Reinstalling a gaze of freedom

Andreas and I are into sleepers - not one-piece pajamas or train cars, though I’m sure one or both could make our life even more amusing. We’re also both rather subdued (though less when together) and I in particular am constantly battling how I feel about exposure and privacy. We don’t overly self-promote because it doesn’t have integrity. We believe what we create stands on its own. Therefore, for months now, we’ve refrained from publicizing our work and let the interest come entirely on its own.

Too often, people indirectly disagree with your message. Indeed, most criticism we’ve received comes in the form of a whine to vacant technological spaces and via unintended messengers. The effect is that I care even less about supposed critique. When quality connections are made, even just one, I’ve done or said the right thing. Synchronicity is priceless.

We’ve heard our language is too strong. For similar critics, I ask: have you ever read a manifesto? The comparisons of our writing to Dogme 95 would also be less redundant if they weren’t made over and over and if I hadn’t made that observation in August, before we even published the manifesto. But research eludes many.

The problem for me is that overproduced online video serials aren’t going away. They’re becoming the norm, a departure from the beauty that filmmaking can be, a bland reinvention of the television model I had assumed (apparently incorrectly) that we all wanted to escape. Video “communities” (the over- and misuse of that word is an entire entry on its own) encourage talking head videos and a total lack of reflexivity about video, and our goal was to make everyone - ourselves included - reconsider the value in that.

On another note, as mistakenly inferred by many, we did not make a manifesto for videobloggers. To write a credo for vloggers, I’d first have to identify as one (which I no longer do). Furthermore, not only do we not define our perceptions of film around online video or vice versa; many of the Lumiere videos in the collection aren’t even on blogs. You could watch a dozen of them to figure this out. That’s twelve minutes or less, depending on your attention span.

In a recent interview with Patricia Lange from the USC Annenberg Center for Communication, Sam Renseiw from spacetwo : patalab offered the following thoughts (which he forwarded to me):

The discovery of the Lumiere project and the simple rules certainly was very important to me. It enabled me to consciously rethink how I was looking at things, situations and conditions, and how I would then be able to record the seen and subsequently convey the seen, in the same candid (yet conscious, even when intuitive) way I experienced it.

Patricia also emailed both Andreas and I, though over the phone and months apart, and suffice to say, I don’t remember a lot of it except my usual cynicism. When people like Sam reflect what I’m thinking, though, it gives me hope.

Sam went on to explain that:

…the Lumiere project can be regarded as a beacon. It’s actual, progressive potential for liberating “sight” might not have been that apparent when the project started. It probably was conceived more out of conceptual concerns, as an inoffensive game to play. But it seems to be one of the very few projects on the net - that I am aware of – that might have the inherent potential of actually re-installing a gaze of freedom.

If people want clarification about our intentions with this project, they ought to ask. Random thoughts and suppositions about our intentions in our writing - if not already clear in the words we carefully chose - can be further explained by either of us at any time. We know for what we stand, and we don’t buy into hype.