Yuyao Wang
Cassette of the Past
Prompt: For the first bridge project, you’ll design a project that responds to a primary source, inspired by oral narration (interview), extrapolating key elements and form to relay information. On day one, you’ll learn to conduct interviews using the methods of a documentary filmmaker, in order to get the most substantive responses from your subjects (your peers). How can you use first person interviews to inform your practice? Your objective is to find an access point (or several) in your gathered narrative in order to inspire a creative making project (this is NOT an interview project, or even a project about an interview partner—it’s simply inspired by something found inside an interview).
I took inspiration from the interview with my partner Ellie. For this assignment I gathered my thoughts on memories about traumatic experience and how one deals with trauma. I took the access point from our interview in which we talked about our high school experience of stress and sadness. I stretched out my thinking based on our discussion and researched on the podcasts I listened to for the seminar class, in which we discussed how celebrities also had challenges of overcoming distress. I was especially drawn by the talk about how Anna Kendrick letting herself out of a toxic, manipulative relationship and how she dealt with the passing of her father. I dived into more information about Anna’s experience and found myself able to relate some of her emotions and thoughts. I believe that everyone has or has had problems in his or her life. And it would be a way of healing and to better understand oneself to be brave and to talk about past hurtful moments or to present them in a symbolic way. I painted on acrylic sheets and then cut them into strips to make them into a faux cassette tape. Each panel depicts a scene in my memory. Thoughts and emotions became clarified as I reeled the tapes and out them into the case. The background noise on the tape represents quarrels and arguments of past emotional turmoil before the state of calm and order is achieved when starting a new life’s journey.