Tate's final Piece

For my final piece I presented a 23 minute video that was a collage of what I deemed "oppressive information". Oppressive information that is both "good" and "bad" information practices as to be equally deadening upon the senses, body and attention span. Information that is ignorant of the body and the myriad of different ways we can experience and gather information. Information that is not relatable. Media exists in a way in a ubiquitous way as to claim neutrality. I am not convinced. The proof is in the pudding, in our lives and in our flesh. I am deeply interested in the ways we take on irresponsible and abusive informational/journalistic practices. How does the abstraction and anxiety become transferred energetically?

It was sort of grueling experiment because some of the information I laced throughout the video was very important to me, all the while most of it was not. How does it feel to make something I hate, or that is necessarily a failure? I had a friend reread a very influential and tear producing graduation speech made by Wendell Berry shortly after the Valdez Oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska. It's a pretty brilliant and challenging piece. Full of urgency and critique, the likes of which few Americans are able to stand. It's written with sharp confidence and a striking tone of morality, which is also a hard pill to swallow. Still it was written in relation to a very traumatic and avoidable event, which was the Valdez oil spill. In that sense the tone and subject matter of the speech are justified. In my own life-time I have experienced either directly or through mass media other similar events that confuse the boundary between war and peace. Chernobyl, BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast, Fukushima, 9/11, etc etc. I am very interested in the ways we experience these catastrophic events. We are at once submerged in mediated wake of these events, yet they are essentially abstract. Never to be felt, yet they change the world? Yet nothing is the same? They enter our dreams and speech yet we have no memory of them.

------------------
The video:
I spent a lot of time recording mundane moments of my friend going about her day. Her waking up, eating, brushing her teeth etc. I interjected these common moments with sensational video clips of huge disasters. Meanwhile the speech was playing throughout. There were also moments of her singing, dancing, interviewing someone about climate change. The woman being interviewed was from Brown university's environmental studies department. She was insisting that one of the things that needs to happen is Hollywood should start showing their characters recycling and gardening more.

We also spent a day walking around town dressed as representatives of West Boca Dermatology, which is a made up lifestyle company. We used the guise of the company to suss out some of the absurdities of the feel good tactics that are aimed at consumers on the daily, especially in light of major political, economic, social and environmental upheaval. Link to example interview