audiovisual storytelling at micro-scales
These videos were made during the August 2020 AS220 virtual workshop MICROCOSMOS led by Sadie Prego and Jeffrey Yoo Warren, which focused on storytelling at microscopic scales.
Thanks to funmi and AS220 Industries for hosting.
Recollection by Jason Eckenroth
Untitled (draft) by Melita Morales
Brewster's Angle (draft) by Dara Nicole
Roofs by Jeffrey Yoo Warren
Sana by Sadie Prego
The second session of this class, hosted by AS220 in Providence, will be slightly different but building on similar themes and skills.
Using lighting, color, sound, and motion, we will each craft a short, abstract video about an important memory or experience you’ve had, at an intimate microscopic scale.
In my work, I’ve been prototyping a micro-photography of Asian-American space, texture, and feeling -- ways of seeing, listening & being at microscopic scales as an artist of color. Building on personal experiences as POC - family heirlooms, recipes, legends, or memories - we will each create our own micro-landscapes for these stories by recording video at microscopic scales. If the subject is an important conversation, maybe we’ll see part of the meal during which it happened. If it’s an important day, then we may see micro-imagery of something you were wearing.
Exploring or examining - those are scientific or even colonial terms. Categorizing, analyzing, “learning the science behind” something. Instead, we will spend time up close with materials and artifacts in a way that doesn’t evoke those ideas. We will use microscopes, not as scientific instruments, but as a means of listening, knowing, and “tuning into” that build on non-eurocentric, non-masculine histories, and so may not speak to all audiences.
-- Jeffrey Yoo Warren
WORKSHOP PROJECT
In this workshop, each person receives a handmade microscope or do-it-yourself microscope kit in the mail, which can be plugged into a laptop (some loaners available) to record video. Each will, over the course of the workshop, learn how to use the microscope, then develop an idea for a micro-scale video about an important memory or experience, including a narration paired with a soundtrack. We will edit and refine this video with feedback from one other, and the workshop will culminate with a showing of each video with an invited guest artist and a peer feedback session.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
Anti-assimilation: the rejection of dominant cultural narratives
Depth of field: the distance between the nearest and farthest objects that are in focus
Scientism: the promotion of science as the best or only objective means by which society should determine normative and epistemological values
Community science: a form of community-led environmental inquiry, and centered on community goals
Microcosmos:
a small, representative system having analogies to a larger system
the 3rd song on BTS' 2019 album Map of the Soul: Persona