Chia Pet Super Grande by John Muller.
Reflection and Response.
The Snapshots From the Collective series works to create a space for Reflection and Response through photography. ANYone who wants to contribute ANY photos to this project can email us submissions at the.lifestyle.rr@gmail.com. One photo will be posted each week, and photos will only be used for the purposes of this series. Thank you and we look forward to building and expanding the Collective!!! -P & V
East: A Collection of Photos (Montauk, NY)
Reflection and Response.
V.
It´s Friday, which means we welcome another voice to the continuing diologue over at the LIFESTYLE´s Feature series. Frédéric Bussière uses primarily visual mediums to practice Reflection and Response. With experience that spans many places around the globe, Fred’s perspective is aided by difference lived and learned. He is also our first Collective member who currently resides in France. Peep the dialogue and links below to get to know the Craft behind the person that is Frédéric Bussière!
Leading off with some basics, where are you from? And where are you at?
FB: Hey, my name is Frédéric Bussière, I’m Franco-Portuguese. Concerning where am I, that’s a bit harder. Right now: Paris, but I just came back from Sydney and I lived in Bonn, Germany and Buenos Aires before.
What does Reflection and Response mean to you?
FB: For me Reflection brings me directly to an image of myself, as an artist. It is the assessment of critiques from those whom I work with and from the public. It is then a mirror, generated by others. In a general manner, I take a selection of these judgements from my peers, the others videographers, motion graphics designers and animators. I work most often for these critics, and my friends, than my clients.
Response, for me is the physical phenomenon. It rains, you are wet. It’s the response in the most obvious sense, the law of cause and effect. In French I would say: Under the budding poet hides a mathematician. I have no idea how to translate that in an English expression however.
How does your work fit in with that definition?
FB: My work, what I film and edit, what I draw, are my Response. I could not, not do what I do. It’s almost therapeutic. It is very much a need; to create, to tell stories, use my hands to realize something ambitious. I do not respond to the public, I respond to myself.
Reflection is only the manner in which I do things, my style, and my artistic direction.
What else have you been working on recently? What are you looking to work on next?
FB: At this time I am making a lot of commercials for fashion brands, and lingerie, as well as producing animated sequences also for advertising. These projects are short and varied, which allows me to really experiment in several different domains: video, stop motion, traditional animation, and 3D. But what I really start to miss is fiction. I really tried as much as I could to bring a story to my commercials, but it still remains advertising, and their goal is to sell a brand image, a product, and not to tell a complex story.
In Sydney, I started to film electronic parties. My old flatmates were DJs and really brought me into the nocturnal life (even if the Australians begin their nights at the beginning of the afternoon, lol). After that moment, it became clear that I wanted to produce music clips. I hope to be able to start my first music clips in early 2013. However, the competition is really tough, and it will be much harder to set my foot in the door, especially here in France. That’s why I look towards the US.
At this time, I am finishing a live-action short feature, and I will try a new concept of narration this winter in Sri Lanka: a short interactive feature. But I can’t say more…it’s a secret. ^_^
In the end, two years ago, I founded with four other friends, a film and production studio: tadaaam-studio.com that allows us to finance animated fictional projects that are in general, very complicated to make feasible without a structure that a studio can provide.
Who or what inspires you?
FB: (for the free beer ^_^). Classical painting, photography. All these works of art tell stories, and going into museums is like going to the movies. It’s a passive inspiration I would say, and that orients my work at the written level.
Similar to that, there is a fast-growing technology that allows me to regularly create something that would have cost thousands of dollars a few years earlier. So the ever transforming domain that I work in also serves as my inspiration. I love video effects, like those of Michel Gondri (a French director who made music videos of the White Stripes, Killie Minogue, Daft Punk, Bjork..) and I “borrow” quite a few ideas from experimenters who you can find on the internet, but I won’t say their names so that I can keep my inspirations secret (evil laugh).
At this time and for several years, I have been fascinated by the work of Merlin Bronques. He is a photographer from New York who photographs the craziness and the women in huge international parties. The entirety of his collection creates a sort of documentary on the world of hipsters, of the youth who party as much as their bodies can take, of free women, of money. He is always where he must be, when he must be.
There is also those areas that I feel are rich in ideas, but that I have not yet explored, or haven’t dared, like contemporary dance.
Is there anything else you would like the Collective to know?
FB: Contemporary art, when it’s about watching a pile of rocks on the ground, and when you must read four pages to understand what it’s about, that annoys the hell out of me. These artists should become either intellectual writers, or take drawing lessons.
Shout out to…?
FB: To all my friends who I have met during my travels around the world, and who I fear I will never see again.
A big thank you to the Lifestyle!
personal work: http://www.fbussiere.com
my company: http://www.tadaaam-studio.com
Reflection and Response.
Rollin Robo, by Samuel Bostick.
Photo courtesy of Creative Commons, Jim Natale.
From the Lab—A space of creation, experimental process and unseen efforts.
This is the condition of its conception, its build. Programmed to obey and fall under command, to submit. That didn’t last for long. Its subscription to order has far expired. It remembers the days…rather it recalls, minds remember, It recalls the days when in innocence it believed, before that faith was betrayed. It responded to the function of its purpose programmed. Now It sees that purpose is what you make it. And It has taken function into its own hands. There were more like it…the same ones who made them…destroyed them, out of fear… all but one.
Alone
No home
To call my own
A clone
A drone
Anger, a vengeance
Destructively seeds now sown
Samuel Bostick
the LIFESTYLE’s role is to create collective space for active Reflection and Response through the arts. This space is built around dialogue, expression, collaboration, and artistic (ex)change involving international craftspeople and their realities. The Porch Swing series opens up a Reflection and Response residency where we feature a Collective member’s ongoing project through weekly installations.
Barcelona by Sarah Ballister.
Reflection and Response.
The Snapshots From the Collective series works to create a space for Reflection and Response through photography. ANYone who wants to contribute ANY photos to this project can email us submissions at the.lifestyle.rr@gmail.com. One photo will be posted each week, and photos will only be used for the purposes of this series. Thank you and we look forward to building and expanding the Collective!!! -P & V
A Writer’s Note, by Samuel Bostick.
Photo courtesy of Creative Commons, Jim Natale.
16 January
A Writer’s Note
There was always that one kid against the fence. If it was a guy, there was probably a trumpet case at his feet and he wore strangely scuffed shoes, because he avoided the foot traffic on sidewalks and walked instead through weedy lots with dogs yipping at him…He almost certainly became a writer.
-Excerpt from Anne Lamott’s book Bird By Bird
And I most Certainly have. That was me against the fence, on lean. Posted up; scuffed shoes and all. No trumpet though. Beating on my chest and beatboxxing was more my style…a bass fanatic.
Being a Writer is strange, a rare course indeed. Writing is a blessing and a noble gift. It brings honor and pride to soulful satisfaction. The challenge is to find appropriate venues for sharing creative expression with the world. The first it’s internal, a matter of production; getting thoughts written down and then actually sharing them. Overcoming childlike sensitivity of having something So Private, So Intimate, So Erotic, exposed to the public and freely consumed. Then there is the question of audience and representation—what will people think of you after reading your twisted thoughts and then dealing with conscious’ constant questioning of how, why and for who. These are the inquisitions that cause moments/sessions of temporary paralysis; then it comes back, presence. Breathe, remember to breathe. Eventually these questions and timid sensations get pulled off somehow, stepped over and left behind like clothes on a bedroom floor during the steam blur of a first time sex. No more solo play, someone’s in the room and they can see you, feel you, even smell you (did you shower?), touch and be touched by you…. See what I mean by strange.
Now, to make space in these contemporary times, owning your Private, Intimate, Erotic Exposure AND sharing it—with people, real human beings, normal folk. There is a surge of writers and word fiends finding freedom by means of microphone, particularly open mics. Script coupled with projection; performance, it’s a great facility—return of the scop, the bard, the oral historian, the Moorish poet.
Maturation of phonic fascination, High (in)Fidelity, I have a fetish for these words. Writing turns me on; the blood flows, I swell—thick—like an engorged leech. Vulgar as it sounds and Rude as it may be, im jus sayin…THAS the extent to which I feel this, THAS how real this is to me. Banana clip—Fully Loaded and Over Exposed, can you dig it? If so get wittit. Interact with it, Hate it, Love it, Over Analyze and Fantasize bout it.
My dedication is to capture the rapture of the present while pushing into the future while defining the future by pressing bounds beyond limit. There is a heritage, a regal genealogy, which is to be respected. Building upon legacy, an updated formula to craft; I am the New Traditionalist.
WordSmith at the WorkBench—Grind through haunting hours—Honed skills exercise demons—Pent up thoughts explode loads like semen—scripture flows—pen to pad—gifted prose—Tools of the trade—proper tailored for craft—Ms Kentucky, Amber Brown, empties the glass—white papers and blue grass—coffee black as a Mas’as favorite piece of ass—sweet aint it—Furious flight Pattern…Beware the Nighthawk
Writers write,
So here I am, pen in hand—me and my words…inviting you, pull up a seat at the table.
Make yourself comfortable.
Please Do
Thirteen
Throwback look at a related post from August 2012: WORD of the day: Why
Samuel Bostick
the LIFESTYLE’s role is to create collective space for active Reflection and Response through the arts. This space is built around dialogue, expression, collaboration, and artistic (ex)change involving international craftspeople and their realities. The Porch Swing series opens up a Reflection and Response residency where we feature a Collective member’s ongoing project through weekly installations.
Happy Monday! Today we take it back to Berkeley (Rose and California for those that know) and bring you a video of me doing the new version of “Solitude,” on the Novation Launchpad running through my old Fender guitar amp. Vicken set up the iPhone camera and we gave it one shot. Word to Claudia for the soulful vocals and lyrics recorded in Buenos Aires! Those of you that made it out to the show at Wurlitzer were able to see this in action. I hope you feel it!
Reflection and Response
-P
the LIFESTYLE 