Project No. 2 - Experimental Video

  

     People who follow my Instagram (@sieurjana) know I often post videos of myself playing the piano. The videos are usually 30 seconds or less, just snippets of my practicing sessions.

    It has always been highly difficult for me to perform live. I think it is ironic that putting myself on display for others feels “safer” online, a place where we are very accessible yet deceptively shielded from the reality that there is always an audience. Modern-day technology, like the news and social media, has realized an perpetual interconnectedness among the human race. This fact is relevant when considering McLuhan’s perspective on technology and the way electric circuits “[confer] a mythic dimension on our ordinary individual and group actions” (62). By “mythic” McLuhan refers to “the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects” (62).

    In the sense of my short film, I reckon with the way content posted online is just as performative as a recital in real life. Oftentimes when feeling pressured to play live for others, I’d assert that I make music for myself, not for others to hear. And this can be true, but social media has also conditioned me to package my music neatly for an audience every time I sit down to play. Just instead of a human audience, a camera lens watches me. I have been swept up by the way technology has normalized my personal image being consumed by other people. While I shiver at the thought of a recital, social media has normalized being observed.

    On the brighter side though, I hope this video makes it clear how much I love playing piano and find it personally fulfilling!

Project No. 1

 Welcome to The Pinkie Page! 

If you will, a little about the title of my blog: When I was young, I received a fluffy, stuffed pink cat for my birthday. Over the years, my brother and I shaped her a unique personality and voice and incorporated her into our cat universe, made up of all our stuffed animal characters. Motivated by the fact that she was the pink cat, she was the “Bitch” stock character for many years (though we didn’t know that word). We attributed to her many things I’d been taught to assign low value: she liked makeup (therefore she was airheaded), she gossiped, she was a girly girl, she caused trouble. One day, our outlook on Pinkie changed. Suddenly, rather than brash and brazen for having ideas, Pinkie was confident and well-spoken; rather than vapid and vain she was a diva, an icon with an eye for style. Nowadays, I aspire to emulate the confidence and boldness of this stuffed animal whose personality I crafted in grade school. No longer hated, her character became a symbol in my life for the value of self-acceptance and pride in oneself. I also came to adore the color pink.

Acquiring Pinkie, circa 2007

My brother and I continue to enjoy impersonating our stuffed animals. I like to think that each animal represents things we feel: the desire for success, the pain of loss, shyness, perfectionism, jealousy, addiction, optimism, compassion, anger issues. The animals are multifaceted, of course, but each of these elements and more posit themselves in a specific individual animal and emerge as they engage with one another.

In life, we are all just impersonating certain characters for all the people we engage with in different situations, all versions of ourselves, each at its appropriate time. In art, and as an actor, I like to create characters for people to enjoy. An example of a character I created is the Chicken, a Lisa Simpson-esque sketch of a chicken I developed in high school and subsequently continued drawing. The Chicken appears on whiteboards, painted on blocks hidden in nooks to be discovered by strangers and taken home, and on homework assignments. It is unshaded, cleanly flat, vacantly staring forward with a benign, vaguely pleased expression. Sometimes it wears hats, or gifts flowers to a fellow chicken, but the Chicken itself remains the same character underlying all that is imposed externally upon it. I like them to be a little funny or stupid: "Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment — of what's really going on" (McLuhan, 51). In light of the pandemic, I made this masked Chicken:

Mask Chicken

And others:

Various chicken blocks I hid in 2021

Balloon Chicken, hidden in Sage Hall kitchen

Very Proportionate! Hidden outside Andrew Commons. Survived there for 2 weeks

Jester Chicken, hidden with the board games in Hiett hall

Rubik's Cube Chicken. Hidden atop a light in Plantz Hall

Space Chicken. Hidden in Colman basement, turned up a year later in my friend's loft and she recognized it. We do not know who found it.

There is no explanation when the Chicken appears. It is simply there when you find it. It is impermanent in many cases, but perhaps there's a part of me that wants the finder to know: If you see it somewhere, it means I have been there, too.