| In my video work, I use narrative conceptually, exploring and exploiting narrative conventions of exchange through the themes of science, religion, transcendence, authenticity, idealism, and trauma. Using shifts in genre or convention within a stringent economy, I attempt to cater to, as well as usurp, expectations in the hope of opening up "story" to ontology, to actively engage the viewer in a dialogue with the narrative. As a strategic shift, I have made a video that uses the "background" of philosophy to propel its narrative forward, while in the dissertation paper I use the "background" of my artistic practice, which includes the social conditions, art histories, and social problems that inform and inspire my very much socially-oriented video work, as well as the technologies and techniques used in each individual project, to propel the theoretical "dissertation" narrative. Tell Me Everything, my dissertation video, takes the form of two recorded "lectures"---similar to TED Talks or PowerPoint presentations that are continuously interrupted---about the initiation of the psyche in the mind and its social affects. The first lecture, delivered by a Dr. Robert Holden, is based on some ideas from Gilles Deleuze's Humean empirical subject, as well as on some notions about Western culture and the destruction of our planet. The second lecture is given by a Dr. Elizabeth Brecht, which is based on Judith Butler's formulation of the psyche as it relates to power, a Foucaultian power analysis by way of Freud and Lacan.;The video and the section of the dissertation discussing the video compare and contrast an empirical formulation of subjectivity with psychoanalytical one, and lays out a foundation from which one can understand the world: that fiction is the basis for every concept we know, and that fiction is the condition that making knowing anything possible at all. Understanding this foundational idea, a subjective position is articulated from which the imagination is free to create new narratives through language and popular cultural forms.;In addition to detailing the development of my own narrative practice in video over the past ten years and the creation of this new work, a video titled Tell Me Everything, the text herein contains a discussion the formulation of the "subject" in film theory, the historical context for a narrative video art form, three influential video artists: Lisa Steele, Cecilia Dougherty, and Tony Oursler, a historical overview of my work, as well as an analysis of my new video and its relation to concepts of subjectivity. This dissertation is about fiction as a constituitive force that can also be deployed in an art practice to illuminate narrativity, or, the active engagement between the viewer and the thing viewed; narrativity becomes an invisible linguistic bridge between the subject and its object, and opens up "story" to life and being. Working in this way, art offers not just story to the viewer, but also something of or about life. |
