GlobaLapses

Last night I had a dream that I was in Japan with old friends desperately searching for a Canadian restaurant. I was wearing my filthy work clothes indicating that I was an employed Japanese citizen, as were my old friends, and there was something satisfyingly itinerant about mustering up the strength to actively seek out the finest Canadian bacon Tokyo could offer. It only seems fitting then that first thing this morning I should discover an article in the nytimes about a video entitled "Dancing" in which a man dances in various locations around the world, literally transporting from location to location while retaining the same goofball poise of sloppy dancing. The video is here http://youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY and the article is here http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/08/arts/television/08dancer.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin The ephemeral sensation of slipping into unknown worlds was sort of offset by the familiarity of a white guy dancing terribly, a faux pas most Americans have either confined themselves to on the dance floor or at the very least have painfully witnessed more than once. While that last sentence may be rife with a postcolonial headache I found something vital in the video in terms of establishing a unified theme in spite of the diverse properties tied to each location, albeit the simple connection of moving your feet in time. The moment in the video in which people swarm the formerly one man act in multiple locations like a battlefield collision is an abrasive and important reminder that the video operates in a context beyond "Tourist-who-makes-me-wish-I-traveled-more" (PS-great battlefield collision in awesome music video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0LIBCw8syA now just stomach that it's children) and instead becomes part of a world in which dancing silently communicates a latent potential we all have for expression.
Anyhow, I found myself in a place of fond reflection in which I summoned up other ambitious forays into expansiveness via online videos, a specificity if I've ever heard one but nonetheless they do exist. Two of them strike me as worth noting. The first is a video by that there Michael Gondy who seems to keep on weasling into my mind these days whether I know it or not, the video is a condensed journey of a car traveling from LA to NYC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A-unBigvoY -again there is the potential for this type of expression to be reduced to a trite attempt at sweeping imagery but I find something raw and uniquely Americana (dare I say it!) about the power of the road journey. America's landscape is traversed by serpentine roads and the borders between nature, city, and suburb are determined by the preferred method of travel-pavement and a 4 seater, the thin lines on a map indicating our routes and highways emphasize America's entrenchment in physical division as well as the potency of all its various locales.
The final video I would like to summon for the day is a collage of pictures a woman took of herself every day for 3 years http://www.videosift.com/video/3-year-long-time-lapse-video-of-one-asian-womans-face I enjoy this video thoroughly for the balance that exists within it. The constancy of the woman's stoic expression is offset by the unrestrained aspects of time that give the video its true angle, the chaos of her hair to the point where it seems as though it were twitching, the tone of her lips as they rapidly shift through a veritable rainbow of light tones, and even her complexion which demonstrates the shifts of time through the occasional roughness of her face. These ever so slight glimpses into expression leave me with an understanding of how dramatic the seemingly nonexistent mutations of time actually are. There are moments in the woman's expression that register with me on an almost imperceptible level, at once I am drawn to create a narrative of her day from the wisp of a face that struck me. What was her mood? What was she going through at the time? Of course the beauty lies in the speed of it all, the sensation of unobtainable knowledge coupled with the grace of her constant and rapid change allows my mind to wander into a nearly meditative space in which my concerns are usurped by the impact of the video, and suddenly it's all vanished.
I think these projects share an aspect of heterogeneousness that reflects the space they occupy within the online realm. The internet offers a multitude of voices that combine and negotiate their desire to exist there, it's a subtle reminder that the freedom of the internet should spur us on to become agents within it. As the online project becomes more and more nuanced, more fully interactive, I feel it's possible for people to lose their grasp on their own ability to create within that space-residing in the internet should not be limited to solely subscribing to the tedium of checking facebook/email/newspaper, instead there is now more than ever a need for people to willingly express themselves in whatever avenue they feel aligned with and to make it public. After all these videos ultimately revolve around the possibilities inherent to public expression, what you can offer for other people can allow them to revel in the constancy of creation and perhaps eventually lend itself to nurturing the audiences' own desires to become players themselves.

(Painting Dance With Your Jailor by Allen Schmertzler)