The Third Space
2009, 27:05
This is a video made with few resources: a low-tech low resolution
recording device (Nikon Coolpix camera) and iMovie software, edited
on my beloved 5-year old iBook, with its dwindling memory cache
and long waits for rendering, converting and duplicating. Software
theorist Lev Manovich is fond of asking us to check our ideas against
our software, and make sure that the software isn't making our decisions
for us. This video looks into Manovich’Äôs queries and reasons that
necessity is the mother of creativity.
The Third Space grew out of my photo/movie blog,
Quotidian New York,
which I used as a portable studio, recording and archiving photographs
and movie clips of my daily whereabouts. In this case they include
the Super King Laundrymat in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Coney Island
on the Fourth of July, the village of Saas-Fee in the Swiss Alps,
and en route to Philadelphia from New York, on the Chinatown Bus.Each
of the four segments is comprised of no more than 10 - 15 minutes
of imagery, reflecting the amount of space available on the Coolpix
1GB disk. Choices of text size and font styles, transitions and
timing, were determined by the limitations of iMovie, which is actually
not so bad in a pinch.
The Third Space is laid over with
text from the books I was reading while making this piece: Non-Places:
Introduction to the Architecture of Supermodernity, by Marc
Augˆ©; Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, by Georges Perec;
Basic Concepts, by Martin Heidegger; and Hatred of Democracy
by Jacques Ranciˆ®re. For me, the text serves as a record of the
environments of intellectual discourse, the locations, both ordinary
and exotic, where favorite books and texts may actually take on
a deeper resonance.
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