Making of A Dream
Dai Kojima
The video You Can Have It All was created as a result of an experiment
I did with my classmates at Teachers College, Columbia University during fall
semester in 2003. The purpose of making this video clip was to simply play
with medium and meaning, more specifically, photographs and the stories they
carry.
The images were derived from digital photographs taken by
Geoffrey Barrett, a friend of mine. Before I used them in the video clip,
I asked him to explain where the pictures were taken, who else was there when
he took the pictures, what he thought about the object he was capturing,
and what he thought (at the time of the interview) of the images. As I listened
to his stories about the pictures, I gave them short titles (e.g. “Dream,” “The
City,” “Red”). Then I borrowed those pictures and assigned
random numbers to them on my computer. Then the pictures were put in a sequence
with numerical order (e.g. 1-100). They were imported into Apple’s
iMovie in the same order, but I only included the first 30. I played a slide
show of those images and watched it over and over again. Then I made changes
to the images using Adobe’s Photoshop and put transitions between
them in iMovie. In some frames I inserted the title of the picture. I played
the sequence along with a music track by Yo La Tengo (“You can have
it all”).
After the video was made, I showed it to my class asking
what they thought the images meant to them, and what kind of stories they
could think of. Every one of them had different ideas and thoughts, but none
of them said it made no sense. It was when I told them how I made the video
they showed strong reactions. Following is a written comment by one of the
audience.
Whose video is this? The viewer’s? The composer’s? The providers
of photographic or musical content? The software company’s? Wherein
lies the narrative and how effectively does this composition convey it?
There is no narrative. Why do we seek narrative? When we are presented with
media are we prepared to accept that there is no narrative?
Does the presence of “media” imply that narrative exists? Are
we afraid to admit that we don’t understand? Why are we afraid to
speculate that there is no meaning/narrative? In a monastery the
existence of God is pondered constantly but anyone who asserts that he isn’t
there will be ostracized.
Do found objects or images gain or lose meaning when transposed into a new
form/experience/sequence/media? How many times can this transformation happen
during an artist’s process? Is it like photocopying a photo and photocopying
the photocopy infinitely? No, meaning and articulation are steadily lost.
This process is more like animal reproduction where some traits are passed
down from the parents and other traits appear inexplicably.
I showed it to Geoffrey and asked him the same question. His reply was that
he felt like he was seeing “[his] dream in [my] head.”
Affiliations
Dai Kojima, Ph.D. Student
Department of Curriculum Studies
University of British Columbia
