Streams

Abstract

In 2004, I was accepted into the Master of Fine Arts program at The University of Hawaii in printmaking. As required by the curriculum, I supplemented my print emphasis with work in various other media I received a video assignment as part of a contemporary social issues class required for all first year, graduate art students. In response, I created Muffler Movie, a reaction to the noise pollution created by the inane loud mufflers of urban car culture. I modeled the piece after Vito Acconci's The Red Tapes (1976), a video involving an alternation between two images and recurring audio that was perceptively altered through repetition, its spoken words blending to create new4sounds. The timing of this project amid my graduate print studies made me rea1ize the potential for combining printmaking with video. Concurrently, video artist Paul Pfeiffer was in residence at the University of Hawaii as a visiting lecturer. Exposure to his work personally legitimized video as an accepted and profound art form. Pfeiffer's use of developing technologies combined with recognizable elements from the mass media produced relevant and dramatic statements about contemporary culture. This electronic intermedia led to the technologic development of my current print-video hybrid work. I realized that print's capacity for creating multiples bad potential for creating stop-motion animation. I developed a system of making video, visually and sonically altering it with a physical filter of deconstruction, and reconstructing it, in the spirit of futurist cinema, into a new cinematic voice for my graphically informed, print-based projects.