Documentary and Film Interpretations

Laura Hyunjhee Kim

SQUIRRELING Facial Emotion Detection

Laura Hyunjhee Kim, PhD Candidate, Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance (IAWP), College of Media, Communication, and Information (CMCI). Honorable Mention.  

SQUIRRELING Facial Emotion Detection is a practice-based research art project.  Laura Hyunjhee Kim describes her project as an interspecies collaboration in which "we walk through a series of movements inspired by the behavioral and emotional responses of Fox Squirrels.  In this human-adaptation of "squirreling" that has been modified for the human body, we learn how to protect our facial expressions from being identified, universally categorized, and mapping by emotion detection, algorithms and cameras, while securely signaling nuanced emotive expressions from one human to another." 

Alexander Britti

I Don't Think this is Working

Alexander Britti, CU undergraduate, writer, director, & editor. Honorable Mention.

I Don't Think this is Working is a short comedic film by CU undergraduate Alexander Britti.  The film centers on a couple coming together during quarantine. The film begins with a couple at odds with each other and on the verge of separating, but who are forced to work out their differences due to being stuck in quarantine. 

The film features Cassidy Nelson as Liv and Myles Aquino as Noah; Alex Britt as writer, director, and editor; Misha Kuetemeier, as director of photography; Myles Acquino, first gaffer; Robert Coller, boom operator; and Rob Ruiz, second gaffer.

Shelby McAuliffe and Molly Ott

The Language Of A Pandemic

Shelby McAuliffe, Photography, MFA candidate Molly Ott, Sculpture and Post-Studio Practice, MFA candidate.  Honorable Mention.

Video One
Video Two
Video Three

Shelby McAuliffe and Molly Ott describe their project as "a three-part video is motivated by the routines developed during self-quarantine which we specifically explore in the actions of communication and cleaning.

Friendships have uncovered vulnerabilities, relational dependencies, and personal attachments with unique intensity because of the new context found in self-quarantine. Our video project intends to visually acknowledge this social territory and push its limits by choosing to create within the exposure that human connection generates. My collaborator and I were apart from one another for most of the project’s development and so Zoom and cell phone videos maintained our connection and friendship. The glitches, the longing, the misunderstandings, and the flat images are a shared, common language of contemporary society; that which sustains human connection through technology during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The first film creates a portrait of Boulder, Colorado through a series of discarded objects found on solitary walks. We then jointly arrange them into a sculptural composition. The building process is filmed and while we practice social distancing, the strain of our separation is humorously exaggerated as we laboriously disinfect each object before adding it to the composition. Cross-contamination of the touched objects is vanquished by this disinfection but the necessity of “contamination” (exchange) in a creative act is revealed for its value.

The second and third part of the series imply the preparation before such walks and encounters. The split screen of the second video presents our individual cleaning practice, without the knowledge of one another’s habits nor preferences. The third reiterates the strain of socially distant collaboration, and the social pressure to agree on the consequences of COVID-19.