Knights
of the North Park is a video documentation of a social
experience effected by Jamin Hall, Michael Evans and Wayne Madsen. Over
the period of four months, between the last winter storm and
mid-summer, these three artists trained themselves to infiltrate and
become a part of a local group from a national medieval fighting
society. Play
hard and fight harder.
Theory:
Within
a social stratosphere, there exists in-groups and out-groups. Within
our in-group of inner social confidants, we usually have our intimate
family members - perhaps not those people we like best but with whom we
share an intimate bond that has been created because of time and
proximity. Outside this group, usually lies the second tier of intimacy
- often times this is our relationship partners and closest friends.
Usually this includes the people with whom we share everything but who
do not know us as long or as well as our families do. Next we approach
the close friends group, then possibly good co-workers, colleagues,
fellow graduate students, and as we go out from our inner group we
reach professors, acquaintances, and finally the people who you see
around and you only connect to them through eye contact (commonly known
as familiar faces). This sphere consists of our social in-group. Within
the out-group, lies everyone else, commonly referred to as "The
Public." The distinct division of communication between the out-group
and the in-group is one of the primary investigations I am interested
in. In order for communication to happen between these two groups, a
vast library of information must be translated from one culture system
to the next. Although the language divide between these systems can
easily be breached, as a system becomes more specialized, it distances
itself further from being understood.
If my previous project taught me one
thing, it was how I needed to adopt more than a visual persona in order
to understand the new social group. My next social experiment involved
a group of medieval fighting enthusiasts. Some friends of mine and I
would drive by a local park every Thursday evening and see, to our
surprise, a group of grown adults fighting each other with foam swords
while dressed in tunics and armor. Stunned by the unique nature of
their club, I concluded that the experience of becoming one of the
members of this club would be my next project.
Method
We began our
journey by reading the group rule books in order to assimilate
ourselves to the language and society's social norms. What we found out
was that not only did we need to understand the rules of the "sport",
but we needed to look like the others within the group by dressing in
medieval clothing, carrying weapons. But most importantly developing a
back history for the character we acted out. Over several months, we
assimilated ourselves in this group, fighting alongside people with
character names such as "Gobo," "Andric the King," "Thornbrier," and
"Bacchaus, Rider of Rohan."
We created character names and
came
to identify ourselves in relationship to this fighting society because
we had taken upon ourselves the language and norms of this culture.
What evolved from this set of experiences was documentation on film of
the art project. Beyond this single documentation, though,
unfortunately not much exists as evidence of this passing from the
out-group into the in-group of this strange group.
Local Entries:
Jamin came up with this idea:
make a documentary about this group of
people who "swordplay" at North Park.
They use pvc pipes covered in
foam that they hit each other with. They've developed rules for this
game and we usually see them practicing until late all through the
spring and summer.
So to prepare ourselves for this, we're doing a
"prologue" to the
film. This will be about our trail to the Knights, getting ourselves
ready for the challenges ahead. This footage was stuff we shot the
other day...a behind the scenes look at the documentary.
Initial edit:
Second day of filming. This time
we ran across a guy named Aaron who
works at Home Depot but is a top class fencer. We plan on further talking with
him again. While filming basic fight footage at North Park, we filmed
two guys who had heard of the Knights before. Apparently they call
themselves 'Battleguard'. Not much footage that can work on its own,
but a good day of filming. Here are some highlights.
Initial edit:
Third day of filming 'Knights of North Park'. While
Mike, Jamin and
I were out at North Park practicing, we met a guy who wanted to stop by
and play Battleguard with us. He called himself 'Gobo' and gave us
basic group training. We knew right from the start we were in
trouble...he could beat all three of us in under 30 seconds. By the end
of the day, we felt we had drastically improved our fighting technique,
so we took him on again. The three of us were beaten by Gobo in under
20 seconds.
This is a summary of our day's worth of filming,
learning from Gobo.
Initial
edit:
Another brief clip from our video documentary on the
"Knights of North
Park". Mike made us new swords which are in accordance with the rules
and regulations of the game. We went Thursday evening to practice with
for the first time with the group. It was too dark to film, but we
talked about the experience. Less fighting, more talking in this clip.
We're getting close to finishing filming and then we go into
post-production.
Initial
edit:
This is the last video teaser I'll be making for our
"Knights of North
Park" film. The filming has turned out nice and we've got plenty of
good footage to work with. In the past weeks of filming, the Knights
have brought us a uniform we played in, as well as letting us hear some
of their personal stories.
