Moments (Blossoms)
Moments is a collaborative/collective project which involves ultrashort, silent videos created by Lin. A number of Lin’s friends were invited to select one or more of these videos (seed moments) to which they respond in words and/or sounds. Indiviual textual/audio response was then combined with the visuals from the selected moment(s) to create another video – the blossom. The editing was done by Lin, with the exception of a couple of videos which were edited entirely by one of the participants, Shantiketu, as his responses. Since there are no restrictions on the choice of seed moments and the participants were not aware of the others’ selections at the beginning of the project, there can be more than one iteration of the same moment.
A list of the seed moments are available at linli-art.com/moments-seeds/. Below are the blossoms which have grown from the seeds so far. This is an ongoing project; this webpage will be updated regularly as more blossoms emerge.
The names of the contributors are shown in the videos and also listed at the bottom of this page with their websites if applicable. Lin is extremely grateful to all the participants for their generous contributions which provide the nourishment for the seed moments to germinate.
Shantiketu’s statement about 12!
Lin created 12 ‘moments’ which she invited others to respond to in any way they wished. I recalled her audio piece about bellringing (linli-art.com/audio/#changeringing) which led me to think about a visual equivalent of ringing the changes. And the twelve hours in each day appear on the face of the alarm clock that features in some of the ‘moments’.
There can be 12! (factorial twelve – 479, 001, 600) permutations of twelve bells and a full peal would take 40 years to complete. With video, many other permutations are possible in terms of colour, exposure, saturation, shot length, speed, direction or whatever, so it could take centuries to work through them all. Maybe a computer could be programmed to do it (though I doubt if anyone would want to watch the output).
Some other thoughts that came to me as I was working on this: a single bell may toll to call mourners to a funeral … momentary glimpses of important life events are said to flash before people’s eyes when they’re drowning … the sound of a bell buoy can be both a warning of danger and a pointer towards safety … and there’s something about the notion that a dozen moments could potentially exist far beyond a single lifetime that I find appealing.
Contributors:
Rachel Beckles Willson rachelbeckleswillson.com/
Sukhema (Larry Butler) playspacepublications.com/
Chris Croft
Merle Ferguson
Ratnadevi (Luise Holtbernd) www.livingmindfulness.net & playspacepublications.com/bringing-mindfulness-to-life/
Rosie Hopkins
Laila Kjellström
Chin Li visualverse.org/writers/chin-li/
Shantiketu vimeo.com/showcase/9287133
Lesley Stirton www.arundelpress.net
Pat Sutherland Everything goes out dancing
Helen Wood