Driving around, parking, and giving directions to 12 high school students can be a little cumbersome sometimes, but for Guerrilla Cinema class it's all a part of the recipe. Over the last month, these students have been working with artist Xavier Tavera to experiment with site specificity and video projection in the public eye. Tavera is mostly known for his photography, but recently has been creating projects that display his photography and video on Lake Street. So this week, we grabbed a projector and a laptop and headed out to Lake Street. Check out a brief write up on the street art/graffiti chronicle Wooster Collective or get the day to day recap on the Guerrilla Cinema blog.
We dove headfirst into American Gods last night and barely made it up for air. For those of you unfamiliar with this popular, multi-award garnered novel by Neil Gaiman, it's a darkly humorous, high-octane blend of pulp fiction, sci-fi, and spiritual warfare, set for the most part in a parallel universe that bears a strong resemblance to northern Wisconsin.
We were able to draw a number of thematic links to the Heart of Darkness exhibition, which we toured immediately preceding our discussion. The Thomas Hirschhorn cave could have easily been a setting for several scenes of the novel, and the blood-stained sofa in Kai Althoff’s installation evoked an eerie similarity to a room where the novel's protagonist engages in a life and death games of checkers.
Though, within our group, gut reaction to the novel covered the gamut of emotional response from love to hate, we came to a shared understanding and appreciation of the massive range and scope of the author's efforts. “Epic” only begins to describe Mr. Gaiman's tome. And in the season of the ten-second sound bite, that in it self can serve as a refreshing respite for frazzled neural receptors.
