Facebook Narrative Pt. 2 (Magical Paradigm Shifting)

We’re closing in on our MoMA deadline, and I’ve spent a significant amount of time over the past two weeks polishing the piece as preparation for a series of crits. I think our guest critics for tomorrow consist of a group of Finns from the University of Art and Design Helsinki who are screening work at UnionDocs today. I’d like to catch the screening, but I’m not sure if I’m going to be close to a satisfactory iteration of my piece by 7 pm.

One thing I’ve struggled with recently is whether our approach to the piece necessitates anonymizing our subject’s identity. Facebook, and I guess most online social networking systems, are unique in their quasi-public nature. I’m having a hard time figuring out what sort of privacy expectations someone who publishes status updates on their Facebook page can reasonably expect. Our subject seems to have set his privacy settings in order to protect his account from access by anyone on the web. So in practice, I cannot access his page since I’m not registered with Facebook. Robbie and I also tried accessing his page through Sheba’s account, but found it locked.  I know that Facebook has a “friends of friends” setting that I assume would allow access to one’s account by hundreds of people unknown to the account holder. But I’m not sure how to figure out what sort of viewing restrictions our subject has put on his page. Our experiments suggest that he has, at a minimum, changed the Facebook’s default privacy settings of completely open access, indicating that he has made attempts to protect his privacy.

That left us with the question of whether or not to change his name. I initially suggested simply eliminating the subject’s last name, but both Jesse and Robbie thought the omission would be glaring and only serve to distract viewers from the narrative. So what were the drawbacks to simply changing the subject’s name? Do we have a responsibility to the viewer to attempt to create a simulacrum of the status updates that is as close to “reality” as possible? And if there is a good rationalization for changing our subject’s name, do we have an obligation to the viewer to let him/her know of the change?

The piece’s score also remains somewhat undecided. Late Saturday night/early Sunday morning I was listening to Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2 and decided to plug in one of the songs. At the time, I was working on a more polished cut of the piece in prep for a crit the following day, but was in a significantly sleep deprived state. Strange how sleep deprivation seems to mimic some of the effects of hallucinogenics (I’m making some assumptions based on readings since I’ve never done any). I later read that the album was an attempt by Richard James to record the sounds he heard in his dreams. Robbie also told me that James was often severely sleep deprived during the album’s creation–further deepening the mythology of his work, while simultaneously establishing it as a document of insomnia.

I’ve had Salem’s excellent EP, Water, pretty much on constant repeat over the last few days after discovering them via Dilla’s blog. Kind of like the musical exaltation of industrial decay.

Facebook Narrative Pt. 1

The first step in construction of the facebook narrative consisted of going through our subject’s wall and simply cutting and pasting most of the entries into a document. Then we surveyed the raw material, and made selective edits to cut away the dead flesh in an attempt to leave us with what we hoped would be a relatively clear narrative. From my admittedly biased perspective, it seemed that the story that resulted followed a traditional three act arc, beginning first with character establishment, then moving to conflict, and finally, resolution. I used some screen capture software to introduce the viewer to our character via an attempt at point-of-view editing of footage of me logging into Robbie’s facebook account. I then made a bunch of still screen captures using a function built into Mac’s OS, Snow Leopard, and did further editing of the still caps in Photoshop. The next step was to import the picture files into a Final Cut Pro timeline, and then structure the piece in a way that would convey the passage of time somewhat clearly in order to establish chronology. I was pretty happy with the way the piece turned out, only having some reservations regarding the pacing of the piece, and it’s soundtrack.

Robbie and I had our first crit about a week-and-a-half ago on the end result, what I believe was the third iteration of our attempt at a facebook narrative. The feedback we got was generally positive. People seemed to respond to our simple approach. It was interesting to note that people always wanted to gain some sort of clearer satisfaction from the story, with most people first asking us what happened. The interesting thing is that we don’t know. We shared as much salient information in the piece as we thought possible, so we know just as much as the viewer. I kind of enjoy the fact that our piece might leave viewers feeling unsatisfied, or at least with unresolved questions in mind. It is very rare in life that we are neatly handed the answers to our questions. So in that sense the piece, as it stands now, at least represents in some fashion that one immutable Truth of life.

The most major criticism revolved around my choice of music to score the piece. I again struggled with this, and in the closing minutes of my deadline just slapped in an early ambient work by Brian Eno. I didn’t want something with strong percussive elements, and was hoping for something that would be emotionally neutral. Unfortunately I evidently failed in this latter goal, with one of our guest critics describing the music as “sappy,” a criticism I wholeheartedly agree with. Some at the crit suggested that our music choice would have the unintended effect of editorializing the piece, and that this effect was unavoidable, and would result regardless of what music we chose. I’m going to try substituting a few different pieces in just to see what happens. I discovered the German group Popol Vuh after watching a 44-minute Warner Herzog doc from the 1970s about a ski jumper, and managed to obtain some of their music. I would tentatively describe it as either early ambient or new age, depending on your perspective, but I guess you could just say krautrock if you’re lazy. I’m interested to see if any of it works with the piece.