“Profile is a stream of consciousness combination of poetry and prose. The visuals of the film were intended to represent the chaos of thought.” This would be a mesmerizing piece even without R.W. Perkins’ very interesting and detailed process notes on Vimeo and at his website (q.v.). Last Friday at VidPoFilm, Brenda Clews captured the essence of the excitement that many of us in the online videopoetry community feel about this film:

R.W. Perkins has it all in this video. When I saw it I felt it was a marker of our era. That surely many films of this type will follow, but his was the first. Identity in the twenty-first century is shaped by social media sites. Your life is not contained in your private diaries and photo albums anymore; it’s all on-line now. The notion of who we are has never been more global or more revealing.

One’s Facebook profile updates and photo albums provide many snapshots of a life. R.W. Perkins has captured that sense of a collided life, a life of snapshots and home videos and snatches of writing. It is a fast-paced life. We describe ourselves to each other. There are millions of us. Facebook is approaching 1/7th of the world’s population. It is a social media site that is creating a twenty-first sense of self.

Put it all together and you get, PROFILE. On his website, R.W. Perkins offers his essay on his videopoem, Profiles, as his Profile.

Read the rest (and if you have any interest in the videopoem/filmpoem genre, don’t miss a post at VidPoFilm).