Catalysts: Artists Creating with Video, Sound, and Time, the MoMA Course by Randall Packer helped me a lot to reflect on our role in social networks and in various media, considering our role more as an experience of collective narration and as a social happening of contemporary and artistic mold.
We’ve become content’s producers and the Nam June Paik’s lesson resonates still alive today: everyone’s a broadcaster. In New York, Nam June Paik with his Porta Pack has experienced shooting outdoors and made the first broadcast run by an artist focused on a chaotic moment in New York: the day of Pope Paul VI visit in NYC. He showed the video the same evening in Greenwich Village, the Cafe Gogo, virtually live. Paik was the first of artists who made a real art event of the video’s report.
My connection with social networks has always been confrontational, perhaps because of need to protect my privacy.
Now I re-evaluated my position on that and I think we must be present at the forefront on the social networks for two simple reasons: to clarify our point of view and to convey the meaning of our thought in the best way possible.
Technology has been of great help to me both as regards the production aspect and both for what concerns the storage and communication of my art. I record my art works with the video camera and than I share them online on Instagram or others social networks, I like to remix my art and to make it transmedial.
I remember that I have always documented everything, even when there was a movie stills photographer where I worked, I liked to shoot everything and have my own point of view.
For years I carried my video camera with me, in my bag, for the need to document what happened around me.
My Panasonic camcorder that I took in 2006, has allowed me to produce and document a lot of works and therefore it is my analogic object of the heart, which I keep as a relic.
I still remember a video that I’ve filmed in 2009, the storyboard that I’ve written was ambiented in the subway in Rome. My video wasn’t a commercial video, however, the Subway Direction had refused permission because it demanded a lot of money to approve it, but I didn’t want to give up the project or to change my storyboard.
I still remember the excitement while filming in Rome Metro. I was aware that if I had been surprised to shoot with my video camera the security men would have seized my videotape and maybe also my video camera ..
It’s been a few years since I shot my short film, but now, turning to the subway I see everyone to film everything, the privacy is dead, but maybe there is a positive side: if anything happens, it’s possible to acquire new trials because today our view is expanded, it’s stereoscopic: we’re all under surveillance but we also can monitor the others.
The video camera is my third eye, with which I record everything: everyday events and those things related to my work. I replaced my Panasonic video camera with an iPhone and a Samsung Tab 3, most technologically advanced.
And I think it’s important to document everything because otherwise a piece of reality would not have existence, it could be the access key that it could return an important point of view to better understand the contemporary reality.
“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.”
Leonardo da Vinci
Gabry Parisi Blog 