Breathing the desire to make new art work, living that desire and allowing it to dictate my way of life was like walking on a conveyor belt at the airport. When it finally reached it the end, I almost tripped and fell. I felt disoriented and somewhat vacant for a while. Only until recently did I finally sink into the pacing that runs my current, working life.

However, despite this eventual acclimation, I still can’t help but to lazy and slow. I’ve known for a while that nothing can replace the fulfilling rewards of making my own work, but I’ve somehow allowed myself to glaze over its significance. The answer to all this is pretty obvious, but actually let it happen is another case. After all, how can I validate making semi-filmic installation about social space as a practical practice? I don’t want to place my work in a white box gallery, nor do I want it to exist in a movie theatre.

I will spend this summer making one thing for myself, I need some mental rejuvenation.

Cinematography & Editing by Serena Kuo
Photography by Lucas Roy

Click here to view the embedded video.

Oakland Recreation Hall is a short documentary highlighting the creative process of furniture maker and sculptor, Tucker Houlihan. Through recounting the history of the place, the person, and the architecture, the documentary brings about a personal look at Houlihan as an individual intimately represented by the work he produces, as well as the meticulousness and intent behind his design nuances.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cinematography & Editing by Serena Kuo
Still Photography by Lucas Roy

Co-written by Serena Kuo & Lucas Roy

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When I Grow Up from Fever Ray on Vimeo.

By the way, if you have twenty bucks to spare, please go and buy Dark was the Night, a compilation double-CD/triple vinyl with songs by basically everyone lovable (except for the Knife), like Andrew Bird, Beirut, Antony, Feist, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors, Arcade Fire, David Byrne, My Brightest Diamond…you get the idea. And it’s for raising awareness/funding for HIV/AIDS. Here’s basically everything I just said, repeated on their website.

My current work focuses specifically on the depiction of action traversing through space and creation of spatiality in cinema. Using the camera as a physical extension of the eye, the viewer is asked to bridge the conventional function of a shot with real-experiences of perceiving space as an immersive environment during the process of travel. In my body of thesis projects, this endeavor is manifested in various ways:
1. Referencing the traditional narrative film format in a purely two-dimensional projection, where the audience expects a beginning, middle, and end, and hence restricting the film space and temporality to one finite entity
2. Placing the lens at the position of the eye to visually simulate the experience of moving within real space
3. Establishing a more active spatial environment for cinematic spectatorship through a change in the placements of its projection surfaces
4. Inverse to point 1, removing narrative and temporal finiteness to imitate the mundane and seemingly infinite nature of reality
Through the work examined in this brief thesis, my attempt is not to interrogate the all encompassing question of reality in cinema, but to articulate a body of work that both stems from and expands the medium’s conventions. With my work, I wish to facilitate a critical engagement with the medium’s process of constructing reality by using its very conventions to move outside the constraints and traditional parameters

Captured by Serena Kuo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Liscense.

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Part of the series of shorts made to advertise the branding of COLAB, a design laboratory at Syracuse University.

Let’s plan for the official opening of this website on Thursday, February 19th, 2009?

One of several (and more to come) shorts for the branding of COLAB, the new design laboratory at Syracuse University.