(cross-posted to my ITF blog)
I was on the M60 late Monday night, on my way to return a big stack of final exams in Modernist literature (brain freeze!), when I figured out why this editing project wasn’t going well, and what I needed to do differently. I was listening to Depeche Mode’s Playing the Angel–the album from which you heard “John the Revelator,” way back on the first day of class. The first song on the album, “A Pain that I’m Used To,” is something of a personal anthem–not just because writing a dissertation is slow going, but because of the controlled chaos of the opening seconds. I find those first seconds incredibly comforting. (NB: I am too old and graduate student-y for club nights these days, and I’ve taken out the facial piercings of my early twenties, but I am generally of the goth/industrial persuasion, so my definition of “comfort music” is… idiosyncratic.) Watch/listen here, just for a few seconds. Go on, I’ll wait.
I recently finished coordinating what has become an annual event for the Macaulay freshman class: the video re-curation projects at the year-end exhibition of the Snapshot Day photos. I had helped out at this event before, of course, and had even done a presentation about it at the annual intra-CUNY IT conference (along with John, my partner in crime fellow central ITF). But this year was the first time I was coordinating something like this: deciding which students would be asked to attend when, getting all the ITFs set up (and picking only some of them to lead plenary sessions, an act that caused me no end of worry), figuring out space… and then being there the whole day, directing people to do things, solving last-minute problems, and so on. It was a great chance to grow my skills and practice event coordination–a task, it turns out, at which I am probably decent, but don’t enjoy as much as I thought I would. (Hey, you never know what you’ll like doing until you try everything.)
So I was on the bus, thinking about this project and the last few weeks at work, generally, and when I heard DM croon “You just need to achieve something that rings true” I decided to take that as the motto for the results you see below. These are my own interpretations–re-curations, if you will–which take both your creative projects and your presentations of those projects as source material for a short video summation/exploration. I tried to make the nature of each creative project clear to the uninformed viewer, but also to use what I thought were your strongest or most interesting points about your own work as a means of suggesting an interpretation. I hope you enjoy them.
(The bits of noise in the opening and closing credits are a looping 2-second sample of a hidden track on The Cruxshadows’ 2007 album, Ethernaut.)
Mac:
Grecia:
Sam:
Jon:
Andreas:
Congratulations to all of you on some fine projects! The diversity here is really quite awesome.
