Kourtrajmé at USC: qui l’eut cru?

March 4th, 2010 referencesTags: city, derive, detournement

Gritty short films, music videos and docs from Kourtrajmé Productions, a Paris-based collective of emerging visual artists, filmmakers, actors and musicians.

Kourtrajmé Productions is a collective of emerging French and Francophone visual artists, filmmakers, actors and musicians. The brainchild of internationally acclaimed directors Mathieu Kassovitz and Vincent Cassel, this production house and artist collective has garnered increasing attention and acclaim after getting millions of hits on online sites like Dailymotion and YouTube. Founded by Kim Chapiron, Romain Gavras and Toumani Sangaré, Kourtrajmé produces playful innovations and cutting interventions in popular culture and society that represent the cultural dreams, lives and crises of transnational urban and peri-urban French youth today.

“Almost Everything Can and Shall Be Cut”: my new installation project gets off the ground!

February 24th, 2010 project updatesTags: architexture, body, detournement, haunted space, inanimata, material, photopia, shock, uncanny, visceral

This two-channel installation piece examines the friction between texture and violence to bring us closer to the felt idea of flesh. The piece intends to question the relationship between affect and materiality, as well as the psychological economy of desire, destruction, and consumption by simultaneously making the viewer feel uncomfortable and viscerally involved.

Preliminary models:

A TV monitor presents us with a video of a hand performing different types of incisions using sharp and blunt metal instruments into a large array of materials. The monitor is covered with a loose “tent” of plastic sheeting, allowing the visitor a mysterious view of the video content through the blurring, glowing screen of the semi-transparent material. To get a closer look, the viewer has to unzip the tent’s opening and insert her head into an intimate space shared by the monitor.

The video is a loop of shot after shot of various texturally ambiguous materials or objects being clinically laid out on a chrome table while a hand, alternately gloved in vinyl or rubber gloves discovers the many methods by which each material can be cut up, destroyed, and divided and the specific instruments that do the job in the most satisfying or interesting way.

INCISION is preceded by a tactile prodding of the object followed by the MORCELLATION, FRAGMENTATION OF THE MATERIAL INTO ITS CONSTITUENT FORMS (filaments, bits, crumbs, slivers).The act of cutting can be smooth, swift : sensation of liberation, closure mixed with disquiet of violent end. The act of cutting can be difficult, messy, awkward: sensation of squeamish frustration. The viewer witnesses a Progression in the act of cutting: colorful liquid starts to OOZE out of the harmed materials (recalling old blood or water, displaying a viscous quality)

The second channel of the installation is rear projected onto a sheet of the same semi-transparent plastic wrapping that covered the monitor. The projection is a looping video of luridly colored organic textures (e.g. close-up of a beating heart, a time-lapse of growing mold). The video is processed into anaglyphic images to produce a stereoscopic effect, visible to the visitor with 3D glasses.

FUN FAIRS AS MEGALOMANIAC SCULPTURE GARDENS

February 9th, 2010 germinating ideas, researchTags: architexture, city, detournement, experimental circus, interactive, kinetic, play, space

Think of these rides as INTERACTIVE SCULPTURES : again, breaking down the false-ontological barriers between the cultural practices of high art and “low” entertainment. pop culture is the avant-garde !

Architexture VIII: Nam June Paik and dreaming about electronic ecology of future urbanisms

February 9th, 2010 referencesTags: city, detournement, experimental circus, inanimata, photopia, screen

breaking down the ontological divide between the virtual and the material…another piece of interactive architexture to consider as flora and fauna for the electronic ecology of the future city.

I Heart Tony Oursler: haunting heads

January 28th, 2010 referencesTags: architexture, body, detournement, experimental circus, haunted space, inanimata, material, uncanny

using techniques pioneered by the imagineers for their Haunted Mansion ride? a real breakdown of the virtual/material barrier, we enter a liminal zone where the virtual animates objects, ensouling them…

Oursler began working with small LCD video projectors in 1991 in his installation “The Watching” presented at Documenta 9, featuring his first video doll and dummy. This work utilizes handmade soft cloth figures combined with expressive faces animated by video projection. Oursler then produced a series of installations that combined found objects and video projections. “Judy”, 1993, explored the relationship between multiple personality disorder and mass media. “Get Away II” features a passive/aggressive projected figure wedged under a mattress that confronts the viewer with blunt direct address. Oursler’s works seem like animate effigies in their own psychological space, often appearing to interact directly with the viewer’s sense of empathy. These installations are consistently disturbing and fascinating and lead to great popular and critical acclaim.

Signature works have been his talking lights, such as Streetlight (1997), his series of video sculptures of eyes with television screens reflected in the pupils, and ominous talking heads such as Composite Still Life (1999). An installation called Optics (1999) examines the polarity between dark and light in the history of the camera obscura. In his text “Time Stream”, Oursler proposed that architecture and moving image installation have been forever linked by the camera obscura noting that cave dwellers observed the world as projections via peep holes. Oursler’s interest in the ephemeral history of the virtual image lead to large scale public projects and permanent installations by 2000.

The Public Art Fund and Art Angel commissioned the “Influence Machine” in 2000. This installation marks the artist’s first major outdoor project and thematically traced the development of successive communication devices from the telegraph to the personal computer as a means of speaking with the dead. Oursler used smoke, trees and buildings as projection screens in Madison Park NYC and Soho Square London. He then completed a number of permanent public projects in Barcelona, New Zealand, Arizona including “Braincast” at the Seattle Public Library. He is scheduled to complete a commission at the Frank Sinatra High School in Astoria New York.

(source: Wikipedia)

Architexture V / soundsuits by NICK CAVE: a fashion of impossible subjectivities

January 25th, 2010 referencesTags: architexture, body, detournement, experimental circus, inanimata, music, play

Fowler Museum presents ‘Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth,’ Jan 10–May 30, 2010

Exhibition features 35 of artist’s ‘Soundsuits,’ wearable mixed-media sculptures

By Stacey Ravel Abarbanel October 23, 2009

“Whether Nick Cave’s efforts qualify as fashion, body art or sculpture … they fall squarely under the heading of Must Be Seen to Be Believed.” —Roberta Smith, New York Times

“Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth,” on display at the Fowler Museum at UCLA from Jan. 10 through May 30, 2010, is the largest presentation of work by the Chicago-based artist, featuring 35 of his “Soundsuits” — multilayered, mixed-media sculptures named for the sounds made when the “suits” are performed.

Evocative of African, Caribbean and other ceremonial ensembles, as well as haute couture, Cave’s work explores issues of transformation, ritual, myth and identity through a layering of references and virtuosic construction, using materials as varied as yarn, beads, sequins, bottle caps, vintage toys, rusted iron sticks, twigs, leaves and hair.

Mad, humorous, visionary, glamorous and unexpected, the Soundsuits are created from scavenged, ordinary materials and objects from both nature and culture, which Cave recontextualizes into extraordinary works of art. The Fowler is the first Los Angeles–area museum to feature Cave’s work and the only Southern California venue for this traveling exhibition.

The Fowler presentation of this exhibition holds particular meaning for the artist and for Los Angeles because Cave’s first Soundsuit was sparked by the civil unrest in Los Angeles in 1992 following the acquittal of the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating.

The Soundsuits almost always cover the whole body, erasing the identity of the wearer. Thus, the Soundsuits can be understood as coats of armor, shielding Cave from the day-to-day prejudice he encounters as an African American man and facilitating a transformation into an invented realm of vibrant associations and meanings.

For this exhibition, Cave also employs animal imagery in ways as complex and multilayered as the human-based suits. While conjuring the spiritual strength and power of animal totems used in ancient rituals from around the world, Cave’s Soundsuits also become vessels of transformation and seek to connect us to the Earth and the animals around us. Using wit, humor and a fanciful sensibility, Cave’s Soundsuits beg us to pay attention and to dream of a different future.

Nick Cave received his B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1982 and his M.F.A. from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1989. He studied fiber art but is committed to a broad spectrum of interests and disciplines. Cave is an associate professor and chairman of the fashion department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches in the fiber arts program. He has led such workshops as “Extending the Body: Experiments in Clothing” and has designed, manufactured and marketed his own line of men’s and women’s clothing. He has received numerous awards, including a United States Artists Fellowship (2006) and a Joyce Award (2006), and his work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions across the U.S. and Europe.

Mercurial Alchemy: A Theory of Ambivalence

December 28th, 2009 referencesTags: archive, contingency, derive, detournement, rhizome

Drawing attention to Karen Pinkus from USC’s Comparative Literature Department and her latest book, Mercurial Alchemy: A Theory of Ambivalence. Quoting Gilles Deleuze from an interview I saw on Youtube, in which he was (apparently) addressing filmmakers: “filmmakers invent films. Philosophers invent concepts.” Extrapolating theorists/critics from philosophers, then weaving alchemy and ambivalence together seems (at least the suggestion of it) to open up delightful new fields of theoretical imagination…interdisciplinary is the word.

“How can we account, in a rigorous way, for alchemy’s ubiquity? We think of alchemy as the transformation of a base material (usually lead) into gold, but “alchemy” is a word in wide circulation in everyday life, often called upon to fulfill a metaphoric duty as the magical transformation of materials. Almost every culture and time has had some form of alchemy. This book looks at alchemy, not at any one particular instance along the historical timeline, not as a practice or theory, not as a mode of redemption, but as a theoretical problem, linked to real gold and real production in the world. What emerges as the least common denominator or “intensive property” of alchemy is ambivalence, the impossible and paradoxical coexistence of two incompatible elements.

Alchemical Mercury moves from antiquity, through the golden age of alchemy in the Dutch seventeenth century, to conceptual art, to alternative fuels, stopping to think with writers such as Dante, Goethe, Hoffmann, the Grimm Brothers, George Eliot, and Marx. Eclectic and wide-ranging, this is the first study to consider alchemy in relation to literary and visual theory in a comprehensive way.”

David Rokeby: n-chant a computer choir and the poetics of randomness

September 25th, 2009 referencesTags: cyborg, database, detournement, haunted space, inanimata, interactive, machine, maze, noise, uncanny

from David Rokeby’s article The Construction of Experience: Interface as Content (1998):

SIMULATED COMPLEXITY
In a similar vein, it’s important to understand the difference between “fractal” complexity and the complexity of life experience. Fractals are fascinating because a rich variety of forms are generated by a single, often simple algorithm. The endless and endlessly different structures of the Mandelbrot set are generated by a single equation addressed in an unusual way. This relationship between the infinite detail of the fractal and its terse mathematical representation is an extreme example of compression. The compression of images, sound and video into much smaller encoded representations is one of the keys of the current multimedia explosion.

Opposed to the incredibly compressible “complexity” of fractals is the complexity of true randomness. Something can be said to be random if it cannot be expressed by anything less than itself… that is to say, it’s incompressible. This rather philosophical notion can be observed in our everyday on-line communication. To move data around quickly and efficiently, we compress it, then send it through a modem that compresses it further. What is left is the incompressible core of the information. As you can hear through your modem when you dial up your internet service provider, the result sounds close to random noise.

Randomness and noise are usually things we avoid, but in the purely logical space of the computer, randomness and noise have proven to be welcome and necessary to break the deadly predictability. But random number generators, used so often to add “human” spice to computer games and computer-generated graphics are not “random” at all. They merely repeats over a fairly long period?a sterile simulation of the real thing.

THE POWER OF RANDOMNESS

…In designing environments for experience, we must remain humble in the face of the power of irresolvable, non-fractal complexity. The computer is an almost pure vacuum, devoid of unpredictability. Computer bugs, while annoying, are never actually unpredictable unless this “vacuum” fails, as when the hardware itself overheats or is otherwise physically damaged. This vacuum is extremely useful, but it’s no place to live.

When I started working with interactive systems I saw the “vacuum” of the computer as the biggest challenge. I developed “Very Nervous System” as an attempt to draw as much of the universe’s complexity into the computer as possible. The result is not very useful in the classical sense, but it creates the possibility of experiences which in themselves are useful and thought-provoking, particularly by making directly tangible that what is lost in over-simplification.

Toy Terrorists, Rerouted Ventriloquists

September 17th, 2009 referencesTags: detournement, experimental circus, haunted space, inanimata, machine, noise, play, shock, uncanny

from Craig Baldwin’s Sonic Outlaws:

NOISE & the sonic/haptic overload: Kawaiietly Please makes art of happy massacre

September 12th, 2009 researchTags: ambiance, amnesia, body, detournement, experimental circus, haptic, immersion, inanimata, machine, material, noise, play, shock, visceral

IN a show put on by noise performer Kawaiietly Please – in which we participated, not listened, or perhaps listened to the point of participation. She started by taking her microphone for a walk around the venue’s small room, picking up vibrations that fed into a distorting filter in her computer, amplifying white noise. It was painfully loud, but only when the beats kicked in four to the floor did our organs start to thump synchronously against their skeletal cavities. Kawaiietly Please creates an event that uses sound as a dilating instrument, opening up the minds/bodies of the audience via their ears: in front of the stage, a giant white stuffed gorilla lies in an inflatable kiddy pool, its belly stitched with black cables. Kawaiietly Please tiptoes towards it, the cacophony around us lending an intense stillness to the scene. Then the sound begins to bark at us like a rabid dog and she pulls out the cable from the stuffed corpse – she struggles, the clothy flesh resists – and some of us impromptu jump on it and start tugging too. The sound – damaging feedback, harsh static, thereminish vibrations – throbs across our muscles as we pull, pull and finally – yes! – we tear. The monkey explodes in a shower of stuffing and glitter, an entire horde of smaller creatures spills out. We go nuts. Now we have something to lay our hands on. The noise that throws us about like rag dolls gives us back what is our own – our impulse to be kinetic. A double acceleration: the movement in time that is sound galvanizes a symmetry-response momentum in extensio – everything snaps (in place) with the thrashing of our bodies.

We dive to the floor, grabbing stuffed animals, pulling them apart solitarily but more often engaging ferociously in tug-a-war: I grab an arm, you grab a head. Soon enough we are fighting each other. Not knowing how it came to this, I am on the floor being dragged around by someone who is battling me for the limb of a teddy bear. The kicking and screaming I do is much more than liberating: this synesthetic simultaneity of hyper-loud sound, cuddly texture (the plush, soft, squeezable bodies of the animals) and violent muscular resistance (the propelling motion of the tugging) is driving me insane with fun. Kawaiietly Please weaves in and out amongst us, jerking her head back, rubbing herself against the floor with scattered petticoats, feeling up the PAs – ghostly in the red light, flitting in and out of the decibelic tidal wave like a hummingbird. We roll her in the rubbery folds of the kiddy pool (the excitement of tactile/sonic texture peaks), mock- suffocating her. She is buried beneath the blue plastic while we throw bits of stuffing and animal parts as though they were flowers.

The noise abruptly ceases: we clap, we shriek, we instantly miss it. She emerges, bows. For about an hour afterwards a number of us are still twitchy – we vault rather than climb onto chairs, we hop rather than walk, laugh rather than bother with coherent sentences. A warmth suffuses us, stretching our mouths in toothy smiles. We want more of this extreme friendliness.

Architexture3: Gutted Organs Old Railway Stations

August 26th, 2009 referencesTags: ambiance, architecture, architexture, city, detournement, haunted space, inanimata, interactive, machine, music, play, uncanny

From architecture and design magazine website Blueprint:

“Clear transparent tubes feed plumbing pipes with compressed air. These create a chorus of howls and moans. It is sort of like an out of tune harmony but isn’t displeasing, almost like the cry of a stream-train but not intrusive. This is apt for the Roundhouse, as it was built in 1846 as a Steam engine shed. The sounds become a reawakening of the haunts of its previous existence. It gives significance to the user of the building, as if our own experiences and lifetimes within that building become infused into the very make-up of it. This user-building relationship is highlighted by the operation of the installation, where the building only speaks when the user touches the keys of the pump organ to feed it.

If the large, round room is empty when you enter it, the installation is silent. One may feel timid walking to the pump organ, with its yellowy spotlight and the massive room to play to. The words ‘Please Play’ painted on the floor offer some encouragement. Most people are generally shy when playing musical instruments to an audience, but the pump organ cannot make a formal tune: the sound it generates is more like the clunking noises made by old, creaking heating systems in houses. The instrument itself is like an exaggerated version of the solitary church organ, usually played alone because it is only in tune with itself and not with other instruments.” (Elice Catmull, August 2009)

HAPPENINGS: dirty habitat risk and fear banana peel perishable state of mind

August 24th, 2009 researchTags: ambiance, body, contingency, detournement, experimental circus, haptic, immersion, inanimata, infrastructure, interactive, kinetic, mapping, material, music, play, shock, space, visceral

Allan Kaprow: “Happenings” in the New York Scene

Andy Warhol's "Exploding Plastic Inevitable"

“In both cases the interactive method comes from outside the community, and because the organizing principles are not within the audience’s sphere of influence, one might next ask whether interactivity of either of these sorts actually goes beyond what Jean Baudrillard calls “reversibility” – processes like sending letters to the editor to the newspaper – and rearranges communication in a fundamental way”. What if participants designed their own game and own rules as part of the game?

“…when bang! there you are facing yourself in a mirror jammed at you. Listen. A cough from the alley. You giggle because you’re afraid, suffer claustrophobia, talk to someone nonchalantly, but all the time you’re there, getting into the act…Electric fans start, gently wafting breezes of New-Car smell past your nose as leaves bury piles of a whining, burping, foul, pinky mess”.

“…they appear to go nowhere and do not make any particular literary point”. Because instead they create experience.

“First, there is the context…that is, its “habitat“, gives to it not only a space, a set of relationships to the various things around it, and a range of values, but an overall atmosphere as well, which penetrates it and whoever experiences it.”

Soke Dinkla: “participation is located along a fragile border between emancipatory act and manipulation”. where do I stand on this?

Sartre in Nausea on the construction of human situations

gallery: taste :: happening: dirty

“…a flimsily jotted down score of root directions”

“chance then, rather than spontaneity, is a key term, for it implies risk and fear (thus reestablishing the fine nervousness so pleasant when something is about to occur)”

(People having to waddle through a room filled with garbage)

“But it could be like slipping on a banana peel or going to heaven“

“The physical materials used to create the environment of Happenings are the most perishable kind”

“they reveal a spirit that is at once passive in its acceptance of what may be and affirmative in its disregard of security.”

“A STATE OF MIND”

Oulipo: intransitive language

August 24th, 2009 referencesTags: contingency, derive, detournement, interactive, machine, play, trap

“A simple example will clarify this: the beginning of Le Chiendent. A man’s silhouette was outlined, simultaneously thousands. A realist novelist would have written: Jules came along. There was a crowd. But in writing this, the realist novelist would only have shown that he was confusing the concreteness of things with literary concreteness, and that he was counting on quashing the latter in favor of the former. he would have claimed to have rendered his sentence wholly transparent to that which it designates.That is literature according to Sartre, and transitive language. In literature, the smallest combination of words secretes perfectly intransitive properties”.

“Language doesn’t manipulate notions, as people still believe; it handles verbal objects and maybe even, in the case of poetry, sonorous objects.”

“Nine or ten centuries ago, when a potential writer proposed the sonnet form, he left, through certain mechanical processes, the possibility of a choice.”

Jean Lescure, Brief History of the Oulipo

NOW!

July 30th, 2009 references, researchTags: detournement, music, visceral

“The message of this song is not subtle, no discussion no rebuttal”. The lyrics of Lena Horn’s song make explicit the political urgency that Alvarez is trying to communicate or rather, to sympathetically transfer to the audience. The editing style of the piece is as syncopated as the music, delivering discrete punches, punctuating the film, giving it an almost tactile reality by conjuring audio-visual motion, momentum. Often Alvarez will introduce us to a face (always the face of the oppressed, the resistance) and then quickly zoom out to reveal the photographed situation the individual is caught up in – he or she is hemmed in by the police, in the process of being beaten or cartered off to jail. At times Alvarez zooms in, uncovering the hidden presence of the protester in the crowd of enforcement officers: the face of an African-American man emerges from behind the window of a police car, looking harassed but defiant – the photograph catching him in the middle of a movement, of action, of struggle. Alvarez’ zooms and pans seem to have a knack for instigating an artificial photographic punctum (to reprise Barthes’ idea from Camera Lucida) for the spectator, the surprise unveiling of detail acquiring the force of shock, inducing a moment of cognitive unsettlement in what would otherwise be a studium type of image i.e. a consensually understood space of cultural signifiers.

This important use of still photography is particularly powerful. The final shots show men, children, women clenching their fists – walking, standing staring at the camera, addressing a crowd. Would Alvarez’ arousal of our feelings of empathetic anger and rebellion have been as effective if photos, as opposed to film, had not frozen the packed tension of this gesture? This way the fist remains clenched forever, the protesters’ resolve can never flag, the fist never drops or relaxes. In this sense, the rapid-fire editing is not there so much to fuel the movement of recorded actuality (although footage of protesters being carried away by opressors does play a significant role) but bombard us with icons, images of confrontation that are all the more effective because they are so clear cut, so compositionally static, literally black versus white. Immobile, these protesters stand for something, they are indisplaceable. And by extension, the photographic record, the history consituted by these images cannot be circumvented; it is issued as black and white chemical evidence. Wherefore “no argument, no rebuttal”. For Alvarez, the images speak for themselves, eschew the necessity for context. But he speaks also to a leftist constituency that already knows how to read these images in politically correct fashion. Ultimately, the purpose is not to convince but to egg on those who have already chosen their camp.

A Propos de Nice: true shades of play

July 14th, 2009 references, researchTags: archive, body, city, contingency, detournement, machine, play

On certain dialectical games going on in Jean Vigo’s elliptical A Propos de Nice:

* the well-dressed tourists, members of a leisured class, gently snoring in the sun, even when a street band interrupts: the city where one comes to be entertained, the destination of leisure becomes a hothouse for boredom. Sandbox flaneurs already exhausted. A crisis of pleasure resolved in a way by the carnival, when upper-class stiffness is put aside. The carnival goers let go of class consciousness: tourists and locals (who service the tourists) seem to forget where each stands in terms of the other _Nice is temporarily liberated and justified.

* carnival participants throwing flowers back and forth at each other: a joyful sending boomeranging in a parabolic gesture of surprise, accidental violence, and laughter as passerby and members of the parade are struck by flowers. The camera captures a rare moment of essential actuality/spontaneity: that look of surprise – that air of nakedness and vulnerability on a face, looking towards another beyond the frame. Like the sleeping cafe-goers, photographed in a moment of unconscious innocence, we are touched by a moment that is only permitted to us by the sans-gene of the filmmakers. Tom Gunning mentions the discourse of reproach that surrounds the advent of the concealed camera and the fear of “stolen” representations, of images capturing their subjects in a state of unreadiness. Here the pleasure is derived from this privileged access into the intimacy of the everyday, an everyday that passes us by; the camera succeeds in closing the gap between us and the present (here, our past). We feel fortunate that there remains an imprint, a record, an index of spontaneity: like the trace of time in the process of its vanishing. We really feel something has been salvaged, wherefore its pinprick tenderness. Who, after all, were these people? Vigo and Kauffman lay out this enigma for us.

* one impossibly tall smokestack dialogues with a jocular old woman. One of the more cryptically intellectual bits of montage. The carnival is winding down, the woman’s laughter remains as a legacy of the fun had. In the parallel universe of the industrial Nice (and the juxtaposition of all these disparate indexical traces of the city does seem to create a patchwork of cities – Nice is a multifaceted black box) an abstract composition of verticality and wavering movement (the smoke and the stack) perpetuates a cycle of joyless labor. And yet the resultant impression is not one of senseless, fruitless antagonism but of aesthetic complementarity: the smokestack would not look so inhumanly fixed and still (incontrovertible) nor the woman so lively – smile creasing folds of skin touchingly marked by the passage of time – were they not conjoined. The montage here functions as a distillating algorithm – not so much metaphor as concatenation, from which a diffuse sense of reality emerges, not so far from the “truth” revealed by Vertov’s kino-eye. Rather than utopian, the camera here is merely curious, the “merely” functionning as an ambitious goal of subversive / subtle / undercover intrusion. Nice has just been ruffled by the camera – and laid bare with a concupiscient look.

Las Hurdes / Land Without Bread: better to destroy a museum than to build a cultural center

July 13th, 2009 researchTags: archive, detournement, indexicality, modernity, photopia, play, visceral

Bunuel, in his autobiography, writes that he finds the thought of destroying a museum more appealing than the idea of building a cultural center. The exercise of building entails casting things in stone all over again, issuing precepts, binding cultural forms according to a discipline of structural soundness and reliability. A cultural center is a didactic institution – it hands down knowledge, it propagates and reproduces. By extension, an exercise in destruction (in the form of an exuberant attempt, a gesture ) feels like a motion of freedom – from various architectures of thought, from institutionally invested representations. The ideology of cultural destruction is the hope of the decimation of ideological frameworks.

Land Without Bread‘s ambiguously sarcastic voice-over upends not only the idea of the possibility of sober and objective representation (in the tradition of Rosen’s historical Chronicler and the modernist project for a scientific treatment of actuality) but destabilizes, decades before the practice of digital manipulation, the photograph’s indexical relationship to the real. In las Hurdes what we see is not what we see: a donkey falling to its death from a cliff (as we are told) is a setup _ the “real” meaning of the image (what actually happened) is completely obscured, irrelevant. In effect the idea of “real” meaning, of a grounded indexical relationship between the image and the way we read it is dismantled. This methodical decimation of sense is pursued in the sequencing of “events” that we are told occur before the camera: a child is “sick”, a shivering man is “sick”, a child lies down, “dies”.

And yet the intellectual suspicion of the image that the snarky narrator communicates is not enough snuff our quasi automatic emotional allegiance to the image. We are hammered with tales of woe and poverty while village scenes unfold and in spite of rational uncertainty we are already half-way towards believing the story: we have to rein in or check spontaneous movements of shock, sympathy, horror within us. We remove our faith from the idea of the interpretational authority of the filmmaker only to assume a form of authority from ourselves: the power to be critical but also, in the end, to feel affect, to feel involved. The metaphor that unfolds in the final moments of the film, when the scene of a poor family lying down to sleep is repeatedly cut with the image of an old woman crying out the announcement of a death through the streets of the village delivers a punch that no longer owes anything to the indexical relationship between the image and actuality. The specter of death that weighs over the inhabitants is a concretely felt reality or hypereality that emerges from the visual text. Have we then left the realm of documentary to enter a fiction? I am reminded of Rosen’s reiteration of Baudrillard’s claim the cinematic can not (or can no longer) reproduce reality, it can only produce more / other reality. And yet, seeing Las Hurdes or any documentary representation that rings a bell of recognition, of understanding (one dare not say truth) I retain the suspicion that metaphor, if not indexicality can still constitute grounds for a certain form of worldly evidence…

Interactive Recombinant Editing: SPECTER OF SENSE

July 13th, 2009 germinating ideasTags: ambiance, archive, contingency, database, derive, detournement, haunted space, kinetic, mapping, maze, noise, photopia, play, punctum, screen, uncanny

still in the room. player squeezes a knob when he hears a prompted word (s) a voice speechifies on possibilities

determines which set of footage from the database will be edited into another set of footage (not completely haphazard) or running simultaneously on different screens??

editing algorithm, blackout, obeys a subterranean rhythm, cuts words in midstence, faces in mid-expression

cutting between this, this, and this ? CLOUD OR SHAPE, SPECTER OF SENSE – sampling of the cultural whirl – not quite arbitrary drops (it’s all water)

Peter Greenaway – Prospero’s Books ; David Bowie ; Jem Cohen: sea change, becoming, wishing, wish fulfillment, riffling through, collecting books, collecting memories, collecting personalities. databases all.

FURTHER EXPLORATIONS IN “VISCERAL” ART

June 12th, 2009 germinating ideasTags: body, detournement, experimental circus, haptic, immersion, inanimata, incision, interactive, material, music, play, shock, visceral

concept for a short live action animation piece_

“ALMOST EVERYTHING CAN AND SHALL BE CUT”

an examination of the friction between texture and violence to bring us closer to the felt idea of flesh

presentation of different types of incisions using sharp and blunt metal instruments into a large array of materials:

raw meat, fish (carving knife, tweezers, paper cutter) ice / ice cube (inefficiently sawing off the edge with a blunt butter knife)

jello or flan (into little cubes using a razor blade) foam core (guitar pick – study in morcellation)

velvet, thick cloth (nail-cutting scissors) light (shadow of a knife or a needle)

wooden floor, wooden surface (repetitive gouging) computer motherboard, electronic circuit (large scissors, carving knife, snipping off transistors)

play dough (axe with blade held in hand, clumsily approaching tiny bits)

INCISION followed by MORCELLATION, FRAGMENTATION OF MATERIAL INTO ITS CONSTITUENT FORMS (filaments, bits, crumbs, slivers)

the act of cutting can be smooth, swift : sensation of liberation, closure mixed with disquiet of violent end

the act of cutting can be difficult, messy, awkward: sensation of squeamish frustration

Progression: liquid starts to OOZE out of harmed materials (old blood, water, viscous stuff – MULTICOLORED, DYED)

INTERACTIVE TEXTURES: KNOB to raise the volume on the sound effects

KNOB to slow down the act of cutting

KNOB to skip frames, so that the cutting becomes schematic vs. visceral

KNOB to introduce lyrical music

KNOB to introduce ominous music

BUTTON to produce WHISPERED WORDS OF ASSOCIATION (push and random word/phrase emerges): i think you enjoy it, fungus, why are you doing it, it will all decay quite soon, soft, squishy, wet, very dry, too dry, i wonder what this is, it looks better when its in tiny little bits, i didn’t think i could do that, this doesn’t seem so impossible, someone told me not to but i’ll do it anyway, nothing seems too bright, nothing appears less important, a good thing its irreversible or it might come back to haunt me, i could eat that, i could drink that, i don’t want to, forage, push.

the knobs frame the screen, unlabeled except for the button (“VOICES OF INSTRUCTION”). tiny switch next to button – makes a word repeat every 5 seconds.

nothing can stop the violence: metal keeps cutting, stuff keeps oozing, more and more stuff oozes out, everything is increasingly MORECELLATED and finally, LIQUEFIED.

LOOPS.

Derive and Detournement: call back to situationism

June 4th, 2009 referencesTags: ambiance, city, cyborg, derive, detournement, experimental circus, flaneur, haptic, modernity, nomad, play, situationism, space, utopia

These texts and clips had me thinking about the relationship between the modernist concern with contingency (starting with the ubiquitous presence of photographic arts from the early 20th century onwards) and the movement of situationism as it flourished in the late 50s and 60s – I see another line or relationship between the flaneur, the nomad, the cyborg and the situationist as precursors of immersive arts/installations practitioners…immersion is basically the design of playful space.

Debord advised drifters to allow themselves to be guided by those features of the street neglected by most pedestrians, like “the sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters” and the “path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the contour of the ground)”. the determinants of drift, apparently, were alternations in emotional and ambient intensity; “the appealing or repelling characters of certain places”; and the drifter’s tendency to “drain” along relatively unresistant paths, “the fissures in the urban network”. The Lettrist International even “envisaged a pinball machine arranged in such a way that the play of the lights and the more or less predictable trajectories of the balls” would represent the “thermal sensations and desires of people passing by the gates of the Cluny Museum around an hour after sunset in November,” as though drifters were like ball bearings, propelled through the city’s channels by the energized “pins” of the unities of ambiance.