(2015, 55 min, digital video / sound / live performance)
Let the Crow Speak was a lecture-presentaton with live video editing delivered on March 3, 2015 at the University of California San Diego. The subject of the presentation was the relationship between art and language. In 1966, the script for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film The Hawks and the Sparrows was published with his essay “The Cinema of Poetry.” That text made a compelling argument about the nature of cinematic language, while his film imagined a world in which birds could speak. This lecture takes the next logical step and asks: can birds make movies? First in a series of three video essays titled The Artist’s Field Library, Part One presents research on the epistemological capacity of art, asking what kind of knowledge does art produce?
The project also includes an essay and a series of 8 photographic prints. A version of this project has been published in the Journal for Artistic Research under the title “If Film Is a Language, Can Birds Make Movies? An Essay in Two Heretical Descriptive Systems.”
(2015, apr. 2000 words, 8 digital ink jet prints, 12in. 16 in. each)