WE ARE THE ROAD (2018)
Conceived of as a broad sphere of activity rather than as a specific media outcome, Collins explores the notion that the moving image exceeds that which is merely present on screen.
In 1987, Stewart Brand wrote an evangelical account of the MIT Media Lab in which he asserted, ‘If you are not part of the steamroller, you are part of the road’. In this brutal formulation, the producers of technologies (the steamroller) are active and the consumers (the road) are passive.
'We Are the Road' presents a series of sequences, imaginative expansions of situations in which filmmaking and its spaces, activities and histories register as a defining presence; and of electrical and computer industry archival materials that relate to moving image and recording technologies, accumulating into a collage of unreliable recollections.
'We Are the Road' considers the position of the viewer and occupies the space of ‘the road’. It takes the activity of the viewer at the moment of viewing seriously, seeking to voice, thicken, complicate and formally double the encounter, refuting the notion that anything about this activity is passive.
Commissioned text, Authoring Agents by Donald Butler at Lux Scotland
London International Film Festival BFI, London 2018
Casa Victor Hugo, Havana, Cuba. October 2017
Gotland Art Museum, Visby, Sweden 2017
One, 2, 3 (2021)
www.joanpublishing.org/Jenna-CollinsExploiting forms that traditionally get burnt up in the production of the moving image, Jenna Collins' One, 2, 3 moves through sequences of writing that dramatize the small but necessary acts of theft and invention that shape a story in its telling. In this case, one that navigates the legacy of a dead female writer and the task of being a living artist.
