The Schizophrenic State Research Project 2000-2014 - War, Media & Appropriation

A project which started in 2000, at the MA in Media Studies program at The New School University in New York. It’s composed of a series of video works, which appropriate mass media footage of violence, war, and protest situations, in the context of my place of birth and growing up; Israel, Palestine and the region. The images are processed via digital means in diverse ways that re-contextualise the found footage, creating poetic videos that formulate media critique. The idea is to extract humanness in the images, highlighting the horror of violence suffered by real people, and at the same time emphasising video as a medium in which these images are delivered to us. It’s a long-term research, covering 14 years of work, forming unique experiences in the shape of video works merging content and texture, dealing with aesthetics, technology and humanism. The work aims to encourage empathy, humanness and sensitivity to the tragedy of violence, that seem to disappear in a post-fact world of clashing truths and “fake news”. Research questions: How can creative processing of news footage of violence, suffering and confrontation, illuminate the cognitive effect of the consumption of these electronically transmitted images? What are the realistic and surrealistic aspects of this experience? Do these images function as a mask or a revealer of the reality they document? Or maybe both? In light of new digital tools and ways of distribution, how can these video works provoke new thought, discussion and awareness regarding the content of news media images, their nature and their impact?​

The full research paper published in the peer-reviewed online journal Screenworks:
https://www.screenworks.org.uk/archive/volume-7-3/the-schizophrenic

Academia.edu: ​https://www.academia.edu/35702434/The_Schizophrenic_State_Project_War_Media_and_Appropriation

The project was presented in academic conferences at Bath SPA University, University of Portsmouth and the Royal College of Art.

See all works here: https://vimeo.com/showcase/6993600

EXCERPT

2008, Israel, 4'35''

One excerpt from a flow of Internet video news: a family is hiding behind a wall in a neighborhood that turned into a warzone. The compressed video is slowed down, enlarged, and accompanied by a new soundscape, revealing additional dimensions in the scene. The image is transformed into a psychedelic landscape, creating a troubling contrast between imagery and content, questioning video as medium, leading to an uneasy affect: anxiety deconstructed into pixels.

Schizophrenic State

2001-3, 5’25’’, USA/Israel

This first work was a sort of a ‘Big Bang’ for the rest of the project and my work in general. It contains many elements which appear later in other works. The highly personal work is dealing with the endless war in the Middle East, and was made while living in New York City. A string of overlapping images and sounds sourced from TV and the Internet, and personal MiniDV recordings, are weved together to a poetic-documentary flow, re/de-constructing image and language. The work questions the effectiveness of them as tools for human expression in the face of ultimate horror.