Niara Knox
The World Has No Love To Give You Brother
Prompt: In class you can draw or work digitally to make a memory map of the urban-geographic landscape you encountered. It can include fragments of experiences, words, signs and signals, and materials you encounter, to add up to your theme or point of view, to experiment with shape and space, and iconic codes.You can change scale and drawing style, and draw from the clips and sound recordings you made from the encounters you had. It should be experiential what you saw at your feet or looking up, etc.
Through my video I wanted to map Harlem while simultaneously showing how it looked through my point of view. All of the things I noticed or thought of on my walk I translated into the video. I also wanted to show the history of Harlem and how that history is trying to be erased. All the book pages in the video are from a Harlem reader, further showcasing Harlem’s historic roots and atmosphere. In order to create this piece I had to compile and edit my footage to make a video, print out all of the frames and design each individual frame before scanning it back in and recreating the video. For my iconic codes I decided to make them more figurative than literal. Although there are street names in my video the codes and index I created serve to illuminate the streets, history, and gentrification that are prevalent throughout the neighborhood. It was a very grueling and time consuming process but it was worth it because the video turned out really well. I enjoyed the opportunity to explore a new neighborhood and experiment with mixed media animation in the context of creating a map.