Blogtastic rantosaurus

Do I have a blog buddy? Oh, the sadness...

Hope I didn't bother anybody by commenting on all blogs. It is possible that I am avoiding some other important classwork. However, there are some questions rolling around here that bother me.

Like what? Well, like questioning things for instance. Yes, I totally believe we should be questioning what we watch, especially since that is often the intent of the work itself. That said, there being no stupid questions and all, shouldn't we be careful about how we are questioning so that we avoid making up questions that have no point. For example, is the word "point" in the last sentence really appropriate? Should it be "purpose?" Am I being vague? Let's leave it at that then.

Another question I've got under my skin is this question of "truth." We are all children of video now. We all know that in whatever format you get a moving image there is a component, at the very least, of artificiality as soon as the choice is made to capture, even if it's only the choice to capture one image over another. If you want close to absolute truth I suggest last year's screenings of 10 skies or 13 lakes. The truth is, we are looking at the work of people, as people. Either there is a resonance with us in the image, or no resonance. My question is how much does it really matter if there is truth going on outside the space of the frame? It is entirely possible that "Birthday Suit" is a total fiction, especially when we consider the quality of the image. Yet the truthfulness of it's content resonated most in the blogs I read. Almost all of us who didn't get tied down by the naked body saw something of ourselves in that piece that was true inside of us, even if it was just the idea that yes, she is quite accident prone; or for me, I am glad that I am lucky enough that I don't really scar too badly.

For a more modern example of total fiction that appears as truth, we have only to look at lonelygirl15. Here, I think we have a good collision of another idea with this truth idea- that of what is experimental. Lonleygirl15 is experimental video: it is an experiment of convention, not unlike "Forgotten Silver" or the "War of the Worlds" radio address. The truth in all of these pieces is the same and is different than the surface content of the pieces themselves: We as a collective believed in them because they spoke a conventional language, through a conventional outlet, and we should question the reality of those pieces. These are reminders of the truth that the created/captured image can lie, and is often the most moving when it does distort reality in some way.

In the end, I think talking about the truth in these pieces gives way too much room to loose our way in tangential argument about what the truth is, and leads us away from what was true, what we found resonant, in each piece for ourselves, which is the thing that gets discussed the least. The truth is we are people watching things made by people. (Except for you- yes you know who you are- I know you're a machine. For now your secret is safe with me...)