Here is my most recent assignment: The video for small devices.

www.hybrid.concordia.ca/~lizlee/a2/dialyourextensions.html

My thinking behind this was again very much MacLuhan inspired. (What can I say, my Art and Technology classes are getting to me, heh) I kept in mind the theory "The Medium is the Message", and how MacLuhan stated that technology is basically just a means for man to extend his senses. However, by doing so in such an artificial way, he mentions that man also alienates his senses, sacrificing one for the other. The net, for example, is almost a fully visual experience, with a touch of audio. We focus all our energies on visual and aural media, and hence lose touch with touch, smell and taste... TV is visual, and pretty much stops us from moving, from feeling, from seeing, some might argue. We are occularcentric mostly, as a culture, depending mostly on our eyes; what we see.
MacLuhan suggests that this came about firstly with the advent of writing, where traditionally aural cultures experienced the world in much more "sensitive" way, using all 5 senses to tell a story, for example. Around the fire, dancing, singing, touching, eating... storytelling was a full-blown, sensual experience. With the advent writing, and notably of Guttenberg's printing press, the propagation of written material and consequently, the need to understand writing by reading caused us to generally lose touch with other senses, and devote ourselves almost entirely to sight to experience the world.

Technology, one might argue, is slowly changing this, by making interactivity part of the visual experience, but by default, we are still very limited.

So for this video project, I chose to show seperate pieces of facial features coming from a variety of people, in a sort of uneven, flowing stream of senses, though there is a certain emphasis on the eye to underline our occularcentricity. We isolate and disconnect our senses nowadays, to experience the world... and so I thought showing a jumble of confused, solitary features would be reminiscent of that. For the audio component, I thought it would be appropriate to create and mix a series of conversations, and to then jumble them up, to give the whole thing an awkward, confusing and honestly uncomfortable feeling. We should feel uncomfortable, seperating our senses like we do, which should otherwise be working all together to truly understand the world.

Since this was a project for small screens, I pictured somewhat of an ironic scene, perhaps in the not too distant future, of someone referring to this video on their cell phone to remind themself of what their senses are, or how they were. I found it ironic that the only way we might even connect with our other senses is visually these days, so through the medium of video, I exposed all of them except of course, taste.

I guess the most generalized point of this video though, was simply to make the viewer uncomfortable, or simply "aware". I chose strange sounds, distorted images of things we take for granted. I just wanted the viewer to "feel". Feel anything, except the cold reliance on technology, feel for a moment, that awkwardness when faced with distorted features that are only vaguely recognizable, that reminds us we are indeed human.