Edmund Cook (UK)

DESCRIPTION

1 It is a cold, crisp day. Less people are cycling because of the weather, so the streets are busier. Bodies shuffle past each other on the creaking snow, gentle smiles, breath expelled in tiny clouds. Bits of street detritus poke out from the white covering the pavement. Children sledge across an icy basketball court while tinny hip hop blurts out. Sun sinks into the shells of half finished buildings. Repetitive drilling noises rise from below, behind boarded off excavations. Trams scrape past. People stand next to a statue at the start of the canal, some loiter and banter next to the nightshop over the street. Ducks sit torpidly on the frozen surface. We put headphones and move down the street that leads outwards from the centre of town, floating through the environment, beginning to focus in on certain details. As we absorb these details, we begin to notice that patterns begin to stare back at us. We feel closer to something or other. Masks with roughly hewn features begin to emerge. Fire hydrants begin to gawp at us, climbing frames stand like totems in an empty public park. A shocked mouth stares up at us from the roadworks. Windows form a toothy grin, gables become foreheads. A logo printed on glass opens its mouth to shout, earrings in shop windows become eyes. Curved forms push through a surface of bricks. Everywhere we look, things begin to open up and identify themselves. We reach the end of the street, the canal bridge is up, at a right angle to us, as boats pass underneath. An empty cardboard box falls down from the vertical segment of bike lane. The barrier comes up, we continue on, and shortly reach the market in the square surrounded by housing blocks. We slip our headphones off, turning the mp3 player off with a firm push of the thumb. Now we can hear the calls from vendors ripple out. Piles of fruit topple and are reformed by careful hands. Some stalls are made into draughty tents with plastic sheeting. People move hurredly through the stalls, checking prices and scanning the textures of the wares. After dawdling a while, we continue, taking a sharp left into a wider road, moving past more industrial buildings. People on the street begin to thin out. We come to a dead end, a wall and fence separating us from the port. Seagulls circle overhead, the horn of a boat rings out and spreads. We open a door into a warehouse. It is cavernous and still inside. Piles of boxes and stock form aisles and a maze of pathways. It is the handling depot of a company with a large distribution service. The lighting is crepuscular, with security lamps illuminating certain sections, enough to make out where we can enter.

2

We can sense the size of the interior from the way our initial shuffling footsteps travel in the acoustic space. On entering, we look just over to the left at a object suspended above a low wall of boxes. It’s a knife, backed by bluish purple field of light. Metallic and gleaming, its edges heightened. It almost shivers. A red light slowly begins to move up the handle, pauses, then creeps up the blade like a life bar in the video game being charged, or a pose being extended, then held, then released. A gaseous article, shrugging off its function through sheer gorgeousness. Different colours begin to move across the knife like a lighting test, orange, blue yellow, green. As this happens a low bass sound begins to rumble through the aisle, creeping above the floor. It passes into our bodies. It bisects two feelings. At first, a sense of creeping dread, then one of warmth, presence, comfort. Our gullets shake, but in a tickly way that is almost pleasurable. I can feel my organs, the inner bits of my body touching each other. But physically, it’s almost not there, such a low frequency. But it holds things together, it covers and envelops them.

3

We move further into the warehouse down one of the aisles of boxes, another scene has opened up at a corner, a slightly more domesticated one anomalous to the setting. We notice the employees, dressed in non-descript workwear, shuffling deliveries between locations and generally busying themselves. They seem a bit surprised that we are here, but get on with stuff around us nonetheless. Under an overhead light, we look down at a table. The tablecloth has been refolded many times. One of the creases is diffused across a number of refoldings. There is another crease. A raised, sharper one that cuts across the other at a diagonal. A key sits at their intersection. A hand moves over the key. It picks it up and turns upwards in the same movement. The key points back towards the wrist. The hand pulls away. The woman who the hand belongs to is sitting at the table. She looks upwards, to the right, then back down, in a delicate little triangle, with a suspicious, alert expression. There are two more identical women on the other side of the table, they look back across the table at the first woman, their hands sitting on its edge. The one on the right looks down at the table. We now can’t be sure which is the first woman we have seen. From a different angle, the key is picked up, and turned over.

The surface of the palm is black, the key turns into a knife again. 

The lights turn off, the scene disappears. A experience comes to my mind. After my first and only mushroom induced trip, I tried to get back to my room from the beach. This took a long time, I stumbled through the garden as if it was a thick jungle. When I stopped at the door and looked at my key, it changed shape in my hand, its teeth reforming over and over, straightening and lengthening. Further along the aisle, a light comes on. Between the boxes, a woman crouches behind a wall of books, perhaps unpacked from the nearby packages. There is a red curtain hung behind her, she is holding a plastic gun, her face is daubed in red. She mimes shooting the gun back past our shoulders, making a tak a tak a tak a tak noise. She then suddenly folds the gun into a radio, and holds it to her ear. We hear the start of a broadcast, it buzzes, she listens attentively.

4

The lights go off on this small event. An awkward pause. No image. Inevitably, I begin thinking about food and chores, minutiae of personal interactions that happened earlier in the day. Grudgingly, we follow down the aisle to the nearest small glow. There is another clearing that breaks through two lines of boxes. Two men are adjusting an arrangement of pieces of cardboard, which sit on a stand. They replace the slice of cardboard with a slice of cheese with holes in it. One man emerges from the right of the shot and proceeds to adjust the angle of this piece by infinitesemal degrees. They debate whether to open it up more, or whether the piece is too high. The man moves his head in front of the two pieces of cheese, much closer, blocking them, and says that it is definitely too high. The other man out of shot disagrees, maybe a bit irritatedly, and just says that it needs to be centred. They eventually agree that this might look really good, rather unenthusiastically. We see the setup from an isometric angle, there is another reflector, we see the cheese is almost, but not quite, in the shape of a bow tie. While they touch the cheese, drum beats begin to trigger and ricochet, attempting to find a rhythm together. Suddenly the objects and the stand disappear, as if they were a photoshop layer added in behind. All that is left are the men making tiny nonsensical movements with their bodies, like overly subtle mime artists. 5 The light fades on this sishyphean primping. It goes black, then comes up again like a curtain. A more profane scene now greets us. We whirl through a mixture of bodies and objects, slanted trajectories. The dimensions of the space fluctuate, it’s really a bit nauseating, my stomach swells. Things come in and out of focus and sharpness, no foreground no background no privileged position.

Everything is mushed together, a paste. Bodies, things and actions become interminable. At any one moment severe humorous arbitrary.

A quaint and savage tea party. A man and a woman amongst crudely made bargain bought textures and shapes. Playing dead disaffected hysterical plaintive.

Lying amongst the layers of fabric queasy and stoned warping colours edges of vision fuzzing a tortured plastic doll together chewed legs maniacally leisurely pause to smoke nose painted blue-black rosette on head she swallowed by cellophane now bored he behaving like a clam opening and shutting the shiny stuff smirking when open.

6

It’s suddenly got really dark in here again. We can here something coming from over near where the huge shelves start. We shuffle over. A comforting echo of strings bumping as we move nearer. From the darkness we see a stubbly, pitted chin bobs near the dark circle of a microphone, a pale green yellow light from behind is the only light source. The whole scene is cast in a crepuscular light, silhouettes of body and instrument move in and out of visibility. They become one object instead of two. The mouth leans towards the dark curve and makes low, gently melodic vowel sounds, as if rehearsing speech, testing the sounds of words in the mouth, everything gets darker suddenly, the chin bobs more vigorously, off the pace of the strings, slight overtones and serrated grating sounds float about. Now something more like words, maybe lion go where the island goes maybe lions aeeh where the island goes. Now its all dark, only the reflection of shapes from the upper lip,

where the islands go 

the nose drops into view moisture from the teeth glints where the islands go a tiny drip of red light on the face

          where the lions go ye-ay where the firemen go 

This becomes increasingly rich and enunciated, the microphone and body so close they cannot be considered separate, Answers me answers me ancest me. The scene clouds over and fades. My attention is drawn by low voices, seemingly emanating from a nearby half-open cardboard box:

‘What…are…you…thinking...about?’
‘I’m thinking about songs. In a way that they hold a space together…’ 

(She says it not so much confidently, but determinedly)

‘…Without being trapped protect their centre…’ 

(Now in a more convincing tone) ‘…What are you thinking about?’

7 We move under the shelves to our left, and emerge in a makeshift living room. A woman in lycra sits atop a rowing machine that purs contentedly, she is exercising with intense focus, seemingly oblivious to his entrance. He stumbles into an arrangement of objects on the floor. There are two long sticks with cords coming from the end, coated with cotton balls, sitting on top of four piles of three books and rolled up stripey socks, he trips and knocks the first onto the soft brown carpet, then steps on top of the second on so that its ends bend upwards in a u shape. The dark gloop from his hands drips onto the cotton balls coating the white sticks with an audible plop. He sways and stays on his feet. The woman turns and exclaims, ‘Hey!’ We can now see she is wearing an eye patch. He apologises and says that he didn’t see it there, his dark hands spread outwards. She says you stepped on my drape runners. He says, well honey, they were right out in the middle of the floor, looking down at the disarrangement he has caused. She says you think that’s an accident, I leave those out there myself. I was up all night working on that invention. He adjusts his hands to prevent further dripping. I’m going to have the worlds first 100 percent quiet drape runner. She begins to exercise again, grunting viciously, the handbars of the rowing machine bend and buckle as she snarls. She dismounts, the machine now broken, and sits panting for a moment. She then ties herself with a rope, so she is suspended from the ceiling. Over the top of this, like a thin projection, we see a cartoon image of a woman in a red and yellow costume throwing off a rope she has been tied with and re-emerging from a cocoon in a spiderweb, jumping offscreen in a little strobe. A woman with a notepad and a tape recorder arrives in the living room. The exhausted woman says, as if provoked by the presence of the microphone:

‘Its not bondage, maybe. It’s self suspension!’

The interviewer says:

‘Has it got to do with independence?

She replies: ‘Actually, yes’ We see another brief projection of a city skyline and meditative metallic music. ‘When flying in the air, I feel really free. On the other hand I’m bound with rope to the centre of something. I feel these two feelings at the same time’ 8 Moving to an end of the warehouse tucked in behind some shelves, we’re in the back end of a kitchen. The interviewer says that its difficult to talk in here. The other man, who seems to be buzzing with static energy, replies;

‘I’m thinking that it’s difficult to talk, but that’s how it goes. We can’t stop because if we stop we’ll never get done.’

He’s right, it is noisy. Recorded sound plays back, burbling away under the actual conversation. Behind the man being interviewed are shelves with boxes and boxes of film, office supplies, film cans. ‘We have er, we shot two hundred and fifty thousand feet of film and two hundred and fifty thousand feet of film to sync, that everything that’s out of sync takes a long time, we average about two reels a day about a hundred reels to go, but, er, such is the price of not having any money and not being able to er, do it professionally, we prefer to do it this way, because its better.’ He points at the guy next to him editing. ‘This guy is a prisoner he doesn’t express himself freely.. hello prisoner’ (they laugh) The guy in a white shirt, smirks as he handles the filmstrip, and says hi, seeming like he doesn’t want to get dragged into this, ‘what do you want me the say ill say, ill say anything. What do you want?’ Both of them are smiling, John puts him arm around him. ‘George, who you’ve seen me with before, he’s an actor, he is he is a cinematographer, lighting man, grip, bartender’ George laughs, more and more... ‘Editor, mechanic, fool, genius, he’s everything, and all things to us.’ ‘He’s the best. The best there is, right George? Are you the best?’ He seems embarrassed, ‘no, you’re the best,’ shyly John laughs delightedly ‘We’re outta sound!

9

HERE OTHER PEOPLE WHO I SHOW THIS TO ENTER THE SCENARIO TO TALK IN IT AS IF IT WERE A LIVING SPACE

10

We see that the object is angular, made from cut glass. Hand, mirror and beam are in the foreground.

REFLECTION

I have only seen this a digital rip. The colours are warped and granular, pulled apart by countless transfers. And light is like carving, describing the topography of the visible from the occluded. This particular mode of presentation brings to mind some of the displays at the Wereld Museum in Rotterdam. Dioramas are backlit in soft shades, the objects suspended by metal arms you can’t see from a head on perspective.

In front of the display there is a sofa, with tonally neutered background music from the relevant aggregated region piped in (Africa, Japan, Polynesia etc). This sound feels like a thin gauze, an insinuation.

Usually places to rest in museums are in the middle of the room as islands, with a circular perspective, not phrased like a living room with a view pointed in one direction. It suggests that the artefacts are a durational experience, that they were doing something sitting there inertly. A contextless object, a floating shell in a droning televisual experience. It’s as if you could domesticate these things, give them sort of cosy afterlife, performing the role of décor. I tried to film in the museum to get some images of this, but they had a lot of those three hundred and sixty degree cameras and guards so it was quite difficult. I wasn’t caught as such, but interrogated suspiciously and more or less asked to leave, I presume on the intelligence transmitted from the security room.

Cutting separates and divides a material. To resist, to distance and make plastic. In contrast to allowing entrance, access and proximity to a interior space. To be absorbed, to be controlled, or at least suspended.

In Interface , Harun Farocki narrates his editing process, describing his position from within the process of viewing and composing images. He describes the overlapping of touching and seeing as he sits at his editing table. He demonstrates, then mimes two actions in front of the monitor he is working on: touching the edge of a film strip and touching buttons on the machine. IMAGE: Still from Interface

He watches footage of himself in an earlier film (Inextinguishable Fire), his own image doubling across the two screens. His previous self stubs out a cigarette on his hand to approximate the violence of distance, a “weak representation” where “only one point relates to the real world” .

Deleuze calls this the point of inflection: that which is between dimensions, around which folds occur . With digital images these folds are either side of the black box. We see the input (physical information) and the output (the image), but not the mechanics of the process, we only contact the thing through the interface. The source information can change so commonly and plurally that the resulting object becomes soft and pliable, yet not quite tactile: a texture, not a fact. The physical is out of sync, social specificity recedes into a horizon. The images are motifs. And he admits his writing is dependent on them. Under the shadow of Alan Turing’s vision of the intellect as a machine, he wonders that by attempting to speak in this position, he doesn’t know whether he is encoding or decoding. Where sensation, and his subjecthood, begins and ends.

THE VIRTUAL-MASSUMI

Hito Steyerl describes a departure in the way that a conventional subject object division is enunciated in relation to images, in her essay ‘A Thing Like You and Me’:

“Traditionally, emancipatory practice has been tied to a desire to become a subject. Emancipation was conceived as becoming a subject of history, of representation, or of politics. To become a subject carried with it the promise of autonomy, sovereignty, agency. To be a subject was good; to be an object was bad.”

She goes further to unpick the remains of the value of the concept of representation in the digital age where distribution and reception are altered (I’m tracing this as a continuation from Farocki’s ‘weak representation’):

“It is not about representation at all, but about actualising whatever the things have to say in the present. And to do so is not a matter of realism, but rather of relationalism – it is a matter of presencing and thus transforming the social, historical and also material relations, which determine things”

            This suggests priveleging the immediate affect of what is present, not instinctively distancing oneself from it. 

The stolid and distant image-object is chewed, to be digested rather than wedged in an awkward position.

IMAGE: Still from O Dreamland. A film from the British ‘free cinema’ movement of the 1950s. Documentary scenes from attractions of the Dreamland amusement park in Margate are the base for an overlapping blend of non-synchronised locational sound. Prosthetic dummies act out awkward movements, games to acquire prizes jerk and disappoint, people circulate around them.

Sound is an invisible object. Something immanently physical, but utterly immaterial. It is plural and promiscuous, can pass by and through unacknowledged.

Percussion is the most sharpened, unavoidable version of it, that separates things into tangible segments. Something that is exclusive enough within a duration to make a rhythm. A rhythm, like sound itself, that the body cannot not respond to. Something that is pre-cognitive, virtual in that is has no state, but charged by this incipience.

Different frequencies and timbres direct themselves at the hips, the head, the shoulders, the knees, the feet. The body becomes animate, presenced.

Back in the interface, a sound dubbed to an object or movement ascribes a weight. Michel Chion calls this the ‘synch point’ , that which obeys the laws of gestalt psychology. Something that forms a tight pattern in the mind. That can suspend itself in any space.

Through the interface we slip back into the image, to the studio neurosis of the perfected ‘image-object’. By that I mean something designed only to look sexy in reproduction; a labexperiment in the trance of its ends. Making, the physical, become irrelevant. The hands just position for the lens. Mistakes, mistranslations, markings, become heinous.

I relate this to images created for scientific testing, the project of controlling an intrinsically variable phenomena to establish a rule, “…to separate signal from noise in order to produce the ‘interpreted image’” . This delineates the boundaries of a subject, its possibilities.

IMAGE: Reconstruction of a frescoes from Boscoreale, Naples. Previously buried under lava. On a wall, the idealised exterior is shown, objects sit calmly in the foreground, but consolidated in the same architecture. The binding imperative is that you pass from the fresco to the window next to it in a seamless fashion.

Materials do resist when we try to actually shape them with our hands. When something is carved or scraped, etched or patted, marked, we enter into a dialogue with it. We use hands instead of buttons. We can craft things, or situations, special effects without computers. Perception is an analogue process. Even perception of digital phenomena.

In his wacko text ‘What is a Thing’ , Heidigger talks about the origins of the word ‘thing’ being in a situation, not in the state of a pure object (before the whole thing demonstratively dissolves into a cosmic riff). We are in the room with things and people, we respond, we play, we react to a situation, to textures. We are offscreen. Things and people, if we consider them as equalised in the realm of the image, contaminate each other (as with the scientific accident that led to the discovery of penicillin ). Not modelled, but necessarily imperfect.

IMAGE: A plane made by a cargo cult. Made from local materials trying to grip a different language of production. Functionless technology based on an incomprehensible machine now departed.

So how can the hard edges of something as definitive as an object be smudged? Subjects and objects break their planes , overlap and inhabit each other. Stop denouncing distances and enforcing borders. To become sensual again, to rub on each other, to play, to concede desire and rejoice in their manipulable states within, or as, an image.

IMAGE: Giorgio Morandi in his studio. Where he would rearrange and paint endless interrelations of his subject/objects, the minute variations of light and shade vibrating and pulsing, simultaneously dead and still.

Nothing functions in a vacuum, or can be isolated. Images are not vacuums, but sites for dubbing. Bruno Latour describes how the bad guy moderns (I actually picture a group of surly, unaware mods on their bicycles with stacks of mirrors) create a false division between things and the social. The quasi-object he describes, that which is neither caterogisable as purely technological nor social, keeps on bobbing up from below the surface:

IMAGE: Still from Quadrophenia . Please ignore the awkward presence of Sting at this juncture and look at the mirrors. The post where i found this picture says it quite clearly: “the more mirrors you had. the more of a face you was.”

“Quasi-objects are much more social, much more fabricated, much more collective than the ‘hard’ parts of nature, but they are in no way the arbitrary receptacles of a full-fledged society. On the other hand they are much more real, nonhuman and objective than those shapeless screens on which society-for unknown reasons-needed to be ‘projected’”

Technology and the simulated liquidity, distancing and distribution it creates can be played with, put out of joint, disrespected, to develop new forms of direct presence and affect within its spiralling feedback loop. 

The psychological and material blur: they are not determinate, not dualistic, however much I wish I could domesticate them like that. I’m now going to add the opposite of the object to this composition to start adjusting the balance. The voice, I mean. How does the voice begin? In tongues, in vernacular, in song.

Out of focus. Myopic. Intimate. Blurred. Pre-grammar. Alien. As we would have it. Distant but intimately affecting. Singing in a language we can’t quite understand, as if in a loop changing slightly every time, rehearsing a phrase, pre-song, like a lullaby . Keeping up. Songs, of course, still work even if we don’t know the words. Because they are based in affect, not in sense. They are are in this realm of incipience, we can only try and put names to the transitive things that make our body the medium. Often I’ve found out the actual lyrics to much loved songs, having always sung along to what it sounds like, stretching and approximating the words in my mouth. Or, I’ve just loved the feel of something, but not really caring if they are incomprehensible, nonsensicial or traumatising the lyrics are. Language gets taken away form itself, charges it, but can still come back round and synchronise. This is how pop music grips us. Songs have a solidity, a solidarity. They communicate through a vernacular, both reinforcing, from the inside out, and making urgent, from the outside in. In Alan Lomax’s field recordings, made on field trips across rural America, we hear songs of routine, pain, sorrow, that document, no, evoke lives. Again, even if we can’t understand, due to strange intonation, accents, vowel sounds or vocabulary, the code is delicious. There are countless examples of this. Language becomes an other, its own distorting tool, evolving inward, finding its own laws . Songs links an object to speech. Allows us to move without it. Making the virtual, the other, tangible.

The voice can also be processed by the interface.

For his last album, Donuts, J Dilla edited samples of soul classics from his hospital bed. Extracting the soaring hook from each jam and recomposing it with a propulsive new engine, clipping its syllables and words. The voice can be ghosted, floated in a soundscape with effects, a new invisible space. The microphone allows a change in scale. The sound system.

movement without objects

The gestures of the body with things removed, the physical contact removed, otherwise known as dance. An act of social catharsis, a ritual. Suspension/Control paradox. A synchronisation. Being absorbed by, or absorbing.

‘its not pro-bondage, it’s admitting you’re repressed!’

‘ghost dance’ ‘convulsions against a situation’ ‘desublimating repression of the body’ ‘anarchic energies’ ‘fun!’

From implicit, to explicit ‘speech’: (Naivety, improv/provisory nature of speech, of attempt. Making it strange. Of a type of acting. The interview, and the improvised dialogue-two features. -increase in anecdotal, introduction of other people’s contributions and responses/actual discussions outside and into the text.)

A journalist assembles a report from different voices. Voice throwing. Personalised, quotidian, improvised within situation. Presence within the feedback loop-a proposal for how voice works within/without images.

What distinguishes free indirect speech from normal indirect speech is the lack of an introductory expression such as "He said" or "he thought". It is as if the subordinate clause carrying the content of the indirect speech is taken out of the main clause which contains it, becoming the main clause itself.

I like this definition. To me, it kind of permits the idea, by extension, that whenever someone speaks in fiction, it could be anyone or everyone saying it. It blurs the first person experiences with the third person narrative perspective, there is an equalisation or levelling, a hierachy that only exists through a medium is made as thin as possible.

The grease is eventually what makes the invention fulfil its purpose) Grease is funk, or what a musician could call feeling. Things rubbing, not just a metronomic pulse, and not just in a libidinal way. Friction is some sort of agency.

There are many dimensions of syncing here. He is in the bowels of his own film, which is simultaneously his own house, the set, the editing room. He talks about the physical process of syncing, amongst the cans that hold his work, are the storage and the product. He talks about his ideals, in front of the physical form they are stored on. The actual films often have a liberal and imprecise synchronisation of dialogue to action, characters faces aren’t visible, the acoustics aren’t right, or their lips don’t’ make the right shapes. This type of recording and editing fits with the method of improvising that goes into the method.

When i say what i say, to you, in this room, this is called presence, in conditions of compression and abbreviation, it seems we are in a baroque theatre of sorts, of endless hypnotic frames: presence, or, saying it simple-GINZBURG

capitalist realism, mark fisher: the framing at every level that gets in the way of fluidity. In Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise, the participants are presented with a graphical score to respond to. It has some gestures towards conventional notation, but is mainly shapes on the pages, rather than notes. People make decisions in the present tense. Different people trying to establish a language together. The ‘song’ is de-synchronised simultaneously by the moment. An interface made human. Rules and the score. on saying nothing: So I often wonder what people think about when people watch intensely durational structural films. I rarely and briefly can enter states of transcendence, rather I start to speculate on the wildly different things that could be going on in peoples heads. The opposite film, as Gidal puts it. What is the discussion you can’t see, that can’t be spoken? Or more simply, sometimes I marvel at patience, and the communality this creates. Nothing happens, the image is irrelevant. on what happens offscreen: Entertainment, conversation, proximity, the present.