Understanding Spoetry
motion, Fall 2006
Interactive Text: Rafael Attias
Tags: anti-heroic, art/design, burlesque, caricature, self-deprecatory, self-referential, snark
Overview
- An analyzation of the over-analyzation of that which is not worth analyzing in the first place.
- A self-referential, self-depreciatory mockumentary supposedly celebrating a fantastic new collaboration between the Internet and the artistic process.
- A seven-minute short film made in collaboration with Mary-Jo Valentino.
Process
This project began in the fall of 2006, in Rafael Attias’s Interactive Text course, but didn’t reach its final, current, state until October of 2007.
The film that we created in the fall of 2006 was very different from what you see here. We didn’t know a thing about lighting, sound or editing when we created that film – and it was pretty obvious.
We decided to remake the film during the 2007 Wintersession: re-examining the script, the graphics, the styling of the characters. We also took the time to learn Final Cut and After Effects, and the lighting kits from the Media Resource Center.
This was a time intensive undertaking – every little scene basically represents a full day or two of time: planning, carting the lights and setting them up, testing the location and realizing we need to go somewhere else or find a different prop or background. The thirty seconds or so at the end where I ride the elevator, then make the mobile out of garbage? That was an entire day of filming.
Small details were important to us. Very few people pick up on the fact that the spam poet’s name is a spam-generated anagram (Victoriana Fughettas / Authentic Soft Viagra.) We also spent a lot of time debating what should be hanging on Victoriana’s wall and how she should dress. We took an afternoon to go to the recycling center to look for weird junk to accessorize her home with – and discovered that the recycling center was closed that day. But it turned out not to be a wasted trip: we found some crushed, flattened, soda and beer cans in the parking lot – which made it into the film.
We didn’t have time to finish the film entirely, and ended up with a two minute trailer as our final offering for the Wintersession review. It wasn’t until last fall that we were finally able to get it together to finish editing – several months removed from the filming and healthily unable to say “We should re-shoot that scene again.”
We kept a blog of our process at http://spampoetry.wordpress.com/
Form
Mary-Jo and I had become interested in the weird constructions that sometimes occur in the nonsense text usually included in spam email. After running a few google searches, we realized that we weren’t the only people amused by this. We found blogs, comic strips, painters and of course, poets all using spam email as an integral part of their creative process – and all of them seemed pretty proud of themselves for doing so.
But we didn’t want to snark on anyone in particular in making this film. In fact it’s probably more self-deprecatory than anything. The RISD experience has been like an extended vacation from the rest of my life. There’s a lot of weird people here wearing weird clothes and having weird self-indulgent nerdy conversations about the artistic process – and I’m one of them. The character I play is an aggrandized extension of these self-conscious feelings of nerdiness.
The mockumentary format lets us poke fun at the kind of people who get excited and interested in the random constructions created by spam – but also acknowledge that we too are those kinds of people.
Exhibition
The final version of the film made its debut at the opening for the graphic design graduate show, Continuum, in the Sol Koffler Gallery on October 18, and was exhibited in the gallery from October 19 to November 4, 2007.
