that I'm not there but the audience doesn't get confused by trying to figure out how it's done. I don't want my audience thinking I'm crazy because they don't understand whats happening, I want them to think I'm crazy because my work takes what they understand and makes it into something they've never seen before.

For me a good experimental film is something that takes one aspect of a seemingly 'standard' film and plays with it, experiments with it, but doesn't distract from what the narrative is; because if it doesn't tell a story then I'm sorry to say you've already lost me.