Creative Work

My work is an audio documentary: that means it's an audio file that you listen to in order to become informed on a particular topic. It's similar to an ordinary filmic documentary, only there's no visual aspect: everything is communicated through sound.

In my particular audio documentary, I narrate over musical tracks about the history of the New Queer Cinema, Gregg Araki, Araki's films, and the music within them. The musical tracks I've selected come from Araki's film Totally F***ed Up and I discuss their significance to the film and why Araki chose them: to emphasize his themes of queer struggle amidst the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Speaking on tracks such as Red House Painters' "Katy Song," I reflect on how the songs' lyrics and instrumentation evoke particular scenes and moods and how these affected emotional states influence the feeling and takeaways of the viewer watching Araki's films.

Much of the cinematic viewing experience relies on audio, and in my capstone artwork I demonstrate that.

I sought artistic inspiration in the album The Fire This Time, which combines informative, journalistic narration about the Gulf War in roughly chronological order examining the plans behind U.S. military decisions and the effects on Iraqi civilians living under Western bombings with experimental electronic dance music that curates an atmosphere of both tension and high energy. I mirrored the "narration over music" approach for my own work.

My academic/literary inspiration I derived from B. Ruby Rich's writings collected in her book New Queer Cinema, which establishes the movement that Araki and his work sprang from. Rich's book provided the context and background that I built my analysis off the back of.