(3:20)

     I first used a portable (reel-to-reel) video recorder in 1972, during my undergraduate studies.   It would be another 30 years before I returned to making my own moving images.  There was, however, one brief Super 8 film project in 1983, shown here, where I recorded myself applying baked beans to my breasts.  At that time, I couldn’t clearly articulate why I did so.  It was ‘art’...period.  It is only now that I have resurrected these dusty moving images, in 2006, that maybe I am beginning to understand the original impetus. 

     Most every traditional logocentric approach to visual critique falls disturbingly short.  It’s true.  Of the hundreds of visual communication books in my library alone, most include no visuals at all...just words.  Current visual-media scholarship has yet to negotiate this paradoxical deficiency.  And so I pleaded, why not use video to examine and discuss video?  The answer always remained, “No”.  Go figure.

     There is no reason to deny ‘new’ forms of visual research: absurdist, surreal or otherwise.  Yet, so many in academia do just this, even though we live in a deeply saturated mediated world.  It’s time to attempt new critical forms of media scholarship by re-using media’s exact languages and techniques.  Because still more can be learnt, even if scholars and viewers alike are unwilling or unable to try.

     Now more than ever, we must re-function our daily media stories --the methods (practice), the grammar (rules), and the lexicon (vocabulary)-- into a new robust methodologies for retelling these dangerous stories back to their makers.

                                      

     ....I wrote the screen-text to this video on a city transit bus en route to the sixth session of my first graduate communication theory class (2006).