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Essay about Omer Fast vs. Gary Hill Video Artist

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For my final I have selected Omer Fast - CNN Concatenated and Gary Hill – Incidence of Catastrophe from the videos screened in class this semester. The experience from watching both Fast & Hill video was very interesting in the way how memory was mediated. These two videos used personal, and recollection of memory, but both very far apart in how memory is conceived in their work. I will give my views on how each video artist applied their problem of memory in the following.
In CNN Concatenated, Fast creates a monologue into a collage of different news reporters used to narrate something they normally wouldn’t read off a teleprompter. The video is edited precisely by mixing each reporter word for word to deliver a message. A message …show more content…

I remember being in the ICU room on morphine to ease the intense pain not knowing that my life was hanging by a thread. They didn’t want to tell me, but it hit me after noticing that my family members where coming and going in pairs holding back tears. Thinking about that message, I was scared at that time but didn’t want my family to notice. It was hard for me to accept so I prayed and asked if it’s my time, take me, if not, heal me. So, yeah the message sort of hit home in that manner.
Hill’s Incidence of Catastrophe, was very different from what I experienced in Fast video. Hill made himself the protagonist from the novel Thomas The Obscure by Maurice Blanchot. Hill’s idea on this video derived from what he read and recreated the story himself based on personal memory. I felt the protagonist in the video was trapped in a bad dream and consumed by the words from the novel. There where scenes where he found himself running frantically through the woods giving me the impression he was trying to escape something or someone. He was attached to the novel so much that his presence at the dinner table felt unwelcomed that everybody stopped talking to each other. It was complicated understanding how everybody became insane near the end. The video ends with the protagonist laying down in the fetal position naked in his own excrement and mumbling unrecognized words.
Both videos where very different

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