Always a work in progress

Statement :

I am an artist, polyglot, promoter of polyglot-ism and creative-ness. Communication and language are vital in my work; they are the impetus. Gesture and perception are concepts that shape it. Hinting at longing and melancholy, my work asks the viewer to question how they perceive. With perception as a key concept, duration consistently carries a lead role in how my work takes form.

Audio-visually, I take leads from Peter Kubelka and Mona Hatoum, among others. Conceptually, anthropologists, cultural academics, and philosophers such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Néstor García Canclini, and Alva Nöe give shape and inspiration to my work.

Recently I have been more interested in observation and allowing the story to tell itself rather than inventing characters, scenarios, and plots. I am a firm believer that reality is much more interesting than fiction, but we have to be alert to the stories it tells.

~Nicole Rademacher, February 2010.

The Thesis has been finished.

Yep. Finally. Some never thought it would actually happen. The title I am not so sure about, but whatev' : The Ubiquity of New Media Forms Allows for More Pervasive Video Art to Occur: a look at new experimental documentary and its roots in consumer practices and experimental movements.

The image to the right is one of the spreads. Two texts run concurrently through the entire thing. It begins like this: ‘The medium [video] is becoming more pedestrian,’ stated Bill Viola in 1981. (Viola 1995, 70) If in 1981 video was becoming more pedestrian, then where is video today in 2008? Because of the success of VHS and Camcorders (leading to DVD format and smaller, cheaper, easier to use camcorders), video is accessible and familiar to the public as well as artists and professionals. This is a hindrance as well as an advantage. The medium is available to people who do not see themselves as artists, yet they can make contributions to the medium (i.e. youtube). Often these creators do not take the medium seriously (for them it is a hobby), therefore devaluing the work of video artists (i.e. youtube). I will concentrate on these advances as an asset. These benefits allow for a different type of documentary to occur: one where the subjects are oblivious to the camera, not because they do not see it, but because they simply do not acknowledge it. Camcorders have become almost invisible/unperceivable. This tendency has enabled me to produce a body of work that challenges ideas of video art, the gaze, the Other, and the familiar. It has allowed me to create the body of work An Infinite Ordered Set of Events.

After the intellectual part comes the show documentation. And thanks to Robbie, I had a real person experiencing the work. After the documentation come the Bibliography and Works Cited. Somehow everything worked out perfectly. And finishes evenly. I still need to figure out what to do with cover, though.....

It feels great to finally be finished. I am now only a few signatures away from actually having my MFA. And what next? What next.

New Thesis Thoughts

Thesis: Memory is composed of real, imagined, and constructed realities. We construct these realities to form our own narratives.
A: What’s your first memory?
B: When I learned how to tie my shoes.
A: What do you remember from it?
B: Navy blue and red. I think my mother was there too. I felt very accomplished.
A: How old were you?
B: Four.
A: Is this your own memory?
B: What do you mean is it my own? Of course! It was my first memory.
A: I mean, did you form it yourself, or is it composited of things people told you, pictures, things you remember, and your imagination?
B: Well, I think it was just how I remember it.

There is no direct way to access your own memory, and the memories that you can access are never how they actually occurred. The setup of the randomized DVD format is to ‘emulate’ the memories and the process of retrieving them, a kind of daydream and retrieval. Sometimes the memories come full screen, some are smaller and appear as a fraction of the screen, sometimes they repeat. Words appear on the screen in between each video: play, mute, channel, stop, setup . . . They signal a relationship with the mechanics of video, of the DVD player. Initially the viewer forges relationships between the words and the video pieces. Soon the viewer realizes that the words simply refer to the remote control, therefore offering the viewer the illusion of control over their experience with the videos, the memories. Do the buttons on the remote control work? They seem to function, but upon closer inspection of the remote, the viewer realizes that there are no batteries. The control they experienced was an illusion.


Short-term versus long-term memory and subconscious. How are memories remembered? The constructed, manufactured, and real. Was it my memory or did I take it from someone else’s life? Did I see this intimacy between others on the street? Or had I experienced it myself? Memory fragments.

Synthetic Artifacts

Thesis Statement:
Using my personal hybrid identity (as adoptee and Mexican American) and the residual effects of memory and re-memory, I will investigate identity within the constructs of family structure and family history. Creating fragments and compiling existing fragments, which contribute to self identity, I will explore the negotiation of identity and imagined identity and its place in the family narrative, the real, imagined, and constructed family narrative.