Monday, April 20, 2009

IVP3 -- Sarah Hamerman

Project Title: "The Game is Playing Us"



About the Video: My project focused on how consumption-oriented leisure time and the 'false gratification' and 'false participation presented by commodity culture and the media spectacle conflict with an idea of spontaneously-organized, participatory "play" in local space. Essentially, the proliferation of communication and information in the virtual realm in which "social" life increasingly comes to be organized has as its consequence a disappearance of social life based around the production of communities in the immediate physical realm or the reclaiming of "empty" spaces. The idea behind the film is inspired by the theories of the Situationist International in "Society of the Spectacle" and "The Revolution of Everyday Life."

Methods: My video mixes a variety of television screen captures with my own photography from various locations around Durham in an experimental photomontage I created using I-Movie. The concluding portion of the film, which acts as a sort of positivist take-away message in contrast to the fairly critical tone of the rest of the film, is shot in moving images to add emphasis. I mixed the audio soundtrack using Audacity, distorting sound clips from various songs and layering my own voice at different pitches for the narration. The "script" is partially quoted from "The Revolution of Everyday Life" by Raoul Vanigem and partially of my own writing. I tried to create an "arc" to the audio around which I could sequence the images. 

Special Thanks to: my friend Andrew, who is featured in the video.

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