Spent the weekend in the role of Professor Ham working alongside professor Cheese in snowbound Copenhagen helping facilitate a workshop with Sam from Patalab on video daydreaming.
Initially I will admit to being a little cautious about the whole concept of daydreaming videos with their surrealist overtones. However as the workshop progressed it became apparent that the notion of an intuitive daydreaming video practice had much in common with the kind of Youtube work programmed for the recent Screen Dump Cog Collective screening. Work in which the transmission from spectacle to screen is keep as uncluttered as possible by overt intention and editing.
One could almost describe this as an automatic process in which the emphasis is on, not looking for things to film but filming things to look at. This is a subtle distinction, but the former seems to result in pieces which are composed of a series of juxtapositions of “interesting” details; a composition of fragments influenced by the language of Bauhaus by way of Pierre Schaeffer whereas the latter is more about letting go and letting the everyday action create its own mis en scene. The shooting and framing of the first process was well described by one student at the workshop as making video doodles, which we truncated to the pleasing sounding term of Voodle. The second process could best be described as some kind of digital camera obscura. Anyway here is a small example of this automatic process.
