Each of them is a three-to six-minute music video by a different creative team, and while they have a wealth of feelings from the past year to draw from, each bears the unmistakable stamp of socially distanced production in their visuals and audio mixing. The format of their presentation implies a suggested viewing order, but each viewer is free to watch any video in any sequence they please.
Modulation: Changes in Key within the Same Work
If the notion of contemplating identity is itself a fraught subject for you, you might find a sympathetic reflection in Paul Pinto’s piece Whiteness: Blanc. A Hispanic person who isn’t fluent in Spanish, his acapella poetry establishes that he’s fifty percent Latino and twenty-to-eighty percent white, depending on varying definitions, putting him at a loss for how to fit into the current cultural narratives surrounding race in the United States. The piece is frantic, discordant, and suffused with ironic humor. His many anxious inner monologues are sent snowballing into a cacophony by a not so simple four-word long question, rendered visually by director Kameron Neal and cinematographer Jon Burkland of the aptly named Zanni Productions. But at the other end of the identity menu, in its own sphere, is Jojo Abot’s The Divine I Am, a “call to allness” dedicated to the birth-cries of all experiences. A celebration of the mysterious, its synthesizer chords are as meditative and melodic as Pinto’s lyrics are verbose and free-flowing.
