Green screen workshops by artist group Superimposed

29.11.2019 — forcar

Superimposed is an artist group created and led by Barbara Jazbec, with her student peers Inka Jerkku, Janina Joutsen, Annika Korhonen and Elina Knuutinen as supervising artists.

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The process for Superimposed started in January 2019 when Barbara Jazbec took part in the course ”Working as a Producer” and learned how to do grant applications.

Jazbec is also working for the video art festival DigitalBigScreen in her hometown Trbovlje, Slovenia. She wanted to connect Finnish artists and TAMK with the festival, where every year they have different workshops related to videos. They had never had a green screen workshop, so the idea was there!

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The plan was developed into creating a community-based artwork, with the visitors of the DigitalBigScreen festival using green screen and then showing the results in a gallery in Tampere. But how to show art made in Finland in Slovenia and vice versa?

DigitalBigScreen is organized every year in October together with the festival of new media culture Speculum Artium. The theme of the festival this year was about the human brain. Therefore Jazbec came up with the idea to have the topic of the workshop about dreams. In the workshop, the participants would discuss and tell stories about what dreams they had had – asleep or awake – and what they meant to them. The participants would decide together with the artists what kind of video and performance they wanted to produce with the green screen.

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In Spring 2019, Jazbec applied with this project to the Pirkanmaa Regional Fund (Suomen Kulttuurirahasto) and was honoured to get the grant in May 2019. After that, the group started to plan the workshops and to work on their own videos on the topic of dreams that they would show in October at DigitalBigScreen’s cinema in Trbovlje.

On 4th of September 2019, a demo workshop was held in TAMK Mediapolis with Fine Art students there. Their task was to work in small groups and create a video artwork on the theme of dreams in a short time. All the videos were planned, filmed and edited in less than four hours.

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After that came the main event of the project: traveling to Slovenia. The workshops took place during the DigitalBigScreen festival in Trbovlje, Slovenia from Oct 17th to Oct 19th 2019. Participants were young adults who mostly had very little experience with this kind of medium. They had about 1.5 hours to create the concept and film with the green screen, with Janina Joutsen behind the camera filming and directing. Then, with the help of Inka Jerkku and Annika Korhonen, they edited the videos. Meanwhile, Elina Knuutinen worked as an assistant and documented the events. One day, there were three groups from a high school of another city in the workshop. On the last day, a pop-up station open for everyone was arranged, where a lot of families came with their children. Everyone we worked with was excited and had fun learning the green screen technique.

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The final event of the project is the exhibition. The results of the workshops and artists’ video artworks are now shown in Gallery Himmelblau’s mini cinema in Media 54, Finlayson area. The opening was on Friday the 15th of November 2019, and the exhibition will be open until the end of December. Welcome!

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Our collective’s journey to collect people’s dreams has been an experimental artistic research in order to see if there is some common ground with other people, when it comes to the act of dreaming. The content and purpose of dreams are not fully understood, although they have been a topic of scientific, philosophical and religious interest throughout recorded history – and the inspiration for many works of art. Dreams are a very interesting brain activity: even when we are asleep, the human brain never really goes off.

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