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Your experiments are part of your body of work

These 17 performance art based videos, each less than 2 minutes long, are discrete works, including several that were created as part of series. I use shorts to explore character, practice my storytelling chops, and perfect visual experiments; and also to save ideas for a later date. It is good exercise for me as a motion picture artist to make a whole story happen in less than 2 minutes.

There was a time when video was a daunting, if exciting, new art form for me. Video has quite a learning curve – i.e., cameras and camera operation, light (which is not the same thing as lighting), lighting, framing, editing, etc. However, since I already had a professional’s understanding of presentation, I already knew that I would die the first time someone called my motion picture art “home movies.” And I did, die, that is.

But luckily for me, part of already being a professional artist was knowing that just in case one of my home movies turned out well, I should exercise the highest skill and attention to presentation that I was capable of. My nanomovies began holding up well to curation. And though it probably was inevitable that having trained as a playwright that I would gravitate to making longer, more narrative work, I try to keep my mind open to moments of experience that are serendipitous opportunities for shorter works.

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Caden Manson is a director, media artist, and teacher. He is co-founder of the media ensemble bigartgroup.com and network, blog, and publisher, contemporaryperformance.com. He has co-created, directed, video- and set designed 18 Big Art Group productions. Manson has shown video installations in Austria, Germany, NYC, and Portland; performed PAIN KILLER in Berlin, Singapore and Vietnam; Taught in Berlin, Rome, Paris, Montreal, NYC, and Bern; the ensemble has been co-produced by the Vienna Festival, Festival d’Automne a Paris, Hebbel Am Ufer, Rome’s La Vie de Festival, PS122, and Wexner Center for The Arts. Caden is a 2001 Foundation For Contemporary Art Fellow, is a 2002 Pew Fellow and a 2011 MacDowell Fellow. Writing has been published in PAJ, Theater Magazine, and Theater der Zeit. Caden is currently an associate professor and graduate directing option coordinator of The John Wells Directing Program at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama.

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