BUREAU OF DISRUPTIONS – The Digital Arts and New Media MFA program at UC Santa Cruz will join the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge to present the work of 14 graduate students. The UCSC DANM MFA Exhibition is the culmination of two years of research and artistic exploration and will include new media works that explore performativity, interactivity and participation.
fragments of migration is a Spanish-English video installation that
incorporates audio interviews with four transgender women from Mexico and one lesbian from El Salvador involved in the asylum process. Three screens with rear projection serve as dislocated frames that show representations of loss, asylum and institutional violence through interactive engagement with the audience. The audio is constantly playing but the screens are not inhabited by video and only
“perform” when an audience member “stands nearby.” Trinh T. Minh-ha’s quote: “I do not intend to speak [for the other], just speak nearby” is offered in the center screen as an invitation to “stand nearby” the screens in order to be able to experience the video that accompanies the audio.
In my recent piece, the birds the bees the flowers and the seeds, a series of spoken fictional “scores” fill an installation space in the form of rich reverberant audio, piped through an six-channel audio interface, with speakers that double as flower pots. Each of the scores begins with some version of the statement, “It is the future, you live in a future garden. You live in a beautiful garden of the future.” These scores narrate some kind of scenario, where, although the garden is very beautiful and you have everything you need, you also miss certain people who are not in the garden, people you love and desire. Or you might need to select new mates to further your species. All narrative scores deal with consumption and desire. After outlining some such theme, the narratives then encourage the visitor to engage the garden in some way; this, they are told, will ensure contact with a lost love, or the selection of a new mate. Visitors are told that the future garden they find themselves in is a communication technology, or memory device. Everything in this future garden has a double symbolism: poppy pods look like grenades, bullets are seeds, the planter is an ammo case, etc. When visitors plant “seeds” to retrieve a memory, as the score instructs, audio news clips relating to the current US war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan play back through speakers hidden in flowerpots. Most, if not all of the audio clips begin with an Iraqi speaking in Arabic and often narrating something to do with the current war’s effect on landscape, gardens, their families etc. Desires narrated in the future garden, then, collide with true stories of death and destruction outside the garden, creating deeply uncomfortable associations within the narratives, alluding to the positions and movements of bodies in wired spaces of privilege and victims of violence. At its most disturbing, the piece asks to what degree the garden — perhaps not metaphorical but very literal — is nourished by this violence. The allegory of the garden is both literal and metaphorical. It operates on the premise that the U.S. is literally a garden, a cultivated space. But also it works to illustrate how this garden requires the blood of others to flourish. Finally, the garden seeks to show how both war and gardens might cultivate us to further their own evolution.
The Peaced2GatherHerstories project is a collaborative audio and visual intervention into the practice of narrating history. Experimental animations and poetry combine and render visual expressions of oral narratives by four female poets of color. Fernanda Coppell, Jillian Izumi Mizokami, Wendy Mi-Shong Fong, and I are the featured poets. Each animation expresses our individual and collective goals of understanding our current positions as women of color by reflecting on our families’ past and present positions as disenfranchised and noncitizen residents of America. I will exhibit the films as instillations within community and gallery spaces around the country.
How to Visualize Memory
The memories of the spoken word artists are translated visually through experimental animation, which utilizes collage-centric stop motion, sound, traditional cell, and found-footage. The animations are collaged memories and interpretations of history as they’ve been articulated in the mass media. They do not attempt to solve the problematics of memory relay, but rather function as counter-memories. They function as hyperreal articulations of history and time then the linear objective time based positioning of time that echoes from modernity’s colonialism projects. The shorts critique truth, the narrator’s truths as well as those historical truths iterated in popular history. These animations are experiments in the process of memory work.
Angela’s Story
As we die from mass consumption
I am a black/African/American woman whose poem discusses the pressures associated with performances of racial identity, history, and knowledge’s gained from televisual moments. My short animation is primarily rendered in black and white utilizing traditional line drawn animation, 2D graphics, and found footage. The film glitches, pops and leaps from industrialization to some anticlimactic gravity, empty with data space. The inside of a motherboard factory reveals a ever-pregnant male difficultly delivering products that are swept up onto a series of conveyors and tried on by blurred black and white consumers. Slightly green b&w hued children hold hands stand and run in an industrial landscape set somewhere between 1930 and 3030 while a flying saucer opens fire lightning on the masses. Lips open and close. Eyes roll back and a deep female voice poses questions in rhyme. How do I begin the narrative? Narrow the wide scope of we stories too often stripped and limited? Minstreled and misconstrued. The voice questions the contexts of history and her story while saying coyly that history be a two-faced slick-talker trying to get all in my headspace. The mythological character Janus is conjured and confused–speaks of the importance of the past but only iterates the importance of progress and industrialization, not stories of the laboring bodies. Their stories, the backs on which progress is made, are not present in the narrative, and sit uncomfortably in the margins of landscapes and banknotes. The films use of dense collages, textures, and repetition fill and disorient viewer’s notions of time and place.
Fernanda’s Story
His-story books that erased me with a penis
Fernanda Coppell, is a Mexican-American woman whose poem discusses the psychic violence she experienced after crossing the border and gaining citizenship. Though her privilege allowed her access into higher education, she described the knowledge’s gained, particularly history, as erasing her with a penis. The visual representation of her poem features stop motion, and dense composite layers. Excretions from various orifices of the poet and other unknown actors frequent sequences. Fernanda’s tongue morphs into a canon, a rifle; rapid firing off the stories of mujeres she has excavated from her body. Coppell positions her body, and the memories she considers history as the archive. This pen is a pick, this page is a brush, I am not a poet, I am an archeologist excavating my own body. This line is repeated at the beginning and conclusion of the short. The excavation is sequenced within the short as a series of exhumed chapters from her body. Her mouth, a penis, her ear, the nose of President George W. Bush each discharge texts of ‘ the dusty tongues of mujeres’, and anti immigration legislation. The texts are all products of access to education, and critique of the knowledges that are accessible within institutions of higher education.
Jillian’s Story
I wish I could say I remember
Jillian Izumi Mizokami is Nisei, the third generation American citizens of Japanese descent. Many in her family were subject to Japanese Internment. Her poem discusses traumas of Japanese internment on older generations in her family. The visual aesthetics of her animated short are varied and representative of Jillian’s fractured American, Japanese, and Nisei identity formations. Colorful landscapes layered atop shadowy pixilated figures dream up funerals in a memory realm somewhere between rural Japan and Southern California. Mindscapes of vineyards, valleys, and graveyards collapse and complicate time, immersing viewers in familiar and peculiar images that nonlinearly chronicle moments in Mizokami’s life. Sounds of rain, machine guns, bombs, and Japanese war songs interrupt the largely silent film, and engage the transitory story. Uncle’s dad just died and I wish I could say I remember are reoccurring statements throughout the piece. The Mizokami family doesn’t speak much about being Japanese. Their silence persists as long as the memories do. Jillian’s voice is sweet, sad, and calming against the newspaper textured cloud-sky. The images are tactile. Each sequence is heavy with contrasting neon and subdued landscapes and geometry.
Wendy’s Story
No visas required
Wendy Mi-Shing Fong is a Chinese-American woman whose poem confronts conflicts with the American dream that her parents desperately work towards, and the late eighties early nineties television sitcoms that socialized her and her siblings. Visuals of Wendy’s piece are extremely bright and reminiscent of educational programming for elementary school students. We five were the first born in America. No visas required as past generations did and died. A Technicolor landscape reflects off the windshield of a retro VW minivan. Five heads with smiling faces poke out of the windows. The van drives off as a large white dove or Ku Klux Klan hood dissolves on the horizon. The imagination of Fong is rampant in the short, as she walks the Great Wall of China, drowns in English oceans, and only finds comfort in pictures, books, and the television box. Sequences in her short reflect her family’s desire to assimilate and the subsequent erasure of Chinese traditions towards assimilation. For the Fong family, lessons on how to be American are learned by watching eighties and nineties family sitcoms.
