Assignment
For the artist, the spaces of the city present themselves as both challenges and opportunities. Although the various structures of the city appear to be carefully defined, small acts and gestures, playfulness, and wandering/wondering can transform the experience of space into that which is suddenly unfamiliar and exciting.
With the language and ideas of Debord’s and De Certeau’s texts as a point of departure: plan, shoot, and edit a video in which a space in the city becomes recharged, problematized, and/or given new meaning through an ‘intervention’ of some kind (we will discuss this term in greater detail). The video can (but does not have to be) narrative based (ie telling a clear story). Your final video should be between one and three minutes in length. Please also submit a brief written statement.
You might begin this project by going on a dérive (or drift) within the city. Choose a starting point (and perhaps no ending point) and allow the process of arriving at the end point to be undetermined and indirect. What happens when you allow the spaces that you encounter to direct your path?
Explanatory Statement
For this project, I decided to go on a dérive to see what I would encounter by simply wandering around the East Village/Greenwich Village. After an hour of just walking around and capturing footage, I decided to head to my actual destination, which was NYU’s Library. Instead of going straight to the library, I stumbled upon a miniature playground and sat on the benches near it. What happened after became the center of this film, and the reason why I named the film “The Variability of Rain.”
Last Tuesday, I met Chelsea Peters, a New York native that just so happened to have a portable piano. Unexpectedly, we engaged in conversation and she decided to play a song for me. When I asked to film her, she was a bit hesitant and told me how she usually doesn’t allow people to film her. However, she allowed me to film her only because I seemed different from most people that had asked. By doing so, I intervened into this space by filming her performance and inserting it behind various clips of my walk around the city.
I decided to revisit this playground/park again this Tuesday just to see if she would appear again. Naturally, I could not find Chelsea or her piano anywhere insight because it to happened to rain on this particular day. Just like the rain, the variability of her was a sudden intervention into my life as well as the space she occupied.
