One of the things going on is that I have a new video work that is out and about, currently awaiting replies from various venues. Film of Sound is a 10 minute video I made with Australian sound artist Roger Dean and writer Hazel Smith, a creative duo and founders of Australysis.

It was performed in Sydney last December (12/10/11) at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music with 4-channel audio and a double-projection screen. The center of the audio space–the sweet spot– was the surface of the screen.

Here are two excerpts.

Film of Sound is a semiotic surface, a skin of image and text on the body of sound. Constructed out of collaborative, indeterminate and remix processes, layers and juxtapositions of disparate media hint at a narrative trajectory — a sleeping man, an evening in a hotel room, and a journey across vast and challenging spaces. But the incipient narrative constantly breaks down into disordered memories of violence and repression, undefined threats, splintered subjectivities, analog and digital glitches.

10 minute, single channel video
Artists: Roger Dean, Will Luers and Hazel Smith
an australLYSIS commission

Electronic art video and interactive works generally prioritize image over sound, this is also the case in commercial culture at large. For this work, we chose a different approach, in keeping with the central focus of the commissioning ensemble, austraLYSIS. That focus is sound : musical, spoken, electroacoustic and environmental. In Film of Sound sound was chosen to be the initiator, sometimes even driver, of the text and visual processes at work in the piece. Three collaborators were involved, respectively with focus on the video composition (Luers), the text composition (Smith) and the sonic composition (Dean). In the first stage of creating the piece, a pair of sound compositions were made by Dean, and Luers and Smith began generating responses to them. After considerable exchange of materials, an overall plan for one imagistic narrative layer, to be constructed first in sound, was agreed. After the drafted sound layer was produced, all the ongoing text- and video- generation processes joined into an iterative amalgamation, interaction, and refinement sequence.

The result reveals at least two continuous narrative and process layers. There are ideas about the continuation of physical objects and processes — such as the life of the ocean — despite the termination of life. These ideas swirl with and against questions of language, the communicative powers of humans, and the resilience of human engagement even when resources and opportunities seemingly diminish.

Through the interweaving of text, sound and image —sometimes complementary, sometimes antithetical — the work explores a number of continua from the pre-verbal to the articulated, from the glimpse to the gaze, from noise to music. It also simultaneously projects both rapidly transforming affective intensities and sustained emotional states.

- Roger Dean, Will Luers and Hazel Smith

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click to play

Lin remixes networked and print reading/writing practices into something dense, beautiful, puzzling and ultimately relaxing. The book is about its own construction, and the nature of a hybrid identity as “book”, as immigrant, as a networked digital being .  Search results, personal lists, metadata, receipts and low-rez images are indexical to the authoring process rather than illustrations of some simulated world.  A narrative essay (sebaldian), with multiple entrances and exits and no specific information to absorb, designed to contain flows of semiotic debris that wash up everyday.  Lin calls his poetry/fiction/essays  “ambient.” And his books do, like much ambient music,  set you on a leisurely stroll through semiotic space.

“I believe a novel should not preserve things, it should blank them out very very slowly around all those beautiful, corrosive things that are not happening in the world and that usually involve figures of state and violent incursions in countries far from our own and the loss of our loved ones.”

The novelistic arts – novels, movies, some documentaries – attempt to represent the complex flows of events, people and things inside dense cohesive structures. The novelist or screenwriter builds a structure so that its world can sit solidly in the reader’s mind. This is essential for immersion. And immersion is necessary to conjure the stresses of life and then to offer a catharsis – an end to the stress – and the ability to go on about ones’ business. Catharsis has always been a hot commodity.

But living with continuous networked flows of text and image, there is never catharsis – no end- to the piling on of information. Why pick up that novel or that netflix DVD and go through the motions of pretending to care about a watered-down and well-intentioned (accessible) version of reality when we’ve just spent the day sorting through various scales of  virtual and local “crises” and flights from crises: news headlines, electric bill, tweets, emails, calls, anecdotes, comments, deadlines, lists, searches. How do you represent that reality?

Sometimes a fiction universe is so good (thick) that it does seem worthy of the semiotic complexity we experience everyday. But catharsis? I have been watching The Wire and find that it and much of the good long-form television beats the novel in doing what a novel should do – giving access to the complex flows of contemporary experience. In The Wire, although plot heavy, the cathartic moments are never fully satisfying, the characters are always frustrated with each other and themselves. The problems never go away completely. I often “watch” the episodes while performing tasks on the computer, or doing light reading. Divided attention. I listen to characters and turn to the interesting parts. Scroll back to cover what I missed. There are, of course, peaks of dramatic action that take over my attention, but mostly the flow of story is background ambience. In a way, I am not looking for a subject, but for a reflective surface that can bring my own mind into play.  ADD?  Maybe, but also an indication of how our brains are remixing new realities.

John Ashbery: I would not put a statement in a poem. I feel that poetry must reflect on already existing statements.

Kenneth Koch: Why?

John Ashbery: Poetry does not have subject matter, because it is the subject.

- Selected Prose by John Ashbery

Tan Lin proposes that the craft of writing “be replaced with handicrafts and utensils of writing. Thus recipes, tickets, text messages, itineraries, legal briefs and disclaimers would consitute various surface entrances.” A collaged “novel” cannot provide great catharsis . But it can, if shaped properly, make us see our life’s material ephemera (shopping lists and earthquake data) as worthy of reflection, speculation and discussion. Not the events themselves, but the intermingling of the various reports and records of those events.

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“… while I enjoyed Shields’s book, and could see it bringing benefits to those who haven’t thought so much about escaping the undoubtedly dead scene of traditional narrative lit, I’d much rather have seen the book act less as a manual or a ‘manifesto’ and more as the kind of amorphous, transfixing objects that he calls for. This is more a syllabus, less an art….All that said, a syllabus can be a great thing. I wish there’d been more feelers that escaped the book, transcended it, rather than a kind of diatribe. ” -Blake Butler

I was also (sadly) underwhelmed by Reality Manifesto. It traces only part of the history of constructing art from contingent reality. Shields hardly mentions the de-mythologizing influences of cinema and networked culture on narrative form. Hasn’t blogging and video blogging done it’s share of breaking down our sense of reality into bite-sized, multimodal fragments? What really surprised me was Shields’ dismissal of fiction-making as a still vital and powerful art. Just ask BP about the power of fiction. It is not the fabrications of fiction vs. contingent reality that is the issue. It is how artists arrive at the structures of their creations that is changing.

In his Poetics of Cinema 2, in a chapter called Structure and Construction, Raul Ruiz writes:

“Structure relates to the creation of the work, taken as a singular entity; while construction concerns the film in relation to the many circumstances that interact with it, throughout its making; during the many processes that will allow it to surface. That is, its relation with that which is near and far.” -Raul Ruiz

It is this “near and far”, the othernesss that intrudes on “the plan,” that is so hard to pin down in an artist’s statement or teach in the classroom, much less welcome inside the creative process. So much of our training in making things is industrial: pre-production, production, post-production; outline, draft, final draft. And yet, our lives have become more and more influenced by Black Swans.

I get great pleasure in contemplating the structures of art – videos, paintings, novels, poems, movies. So when I embark on my own art project, if structure isn’t clear, I start doubting my choices and the project stumbles. But then sometimes, something happens. I let go of my own plans and start listening for the works’s own desired shape. I start constructing. Good structure is grown inside the contingent circumstances of the work’s construction. It is a dynamic of mind, body and materials.

If we give up worrying about structure and all that that it implies – mediums, genres, markets, audiences – and instead look to practices of construction, we might find that digital art wants to be something very different than most models of (popular and high) art in the industrial age.

For example, we know digital art wants speed. It wants to be free or cheap. It wants to be social so that it gets attention. It wants novelty so that it acts like an eddy in the rush of information. It may even want to alter our senses with “mutant percepts and affects” (Guattari), or at least do something that a steady diet of information bits cannot do.

If we abandon knowable forms in favor of hybrid monsters, where do we look for models? Avant-garde and modernist practices, barthesian fragmentation and delluezian rhizomes – where to start? The history is there and will be (re)taught in schools and universities as economies (once again) shed 19th century models of mind and reality. But let’s not mistake storytelling for structure as we create new digital forms.

I’ll leave you with the constructions of Michael Robinson. He has taken remix art to a different level by building improbable and beautiful enigmas of sound, text and image. His cinema is made of the shells of past structures and re-purposed into hybrid monsters. But instead of being diatribes against the mythic past, they weave stories from an inhuman future. Dark and good. Enjoy.

VICTORY OVER THE SUN from Michael Robinson on Vimeo.

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via Ubu

Mayhen 1987, by Abigail Child
Part 6 of Is This What You Were Born For? Film (16 mm, b/w, sound, 20 min.).

This whole series will require some deep attention if I can find it.

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None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.

-Susan Sontag,  Against Interpretation.

The 3-minute pop song has it’s roots in the ballad – a collage of words and sound given form with repetition and melody. We listen to most music (pick your favorite genre) over and over again not because we know what is going to happen next, but because our minds are turned on by the complexity of multiple inputs and the oceanic state beyond linear thought and meaning.

I am reading the new bio of Donald Barthelme, and getting reintroduced to his fragmented stories. For a while in the 60′s and 70′s, he was celebrated for a cinematic montage style where meaning was found (or discovered) in the juxtaposition of images, voices and genres. Everybody was doing it – The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Fellini, Godard.  And then came a backlash, the collage style went out of fashion. Story and collage went their separate ways.

As I toil away at another draft of a screenplay, I get the heavy feeling (again) that the feature drama, like the novel, has lost much of its alchemical magic as an art form.  I don’t think it’s a question of storytelling vs. a collage aesthetic. The traditional ballad and many pop songs, are fragmented stories. Some of the great storytellers of cinema (Welles, Hitchcock, Renoir) had a complex and somewhat fragmented style. Mainstream movies and novels have lost their power to connect to experience, which is more and more a collage-like messiness. As commercial art forms, they need to justify themselves to agents, publishers, producers and distributors. Every moment needs to be about something.

That’s why I love the fragmented messiness of net video. It is hard to find the magic and poetry, given the relentless and tiresome 20-something relationship dramas,  but it is there. Here is a taste:

• Whisper To Me Gently | Robert Croma
• spacetwo : patalab: On chamber(work) and oblique conversations
• Renard Lumière | Pierre Wayser.

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