things i've been making

I work for the City of Austin, in the Parks and Rec department, as a "movement instructor" for the Dougherty Art Center's Totally Cool Totally Art Program.I have a lanyard badge printed with my picture and this information. I have a city bus pass, which I think is hot shit. I travel to recreation centers around the city, two at a time for four week sessions, and teach afterschool art classes to teenagers. The class is called Bodies in Motion. For the first part of the year I was teaching with Kelly, who has a theatre and dance background and taught a dance/music video class last semester. My application lesson plan was a stop motion animation class and we paired up with the idea of doing something like this:

We combined our backgrounds and worked with the first few recreation centers making body stop motions, puppets, and music videos. In January Kelly stepped up to take a full time administrative position and I got paired with a new teacher. Jeannie has a background in fine arts and is going to grad school for art history in the fall, and we've been doing a lot more hands on, macro, and made stop motion: claymation, drawing and object animation, although there is still an emphasis on bodies interacting with objects, drawings, or the environment. When it was just Kelly and I, I was doing all the editing, now Jeannie and I split it relatively half and half, and often collaborate on some, trading the work computer back and forth. I've been thinking a lot about the authorship in this kind of work, the push and pull of collaboration between me, my co-teachers and assorted groups of 9-19 year olds. How is this process different and similar to the processes I use in shooting and editing my own work?

i showed these two videos at an open studio/outdoor event last weekend along with the video I showed in Portland earlier this year ( my last post I believe).






I feel a little mixed about this work. I'm not sure if its a false direction or a confused beginning. Maybe i take that back. Certainly it is representative of an exciting new relationship with sound. I just went back and watched some of the sequences from my thesis, which---silent-- was very much about language. My new work, still rooted in intimate emotional experiences, explores a changing environment without language.... I also recently watched Amanda Bagg's "In My Language" again.

which I found particularly stirring in a new way and relevant to this train of thought. I've been shooting a lot more than i've been sharing; When I made that video in chinatown I started thinking about video diaries. I've been shooting little snippets of consciousness, trying to capture an emotion , a moment, a setting. Doing a lot of in camera editing. Reed and I have been shooting a TV show called "can i borrow your extra i phone" which consists primarily of reenacted scenes from our life. I'll have some of this to show you soon: my new camera, purchased for $40 and a 3 hour busride from a woman on craigslist when I first got to Austin, shoots Digital 8 tapes. I bring them over to my friend Kyle's house and we watch them as his deck transfers the information to dvd (.ts files) which i then convert into .mov files to edit and export from Final cut... this process has encouraged the linear, succinct type of shooting i've been doing.
In austin I've been eating and sleeping well while the city reels with thousands of visitors. there are bands playing in every space that a band could play in, some with audiences, some without. it has just suddenly turned cold after a few days of balmy ecstatic heat. We will cover the broccoli and tomato plants tonight with sheets to protect them from the freeze. outside at night you can feel how the city aches with wandering, is bloated and tired from days of drinking, and mildly underwhelmed.
I"m on break from my classes, and I will be for another week. Some friends are in town and it's been nice to see them. Many projects are afoot. The world is settling in slowly around me.
love to all of you in your parts of the world.