Above: Modified image clip from A Comforting Thought by Donna Golden

Saturday Fantasy Q+A is our ongoing post series that probes the thoughts and insights of individuals participating in sci-fi, fantasy and horror genres.

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Donna Golden is a digital media artist and filmmaker. She creates processed, collaged, remixed, animated videos exploring our relationships to history, memory, language, and power. Before coming to Los Angeles to study experimental animation, she worked as an editor in New York and participated in art/activist collectives creating multimedia projects exhibited at festivals and museums in the US and abroad. Her videos have been shown at the Black Maria Film & Video Festival, the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight series, and the Atlanta Underground Film Festival. She holds a BA in US History from Columbia University and is a (soon-to-be!) MFA grad in Experimental Animation from California Institute of the Arts.

  Watching cartoons & sci-fi movies (Kimba the White Lion, UltraMan, anyone?), making my own breakfast (Steak-um sandwiches, seriously), or staying in bed reading sci-fi novels (lots and lots of Andre Norton) donated by an aunt.

  The look of the project (animated photo collage) is loosely inspired by political graphics posters from the 60s and 70s (esp. OSPAAAL posters). Although the posters weren’t intended to be satirical, they nonetheless provided a starting point for visualizing the film.

Re: fantasy, there’s a line I love from a well-known Donna Haraway essay where she talks about those “… who can join rational conversation and fantastic imaginings that change history.” This concept of connecting seemingly incompatible and contradictory elements - the fantastic, the rational, the serious, the absurd - is really exciting to me.

  I’m interested in our relationship to history: how our understanding of the past affects our capacity to act in the present, and how we generate new tools (i.e., language, images, ideas) or rely on existing ones, to imagine and shape the future.

Film/video making gives me the chance to play with a lot of elements: sound design, mood, color, motion, rhythm, animation techniques and/or live action, and to explore an idea or work through a problem over time.

  We seem to have an apocalypse fetish - obsessing/fantasizing about “end times”: economic disintegration, environmental collapse, global pandemics, 2012, FEMA camps. We may be at the end of one era (neoliberalism, unipolar world, etc..), but it’s not at all clear what’s going to come next. That uncertainty, coupled with a sense of vulnerability, generates, for me at least, alternate bouts of panic and exhilaration.

I think we’re living in an age of extreme possibility - which direction that leads is up to us.

  I’m working on a follow-up to A Comforting Thought. I’m planning a series of animated commentaries: “Notes on the Habits of Highly Successful Societies”, so I’m looking forward to sharing those.

Join us Saturday, October 24, 2009 at Rec Center Studio to view Donna’s short animation, A Comforting Thought.
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