Jordan Baseman

Jordan Baseman (b. 1960)

Artist statement

The film installations I make have something very real at their core. However edited, constructed or manipulated the final works may be, the source, the starting point, the genesis, is always rooted in veracity – not artifice. My recent work is a synthesis of reportage, portraiture, documentary, creative non-fiction and narrative practices. I am interested in the spontaneity and unpredictability of the interview situation, exploring speculation, opinion, belief and anecdotes as central components of this process. Voices are edited to operate as if a participant is speaking directly to an audience. The timbre, pace, pauses and vocabulary of the participant’s narratives are reconstructed to emphasize and convey personal accounts of individual or intimate experience. The recorded interviews are edited, transcribed into text, and then re-edited textually to form a script. The final audio edit, follows the transcribed text-based script, creating narrative through a reversal of the conventional script-writing process.