Thursday Night -- 12.13.07 -- Jackie Goss -- Animated Documentaries

Contents:
1. About This Thursday
2. About Jackie Goss
3. Artist's Statement by Jackie
4. About "Stranger Comes to Town" & "How to Fix the World"
5. Useful Links

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1. About This Thursday

What: Screening and Discussion
When: Thursday, December 13. 7:30 Pm
Where: 16 Beaver
Who: Free and Open to all

We're pleased to have Jackie Goss in person to present two of her "animated documentary" works (and maybe some related surprises). While her work has screened recently in several festivals in New York, we were interested in convening a more extended conversation that some of the questions and internal complexities staged within her most recent works would seem to invite. We have had recent conversations about a present uncertainty regarding the power of images, particularly documentary images with revolutionary associations. In this context animation as not just as a formal technique, but perhaps a concept and accompanying social or historical practice––involving the mediation of what has been or could be "animated"––seems highly relevant.

This event is co-organized with Eyespeak, the Graduate Student Association of the Hunter College Integrated Media Arts MFA Program.

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2. About Jackie Goss

Jacqueline Goss makes videos and web-based works exploring the rules, histories, and tools of language and mapmaking systems. Her projects take as their source specific acts of writing and cartography that bring about cultural change, technological innovation, or create social narrative ruptures.

For the last few years she has used 2D digital animation techniques to work within the genre of the animated documentary.

A native of New Hampshire, she attended Brown University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She teaches in the Film and Electronic Arts Department at Bard College in the Hudson Valley of New York.

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3. Artist Statement

I make movies and web-based works that explore how political, cultural,
and scientific systems change the ways we think about ourselves. Older
works include "The 100th Undone" and "There There Square," short videos
about the Human Genome Project and North American geographical
mapmaking, respectively. My most recent videos are "How To Fix The
World" --a look at Soviet-sponsored literacy programs in 1930's Central
Asia and "Stranger Comes To Town" ––an animated documentary about the
identity-tracking of immigrants and travelers coming into the United
States.

My favorite stories are about people who set out to objectively
measure, describe or map some part of the world. Inevitably human
nature and the natural color and noise of the world complicate that
objective task. What happens instead is always far more interesting.
How are these acts processed and manifested in the thoughts, utterings,
and gestures of the people they affect? Does the Genome Project change
the way one thinks about the consequences of human fallibility? Does
the process of mapping a nation lead to its inhabitants'
internalization of surveillance systems? What does a 1930's Muslim
student's ability to solve a syllogism say about learning to live under
Soviet Socialism? How does the lending of one's body to a physical
identification process change how one sees oneself? These are the
questions at the heart of my most recent videos. I work with the
assertion that illuminating obscured histories and texts, and
illustrating their connections to each other, can lead to a more
complex and pleasurable reading of our own lives.

My recent projects have taken the form of 2D digital animations working
within the indeterminate genre of the "animated documentary." I use
animation, not to create fantastic worlds or data-based illustrations,
but to craft subjective responses to what people actually do, write,
and say.

Although my work often shows at animation festivals, it is most
successfully programmed, in my opinion, as documentary. Arguably,
animated documentaries have been around since the beginning of cinema,
still, few works fall within this genre. In my categorization, they
include Winsor MacKay's 1918 film "Sinking of the Lusitania," sections
of Chris Marker?s films, Bob Sabiston's "Roadhead," Marjut Rimmenen's
"Some Protection," Blanca Aguerre's "Our Story," the work of the
Southern Ladies Animation Group, and the on-line ruminations of YH
Chang. Increasingly filmmakers have been exploring this genre and I
find this to be a good context for thinking about the things I make.

The unsettled territory of the animated documentary – where historical
document meets the unabashedly subjective eye --appeals to me. Here I
work to develop a deeper understanding of the relationship between
image and text on the common ground of abstraction, and the powerful
ability of sound to give animation qualities of physical embodiment and
purpose. Although animation is sometimes read as simplistic or
reductive (perhaps because of associations with media for children), I
find that animated works are usually more challenging to read than
live-action cinema because of their abstract nature. I embrace this
apparent contradiction and want to make more use of it in my work. For
instance, using animation let's me challenge stereotypes head-on, to
repurpose their simplistic outlines by combining disparate faces and
voices, or by reducing a stereotype visually to the point of absurdity.

Producing an animation is time-consuming and involves hours of
repetitive labor in one sitting. It often feels much more like a craft
that an art practice, and I find myself meditating on that distinction
and how it affects my projects. This is work that I enjoy. Making a
mouth move in sync with an audio interview gives me time to really hear
subtle cadences and changes in a voice and more fully understand what
that person was thinking and feeling during an interview.

Increasingly, I am interested in combining animation with photographic
and live-action images, to explore the use of rotoscoping, and to poke
at the places where one can't easily define an image as photographic or
drawn (many Google Earth images are like this for me). In this regard
I find new media theorist Lev Manovich's reconceptualization of
live-action filmmaking as a subset of animation very useful. While
live-action images make their way into my projects, I still define them
as animations.

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4. About "Stranger Comes To Town" & "How to Fix the World"

Stranger Comes To Town
28 minutes 2007

They say there's only two stories in the world: man goes on a journey, and stranger comes to town.

Six people are interviewed anonymously about their experiences coming into the US. Each then designs a video game avatar who tells their story by proxy. Goss focuses on the questions and examinations used to establish identity at the border, and how these processes in turn affect one's own sense of self and view of the world.

"Stranger Comes to Town" re-works animations from the Department of Homeland Security --combining them with stories from the border, impressions from the on-line game World of Warcraft, and journeys via Google Earth to tell a tale of bodies moving through lands familiar and strange.

How To Fix The World
28 minutes 2004

Adapted from psychologist A.R. Luria’s research in Uzbekistan in the 1930s, “How to Fix the World” brings to life Luria's conversations with Central Asian farmers learning how to read and write under the unfamiliar principles of Socialism.

Colorful digital animations play against a backdrop of images shot in Andijian (where Soviet-era President Karimov's supression of Islam lead to violence in May 2005.) At once conflicting, humorous, and revelatory, these conversations between Luria and his “subjects” illustrate an attempt by one culture to transform another in the name of education and modernization.

The subtleties of this transformation, as well as the roots of current cultural conflicts, are found in words exchanged and documented seventy-five years ago.

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5. Useful Links

www.jacquelinegoss.com

two articles about recent work:
http://www.pulse-berlin.com/index.php?id=83
http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1627&lang=en

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