Portrait of a character - the Jankowski project
The assignment was to create a portrait of a character, using 2-3 different points of view within a single medium.
Eric and I chose to portray a character under surveillance, a mysterious figure with weird effects on cameras, whose apartment is searched while away. Two monitors, reminiscent of those used by security guards, show video: one channel tracks the character as he leaves the apartment and visits a graveyard; the other channel takes us on a furtive search inside the apartment.
The video is intentionally degraded, for a number of reasons: it is more consistent with the setting, a surveillance scenario; it reflects the character's distorting effect on cameras; and finally, by making it more difficult to make out key details, it attempts to sharpen the attention of the viewers of the piece.
You can watch a high quality Quicktime video of the piece here
More detail after the link...
The development process was interesting, and highly entertaining: the character took on a life of his own as we were trying to flesh him out. External coincidences and synchronicities that occurred during the writing and filming ended up in the final piece, as part of the character and his story.
We made a conscious effort to translate our character description into the piece - almost all the elements of the character description are ultimately reflected via the character's actions and possessions (but not acting). The various locations (hallway, graveyard) were chosen to fit with the character's persona. We gathered together photos, and made prop books, that revealed the character. This seems to have worked, to the extent that some details that slipped by, such as the sheets on the bed, were immediately noticed as jarring.
In addition, the framing of the piece (surveillance) makes the character interesting: if someone is watching him, he must be interesting. Another idea was to induce a kind of voyeuristic state in the viewer, to evoke the urge to explore someone's living quarters while they are away, to spy on them from a distance, unnoticed.
I enjoyed the deep artificiality of the piece: simulated video effects, "acting out" a role, and creating various detailed props (fake books, documents, etc.) I have always enjoyed films with a detailed back story (eg. "Blade Runner"), and this was an opportunity to create something like that (albeit on a smaller scale). Even the documents, coffee cups and envelopes on the table with the monitors were props - I carefully made the coffee stains on the "surveillance order". I was also influenced by the work of Christopher Büchel, and his fabricated environments.
An interesting component of the piece is that Eric and I decided to act the role of the people doing the surveillance, dressing up for the occasion, watching and commenting on the action on the screen as it unfolded. While fun, it may have distracted attention from the video component. Most people would rather look at Eric and I than at screens, especially if we are acting (and in Eric's case, dressing) rather atypically.
A close up of one of the monitors, showing one of the fake prop photos:
Video was filmed in four locations, my apartment, Eric's apartment, outdoors on Second Ave. and the Greenwood cemetery in Brooklyn. Footage was edited together with an intentionally film-like idiom: time is highly compressed, cuts follow the action very closely, framing is controlled to focus viewer attention. We were very consciously trying to evoke film noir/spy/surveillance genres of cinema.
Another monitor showing a long-distance tracking shot of an unexpected participant
A key concern that I had with this piece was that it not be too literal: it was tempting to lay things out too clearly for the viewer, and this would make things a lot less engaging. (Probably one of my biggest learning points at ITP so far: design is good when it is obvious, but art is not... This tension between art and design seems to be at the core of what ITP is trying to do.) I think we successfully avoided this, by packing a lot of information into the piece, and then presenting it through an intentionally limited medium. You have to view the piece several times to really extract the full story of the character.
There are a number of areas to explore going forward:
1) Sound - the piece is currently silent. I would like to experiment with various options for adding a soundtrack, maybe either "cinematic" (a musical score) or more "verité" (simulated ambient sound).
2) Duration - given the constraints around the presentation of the piece, there was substantial compression of the overall duration. The piece represents events that take more than hour in about 7 minutes, by cutting out much of the dead time. However, given the nature of the work, it would be interesting to restore this dead time, and actually show it as simulated "real time" feeds from a number of video cameras.
3) Scope - if the work lasts longer, has sound, and involves more elaborate set dressing, then it could be an installation more like those of Christopher Büchel. I could see replicating an entire surveillance post, with battered furniture, half-eaten donuts, coffee-stained documents, etc. which on closer inspection tell a story (or several stories). It would be possible to add more surveillance video channels, or video channels representing different types of information: data feeds, website searches, aerial maps, photomontage, etc.