I recently went to check out an exhibit that used some formal elements that might be applied to my Narrative in Sound & Motion class. A few motion pieces and one printed piece stood out to me. I saw some elements of a narrative in one, simultaneity in a few, and anticipation in all that revealed something as time passed. The first piece that drew me in was called "Board". Each artist positioned themselves on each side of a large white board with the broad side of the board facing the camera so it left one man revealed and the other hidden behind the board. This is set up so you see one man in a white room. Then the board falls backward and the other man is revealed and the two performers begin to flip this board around constantly exposing and hiding one another. One man stays on screen at all times while an anticipation is created of where and how the next man will appear.
The next piece I noticed was "Some Words, Some More Words". This piece consisted of about 50 screen prints of short phrases. These phrases exist independently but also as a part of a larger piece. This piece I would directly relate to our Kinetic Typography assignment. The poetry I used for the class had a fragmented narrative of sorts that could be read several ways in which the reader could look at parts of the poetry or the whole and it not matter. Simultaneity and fragmentation were the strong elements correlating between John and Paul's piece and my assignment.
"66.96m" was the next piece to call me in. Mostly because of the noise I heard coming from the television but couldn't see what was causing it. Already my anticipation grew and I was intrigued to learn more. The piece had strings on a pulley system that rotated into a white room where the camera was set up to view the intersection of the two systems of strings and pulleys. Segments of the strings were colored black and at first I believed the purpose of the piece was to test serendipity of the crossing black marks. But after watching long enough the black marks fell into place so that the all intersected and made an image of a chair sitting in the room. I was so surprised. Totally unanticipated and new. A story unfolded before my eyes as the chair came to be.
The final piece I will mention is "Only Other Point". This piece consists of a camera panning through large areas in which balls are dropped on screen, rotated and rolled away. The main part that I found nice was when the camera panned across a ping pong table. Twenty or so ping pong balls fell from above one after another attached to a string that held the ball in a position that showed the movement of a hypothetical ping pong ball bouncing across the table. This piece held the viewers attention with an anticipation of the movement and the unraveling of the narrative that is the balls movement.
Overall, the exhibited had strong elements of anticipation. The anticipation gets the viewer asking questions and looking deeper into the pieces ready for something to happen
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