The ocean and swimming are two things I begin to work with in the project that for the moment has no name. I draw and write to work out possible narratives in the form of a storyboard, one that will eventually become a short animated video.

I am not very good with making storyboards. In fact,  I am terribly impatient and want to jump immediately to the camera. But,  I won’t be able to go too far conceptually, because I need to see how the materials will act…they always end up contributing to the narrative.

I want to keep it simple – just paper and words swimming in a Hokusai-like wave of tiny bits of paper. There, I’ve complicated it already.

Saturday, I went to the Mori Tower Academy to hear Gabriel Acevedo Velarde give a presentation on his work and yesterday, I went to see the installation of two of his videos at the Mori Museum. I won’t write about that now, but I do want to point out the citation below that his talk led me to find about how we see ourselves.

…………………nomads, adrift in the sea – mother of all metaphor!………  A good place to start from.

“As our bodies change in a dangerous world now subject to global warming, color sense like heat sense detaches the senses from the complacent view of the body as a fortress with peepholes and antennae, sensing externalities, and instead encourages us to take a world-centered and not a self-centered view of viewing such that the self becomes part of that which is seen, not a sovereign transcendent. To thus see ourselves in the midst of the world is to enter into ourselves as image, to exchange standing above the fray, the God position, for some quite other position that is not really a position at all but something more like swimming, more like nomads adrift in the sea, mother of all metaphor, that sea I call the bodily unconscious.”

Taussig, Michael. “What is the Color of the Sacred?” in: Critical Inquiry. Fall 2006.

For an interesting look at Hokusai’s Great Wave view this five-part BBC documentary http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWesQcVUoKw