Lecture 1-28-08

Alix Pearlstein

Between tallying how many times she said "um" (over 80 times in less than four min), I had time to be very confused as to the point of her videos. The first one, "Two Women", made me feel a little motion-sick, which I'm not sure was one of the goals of the video. They seemed like bad experimental high school student films. The sounds seemed to serve no purpose other than to fill in space that the visuals left. There was really nothing visually or aurally appealing or even interesting about these videos. The video "Episode" seemed to be nearing some success with sounds, when the boy is imitating the father, but it all still seemed to be unfocused, awkward, and pointless. When she spoke about her videos I found it very hard to pay attention through how annoying it was that every three words out of her mouth "um" or "uh". I guess the best I got out of this lecture was how not to make performance art.