Edmund Cook (UK)

DESCRIPTION

Persona: fictional experience/personalised self-own allusions and memories. (the zone/virtual) The I EMERGES. Acknowledgement of group???- a we. Story flow. Levels of disorientation.

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 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, 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. It’s almost not there, at such a low frequency. But it holds things together, 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. I remember being on the beach with some friends, we had taken a liquid form of mushrooms procured from an eccentric Swedish man. The sand began to feel like the surface of the moon, purple lights and diamond like shapes appeared on the horizon. Things began to feel a bit more menacing, so I tried to get back to my room to try and lie down. This took a long time, as I stumbled inelegantly through the interior garden of the beach huts 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, expanding and contracting.

4

The lights go off on this small event. An awkward pause. No image, just black. Inevitably, I begin thinking about my eating plans for later, and a to do list for the immediate future. Then the minutiae of personal interactions that happened that day. People’s positions, insinuations of words already spoken start to rotate slowly. I wonder, absent mindedly, what the rest of the group are thinking. We follow down the aisle to the nearest glow of light. There is another clearing that breaks through two lines of boxes. Two men are adjusting an arrangement of cardboard shapes on a stand to create a certain composition. One by one, they replace the pieces with slices of cheese with holes in them. While they touch the cheese, drum beats begin to trigger and ricochet, Whump Crack Fsssssss gradually gaining in volume, attempting to find a rhythm together. Another man emerges from the right and proceeds to adjust the angle of the largest 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 for closer inspection and says that, yes, it’s definitely too high. The other man who is now outside of the light seems irritated, and replies that it needs to be centred. They eventually agree that the whole setup might look really good, rather unenthusiastically. The stand rotates, we can now see the cheese is almost, but not quite, in the shape of a bow tie. All of a sudden the objects and the stand disappear, as if they were a photoshop layer added in behind the guys. They are now all that’s left, continuing to make tiny nonsensical movements with their bodies, like mime artists with ambiguous phrases. This reminds me…

5 The light fades to black, then whips up again like a curtain to reveal a fathomless swirl of layers and volumes, a mixture of bodies and objects in flux, on slanting, irregular trajectories. The dimensions of the space swell and contract, planes and framing and focus dissolve.

no foreground no background no privileged position

Everything is mushed together, a paste. Actions become interminable.

It’s really a bit nauseating, my stomach swells and grips, as if preparing to force vomit up. I worry if i should run off to avoid spewing on the others, but the feeling subsides.

Two characters (or bodies at least) begin to surface in this slippery vision rubble, their silhouettes forming boundaries. Textures and surfaces begin to connote, crudely made or bargain bought tea party paraphenalia, cheap fabrics and squishy rubbish, quaint and savage. They over or under act, camp ham numb void, at any one moment their demeanour switches severe humorous arbitrary. Playing dead disaffected hysterical plaintive.

lie they amongst the layers of fabric queasy stoned warping colours in 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 crumbled cartoon face sticky hair incantations sucked backwards to the top corner of the room.

Link?

6

It’s suddenly got really dark in here again. We can here something coming from near where the huge roof high shelves start. We shuffle over, exchanging timid glances. We hear a comforting echo of strings bump along as we move nearer. From the darkness we see a stubbly, pitted chin bobbing 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, body and instrument move in and out of visibility. They become one object. 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 aeeyeah 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 it changes everytime a tiny drip of red light on the face

          where the lions go ye-ay where the firemen go 

now inceasingly rich and enunciated answers me answers me ancest me dala doah da

The scene and sound clouds over and fades. My attention is drawn by low voices, seemingly emanating from a nearby half-open cardboard box to our left.

‘What…are…you…thinking...about?’

(As if the words are foreign to his mouth)

‘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?’

REFLECTION

Persona: didactic lecturer to drooling instinctive idiot

SOFT ARTEFACTS

I have only seen this a digital rip. The colours are warped and granular, pulled apart by countless transfers, layers of light readings aggregated. ______________________ Light is like carving, describing the topography of the visible and 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 are suspended by metal arms that 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 placed in the middle of the room as contemplative islands, 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. To reconsider self and other, through a tiny attempt at a present moment. The stolid and distant image-object is chewed, to be digested rather than wedged in an awkward position. garbled and distant images, repopulated and rembodied by our voices and approximations.

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 a tautology invisible object. Something immanently physical, but utterly immaterial. It is plural and promiscuous, can pass by and through unacknowledged. Maybe it can loosen things up a bit, unhinge this thing and source.

Percussion is the most sharpened, unavoidable and explicitly durational, that separates things into tangible segments, creates a loop, a consistency. 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. In a state of potential.

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. A realm where objects float free from their sources.

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. 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, 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.

Lets:

smudge hard edges, let  subjects and objects break their planes , overlap and inhabit each other, work against distances,  become sensual again, rub on each other, play, concede desire, rejoice in manipulable states within and without of the 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, speculation, reanimation. 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 (images or objects in a functionalised, artefactual condition) 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 messed 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 they could be domesticated 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. Where does the voice begin? In noises, tongues, 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 cared how incomprehensible, nonsensicial or traumatising the lyrics are. Language gets taken away form itself, charges it, but can still come back round and synchronise with the sensible. 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 life. 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.