Gina Czarnecki

This weeks lecturer was Gina Czarnecki. Gina’s work has changed throughout her whole career, she has experimented with hybrids of art, cultural innovation, future concepts and new technologies. Gina’s experimentations have lead her to projects that reach beyond specialist boundaries. At first I was indifferent to some of her work and found it all bit bizarre, especially her project to do with mosquitoes, which unfortunately I didn't get to watch due to my awful wifi cutting her lecture short.

One of her video installations did spark some new ideas for me. This film was her first collaboration with Ulf Langheinrich. They wanted to build upon their individual careers and their experiences working with dance, film, theatre, sound and installation. The video starts with the sky slowly changing, showing the transformation from vibrant sunlight into red, into blue, then it ends with a black sky. The majority of the film is a slow motion sequence of what it appears to be in a nightclub, filming people dancing. I found the music quite dark and sinister, which was weird as it was showing people having a good time partying. The music sounded almost like frequency waves, parts of the video would submerge into textures, that kind of matched the sound. After doing some research I came to discover the noise was created by ‘millions of insects and amphibians, the constant rumble of generators and distant traffic.’ I found this quite quite bizarre, however in an explanation it says that ‘the pulsing crowd forms one motion, one being; a rhythmic, sexual and elemental force as brutal as the cycles of the natural world around’. So I guess they wanted to include an element of the natural world into this clubbing sequence, not too sure as to why though. No colours were used in the dancing sequence which took up the majority of the video, which made it even more gloomy. I found it slightly slow paced, however at the same time it was hypnotic and put me in a slight trance. I can imagine watching it big scale in an art exhibition, and zoning out to it. I didn’t fully understand and grasp it, but in my opinion you don’t need to understand art to enjoy it, it’s completely up to people’s interpretations. Even though I found it a bit daunting and slow paced, it did in fact inspire me to create my own video installation. Due to corona virus and clubs etc being shut, I thought I’d gather together some of my favourite videos from nights out and put it all together and create a video installation. The majority of the video is in slow-motion, but not as slow-paced as Gina’s installation as I wanted it more fast paced and fun to watch. I wanted to use a more upbeat audio to give a sense of euphoria. I’ve been messing around with my projector and layering this video onto some of my large scale art works to see what different outcomes I could have. Gina said in the lecture “you can stretch one art work and see how many outcomes you can do”, so I tried to do exactly that.