Edit Sessions
October 29 – November 5, 2015
Edit Sessions is a series of durational performances in which the videographer acting as performer makes available for use by a participating audience-editor, her video tape archive of footage spanning a ten year period (1999-2009). The footage in this video tape archive includes vignettes documenting aspects of personal everyday-life, material shot of past projects, and video documentation of other people’s performances and activities.
After semi-arbitrarily selecting footage from the video archive, the audience-editor has a predetermined set of time to parse through their selected material, taking note of the segments they are personally interested in including in the creation of a three minute video piece. For the audience-editor, the first part of the session involves sifting through the selected material and maybe taking notes. The second part of the session involves the videographer digitizing and editing the selected footage according to the audience-editor’s directions using the editing program Final Cut Pro.
Throughout the Edit Sessions, what will be visible on the screen of the videographer’s laptop, will also be visible to any visitor to the space, as the screen will be projected on to one of the walls of the performance space. Seating proximate to the edit station will be made available to an unspecified audience of indeterminate size. The vocal interactions between audience-editor and performer-videographer will be channelled through speakers located outside and inside the performance space. Available to seated audience members will be headphones with pre-recorded audio commentary by the performer-videographer on the footage in the archive, (footage having in all likelihood no correlation with the footage currently being edited).
There is a working acknowledgement by the videographer that the video archive might elicit something entirely different to the participating editors, and yet continue to serve as a physical register for extending memories of past experience. In this unrehearsed, performative, working scenario, the permeable proximity between performer-videographer and audience-editor are simultaneously heightened, while authorial intentionality is blurred, as the videographer’s personal history is rewritten.
