Disgust Down By The Sea

In less than 11 months, "American Reflexxx" has accrued 1.5 million views on YouTube. The video, a social experiment by artists (and couple) Signe Pierce and Alli Coates, follows Pierce the night she strolled Myrtle Beach wearing just sky-high neon green heels, a micro mini-dress, and a chrome face mask. Against a backdrop of blinking amusement rides and technicolor souvenir shops, Pierce is spat at, verbally assaulted, tripped, hit on, laughed at, run away from, called a man, and pushed to the ground by total strangers-- all in less than an hour.

I first saw Pierce's work--as a self-proclaimed "reality artist"--on Instagram. In an onslaught of colors pulled from the Lisa Frank ads of yesteryear, she aims to question traditional notions of gender and sexuality and disrupt patriarchy, capitalism, homophobia, and other societal tendencies. "American Reflexxx," specifically, brings attention to the terrifying reality of transphobia and mob mentalities in the US.

The production is markedly low-budget, Coates recording with a single handheld camera and only editing the clip's speed. Both the editing, the theme, and the aesthetic of this video remind me of Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, an homage to the gritty (but beautiful) reality of drug- and sex-dominated beach cultures.

"American Refluxxx" is uncomfortable to watch, and that's the point. By also being weirdly mesmerizing, Pierce manages to gets eyes on her works and--more importantly--minds on her various troublesome subject matters. And 1.5 millions minds realizing how tragic and warped the behavior in "American Refluxxx" is, is a start in the direction of positive change.

melt

A friend made a model of his chest out of crayons for a class this semester and got the idea to melt the whole thing with candles over a tub of water. He also thought it would be coo to film the whole thing, so he enlisted my help with the coverage of the project. One afternoon we brought all our equipment over to the Cerrache building and set it up. A few other friends stopped by to see how everything was going and to take a few pictures. One thing we didn't realize was just how long it would take to melt the whole sculpture; after about two or three hours the candles had burned all the way down and we had only melted the bottom portion of the model. At one point my friend found a blowtorch in the metal shop and attempted to facilitate the melting process, but even that took a long time. The footage was pretty cool, so I edited it together and put it on YouTube (Vimeo requires you to pay to put anything above 500 MB online). My friend hopes to eventually melt the rest of the sculpture once he figures out a way to melt it quicker.

Originally we decided a section of a song called 'Echoes" by Pink Floyd fit very well with the video we had edited, but once I uploaded it to YouTube EMI blocked the video due to copyright issues. Apparently they don't allow you to use even a section of their artists' work for non-profit purposes and even when you credit the artist for their work. So I had to switch the song for something I was allowed to used, but changing the credits would have taken a very long time to reconvert the Final Cut file and then upload the 1.65 GB QuickTime file; I just left the video the way it was. Anyway let me know what you think.

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