Experimental Methodologies: Towards the Moving Image

Abstract

The moving image - before it is anything else, before it delights an audience with beautiful stories, characters, before it communicates an idea - is the art of making us aware of movement; (Gunning 142) or, following Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, it is "the organization of light and shadow effects producing a new enrichment of vision."

The methodologies in this thesis carry the legacy of experimental moving images, with its perspectives on formal aesthetics, emotion, and alternative modes of narrative. These methodologies informed my approach to physical interactions of objects and materials as a strategy to create unpredictable footage results - which through iterations yielded a poetic visual language from which I built a sequence focused on sensory impressions.

These modes of inquiry and iterative experimentation generated two moving images - visualizing the human experiences from the current unstable immigration laws as manifested on the southern border with Mexico.