HAIR - LOSING ONE'S STRENGTH AND VITALITY

Initially, my previous film project "I Got Life" was intended to contain more references to hair. My stress related illness was causing me to lose a great deal of my hair and with it, a chunk of my feminine identity. Long, curly hair is emblematic of a creative, feminine and powerful person, and I wanted to own this persona. When I finally had to cut off all the very damaged long hair I'd spent years growing, I felt robbed of some of my power to shape and communicate my own identity. 

Hair symbolizes physical strength and virility; the virtues and properties of a person are said to be concentrated in his hair and nails. It is a symbol of instinct, of female seduction and physical attraction. Baldness may suggest sterility. Hair flowing depicts freedom and looseness; the unwilling removal of hair may be a castration symbol. Carries the context of magical power; witches had their hair shaven off, as well as in the Bible, in which Samson loses all his power when his locks are stripped. Heavy relations to fertility and even love (the quantity is related to love-potential). It can be thought of as the external soul. (Dictionary of Symbolism)

This short film is a spin off from "I Got Life", which talks about stress in the broadest sense. The featured song is from the musical Hair and meant to include footage of hair. Instead I chose different footage. There was a clip, however, which I decided to make into a separate project, "Hair". The soundtrack is an excerpt from "A Long Way to Heaven", which I used for the project about stress. This little film hopefully encapsulates the stress, anger, obsession and frustration of losing one's strength, vitality and personal empowerment.



HAIR from Vivi-Mari Carpelan on Vimeo.

Hair is symbolic of strength and vitality, of freedom, sensuality and physical attraction. One often loses one's hair when illness occurs. This film attempts to express the stress, anger, obsession and frustration of losing one's strength, vitality and personal empowerment.

"I GOT LIFE" - A FILM ABOUT WAR MENTALITY AND STRESS

Still from "I Got Life", copyright by Vivi-Mari Carpelan 2014

This was another fiddly project to finish, lots of technical issues that stretched this project over a period of a couple of months rather than weeks. I have vowed never to make anything similar again with somewhat unsophisticated software! I wanted to create something ironic around the song "I Got Life" from the musical "Hair" (1967) and then decided to combine it with my latest sound piece, "A Long Way to Heaven", mostly based on machine sounds that represent the mechanised, industrialised aspects of our lives that we have clearly not yet come to terms with. At the time, I was losing a lot of hair and ended up cutting it all off. Hair is, of course, a strong symbol of individuality, confidence and strength. I also didn't feel I had much life to speak of, as my condition and the insomnia was getting the better of me.

I decided to make an emotional film about the modern age conundrum of surviving inhuman amounts of stress. I used some footage of my own to express feelings of stress in our modern lives, yet mostly looked back to old footage of WWI and WWII, for an authentic document of war related stress. Since I have no way of using modern war footage, this was a self-evident choice that also fits in with the 2014 commemoration of the Great War. There is an obvious correlation between day-to-day stress in modern times and war related stress. Stress affects most of us in one way or another.

Stills from "I Got Life" copyright Vivi-Mari Carpelan 2014

Warfare defines our life on Earth. The war mongering mentality that gives rise to this regrettable fact pervades all of society and poisons every aspect of the human life experience. There is nowhere to escape from the feeling of being targeted, chased, threatened and hunted down. The unconscious stress reactions that follow aren’t confined to the battle field or the besieged city, but arise everywhere and anywhere throughout our lives. The majority of illnesses are generated by stress, and over time, they are increasingly likely to become chronic. It isn’t just our immediate physical survival that is at stake, it’s also the body’s ability to sustain life in the long term. The mental and emotional repercussions are disastrous and the survival of the authentic self is eventually also at stake. Severe disability will no doubt soon become the norm within the framework of society as we know it today.

In the film “I Got Life”, war is presented as a fact as well as a metaphor for a stressful life that has undertones of constant warfare. Life has become a traumatic struggle to manage the invisible forces that manipulate our bodies and mind, and the joy of being alive is gone. Moreover, when humans do break down from the effects of chronic stress, society is quick to jump on more guns to finish off the ones they consider weak and useless. The irony is that it’s often the shallow and dull individuals who are able to withstand stress the best. Are these the people who should lead our world?

“I Got Life” is based on old footage from the World War I and World War II, as well as footage of myself as the civilian narrator. The circular shape is indicative of the feeling of being targeted. The black and white, as well as negative effect, underline the timelessness and starkness of the affects. The film has been constructed around a sound collage I made called “A Long Way to Heaven”. It features machine sounds, radio sounds from the Cold War and other war related sounds. I performed the song “I Got Life” from the musical “Hair” from 1967 and added it to the track. It was sung on a day I felt quite tired in the same tempo as the song in the 1979 film version. As it is fast and quite a tongue twister, it makes the performance sound shallow and panicky. At the time, the musical was a radical criticism of religion and warfare that met with a lot of resistance until entering pop culture for good. By using this highly energised song about the good things in life in the context of stress and war I was hoping to further reinforce the sense of irony and how difficult it is for severely exhausted and ill people to feel that joy of having a body and being alive. Yet this should surely be everyone’s birthright?

TRAILER FOR TRACES, A MULTIMEDIA PROJECT

I seem to have failed to post about the trailer Martin and I finished a while ago! I created the visual show and Martin the soundscape. This is in preparation for the complete project, which should be about 20 mins long. If I have an opportunity to go and collect more material, i.e. abstract photos from the original source in Finland, there may be two parts. I would love to, as I would like to have more images to play around with, but at the moment we can't afford to eat, let along pay a visit to my home country.

Please choose the highest resolution for viewing, and view it full screen!

TRACES

Trailer for a multimedia show based on abstract images by Vivi-Mari Carpelan and music by husband Martin Herbert. This project idea is based on the use of koans in Asian Buddhism.

The work should disrupt so-called "functional fixedness" in the viewer, breaking old cognitive patterns and helping the brain make new connections. "Mind-wandering" that is neither too focused nor too slack is beneficial to a receptive state of mind, conducive to creative thinking. This is not really meditation, but rather an exercise in "a fresh look on life".

The gently flowing yet dynamic feel of the multimedia show should lull the viewer into a contemplative state of being. Inspiration has been derived from the ancient Japanese tradition of the koan, a story or statement that is ultimately absurd, offered to Buddhist disciples as a way of breaking old cognitive patterns, i.e. the mental "rut" humans get stuck in. The statements are meant to help the disciples drop their rational minds and become susceptible to the greater mystery of life.

Ideally, we want this shared subjective encounter to inspire people to question the rationale behind the frantic process of dashing about the planet in a state of semi-functionality.

The title references the marks that people have left behind while simply doing their job. Successive layers of paint, repeatedly stencilled or painted signs and lettering and the corrosion express the convergence of cultures, communication as well as the universal concepts of decay, the passing of time and the echo of history - all of surprising aesthetic value.

My fascination with creativity, the many forms of linguistic expression in different cultures as well as belief systems around the world were at the core of my MA at Helsinki University. This, as well as my very personal and first hand concerns with the psychology and physiology of stress, are all behind this artistic venture.

The finished multimedia show will be about 20 mins long.

David Drake of the prestigious Ffotogallery in Cardiff has offered personal comments on the photos, and encouraged taking the project further.

This project is in line with my research into fatigue and invisible illness, notably the category that holds solutions rather than just problems.

DE-CLUTTER YOUR SPACE, YOUR INTERNET, YOUR MIND, YOUR EMOTIONS...

We've been in the news!

I guess spring is in the air because spring cleaning seems to come to mind in somewhat unorthodox forms! People with pagan belief systems would say that it's all in tune with spring equinox. I believe that de-cluttering one's physical space is necessary at regular intervals. This also goes for the computer and the internet. A thousand e-mails have been deleted, newsletters have been unubscribed to, personal photo albums have been deleted off the internet, several internet accounts have been closed down, and on it goes. One must re-centre, re-focus and re-prioritise. The internet is a kind of ghost land, and maintaining a presence there most certainly requires energy. Equally, I can sense people's presence, but I can't see their physical shape... so it's like moving in a haunted house with a lot of ghostly presence. Don't get me wrong, I am all for technological advancement. But there are obvious pitfalls in the form of the amount of time and energy it requires from you, and the way the illusory aspects of virtual reality mess with your head.

Although good things occur, I have also found that social media and forums consistently create stress and unwanted emotional ups and downs in myself. So the advantages of keeping in touch with some people and sharing aspects of my life that I want to share with others have to be weighed against the disadvantages. Martin and I have talked about it long and hard and come to the simple conclusion that the internet isn't serving us well enough to warrant all the energy we're putting into it; there is on top of everything that feeling that one should do more, and more and more... and it really is endless, and never enough. We also feel that social media is not all it's cracked up to be. One reason may be that novelty value is wearing off. We feel that people are maybe getting jaded and aren't quite so interested in responding to other people online... the responses are so inconsistent and random, and quite few and far between, that it's starting to look futile. No one likes being bombarded with so much stuff all the time... While internet developers are working on making the internet easier to use, there are more and more adverts and more general noise. This is possibly a time of great transitions, but at the moment it's really all quite strenuous and not very user friendly. Learning new technology all the time (for instance, just setting up a simple account somewhere) is very time/energy consuming too, so it's worth thinking about which bits one feels a real need to learn. Perhaps one could talk about de-scattering one's brain!

While social media gurus abound, it seems to us that there's a lot of hype but very little real substance to the claims that the social media can help you reach people's consciousness. We are fully aware that it may still work for some people who have certain advantages, for instance youth, glamour and the ability to engage with people in real life through performance. Having a really cool gadget to develop is also something that wakes people up. Through our current project and fundraising campaign we have found out quite a lot about the way it really works, or doesn't work. While some truths are painful, I feel that my own online presence has served several purposes and it has certainly not all been in vain. However, it may be time to refocus and rethink one's attitudes and strategies. Trumpeteering one's truth into the void when no one is listening is certainly pointless, and it scatters the mind. I don't intend to abandon the internet altogether, but I'm going to make my presence more restricted and focused. Feeling too dependent on the internet for solutions to one's own life issues and feeling too desperate to be heard is a bit like entertaining a co-dependent romantic relationship (in real life, of course), and it's not healthy.

It's too soon to say just what our crowdfunding campaign has taught us, as it's running for another three weeks. Real media such as newspapers and Finnish TV have shown a lot of interest, but for many lay people out there it's still a bit hard to grasp the concept. My own dad said he hoped we weren't embarrassing ourselves by begging for money from our friends. He may be excused due to his age. Of course, most people understand that it's not about that at all. It's about showing support, which you can do either by sharing the idea with your own friends, or by donating a sum of your choice. My own achilles's heel is that I wish that people were loyal and supportive in ways that most people aren't able to be. On the other hand, some people feel they want to support by giving unsolicited advice, and that's something I'm not happy about at all as it often takes the form of a patronising attitude. But dealing with my own reactions and rethinking relationships is all part and parcel of my own process of "growing up" and finding the steps I have to take in order to minimise exposure to stress in my own life. "Letting go" is that one thing that keeps creeping up in my mind... 

So what happens to us middle-aged artists? Well, if one direction isn't fruitful then another one will surely appear if one keeps an open mind. It's tempting to abandon art as another pointless exercise - if it tends to be a one way communication and you feel that your whole existence depends on whether you reach other people or not, then it's not healthy. Of course, giving up is always an option if you're truly better off doing something else. But - my feeling is that Martin really wants to make art (he just needs to spend more time doing it in the real world) and that as he's evolving as an artist, he should by no means give up at this point. We are really, really struggling with the finances but on the other hand there aren't any other jobs available for him in this region either. As for myself, well I have to find ways of minimizing the impact of stress in my own life. My health is a priority. I could imagine doing lots of different arty things that demand time and energy if my reality was not restricted by health issues, but as it is, I have to live with them and organise my life around them. In discussions with Martin I have started to see some new ideas emerge about the role of art, and how some of my work fits in with these ideas... We'll just have to see where it takes me.