The decadent world of undergraduate research

Thanks to the many dol­lars the UW is able to devote to under­grad research, I spent my sum­mer work­ing on an inde­pen­dent video project over the sum­mer. Here’s my speech and the video, oh boy oh boy.
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My name is Claire Fox and I’m from the Com­par­a­tive His­tory of Ideas and Com­par­a­tive Lit­er­a­ture pro­grams. I’ve been in both depart­ments for nearly a year now, so I’m pretty firmly rooted in the human­i­ties and cul­tural stud­ies. About this time last year, I was study­ing print jour­nal­ism pretty seri­ously, but I was in the process of com­plet­ing an inten­sive media stud­ies and social change pro­gram in Port­land that fea­tured a strong video com­po­nent. When work­ing with video, I real­ized that there were a lot of artis­tic oppor­tu­ni­ties in jour­nal­ism that I had yet to explore.

With that in mind, I’ve spent the past year caught between medi­ums; still work­ing on my writ­ing, but keep­ing an eye on other forms of artis­tic com­mu­ni­ca­tion. So, since I’ve entered this Sum­mer Insti­tute, I’ve been try­ing to cre­ate a visual lan­guage that par­al­lels the ideas I’m already artic­u­lat­ing rooted in lin­guis­tic or the­o­ret­i­cal traditions.

The name of this research project is “Ampli­fied Present: The Delayed Beauty of a Bizarre Locale.” Toward the end of this pre­sen­ta­tion, I’ll show a video I made which was inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s short story, “Signs and Sym­bols.” This is my attempt at visual language-making.

“Signs and Sym­bols” essen­tially traces the rela­tion­ship between an elderly Russ­ian immi­grant cou­ple and their incur­ably deranged son on his birth­day when the cou­ple vis­its him in the sana­to­rium. I ini­tially was attracted to this story because of the son’s con­di­tion, which in the story is termed “ref­er­en­tial mania.” This con­di­tion is an acute form of para­noia where the son thinks that all inan­i­mate objects and all of phe­nom­e­nal nature are con­stantly engaged in a mali­cious com­men­tary on his life. This sort of psy­cho­log­i­cal con­di­tion seemed like an excel­lent set of images to unpack in video.

In video, I can approach the nar­ra­tive through a phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal lens, by pick­ing out indi­vid­ual ges­tures, moments, or objects in nature from Nabokov’s writ­ing and med­i­tat­ing on those images to com­mu­ni­cate a story instead of using tra­di­tional chrono­log­i­cal nar­ra­tive struc­ture. This allows me to look at the inter­ac­tion between phe­nom­e­nal nature and arti­facts on one hand with per­cep­tion, imag­i­na­tion, and mem­ory on the other, this all done with­out hav­ing to deal with words as a bar­rier, or even hav­ing to depend on them by default as an anchor.

In addi­tion to my fas­ci­na­tion with ref­er­en­tial mania, there was one par­tic­u­lar image in “Signs and Sym­bols” that held my atten­tion. The struc­ture of this story is shaped around the elderly couple’s rou­tines, all which have com­ple­men­tary sets of ges­tures or sounds embed­ding them into our sen­sory mem­o­ries. At one point in the story, how­ever, the hus­band makes a sud­den, inci­sive deci­sion that launches the cou­ple out of their rou­tines into unknown lifestyle territory.

What was even more fas­ci­nat­ing to me, though, was what hap­pened imme­di­ately after this deci­sion was made. As Nabokov writes, “They sat down to their unex­pected fes­tive mid­night tea.” On my first read of this story, this sen­tence was unre­mark­able. It was only when I con­tin­ued to re-read the story that the image of the “unex­pected fes­tive mid­night tea” became a famil­iar space where two char­ac­ters cre­ate a bizarre locale in the weary famil­iar. The space was also very present: the hus­band sev­ered the cou­ple from their past, but they hadn’t yet taken any steps to orga­nize the future. This was another instance of per­cep­tion worth addressing.

Yet again, video seemed like the prime medium for image inter­pre­ta­tion. In addi­tion to its abil­ity to pull apart and med­i­tate upon images, video allows the abil­ity to choose one pri­mary image as a plateau and have a struc­ture that lends com­ple­men­tary images the impor­tance of that pri­mary image. That in mind, when I started plan­ning this video, I wanted to cre­ate and decode my own fic­tional locale and unearth an image-based, psy­cho­log­i­cal space from Nabokov’s lin­ear narrative.

Before shoot­ing the video mate­r­ial, how­ever, I forced myself to choose another medium as a fil­ter to inter­pret cer­tain images fur­ther. The medium I chose was paint­ing. Con­cen­trat­ing on sketch­ing and paint­ing allowed me to both engage with and detach from the images: as I painted, I had to think about very spe­cific details in the ges­tures and phe­nom­ena I chose to rep­re­sent, but I also had time to let the images pass through my mem­ory and inte­grate more with my sub­jec­tive per­cep­tions of them. I dis­played these paint­ings along with some note­book pages and rough sto­ry­board sketches at the In-Progress exhi­bi­tion at the Jake. I also took some pho­tos that I ended up not dis­play­ing at the exhi­bi­tion, but they still helped me fur­ther con­sider ideas in com­po­si­tion, just in more of an impul­sive man­ner than painting.

When I finally started work­ing on the actual video, I had a cou­ple of goals in mind. I wanted to con­struct a world where arti­facts and phe­nom­e­nal nature are oppres­sive, and then make that feel­ing move. And, as I said before, I wanted to cre­ate my own fic­tional bizarre locale, and I wanted that locale to aid in decon­struct­ing the weary­ing feel­ing of the arti­facts and phe­nom­e­nal nature sequenc­ing. The result­ing video works to cre­ate an envi­ron­ment rooted in the present, simul­ta­ne­ously engag­ing and chal­leng­ing the viewer to appraise the value of a sin­gle moment.

I like to pref­ace videos with a quo­ta­tions, so here’s one from “Signs and Symbols”:

“He must always be on his guard and devote every minute and mod­ule of life to the decod­ing of the undu­la­tion of things.”

ampli­fied present from Claire Fox on Vimeo.

In inhab­it­ing this boy’s per­spec­tive, I attempted to turn his sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence into some­thing to be col­lec­tively expe­ri­enced. Though I’m pri­mar­ily approach­ing the work from his per­spec­tive, we as view­ers have our own attach­ments to the images we see, so we strug­gle to inte­grate the two as we gaze at the images on the screen. In this way, I invite view­ers to engage in that per­spec­tive along with me, and decide for them­selves based on their inter­ac­tion with the piece whether the pres­ence of nature and arti­facts is oppres­sive, or maybe lib­er­at­ing, relax­ing, or some­thing else com­pletely. And, by way of the bizarre locale, I hope to engage view­ers’ mem­o­ries, allow­ing the images to linger and take on beauty later.

So, with that in mind, I want to leave you with one final quo­ta­tion from Chris Marker’s gor­geous film, Sans Soleil:

“I think of a world where each mem­ory could cre­ate its own legend.”