13 March 2019
I include the above correspondence for a reason. It is the most fulsome reply (it is not a response, really) that I have ever received concerning this project.
Indeed, my work here cannot be supported, because these videos violate, too much, against-the-grain of social normatives. But is this merely an assumption on my part? Should I also devise some small experiment to test if this is indeed true? How could I go about measuring this claim -- that these works are vital exactly because they do violate. This conjecture turned into an interesting testing predicament.
Hypothesis: I can find no one even willing to view the videos herein -- because they violate too many social boundaries -- which, in turn, helps to verify this project’s veracity and vitality.
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1. I need viewers to measure.
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2. However, no one will watch these videos.
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3. So, I should pay for a group of 20+ viewers, maybe.
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4. But who is able to respond, let alone willing to watch?
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5. Conclusion: I need a group of responders who are required to watch and respond, and who also have, at least, some kind of experience with judging social boundaries through transgressive expressions of media.
Method: I decided to submit this project to film festivals: To pay for entry and then see if my submitted work gets accepted. Every time this project gets rejected, I intuited, it could be an indication of a kind of vitality -- that is to say, as something even too transgressive for open-free-thinking-film-festival-goers to consider. Because that’s what is necessary for countering the immensity of sacrilege Trump invokes.
Luckily for me, film festivals list into the thousands. Every nook-and-cranny in this country hosts some kind of film festival, hyping every thematic impulse imaginable. So, I purposely selected the weirdest, most permissive, most accepting alternative festivals I could find. And, I tried to do it all over a short 15 month period across Trump’s second year in office (Dec. 2017 - Mar. 2019).
I submitted to 20+ media festivals, each averaging maybe $25 per entry. Hence, I spent about $600 overall to conduct this loose experiment. I paid them; now didn’t they have to view my half-hour entry? Someone on their end would have to watch at least some of this project, right? I waited to see what would happen.
Nothing happened.
Yes, as fully expected, my work here was resoundingly rejected. No film festival, of course, ever responded to tell me why exactly... just a REJECTION. Yet, while this wee experiment was cursory at best, I did come away with some validation. Perhaps I did truly make something as vile and as repulsive as Trump himself: Symbolic Exchange. At least the Experimental Forum emailed back: “We only award Honorable Mention to the film we thought it has some special qualities (sic).” Ha!...a most clumsy explanation. But now, I suppose, I can’t never say that I ain’t got nothing from nobody never. Or can I?
Vancouver Badass Film Festival
The Cinerotic Erotic Film Festival - International Dirty Show
DIAMETRALE - Experimental Film Festival
Erotic & Bizarre Art Film Festival
Seattle Transmedia & Independent Film Festival
Arizona Underground Film Festival
The Golden Skull Film Festival
BLOW-UP - International Arthouse Film Fest · Chicago
Mondo Cult Film Variety Showcase
Threadbare Mitten Film Festival
Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival
NOTE: And then out of the blue I received the email, below, from a complete stranger. This is the only -- the very first -- response I have ever received, and it came unsolicited from some guy named Regis. I was moved to tears:
And then, two weeks later -- 13 Nov 2019 -- on the very first day of the televised impeachment hearings in Congress; I discovered this:
Humm...and so it goes. At bottom, this website stands as a theoretical enactment of experimental methods -- towards a more fulsome understanding of our mediated realities (Theory & Practice). But then again, maybe my entire fallacy is wrong?
An American
resident of Canada, experimenting with new forms of critical media ethnography in Cultural Farming.