Category: blog

We asked Claire Bain a few questions about her upcoming presentation of The Nova Avon, at ATA on Friday, August 9.

What is “The Nova Avon” all about? Can you tell us what inspire you to start this project?

“The Nova Avon” is about systems-identity-power: mass media and surveillance systems, sociological systems; identity and persona; interpersonal, economic, and political power. Using social media, this project consists of fictional characters that have real pages on Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and YouTube. Using the format of the photos, videos, and text that people use on social media (in other words, snapshot cellphone pics & videos, texts, etc.) these characters’ lives are plotted out in real time, bit by bit, post by post. I portray most of the characters, male and female, and some other folks are involved, portraying characters either in my pictures or videos, or online in pages that they make. I know of one other fictional Internet character that interacts with me and my characters. There are some real people who interact with my fake Internet folks, too.

I was inspired to make this project four years ago when I saw TV commercials for smartphones, and there were generational conflicts between the characters in the commercials. The parents were annoying and embarrassing the kids by posting banal comments on Twitter and writing “I love you” on their Facebook walls. I had heard about people being stranded and using Facebook to get help, and I’d seen a couple of Twitter novels and video projects. I was writing some short fiction at the time, and I thought of making a Twitter novel, so I created this character, Nova Avon. The plot was that she would unknowingly buy a purse that had a secret item in it, and get kidnapped by people connected with that item. I gave her a backstory as a mid-level marketing manager from Middle America, in her early 30′s, who came here for a great job she had landed. I even had pictures of a great yellow purse (still on her Twitter page, @novaav). I started tweeting her story, but realized that I didn’t want a closed story arc, and that any audience reading it might start in after the beginning of her story. So I changed the narrative idea to the same story arc as most people’s on social media: flat. Nova meets some interesting people, and shares about her interesting brother, Bret…

The audience will have the opportunity to collaborate by making content during the presentation. Would this be the first time you allow this to happen? Why is collaborative content making important for the project?

It’s sort of the second time since I got out of art school (I did one interactive music project in a class at the SF Art Institute where the audience created words and chose musical notes) that the audience creates content. The first was a performance I did at Somarts where I took a panoramic photo of the audience and posted it on Facebook immediately as part of the performance ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/somarts/6507164311/ – http://blogs.sfweekly.com/exhibitionist/2011/12/100_artists_1_hole.php )

Collaborative content making is important not only because that is the nature of social media, but because at this program, we will work in meat space, a compliment to the mediated interactive space of the Internet. I look forward to whatever it is the “audience” comes up with. As soon as they participate, they are no longer the audience. They become the performers. That is fun! It also approaches the communal impulse of the crowd sourcing and participatory activities in current media. But a lot of consumer participation these days is really a form of manipulated free advertising or generating of capital for corporations. So if we create media together at this event, and employ some fakery, we’ll gain the opportunity to question what we are consuming in the future. Maybe sharpen our media literacy.

What has been the biggest challenge during the making of “The Nova Avon”?

At first I got really disappointed that hardly anyone looked at the project, even among my friends. Then a good friend in Germany (a professor of American studies) read it, and I felt happy.  She missed some of it, because it branches out over several blogs, feeds, pages, hyperlinks, etc. It’s a little complicated unless one has the patience to click on all of the links. It’s like a micro internet; depending on how one uses it, different paths open up. Now I’m not so concerned about gaining an audience (a good thing, since I started it in 2009!)…it will exist on the Internet for a long time. I will eventually print it, and maybe convert it to some other online format that’s consolidated–an app, perhaps?  😉   It’s really quite easy because I can behave like anyone else using social media, and post whenever I feel like it. Right now the only challenge is to keep updating the characters’ pages and checking their email so they won’t get shut down. Somehow Facebook caught on to one of the characters and changed her to “Just for fun” status ( http://risingsuninstitute.blogspot.com/ )

Is “The Nova Avon” eventually going to have an end? If so, do you have any idea of how?

At this time, I don’t know if I’ll end it. I intend to keep going with it because it’s fun, easy, and a vehicle for all kinds of new ideas. I love the Internet as artistic medium! This project is an extension or branch of my persona-based film, video, and performance art. If you don’t count an alter-ego named Applebee Crockocidile, whom I performed for my mom and sister occasionally when I was a teenager, I began creating personae in film school. The first character was named Vel Richards, and she was a middle-aged lady that I made super-8 sound films about, in which Alfred Hernandez, John Steiner, and other artists acted. For “The Nova Avon,” I created a character named Burn Richards (acted by filmmaker Andy Burns http://nova-notes.blogspot.com/2010/09/burn-richards.html?utm_source=BP_recent ); he is Vel’s husband, and I decided that Vel is deceased. But she lives on in portraits on Burn’s wall. So the characters may come and go, but the project will live on.

Do you hope your presentation encourages people to think about their real and virtual interactions differently? If so, how?

Yes, I hope it does encourage reflection on interactions–that is one of the underlying reasons for making the project, and much of my work. I’m interested in the ways people attempt to hide or misrepresent themselves, and how we can mis-read or assign identities to others. All of which can be magnified on social media, and some content appears to be fabricated public personae. The most obvious way my project questions virtual interactions is through camera tricks and textual fakery. But I like social media very much, and love that it is sort like a virtual town square where I can see pictures of people with whom I went to elementary school, eating hamburgers and shooting rifles in Utah, along with pictures of Drag Queen friends from my art studio.  Folks who come to the program this Friday August 9 will be able to engage and ponder ways in which virtual interaction imitates, influences, parallels, and diverges from real interaction.

What have you personally learned so far from making “The Nova Avon”?

That marketing is not only for business! Ha ha ha!

Also, that this project has lots of opportunities for communicating in ways that only the Internet can provide.

Why did you choose ATA as a venue for your presentation?

Because ATA is a cultural underpinning of San Francisco, and it maintains the evolutionary creative spirit that San Francisco’s art scene needs. I knew that ATA would be open to hosting a presentation like this, which is not the usual audience/presentation format. I want to support ATA and the arts in San Francisco.

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Hisham Mayet visited ATA this week with two impressionistic documentaries from his archive. Both films, Palace of the Winds, and Folk Music From the Sahara: Among the Tuareg of Libya, explore the musical and cultural practices of North African Muslim communities, isolated from the region’s major thoroughfares by vast and windswept deserts, but connected enough to modern technology to employ phase shifters on their electric guitars.

 

Mayet is the founder of the record and film label Sublime Frequencies, a world music project with a special interest in ritual and folk music. His storytelling complemented the presentation, and gave the audience an entry point into the music and imagery. His account of traveling South on the Moroccan coast, drinking bittersweet tea in a series of living rooms, looking for a song that he had almost missed on the radio..  I felt his thrill in the journey , his passion for the music, and the way that music can connect us. I imagined his tea-serving hosts drawn into the mystery; who sings this song and where does he come from?

As a portrait of a place, the films are opaque. In Palace of the Winds, particularly, the viewer has a profound sense of watching through the lens. I felt that the camera was always present in this film; it was my window into the place, but the glass was thick on that window– I peered through it and so did the film’s subjects. Children mugged for the camera, and women giggled and turned their faces away. It’s standard practice to cut these shots out a documentary and I was glad that Mayet didn’t. A foreign culture will always be opaque to travelers with camera eyes. Let the film articulate that distance, rather than try to trick it.

The music was exceptional. These are music films, after all, but I wanted to hear the sounds of the space itself. I wanted to hear the wind howling through the open windows of the houses, and banging the plastic tarps that were rigged all over to keep it out. I thought that this desert music must be in conversation with the space where it exists, and while the camera wandered over the goods at the market, leered from a hanging lamb’s head into the dried husks of lizard bodies, I missed the sounds of that space. The film reached its peaks when the music and imagery fell into sync. A singer clapped his hands beneath his own enormous shadow. The camera panned across a sea of wedding women; restless and excitable, their hands fluttered to their candy-colored headscarves.

The second piece was filmed at a festival in Ghadames, Libya. It is an ode to Tuareg pageantry. In contrast with Palace, Music From the Sahara brings the camera right up to its subject, moves in rhythm with the dancers. At times it felt like the camera was jousting with the camels whose noses pushed into the lens. We barely saw their riders, high on the hump. I was interested to see so many female musicians. It’s rare to see a woman drummer, and they were all over both of these films. The camera spends a lot of time with these women, with young girls in traditional dress, and with the female musicians. I couldn’t help wondering if these are the women from the film’s description, “..some of the most beautiful women in the world”. I think that phrasing does a disservice to the piece– it implicitly exoticises and objectifies the film’s subjects. (“..as a connoisseur of women, I find this tribe particularly striking..”). But, forgive my pet peeve. It’s just a quip with the blurb. There is no text in either film, no commentary. The films are about music and looking.

Without text, without story, the films are slow. They are not edited in the familiar arc-like structure. I appreciated the long takes for what I read as the length of each session, the movement of time in those places. The reward for our patience is that the filmic experience of these events is closer to the lived experience. Our moments of looking are not mediated by language of mainstream documentary. At the same time, I would have appreciated more editorial control. In Music From the Sahara  especially, the fade in, fade out cuts became repetitive.

Near the end of Music From the Sahara, the camera pans to the audience. It becomes clear that we are watching a performance, that these dances have already entered the realm of “culture”; these are traditions that are deliberately preserved. In the sea of spectators, a young girl is standing on her chair, moving to the music. Watching her, I appreciated the light touch of these films. They enter the struggle to preserve, classify, and disseminate the rich fruit of folk music and performative tradition, but they don’t talk about it. They just stand there and bear witness.

 

 

 

 

On Friday, ATA hosted the kind of free-form film and music collaboration that makes a viewer feel like there are small and wonderful programs playing in all the tiny venues across the city; one step through the unmarked door of a dusty storefront sends a wanderer into an uncynical urban bohemia where young artists push against the boundaries of new form. Not so– Her Tail Was Cut in Two was a rare and singular event, a junction of understated talent. Sorry if you missed it.

Chris Lynn opened the program with three wide, still films, loosely connected to the subject of water. Atracados- Moored by Filipe Afonso sets two boys at a harbor. Their discussion, in Portuguese, references a story and a life beyond the screen– will they leave home? One recounts a dream in which he walked into the sea. The acting is opaque. Their backs face the camera and the world is beautiful in its indifference at sunset.

Lynn’s film follows. Snow gathers on the wings of an airplane before it pierces the clouds. Then, Ann Deborah Levy’s camera rests on the surface of still water. Trees shimmer. These films are made in a lovely, uncaring world.

Janel Leppin follows; frantic plucking of the cello’s strings makes mixes with Gino Robair’s idiosyncratic compositions– out of the mixer board, we hear electronic echoes of dripping water. Janel’s voice rises, ethereal over the sound boards. She is on the floor, singing into her pedal board, while Cyrus Yoshi Tabar’s green apocalyptic clouds billow onto the projection screen, then scratch away. The voice is the warmth in the program, piercing all the carefully framed surfaces. She breaks everything open. And, the humming of the bow over the cello strings sews it together again.