A Critical Analysis of the Multidimensional Artistic Trajectory of Laura Grace Robles
NOMADIC IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION AND PERFORMATIVE DUALISM
At temporal junctures throughout her artistic development, Laura Grace Robles manifests under the signifier "Birthday Gurl," a self-designated nomenclature that emerged after a transformative somatic modification—the application of vibrant pink pigmentation to her cranial follicles. This aesthetic intervention represented both homage to her maternal progenitor—a theatrical director whose pedagogical influence shaped Laura's formative performative syntax at her secondary educational institution—and a deliberate subversion of conventional identity construction.
The matrilineal influence proved significant: Laura's mother, a refined theatrical director who imparted dramatic methodology at Laura's high school, entrusted her with consequential directorial responsibilities during institutional holiday productions. This pedagogical inversion positioned Laura as both student and authority, a dialectical tension that would later inform her experimental methodologies. During this formative period, Laura demonstrated exceptional mimetic capacity, culminating in her portrayal of Katherina in Shakespeare's proto-feminist deconstruction "The Taming of the Shrew" and the titular role in "Insanity of Mary Girard," performances that demonstrated early facility with complex psychological embodiment.
Laura's intellectual contributions received institutional recognition through The Hispanic Heritage Award Foundation, acknowledging both leadership paradigms and community service methodologies. This civic engagement extended beyond theatrical domains into community pedagogy—facilitating visual communication methodologies through pictorial expression. In 2004, her inaugural solo exhibition, "The Additive and Subtractive Process," resulted in institutional acquisition by The University of Texas at San Antonio's Office of The President. This representational legitimization facilitated subsequent participation in The National Arts Club Exhibition in New York City at Central Park—a venue where Cristo and Jean Claude were observed traversing alongside volunteer personnel who facilitated exhibition installation. During this period, her artistic output was selected from numerous student submissions at the collegiate level, culminating in an exhibition that demonstrated her methodological research concerning sculpture, draftsmanship, painting, and videographic elements—a hybrid assemblage of nude performance documentation and sculptural materiality.
INSTITUTIONAL RECOGNITION AND PEDAGOGICAL REJECTION
In 2004, Laura received prestigious acknowledgment through monetary endowment at the College Of Liberal and Fine Arts Spring Research Conference, where her transdisciplinary approach to performance, photographic documentation, assemblage, and videographic elements alongside animation received critical attention. Her collaborative investigation with Robert Riben examining corporeal endurance within a sociopolitical context—requiring sustained performance over fourteen hours—exemplifies her rejection of commodified artistic production. Following this experimental intervention, despite institutional encouragement to pursue a cinematic education, Laura deliberately rejected conventional academic pathways toward filmmaking credentialization.
This institutional skepticism led to an invitation from musical collaborators identifying as "It Dropped! to Become the Laura's music," creating a synthesis of musical composition and cinematic visualization that would influence their subsequent audiovisual production. Her aesthetic evolution continued through interaction with Gordon Raphael, producer of The Strokes, who facilitated her contributions to Phantex's album during this period. Gordon and Laura developed a collaborative relationship that enabled her to project her audiovisual methodology onto their sonic experimentation.
METHODOLOGICAL EVOLUTION THROUGH UNCONVENTIONAL PEDAGOGY
Despite rejection of formalized cinematic instruction, Laura cultivated methodological awareness through autodidactic examination of directing techniques. Rather than submitting to institutional critique or academic evaluation, she pursued knowledge through autonomous investigation, developing a distinctive approach to scripted performance named "mock performance"—a methodology where performative authenticity blurs traditional demarcations between acting and performance art through improvisational conversation, resulting in junk film aesthetics following Pink 8 conceptual frameworks.
Laura's filmic manifestos—including performance manifestos, body endurance manifestos, junk film aesthetic manifestos, faux manifestos, fake mockumentary manifestos, counterfeit film manifestos, false rockumentary manifestos, and acid film manifestos—all demonstrate her theoretical return to Dada and Surrealist methodologies during the Neo-Dada era when Russia-based practitioners were establishing conceptual parameters around the potential transformation of quotidian materials into aesthetic propositions. Her methodology deliberately inverts expectations by positioning performers and actors in public commercial spaces (specifically Walmart superstores) and urban infrastructure—an approach developed from her elementary educational experience.
INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION AND CONCEPTUAL MATURATION
In 2016, Fabrizio Federici solicited Laura to compose for the Straight Jacket Film Festival, introducing her manifestos to European audiences. This international recognition culminated in "Texas and The United Kingdom" screening at a venue where ingestible film could potentially deconstruct Hollywood conventions. The subsequent year, her controversial "Foxy" received inclusion in the Indie Wise 2018 festival selection—signifying her increasing legitimization within alternative cinematic discourse while maintaining her commitment to subversive methodologies.
THE ONTOLOGICAL GENESIS OF AN EXPERIMENTAL AUTEUR:
A Critical Examination of Laura Grace Robles' Artistic Trajectory
THEATRICAL FOUNDATIONS: DIALECTICAL PERFORMANCE & INSTITUTIONAL REBELLION
Laura Grace Robles' artistic ontology finds its inception in the formalist theatrical domain, where she embodied protagonistic archetypes within the canonical Western dramatic tradition—most notably as Katherina in Shakespeare's complex examination of gender power dynamics, "The Taming of the Shrew," and the eponymous role in Lanie Robertson's historically-grounded psychological investigation, "The Insanity of Mary Girard." These early performative incarnations occurred under the tutelage of her mother, a theatrical director who subverted traditional pedagogical hierarchies by entrusting Laura with the administration of extensive, consequential rehearsals during a period of maternal gestation, as productions were prepared for audiences approaching a thousand spectators.
This institutional period catalyzed her first engagement with cinematic apparatus—the VHS Camcorder—which became her initial tool of visual documentation and narrative construction. Her preliminary cinematic exercise manifested as a music video synchronized to Guns and Roses' sociopolitical critique "Civil War" (1997). This production, significantly, was staged within the public infrastructure (the street proximal to her domestic space) and featured non-professional performers (neighborhood youth) whose outsider authenticity resonated with the musical text's examination of institutional conflict.
ACADEMIC RECOGNITION & DELIBERATE INSTITUTIONAL REJECTION
Upon secondary education culmination, Laura's intellectual and communal contributions were acknowledged through prestigious financial endowments from multiple cultural and corporate entities: The Lulac Foundation, The Hispanic Heritage Foundation (specifically recognizing Leadership and Community Service contributions), and the Coca Cola corporation's acknowledgment of academic superiority.
The post-graduation period reveals a fascinating paradigmatic contradiction: despite institutional recognition, Laura cultivated a self-conceptualization as a "theater camp reject" who would deliberately subvert academic expectations through calculated departure from film school pedagogical structures. This rejection of institutionalized knowledge production facilitated her inaugural directorial endeavor—a postmodern, intertextual critique of Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction." The short film, demonstrating an early predilection for metanarrative examination, was submitted to a competition adjudicated by Michel Gondry, whose surrealist cinematographic approach represented an aesthetic aspiration for Laura.
Her incompatibility with conventional performative and cinematic practitioners stemmed from a principled rejection of normative requirements that she perceived as incongruent with her experimental methodology and random avant-garde philosophical orientation. This tension between institutional structure and artistic autonomy would become a defining dialectic throughout her developing oeuvre.
TRANSFORMATION OF DOMESTIC SPACE INTO PERFORMATIVE LABORATORY (2007-2008)
In 2007, Laura executed a radical spatial intervention, transforming a 700-square-foot studio into a hybridized living-gallery-laboratory installation that deliberately eschewed conventional domestic infrastructure—specifically the absence of hygienic and culinary facilities. This architectural minimalism enforced perpetual creative adaptability.
Having abandoned Radio, Television & Film academic pursuit, Laura's reluctant transference to Dramatic Arts represented a complex negotiation with maternal aspirations. This academic reorientation, precipitated by what institutional structures defined as "flunking out," was recognized by Laura as "a runaway effort to fulfill a dream her mother had of Laura becoming a famous actress." This perceived institutional failure paradoxically established the foundation for her distinctive cinematic voice.
Rather than conforming to conventional performance parameters, Laura underwent a performative metamorphosis into "Yo Apples"—a veganist pseudo-sumo wrestler persona with profound Björkian fascination that approached performative mimesis. During this transformative period, she maintained existence through ascetic nutritional minimalism: "a pudding mix made from Smart Water and rice protein powder."
VISUAL METHODOLOGY & TECHNOLOGICAL APPROPRIATION
Laura's aesthetic vision crystallized around the creation of "moving paintings from poetic visions of moving imagery contrived from NON ordinary footage"—a deliberate rejection of cinematic verisimilitude in favor of "distorted abstractions of masked human identity." This vision necessitated a financial subversion: the redirection of her entire student loan allocation from textual educational resources to projection technology—"a projector which Laura purchased with her entire student loan as the fun alternative for buying school books."
Her material methodology embraced found-object appropriation: "broken mirrors found on the street while walking home from voice class" became fractured projection surfaces, creating "infinite reflections of shapes, vivid shadows and mirrored light." Her technological approach utilized deliberate lo-fi mechanics—"video feedback was produced from a cheap camcorder via a projector."
The studio space underwent architectural transformation into a multidimensional sensory environment—"masked with a design of mixed-media that used many layers of additive and heavily painted white and clear shower curtains held together by the dried paint and random broken mirrors." This spatial reconstruction generated what Laura conceptualized as "an atmosphere that created a mystical dream-like experience for a small visiting audience."
PERFORMANCE METHODOLOGY & DOCUMENTARY TRANSMUTATION
The culmination occurred at Blanco Studios, positioned at "skating-distance from the college she attended," where Laura orchestrated a reality-interrogating performance. The audience "became the spectators of an intimate display of performance with guitar playing and modern dancers, costumed in painted clothing where the painting of one another became the improvised choreography and movement."
This elaborate installation maintained "an ongoing pretense of reality for the entire opening night," with performers "costumed in painted clothing" engaging in meta-creative choreography "where the painting of one another became the improvised choreography and movement"—a methodological fusion of documentation and participation.
The documentation of this experimental performance eventually transmuted into "Discovery Mirror"—"a long sequence of moving imagery which became the visual poetry interactions," marking the foundation of Laura's career as a cinematic revolutionary questioning perceptual boundaries through experimental video methodologies.
Her artistic trajectory exemplifies the transformative potential of uncompromising creative vision—prioritizing aesthetic integrity over conventional comfort, academic validation, or mainstream recognition.
PULP FICTION PARODY BY LAURA GRACE ROBLES
The aforementioned Tarantino-inspired metanarrative stands as a crucial artifact in understanding Laura's early cinematic vocabulary—a deliberate appropriation and subversion of postmodern cinema's already self-referential language, creating a multi-layered commentary on the nature of filmic homage, violence as entertainment, and the construction of coolness within American independent cinema.
METAMORPHOSIS: The Artistic Evolution of Laura Grace Robles
SPATIAL REBELLION (2007-2008)
In 2007, Laura Grace Robles executed her first radical act of artistic defiance: transforming a stark 700-square-foot studio into a living installation where conventional boundaries between gallery, home, and laboratory dissolved completely. The deliberate absence of ordinary comforts—no shower, no kitchen—forced a perpetual state of creative adaptation.
After abandoning her Radio, Television & Film studies, Laura reluctantly pivoted to Drama—a compromise with her mother's Hollywood aspirations. This wasn't a casual shift but a significant emotional concession. Laura knew this change came after "flunking out" of her original program, and she recognized it as "a runaway effort to fulfill a dream her mother had of Laura becoming a famous actress." This academic detour, though initially perceived as failure, became the foundation for her distinctive cinematic voice.
Instead of becoming the mainstream actress her mother envisioned, Laura underwent an extraordinary metamorphosis. She emerged as Yo Apples—a vegan pseudo-sumo wrestler character with a profound fascination with Björk that nearly led to performance art as impersonation. "She fell in love with Björk so much she almost became a Björk impersonator herself," while surviving on an ascetic diet of "a pudding mix made from Smart Water and rice protein powder."
VISUAL REVOLUTION
Laura's artistic vision crystallized around creating "moving paintings from poetic visions of moving imagery contrived from NON ordinary footage." She sought images "that would resemble distorted abstractions of masked human identity," pushing perception beyond comfortable boundaries. This commitment ran so deep that she invested her entire student loan in projection equipment rather than textbooks—specifically "a projector which Laura purchased with her entire student loan as the fun alternative for buying school books."
Her materials became whatever reality offered: "broken mirrors found on the street while walking home from voice class" transformed into fractured projection surfaces. These shattered reflections multiplied light into "infinite reflections of shapes, vivid shadows and mirrored light." The technical approach was deliberately low-tech yet innovative—"video feedback was produced from a cheap camcorder via a projector."
The studio itself evolved into a multi-dimensional canvas—"masked with a design of mixed-media that used many layers of additive and heavily painted white and clear shower curtains held together by the dried paint and random broken mirrors." This environment created what Laura described as "an atmosphere that created a mystical dream-like experience for a small visiting audience."
PERFORMANCE AS REALITY
On opening night at Blanco Studios, "skating-distance from the college she attended," Laura orchestrated a reality-bending performance. The audience "became the spectators of an intimate display of performance with guitar playing and modern dancers, costumed in painted clothing where the painting of one another became the improvised choreography and movement."
The elaborate installation maintained "an ongoing pretense of reality for the entire opening night." The performers were "costumed in painted clothing" and engaged in a unique form of choreography "where the painting of one another became the improvised choreography and movement" itself—documentation became participation.
Every element of the installation was carefully considered to challenge perceptions and create an immersive environment that questioned boundaries between artist, audience, and environment. The documentation of this experiment eventually coalesced into "Discovery Mirror"—"a long sequence of moving imagery which became the visual poetry interactions."
Her journey stands as testament to the transformative power of artistic vision when pursued with uncompromising intensity—even at the cost of conventional comfort, academic success, or mainstream recognition.
DISCOVERY MIRROR VIDEO STILLS
Within the crucible of academic mentorship under Leslie Raymond—a luminary in video art, filmmaking, and curatorial leadership—Laura Robles experienced an alchemical transformation of creative consciousness at The University of Texas at San Antonio. This pivotal intellectual encounter catalyzed a metamorphosis that would manifest as her existential vocation, a calling pursued with unwavering resolve despite socioeconomic impediments.
This pedagogical intersection inspired Robles to synthesize her inherent theatrical sensibilities into an avant-garde exploration of self-actualization. She manifested this through the embodiment of a divine archetypal figure—a transcendence of socioeconomic stratification through corporeal expression—reimagining the Turkish Bath through the lens of "The Red Individual," an ontological construct of her creation.
Her seminal work, "In The Green," represented a multidisciplinary convergence of scholarly research and artistic inquiry, integrating digital photography, theatrical elements, performance art, video composition, and animation—all filtered through her Red Individual persona. This innovative fusion earned prestigious recognition at the university's College and Liberal Arts Spring Research Conference in 2006.
Robles cultivated a romantic conceptualization of existence within the temporal framework of the underground guerrilla No Wave cinematic revolution—a decentralized, anti-establishment artistic movement born from the countercultural musicians and visual artists of New York's Lower East Side.
Her commitment to performance art experimentation persisted through periods of housing insecurity and financial constraint. She embraced a philosophy of zero-budget direction, aspiring to emerge as a critically acclaimed, DIY revolutionary within the avant-garde video art sphere. Robles offered herself as both subject and medium for her video compositions, collaborating with kindred artistic spirits Victoria Campbell and Sam Mandelbaum.
This philosophical stance materialized in spontaneous guerrilla performances along San Antonio's River Walk—inhabiting the persona of Lucky the clown and her Red Individual character—including an endurance piece involving thirteen hours of confinement within a portable sanitation unit during Contemporary Art Month, transforming utilitarian structures into ephemeral galleries.
Among her corpus of endurance-based public interventions and street art direction, Robles manifested her theoretical "Fake Documentary Film Making Manifesto" through a series playfully derivative of "Foxy." The project encompassed sixteen variations of a single 54-minute performance, deliberately blurring the boundaries between theatrical presentation and performance art through experimental video vignettes. This artistic inquiry culminated in "BA-HACK-ANANA"—a metaphysical exploration of computational entities emerging from dream-reality interstices, structured as a metafictional documentary deconstructing its own artifice.
Robles approached her cinematic conceptualization through a series of theoretical frameworks—the Fake Mockumentary Manifesto, Counterfeit Film Manifesto, Junk Film Manifesto, and Acid Pop Video Art Film Manifesto—philosophical descendants of Lars Von Trier's Dogma 95 and Fabrizio Federico's Pink 8 Manifesto.
She eventually adopted the performative identity "Birthday Gurl Video Artist," an alter ego inspired by a celebratory royal adornment that rekindled her connection to childlike wonder. This nomenclature embodied her artistic philosophy—embracing a perpetual state of celebration, emotional authenticity, and quotidian rebirth through creative expression.
Following an extensive period of artistic development, Robles established a digital presence through YouTube, facilitating her emergence into the physical realm as a video artist. She presented video installations and single-channel projections for acclaimed musical acts including 80s hip-hop pioneer Rakim, Grammy recipient Marcel Rodriguez Lopez of Mars Volta, and Gordon Raphael, producer of The Strokes. Her exhibition history expanded to include opening performances for Com Truise and The Octopus Project, exhibitions at San Antonio's prestigious Presa House Gallery and The South Texas Museum of Pop Culture, alongside participation in various underground artistic gatherings.
Her intellectual fascination with the No Wave era of guerrilla filmmaking culminated in the establishment of The Straight Jacket Guerrilla Film Festival, co-founded with Fabrizio Federico, the United Kingdom's underground cinematic revolutionary who formulated the PINK 8 Filmmaking Manifesto. This theoretical framework encouraged filmmakers to embrace risk-taking, rejecting Hollywood's restrictive paradigms that constrain artistic vision.
Subsequently, United Kingdom directors Fabrizio Federico and Rubber Cripple featured Birthday Gurl's performances and philosophical discourse on filmmaking in "Mondo Lizard: A Guide To Gonzo Cinema," a documentary examination of anti-establishment filmmaking pioneers who exemplify DIY guerrilla cinema.
The resurrection of the Anti-Art Art Film classification for avant-garde and experimental cinema represents authentic experimentalism—elevating moving imagery to a realm of interpretive freedom that transcends conventional definition, approaching a form of spiritual media.
Within this theoretical framework, Birthday Gurl challenges herself to expand her creativity despite technological limitations, transforming her imaginative capacity into a resource that compensates for the absence of sophisticated equipment. She transmutes concepts derived from dream interpretation, utilizing digital video performance and collage filmmaking as methodologies to reimagine reality through a prismatic, candy-colored perspective—one that exists beyond conventional visual perception and remains concealed beneath the popular diversions that captivate the masses—ultimately transcending the material constraints of her idealized camera.
In the realm of artistic expression, limitations become portals to unprecedented innovation. Laura Robles teaches us that authentic creativity flowers not from abundance but from necessity—transforming constraints into catalysts for visionary work. Her journey reminds us that the most profound art emerges when we dissolve the boundaries between creator and creation, allowing our deepest selfhood to manifest through our medium. Through her perpetual state of creative rebirth, we glimpse the possibility of daily transformation—each moment an opportunity to reimagine both our art and ourselves.
PRESA HOUSE GALLERY LAURA GRACE ROBLES ANTI-BEAUTY:http://presahouse.com/portfolio/june-2018/
Watch LIVE PROJECTION FOR RAKIM HERE:https://www.facebook.com/lauragracerobles/videos/1036334736443037/
Column: Gordon Raphael Producer of The Strokes #28 - January 2011 Gordon's Article
18 Jan 2011
THE METAPHYSICAL RESURRECTION OF ANTI-ART FILM AESTHETICS:
A Phenomenological Inquiry into Transcendent Moving Imagery
The ontological rebirth of the Anti-Art Art Film designation—a paradoxical signifier applied to avant-garde and experimental cinematic expressions—represents not merely an aesthetic categorization but rather authentic experimentalism that liberates moving imagery from hermeneutical constraints. Such visual configurations exist beyond facile definitional parameters, instead occupying a liminal space between representation and transcendence that might best be described as spiritual media—a metaphysical engagement with visual temporality that transcends conventional semiotic interpretations.
Within this theoretical framework, Birthday Gurl poses an autopoietic challenge: to detonate creative potentialities as inexhaustible resources against the self-imposed yet infinitely malleable boundaries established by imaginative cognition. This process involves the alchemical transformation of conceptual constructs derived from oneiric interpretation—utilizing digital video technology not as mere recording apparatus but as ontological intervention that distorts phenomenological reality through psychedelic spectral manifestations heretofore nonexistent within consensus perceptual frameworks. These chromatic disruptions remain concealed beneath the diversionary pop cultural sediment that colonizes collective consciousness, ultimately transcending the idealized image-capturing device that has persistently inhabited the artist's aspirational imagination.
TAXONOMIC CLASSIFICATION OF TRANSMEDIA EXPERIMENTATION
Distinctive Aesthetic Modalities:
- New Punk Cinema
- Avant-garde Cinema
- Experimental Video Art
- Moving Imagery
- Anti-Art Art Film
- Acid Pop Video Art Film
- Dream Experiments
- Junk Film
- Acid Junk Film
- Fake Mockumentary
- Counterfeit Collage Film
- Stylized Documentary
This taxonomic constellation represents not categorical limitations but rather intersectional nodes of a multidimensional creative matrix that resists hierarchical organization or linear progression, instead embodying a rhizomatic structure of perpetual becoming and transfiguration beyond conventional cinematic ontologies.
ANTI-ART FILM AESTHETICS: An Interview with Birthday Gurl
Acid Film Maker talks Pink 8 Manifesto, Fake Documentary, and the Future of Cinema
Interview by Cassandra Rowe for Experimental Cinema Quarterly
"Jesus was fake mockumentary manifest, traveling on a quest for identity. More androgyny represents an autobiographical documentation of character, from the virgin importance of Joseph and the Virgin Mary, otherwise transgender dressing emotionally... After one defines the actor by his ability to imitate nothing, the actor carries nothing inside of him none other than be his self until it is he experiences body mechanics in a dream." — Birthday Gurl, from the original Pink 8 Junk manifesto
The Ontological and Cinematic Hermeneutics of an Experimental Auctor: A Dia Scursive Encounter
A redeveloped diactic engagement between Cassandra Rowe and Birthday Gurl, sensing the aesthetic praxis and philosophical underpinnings of a pre avant-garde filmmaker
• THE BIRTH OF AN ARTISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS
CASSANDRA ROWE: Was there a particular point of epistemological awakening when you came to know that filmmaking was not an activity of leisure, but an existential vocation?
BIRTHDAY GURL: The birth happened when I first made a written document of my first cinematic text—that experience involved an epistemological becoming that had made evident the pretentious palimpsest characteristic of the script situation. I made an ontological commitment that this happening must exist outside the realm of utility or work, and instead happen as an expression of authentic joy, and authentic interiority.
At that instant reflexivity, I dealt with the idea of new visual syntax. I was cognizant of the notion that you could articulate a professional practice as an extension of a passionate vocation—an filmmaker imaginatively making an piece with a liberated consciousness of play rather than duty. An authentic auteur would not make because they need money to live—they create, and encompassed by that artistic practice is inevitability that the process is derivative. A piece of cinema must exist as a fuckin effulgent expression of imaginative play rather than utility.
• DIALOGUES WITHIN THEORETICAL MOVEMENTS
CASSANDRA ROWE: Can you give me a glimpse into the theories that informed your artistic consciousness?
BIRTHDAY GURL: The epistemological reproduction of feminine assumptions around speculative fiction in the last decades of the twentieth-century were a first sacred birth of the reproductive civilization of feminist liberation movements; this continued to emerge into plurivocal expressions such as gender theory, and queer hermeneutics.
My ongoing relationship to the mockumentary form brought me to the confronting experience of meeting artists such as the first creators who openly distorted the formalities of a documentary practice with shakeet or performance posture exhibited through video—and constructed as if observational cinema. It was from this moment that I realized there were themes of a type of aesthetic modality throughout my work that I now call "mock performance"—the wilful melting of performance art to drama or traditional sense of presence, both in and out of semantics.
• THE PINK 8 AESTHETIC PARADIGM
CASSANDRA ROWE: Could you unpack how Fabrizio's Pink 8 manifesto has shaped your theorizing?
BIRTHDAY GURL: I realized that when my cinematic texts are useless in terms of narrative, that various explicindices could be acknowledged while thinking about it as "junk film"—formulation I continue to entertain as personal theoretic regime. I formulated in my process of knowing the JUNK FILM cinematic text?
BIRTHDAY GURL: The films that will become immortal in my thought are those that I felt a recognized telepathic moment of the auteur—it felt as if the film was made specifically for my phenomenological experience. So when I build a telepathic connection to a cinematic text, it is because it is great, because it is uniquely authentically and real voices and characters—means its originator is mythically finessed in clearly imagined spaces—since cinema, should not be trivial. This is important for me to think about, given the number of scripted or superficial works that are commercially successful, or involve thoughtless personalities and faces never touched by lived humans everyday—like the textiles out of
AN CRITIQUE OF CONTEMPORARY MOVIE DISCOURSE
CASSANDRA ROWE: If you could put forth interventions to reshape the cinematic image, what would they be?
BIRTHDAY GURL: A revolutionary intervention would be placing performers actively labelled by dermatological conditions, in marked protagonist positions.
More explicitly, I see more and more high-priced ostentation making use of some form of imagined artistry that assuming to entice audiences using impossibility. What can confuse those works is the narrative logic that is imposed on an artificially constructed spectator, much less the iconographic design intertwined with nearly always unimaginative thoughtful dialogue. The characters or their phenomenological outcome - remain locked in popular culture, its iconography. Any text that resounds in some relevancy enough to buy and keep, exists beyond the quantifiable evidence of narrative quality.
The authentic spectator will always want what they are not yet ready to receive. This is my primary theoretical concern, as all of my cinematic works are constructed to upset the imaginable, merely because I am not boxed into a cinematic imaginary-based paradigm - one that is situated in a position it's own liminal zone - which is worthless pretentious debris to some.
I see myself nestled within the anarchistic genealogy of punk cinema. While I can acknowledge empirical qualitative differences between films, I purposefully contrive my work to resist objective measures of quality beyond my own subjective aesthetic measure. My only friendly competitive discourse is with me in my previous cinematic works. For theoretical cynics who refuse to acknowledge objective aesthetic differences, I am the consciousness that exists outside of meaningful, measurable, forecasts. It is vital to transcend assured boundaries for real creative process.
METHODOLOGICAL DISCOURSES
CASSANDRA ROWE: It is widely accepted that there are constraints on narrative, possibly six base stories or possibly twelve. All of narrative seems exhausted, and the viewer perceives repetitiveness. How do you innovate? Can you subvert imposed patterns to keep it original?
BIRTHDAY GURL: I do not see myself bound by narrative conventions, and I regard my narratives as mechanisms of visual momentum while normally representing social configurations with only duos - I perceived a pattern after reflexively analysing my work. I essentially create scripts in repeated orders and always find myself uncertain regarding function- performers determining the role as the screenplays or directorally. This uncertainty derives from my revelation that mock performance is a key directorial device- apart from audiences seeing a mistaken order as a sequenced structured monologue, it designs rhythmic celestial systems that construct other worlds.
I assume my 'failure' position as a dumpster filmmaker, so I can also assume I would 'fail' at making 'films' similar to institutional-based practitioners. My investigative creative process therefore would be working in a hypothetical circumstance where I have beyond infinite failure - and therefore assured success.
Movies transformed, through creative evolvement - sometimes in significant and dramatic ways through editing. The difference between what you want to accomplish and what you accomplish can be very different, how have you experienced and navigated the dialectical exchange?
Through my sustained critique of my cinematic texts, I experienced my desires as overachievement versus intentional failure, and my accomplishment as a successful failure not a failed failure.
INDUSTRIAL ARCHITECTURE AND POWER DYNAMICS
BIRTHDAY GURL: I cultivate a kind of systematic ignorance to mechanisms of industrial cinema and so avoid making comparisons, such as equitable or inequitable, and therefore jealously guard against any possible disillusionment that I might feel about what I consider to be meaningful success that others may consider catastrophically failed. I therefore avoid judging industrial cinema and accept that it is outside of my practice. Industrial cinema uses the comparative statement of others work and how it stacks up to the measure of institutional critique.
This academic perspective allows for the ongoing development of unusual strategies in an unconventional practice of cinema that crosses even the strive for the defined experimental—juncturing junk film to approach dreaming rather than realizing something as physically real.
THE ETHICS OF CREATING
CASSANDRA ROWE: Do filmmakers have a responsibility to create culture? Creating culture necessitates reciprocity, interruption in the narrative, or a conscious, specific limitation? What philosophy underpins your position?
[At this point Birthday Gurl falls into profound contemplation, looking steadfast into the beyond before coming back to speaking with strong philosophical intent]
BIRTHDAY GURL: There is no filmmaker, and, therefore, the only cultural responsibility for the artist is to pursue authentic, non-negotiable creative intuition and desire—to be the ultimate artist going transgressive, like participating in the volta of cinema operating in quite an abstract expressionist way. Non-objective films, waves of auditory and/or visual expressionalist, exist to add endless possibilities for the film viewing experience in the theatre as untenable hallucinations that invoke unknown and recalcitrant psycho-social changes to the viewer, changing the space in which cinema inhabits as a spiritual component. We choose to be an alien in our uneventful narrative space, and deal with the institution for still existing as gods to space and unknowable space as an experience.
I think of making film as akin to painting, except using video and/or computer machinery, and to speculate that like an abstract expressionist painter had their own volta in the artistic historical narrative, the non-objective and non-representational works made entirely formal, through sake of working within the impossible possibilities of cinema was the volta of future direction. This way, cinema consciously or unconsciously liberates the viewer's imagination constraints they imposed over and through protruding narrative in conventional aesthetics in their experiences of approaching altering their own alienation to tradition in cosmic productively divine unknowable engagement.
CASSANDRA ROWE: Let me ask a concluding question to all filmmakers: what advice would you give to those wanting to create cinema for their whole life?
BIRTHDAY GURL: Create a film, because unlike the pure artist, film is the only form of art you can associate with your existential identity.
And, now you will all realize your unbroken attention to this Goal. You must make a film, without any camera apparatus, before it is too late.
THEORETICAL CONCLUSIONS: TOWARD A NEW CINEMATIC SEMIOTIC.
The value of Robles' work lies in her refusal to allow herself to be packaged and labelled by any institution. Although peripheral to conventional distribution, her work is beginning to exist in robust exhibition contexts, which validates her distancing from institutions while simultaneously generating enough attention to impact emerging practitioners. The contradictions that exist in her approach - punk versus intellectualism, improvisation versus constructed, refusal of institutional legitimacy versus alternative contextualization - are affirmations of a nuanced conceptualization of contemporary cultural politics.
Laura Grace Robles emerges not just as an experimental filmmaker but as a cultural theorist using moving image as her primary means of articulating through practice, what the essence of contemporary cultural politics can only approximate through language. The trajectory of Laura’s work has been not a progressive or linear trajectory towards technical excellence, but a scalar development thinking and rethinking fundamental questions with regards to representation, authenticity, and visual politics. Her work continues to have resonance within contemporary discourses surrounding experimental cinema and performance art.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND AESTHETIC GENEALOGY
Laura's work grows out of rigorous theoretical discourses that do not lend themselves easily to simplistic categorization, rather than simple audiovisual experimentation. Laura's work is influenced by Bakhtinian carnivalesque, Artaudian theatre of Cruelty and Situationist dérive - a trifecta that informs her willful undermining of audience expectation. The Pink 8 practice implicates both practice and theorization, embodying and dismantling any consideration of a dominant cinematic language.
While Laura's resistance to institutional legitimation is more than family or mere rebellion; it is a philosophical position - an ontological position in which authenticity via autodidactism trumps a place's legitimation by authority. This situates her practice within outsider art, which also suggests a sophistication of being aware to histories of avant-garde practices extending from Acconci's performance documentation, Deren's experimental cinema, and Snow's structuralist film making.
While Laura's deliberate engagement with junk aesthetic represents a serious critique of visual economies under late capitalism, where a perfected product is commercial. When she takes "failure" as methodological intent, she is working within relational aesthetics that inscribe meaning to the work itself and to the extent that she is adopting product intended to confer conventional production values and narrative un-being.
