The tutor provided a link to an eight-minute excerpt from the full 26-minute film, a project within a project, in which the camera records someone viewing a film on a mobile device. The point of view is the viewer. All we see of the viewer is his right hand holding the mobile device. The film being watched was shot in the same train station in which the viewer is standing. As the view in the film moves around the station, so too does the viewer, creating a film within a film. This is an intriguing idea, but after you figure out what is happening, there is little left to see and you are left to follow the narration, which I didn’t find particularly engaging. This is an example of aural text.
http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/alterbahnhof_video.html
This 1975 project is much older and perhaps an early expression of multi-media presentation, a series of black-and-white images set next to text as a means of commenting on documentary photography. Rosler’s subject was the Bowery, a neglected area of NYC often visited by photogrpahy students and other documentarians in search of an experience of the urban poor. Rosler pairs images of urban landscapes with word lists, synonymns for drunkeness. This is a small work of less than 30 images. I felt it might be of even more interest had she used a greater variety of textual themes, such as poverty or unemployment. It might have also been more pointed had she used documented examples of these words from published materials.
Interview: http://whitney.org/WatchAndListen?play_id=476
Images: https://goo.gl/ufc9yb
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