Experiments III (now with a project title?!)

I have less to say than I hoped I would about this project update. Unfortunately, a nefarious and time-consuming agent known as Capstone has eaten much of my attention since the beginning of this term. However, I am close to fighting my final battle with Capstone, and I have been thinking many thoughts about my project for this class in the meantime.

Total amount of concrete progress amounts to a page and a half of notes, but my brain has been busy!

I decided to combine some elements from both videos I showed in my first presentation about this project: collaboration, perception, and collaboration will all be major elements. I kept the idea of filtering reality through a limited number of senses, and I decided to use people's online presences or personas as the visual and auditory basis for the project. I will be conducting short, casual interviews with my peers on the subject of their online projection of their selves and their perception of that projection. I will be distorting this audio (layering, chopping, repeating, etc) to aurally represent an altered sense of hearing due to technological intervention. The visuals are the least concrete part of my vision, but I know I want to film them on my phone. (The medium is the message, after all.) The video will also be distorted, but in a different manner to the audio. I want the video to look mostly normal in the beginning, and gradually shift to more unnatural colors, accompanied by a transformation of myself from "the real me" to the cartoon version of myself I like to doodle instead of posting pictures of my face. Cartoon-me lives in the online world only, and references me without actually being me. I could give Cartoon-me a different personality or a different life and no one who doesn't know me in real life would be any the wiser. I have this vague idea that I want to partially rotoscope over video of myself/my face, maybe while leaving the rest of my body alone, as I think that would give the effect I'm going for. However, I've never rotoscoped anything before and most of what I know about it is that it takes a long time. I may have to come up with an alternate solution.

As for a connection to Baudrillard, I remain obsessed with the successive phases of the image. I have started trying to categorize things in my daily life based on what phase of the image they're in, and I also bring up that specific passage in other courses because it keeps being surprisingly relevant. Sometimes I think to myself, how silly is this? Does it matter whether that image or this video is a third or second order simulacra? Doesn't it mean something that I'm here anyway, experiencing them? And then I reflect on how many times I've had to think through the layers of a visual art piece or a minimalist musicking, in order to understand why someone might feel the need to create it and what it's responding to and what it's making me feel, and that makes me want to make my own art about all of it. Images and social norms and cultural values and consumer products make me so angry sometimes (I would rather sit outside with my bare feet in the grass than do most anything else) and yet I'm still here participating in The System because I have to work within it to see outside it and change it. How do I make it easier to see and think outside of my box? How do I reach others in their own little boxes?