what happened? (artist statement)

For my final video and sound project I wanted to document the near death experiences of my friends and acquaintances and explore the way these events impacted their day to day lives thereafter. I was interested in the withdrawn and passive tone with which many of the interviewees discussed their dramatic or traumatic experiences, and I found the the reoccurring tone of indifference and/or indestructibility both scary and inspiring. I chose to use the collage format because I thought that it best reflected the overwhelmed feeling I got when presented with so many powerful experiences.

Some issues that came to light in the process of stringing interviews together included the issue of sorting the material out and creating transitions between samples of video and sound, a problem I solved by creating "video haiku's" or sections of three video and sound samples which incorporated two near death experiences and one nature (spring) image. I chose the spring imagery to reinforce the idea of survival, or rebirth, and incorporated image of children and child-craft books to convey the idea of innocence, or innocence lost and to make a reference to the limits of storytelling, or art in general, to truly capture a moment.