Verde Smoke

Well, it’s complete - the final essay videos are now up:

url http://web.mit.edu/d_martin/www/sensing-place/index.html

Hopefully, these will be a great jumping off point for my work next semester on a collective identity media piece for MIT@Lawrence.

My final essay was presented ably by Evan (of the Comparative Media Studies Program) who is our resident sound and music guru so I thought it was rather fitting (check out his AMAZING final essay too). I enjoyed how he compared the three parts of the essay to three movements, each with a distinct mood and feeling.

I finished up a rough draft of just the imagery of my final essay movies without adding the sound, but the narratives significantly changed as I listened to the audio of the youth and from some short video I had captured from the Lawrence Community Works opening. I decided to use iMovie to keep it simple, rather than try to recreate standard effects in Final Cut. The “past” and “future” obviously had less photos and good audio, but I improvised when I could.

I have to admit, I procrastinated a bit around building the rough draft of my final photo essays.  I had all the pieces (in fact, too many pieces) and ideas, but I felt like I was back in high school again, facing down the insurmountable beast of a final paper of which I had too much I wanted to say.  Usually, once I get into working, it flows easily once I get started but it’s taking that first leap.  With this project, the themes I wanted to cover and the enigma that is Lawrence’s identity seemed like a black hole, that I’ve circling around like a hesitant but curious animal.

I called my self a photographer recently in a meeting for my research work for MIT@Lawrence the other day, and honestly, I felt a little like a liar.

Those of you from my former life, who’ve called me “Teach” and railed at me when I made you edit a story down to one page, might have a chuckle at the thought of me writing a script and storyboards of my own. What’s the old adage…”Those who can’t do, teach”?

This week, I’m sensing that we’re going a bit deeper in our examination of landscape – moving from focus on individual vocabulary and grammar of single sentences to more complex expressions stolen from the realm of poetry.

[10/20/07] This week’s ruminations extend the discussion of significant detail from vocabulary to the grammar of the language of landscape in Lawrence (and Austin actually). Basically, grammar refers here to the rules or formulas employed to communicate meaning using land vocabulary elements such as materials, forms, paths, and processes. And like any good sentence, the meaning is all in how you construct it – its order, its relations, its context in time and space. I see multiple grammars at play in Lawrence: creation, immigration, exodus and reluctant residence.

This week I got into the meat of the work in Lawrence, in that I finally met some residents in a context of social change, at a community meeting and a cultural celebration. As I described last week, I’ve previously tried to taste the context of Lawrence’s landscapes and people by just showing up and walking around.

This week we’re transitioning a bit away from the daily light observations, into some deeper observations based on our readings, primarily from Anne Spirn’s Language of Landscape. This week, we delved deep into discussion of the vocabulary used by language: processes, matter, form, and performance spaces.