JESSE SHADE / DCOM-200 / Leah Peterson / 12-2-2008 SPONT: Artists Statement The first syllable in the word spontaneous

is spont, which happens to also be what Ive entitled on my project on the spontaneous and wilder sides of people of apparent power and authority. I think that its a nicely ambiguous and on-the-fly expression for this free spirit which I represent in my video, but never exactly pin down. By putting the wilder actions of a person who is normally dry and authoritarian side by side, I instead try several visual and sonic experiments of dehumanizing this figure of power, whom I portray in the video, to create a difficulty in differentiating the dry and proper from the wild and spontaneous. In between each section of the larger work, a series of clips from an old movie countdown are inserted to create an authentic feel in film which I feel is only achieved with the scratches and long scene changes associated with old movie reels. Its my way of interconnecting these sometimes wildly different interpretations of mine on powers wild side, to have viewers move beyond the apparently free-form approach that Ive taken here and see a more cohesive work. Mostly, in the actual parts of the video, I use repetition of clips and unconventional video effects in a way which tries to emulate both the types of artwork exhibited by Nicole Arendt and Keith Sullivan, and the series of YouTube Poop remix videos which I find a very funny distraction on the video uploading site of the same name. And even though such humor is only brief in this piece, I hope that the disoriented feeling that I intend to leave the viewer with will be as stimulating as anything funny. I want the viewers interpretation to go out in as many ways as my mind did in creating the piece, and find something cohesive in my random approach. I want the viewer to not be able to look at their presidents or teachers, and not think that they have a similarly wild and out-there side beyond the stiff demeanors and joyless expressions we see too often.