Thought in Reality

This is an experimental video essay (25 minutes) that attempts to turn both a rejected academic paper and a failed job talk (recording) into video art. Titled "Thought in Reality," the broad topic of the film is the question "where does thinking take place?" as it juxtaposes video footage of an academic talk (a campus visit job talk that did not result in a job) given in a typical ugly college classroom with a collage of photography, video, color scapes, and other visual objects. The film unfolds over 5 sections that deal with epistemological, religious/theological, and scientific categories related to the conditions and sources of thinking and creativity. It also offers a tacit critique of academic conditions of thinking that poses the academy and contemporary job market against the uncontainable sources of nature and the apophatic outside of what Edouard Glissant calls the "chaotic flux of evolving culture." Centered on passages taken from Edouard Glissant's *Poetics of Relation,* Niklas Luhman, Jacques Derrida, and Sylvia Wynter, and Hortense Spillers, the audio text of the film represents a kind of poetic transformation of a traditional academic text (one that was rejected by an academic journal) set in a visual medium.