I have some work I should be doing but cracking this blog malarkey is my priority right now. It also does seem a marvellous place to air one's thoughts. Potentially..
It's just taken me about and hour and a half to put a picture in my profile. But I need the practice. I have a lot of technological/cultural catch-up to do- when Harriet describes her addictions to myspace and flickr etc I feel that anxiety of culture occurring without my participation-impressed that she's "in" and I ain't- when evidently SHE's feeling anxiety that she doesn't know enough either (Hope you don't mind me using use you as an example Harriet-it is to create conversation and definitely no dis.). Yeah I check out friends MySpaces and websites-but perhaps having spent too many years of editing through the night over and over my tolerance for computer o-d is limited. I love "real life" and our worship for technology seems too much like our worship for mainstream North American culture and equally destructive to our selves as living breathing fallible and interesting beings.. Yet, Of Course I can see the internet's revolutionary, life affirming, culture creating and interpolating potentialities- I just want to get the balance right- in a way I just didn't achieve before.
(pictures by Kristian Buus in 2006 taken at the Albion Pub near Broadway Market. We were all watching a film made by Emily James -middle photo-about our-an extremely mixed bag of local residents, artists and shopkeepers- occupation of Tony's ("Francesca's") Cafe in Broadway Market after Hackney Council had sold him out to a notorious local landlord)
I kicked the video access business I was running in 2003 and have since learned to dance and survived financially from freelance work I mostly gained via friends-but am only now beginnning to feel the beginnings of a sense of direction again. As somebody who decided they wanted to be a filmmaker aged 16 and did go and do that in a vast variety of ways, it has been deeply unsettling to find myself in my mid 30s with no clear direction. When one lacks a focus it is hard to find a reason to learn and imagine how much technology has changed since 2003 (and I was losing interest well before that). Having been a filmmaker I have been overtly intimate with technology from film through linear tape editing to digital editing and the internet and although FIlm and Video are obviously very social media and I a very social person, on a psychologicalemotional level I feel that damage was done. But maybe if I continue my resumed regime of Dance classes 4-6 times a week (Spending exactly the same as I did on smoking until almost exactly a year ago-eek) while learning all this new communication technology I can work out a healthy way of being a 21st century artist.
Somewhere on these explorations I hope to find out what is my "new practice". This is why I'm Lucy ShapeShifter. I went to a Live Art Bursary Talk at Arts Admin and one of the Artists' Advisers, who had known me for a number of years as a filmmaker, said "So you're shapeshifting are you Lucy?" -I actually found that rather dispiriting. It is strange how much people want to pigeonhole you in one discipline, especially in the ways that culture is currently mutating.
Do you all think that this phenomenon is changing at all?
(I'm so assuming people are reading my rambles-is this blind arrogance?)
Now I'm going to go and find out how to create live links on this page so that you can find all about the wonderful worlds of ARtsAdmin and Kristian Buus and Emily James etc etc xoxo
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