Edmund Cook (UK)

Edmund Cook Piet Zwart Institute Fine Art Masters Thesis First Chapter Submission

Working title: A Voice Through A Loop

Summary:

The text uses selected clips from moving images to develop a description of a fictional live experience. This moves between different materialities of language: from object to sound to the human body, and eventually, to speech. This description is punctuated by reflections on the different degrees of presence and distance within and outside of an image, using recourse to relevant resources. Through reflecting on issues of immateriality and the redefinition of the conventional subject-object relation that results from this, it proposes the potential of audio-visual affect as an affirmation of presence in these desynchronised conditions. Submitted here is the introduction, The Exterior, and the first chapter, Soft Artefacts. The second chapter, Speech Filters, will continue by discussing the role of the voice.

Bibliography/Filmography/Discography:

Automatic Writing, Robert Ashley. Lovely Music, 1979.

Bryson, N., 1990. Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. London: Reaktion Books.

Chion, M., 1994. Audio-Vision. New York: Columbia University Press.

Daston, L. and Galison, P., 2007. Objectivity. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press.

Deleuze, G., 2006. The Fold. London and New York: Continuum.

Dolar, M., 2006. A Voice and Nothing More. Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press.

Donuts, J Dilla. Stones Throw, 2007.

Eyeballing, 2007. Film. Rosalind Nashashibi.

Filmmakers of our time: John Cassavetes, 1969. Film. Hubert Knapp et Andre S. Labarthe.

Fisher, M., 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: John Hunt Publishing/Zero Books.

Floating Frequencies/Intuitive Synthesis, Eleh. Important Records, 2011.

Franke, A. ed., 2010. Animism: Volume 1. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Ginzburg, C., 2002. Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance. London and New York: Verso.

Goodman, S., 2010. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press.

Heidigger, M., 1967. What is a Thing? Washington DC: Gateway Editions.

Interface, 1995. Video. Harun Farocki.

Joselit, D., 2007. Feedback. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press.

Knife, 1975. Film. Jack Goldstein.

La Chinoise, 1967. Film. Jean-Luc Godard.

Latour, B., 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Little Stabs at Happiness, 1963. Film. Ken Jacobs.

Lovely Andrea, 2007. Video. Hito Steyerl.

Massumi, B., 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, London: Duke University Press.

Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943. Film. Mara Deren.

Moyle, R., 1999. Polynesian Sound-Producing Instruments. Princes Risborough: Shire Publications.

O Dreamland, 1953. Film. Lindsay Anderson.

Prynne, J.H., 2005. Poems. Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books.

Russell, C., 1999. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham, London: Duke University Press.

Sound System Scratch, Lee Scratch Perry. Pressure Sounds, 2010.

Stein, G., 1998. Tender Buttons. New York: Dover Publications.

Steyerl, H., 2010. A Thing Like You and Me. [online] Available at <http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/134>[Accessed 13 October 2011].

Still Life, 1997. Video. Harun Farocki.

Terrace of Unintelligibility, 1985. Video. Phill Niblock and Arthur Russell.

Cornelius Cardew: Treatise, Oren Ambarchi/Keith Rowe. Planam, 2010.

The Diamond, 2008. Film. Emily Wardill.

Toop, D., 1995. Ocean of Sound. London: Serpent’s Tail.

Traces to Nowhere, Episode Two of Twin Peaks, Lynch/Frost Productions, Republic Pictures and CBS Television Distribution, 1990.

Untrue, Burial. Hyperdub, 2007.

Wardill, E. and White, I., 2010. We are Behind. London and Amsterdam: Bookworks and de Appel.

Wave the Ocean, Wave the Sea: Alan Lomax’s “Southern Journey” 1959-60. Mississippi Records, 2010.

The Exterior:

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.

Soft Artefacts:

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. It’s pointed. I mean obviously a knife is, but this has a particularly cruel tip. It’s 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.

I have only seen these images as a digital rip downloaded from ubuweb. The colours are warped and granular, pulled apart by countless transfers. Light is like carving, describing the topography of the visible from the occluded. This particular setup brings to mind some of the display mechanisms at the Wereld Museum in Rotterdam, where 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. Its 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.

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. I intuitively recall an experience. 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.

The function of a knife is to cut something, to separate and divide a material. To resist, to distance and make plastic. The function of the key is to enable entrance, to allow access and proximity to a interior space, to be absorbed. This is how control works. 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.

Still from Interface

He watches footage of himself in an earlier film (Inextinguishable Fire), his own image doubling. 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 the image. In other scenes, he taps a button next to an image of a roman sculpture, describing the weights of limbs that cause its interpretation in sculptural form, he watches footage of a wave machine with his hands on his thighs. 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.

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 in an altered state (if we trace 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 would mean to privilege the immediate affect of what is present, not instinctively distancing oneself from it. The stolid and distant image-object must now be chewed, to stand any chance of being digested.

The lights go off on this small event. An awkward pause. We inevitably begin thinking about food and chores. Grudgingly, we follow down the aisle to the nearest 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. On 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.

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 ultimately immaterial. It is plural and promiscuous, can pass by unacknowledged. And 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 (affect). 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 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’, something designed only to look sexy in reproduction; a laboratory experiment in the trance of its ends. Making, the physical, become irrelevant. The hands just position for the lens. This has its origins in images created for scientific testing, controlling an intrinsically variable phenomena to establish a rule, “…to separate signal from noise in order to produce the ‘interpreted image’” . And thereby delineating the boundaries of a subject.

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.

The light fades on this sishyphean primping. It goes black, then comes up again. 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. 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, severe humorous, arbitrary. A quaint and savage tea party. A man and a woman float between crudely made bargain bought textures and shapes. Demeanours from one moment to the next, play dead or disaffected, hysterical and plaintive. Lying amongst the layers of fabric, queasy and stoned, warping colours, edges of vision. A tortured plastic doll together chewed legs maniacally. Leisurely pause to smoke. Nose painted blue-black, rosette on his head, she swallowed by cellophane, pretty bored. Behaving like a clam, opening and shutting the shiny stuff, face smirking when open.

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. Heidigger, in his slightly wacko text ‘What is a Thing’ , talks about the origins of the word ‘thing’ being in a situation, not in the state of a pure object (before the whole thing, the text that is, demonstratively dissolves into a cosmic riff in its end coda). 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, need to contaminate each other (as with the scientific accident that led to the discovery of penicillin ) to seek imperfections in the physical and social translations that occur.

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 should break their planes , should overlap and inhabit each other, and stop denouncing their distances and enforcing their borders, to become sensual again, to rub on each other, to concede desire and rejoice in their manipulable states within, or as, an 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. 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, must not be denied.

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 should 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 sensual, not determinate, not dualistic. The physical opposite (as the mods would have it) of the object must be added to this composition: the voice. How does it begin? In tongues, in vernacular, in song.