User:Aitantv/j o u r n a l

30.12.22

What about the travel film from Bibi and Bobo - shot in 1952 - was accompanied by a voiceover describing in exact detail the goings on of the movie - or directing the movie. Then in a second uncreative writing experiment a screenplay accompanies the film of Talia's wedding. What would the text be adding? What is omitted in the process of screenplay becoming film? The frame holds all that information we take for granted. The video could have a side panel detailing exactly what is happening on screen. I see it as green text on a black backdrop. It rolls in time with the action. This is all to make clear that the documentary is at every point an exercise in framing and directing. Nothing can be taken for granted.

I'm back home now after the christmas family trip. It was an intense ride. I welled up while scanning through the family archives. I photographed pictures of the pictures for fear of losing the special ones in the heaps of celluloid negatives and large glossy prints from the 90s.

There's also an interest in transcripting the interviews i made with mum, bellz, sapir, and dad. these could interact with the thesis. i want the thesis to be an interactive document - not just text running from a > z. The chapter i just read in Kenneth Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing is especially helpful in engaging with different modes of address, contrasting writing conventions such as transcritpion, subtitling, screenwriting, prose, essay.

I want to get the zoom 8Qn but I'm afraid of the poor image quality. Yet the superior sound quality will surely pay off. & the freedom it will give this project is undeniable. Freedom v image quality. Freedom v 'cinematic'look.

13.01.23

Yesterday I had a meeting with Tingyi to discuss a transdisciplinary collaboration on a performance art-meets-film project and watched an Ed Atkins interview. Both centered around the role of representation. The camera only gives a partial view, where as theatre is exposed (at leats the audience-facing side). With a long lens the director edits what the audience can see effectively cropping and zooming in on elements of the action. Theatre audiences, in contrast, choose their own focal point. CGI and Cinema hold the promise of making dreams become a reality. Atkins, by making melancholic figures in desperately abject worlds - he describes his figues void of life - sees his animations process as a rebellion against blockbuster image making economies. This explains his video of the rolling credits with animated 3D figures stumbling into eachother. He's defacing the slick, productive, narrative-driven moving image we're saturated with.

I'm becoming more interested in the form over the content. How can the form itself deal with this research into food, identity, diaspora? It could be so simple and totally void of content as we're used to experiencing it.

I'm going on a social media detox right now. I couldn't delete instagram. I could only intervene with some artificial barriers to entry like storing the app buried within several sub-folders and blocking the app from operating with mobile data. We use gastronomic language to speak about content platforms - feed, consumption, ingestion, digestion. There's something in this. The consumption of banal imagery, the quotidian, the superficial avatars that represent us in social media spaces.

Recently I wrote screenplays of three of my video works: OOO (2020), Commander (2020), and Third Rock (2022). It felt oddly pleasing to concisely describe the blow-by-blow happenings in each scene. It also felt like a futile pointless exercise. The films already exist so why bother writing a screenplay post-release? The exercise seemed to suggest that even casual accidents can seem causal and intentional if provided with a convincing enough framework. The solidity of how a scene is structured can capture those accidents and make them seem designed. Alternatively accidents can be built into the design in order to perforate the solidity or control of the frame.

16.01.23

Host, hostile, hospice, hospitality. I'm sick and achey. Ik ben griep (I have flu). After bartending at murmur, a listening bar in Amsterdam Noord, I cycled home with my still-damp clothes from a day of soggy weather. I thought I was perfectly warm, but it turns out and I was too exposed to the elements. I got a frightful chill last night and could't stop shaking.

[Watsapp, 16/01/23]

Daniel Dc (12:45): How are you today?? ~Aitan~ (14:29): Oh I feel awful haha ~Aitan~ (14:29): Super achey and slow and cold ~Aitan~ (14:29): Must have been the cold and the rain Daniel Dc (14:43): Shiiii Daniel Dc (14:43): Do you have chicken soup! ~Aitan~ (14:44): No I don't ~Aitan~ (14:44): My wife should really be simmering a bouillon and rubbing my toes Daniel Dc (14:44): Yes!! Daniel Dc (14:44): Yes!! Daniel Dc (14:45): But she's out earning money? ~Aitan~ (14:47): 'Bringing home the bacon' she claims but she spends it all on snail serum and mulberry bags ~Aitan~ (14:47): 'Bringing home the bacon' she claims but she spends it all on snail serum and mulberry bags Daniel DC (14:48): xDxDxD

The expectation (and longing) to be cared for by my girlfriend is both real and hallucinatory. The desire to be looked after, waited on hand and foot, is a reflex from hospitality work. There was a point during my bar shift on Saturday night where my hip flexers were crumbling, the soles of my feet were perforated, my sweaty brow had been mopped one too many times. This form of labour isn't amounting to anything more meaningul, an intellectual or creative outcome - it's a paycheck accounted for by the hours accrued. When hospitality is not reciprocated - when it's contractual and performed in exchange for money - what happens to the emotional well-being of the host?

I think of my grandmothers - on both the Iranian Sephardic and the Eastern-European Ashkenasi side - and how they worked tirelessly at their stoves with no expecatation of reciprocity. They would never be waited on hand and foot by their husbands. They would chop, dice, mix, blend, fry, roast, pound, kneed, bake, and serve, without any one taking a moment to reciprocate. Both these women - now ancient fossils - sit waiting to be nursed in Jewish old age homes mostly for demented and Alzeheimer's 'residents'. After decades of service to their families and communities, they now live in an altered perpetual present with no autonomy. They are incapable of serving. Their value has depreciated. They sit, wait and decay. After decades of service there is no graduation celebration, no golden retirement package. They sit, wait, and decay.

18.01.23

We had a natural wine tasting at work last night. I considered it a social event, a chance to bond with my fellow hospitality drones. It was actually a training event. On the one hand for us, as bartenders or waiters, to gain some valuable cultural capital that would impress customers and surely company and dinner parties. On the other for us to be able to push the product better: enthusiasm = sales.

I sat there feeling warn down and crusty from a chill I'd caught over the weekend. I was desparately hungry after a day of assembling versions of hypothetical video installations at art school with whatever material we had available. I managed to sneak out for a quick bite at the market, the ritual gozlomeh, a stuffed turkish flat bread stuffed with feta and spinach, wrapped around shredded salad, garlic sauce, and sambal. An attempt to squeeze moments of satisfaction and gastronomic satiation in the cracks of a routine day.

Learning, generating, innovating, mediating, selling. These steps in the artistic process require a level of self-sacrifice, offering your labour to a hungry spectator. But how hungry is the audience? Is there appetite for media spoiled by the abundance of memes, clips, tiktoks, tweets, posts, emojis, pirated films in UHD availabe on openly clandestine streaming websites, or the assembly line of high-budget programming and films neatly packaged by congolomerate serial streaming giants Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV, Disney+, etc. What to do with all this content? Can film return to a prelapsarian state, a more precious, poetic, subtle form? Is it redundant to romanticise the medium? Is it better to reflect the times and make something that parodies the attention economy we're competing with? If there is a battle between art and media, the media world couldn't care less.

19.01.23

Consume. Ingest. Expunge. Digest. Gastronomical vocabulary bares a striking resemblance to media terminology. Processed/Unprocessed; Cut/Uncut. I still speak of video in sensual, physical terms, e.g., 'the image is warm or grainy', perhaps as a celluloid legacy. Yes, videography or filmmaking can be a sensual, physical collaboration, a dance between cinematographer and subject. But video cameras are also tombs for a semblance of reality compressed into digital data. The media stored on my precious SD cards can be deleted, reformatted, with a single tap of my index finger on my cameras touch screen interface. There's a strange illusion at play. The representation of, for example, a grilled cheese burger in a brioche bun, is seductive, and may even trigger a guteral response, a hunger for steamy red meat. But the illusion ends on the surface - you can't smash through the digital billboard at a bus stop on a dreary sunday afternoon and grab that succulent, juicy patty.

Behind my digital moving images are millions of pixels, based on streams of code. Video is data, RAW uncompressed megabites that require storage on harddives I have trouble affording. I can't eat this hardware, nor the data stored inside. But still gastronomic vocabulary lends itself to film. Directors can be thought of as chefs, selecting ingredients, balancing flavours, getting the proportions right, choosing key collaborators to finally frame or plate the outcome. Gastronomic films are a genre onto themselves, and there are many I love ('The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover,Tampopo,' 'Jiro Dreams of Sushi').

As I write about food in front of a cold blue ASUS monitor, my girlfriend prepares a putanesca pasta in the kitchen. The smell of garlic, onion, anchovie, capers and tomatoe, is reducing to a thick, rich sauce that will coat salty lunguini. Grated parmesan, fresh parsely, a drizzle of olive oil, and freshly ground black pepper are added when serving. Something so full of life as raw ingredients is processed, diced, reduced, fried, essentially obliterated for our gastronomic pleasure. Food achieves its final death in our acidic stomachs. Life is captured on camera, and a trace is translated. Sometimes this trace is so potent - a distillation of emotion and energy - that life on the silver screen becomes larger than life.

26.01.23

26.01.23, 14:10, Amsterdam, overcast slushy grey sky

Today I do the laundry (to assist with J's domestic duties, which she currently finds overbearing). I assemble the IKEA drying rack next to our bed - the side-car to our dream wagon. Delicately I separate J's synthetic underwear from the heavy duty cotton briefs, hipster slogan t-shirts, tattered denim, polyester suit trousers, sweat stained oxford shirts, bobbly woolen socks. As I handle the black frilly underwear with my fingertips I catch glimpses of period blood, sex, desire, penetration, mixing in with the soapy alkaline smell of non-bio detergent. I resume thrashing the garments open (to release the wrinkles in the fabric induced by the washing machine) before folding them over the parallel rods of the drying rack. This meditative service to J, myself, the couple, feels at once like triumph and bitter submission. How have I come to occupy the precious hours of my days with mundane domestic tasks? I should be creating. I should be thrashing out ideas, materialising concepts, in the studio. I fantasise about the international modernist avant garde - Joseph Beuys, Nam-June Paik, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Maria Lassnig, Louise Bourgeois - starving in their studio, feeding off of nothing but inspiration, materalising iconic ironic sardonic works that simultaneously defile and dictate the taste of the art establishment.

I search for my inner singular genius, but I see a shrivelling loner transmitting text through a gaming laptop onto as ASUS wide screen, partially blinded by the white pixels refracting through my prescription glasses. I make films for a hypothetical audience that may or may not materialise based on the marketing, credibility, allure, urgency, timeliness, aesthetic and immersive quality, of some relevantly titled group show that chimes with the political leanings of the latest trends in contemporary art. I attempt to feed this audience with content that's compelling and mediated in a novel form. All the while I feed myself - literally - with costly supermarket food which is burning a hole in my freelance revenue stream, a hole that expands and contracts with a singed circumference, the embers of which will never be extinguished. Human hunger is a capitalist dependency. It's practically impossible to shake in the urban milieu. I'm all for urban subsistence and farming, but I can't subsist off of turnips harvested from a 1-square meter balcony.

In Berger's critical assessment of the life and works of Picasso, he notes the disjunction between labour and livelihood experienced by the industrial tertiary worker. "For peasants, work is a continuous response to a natural cycle – so that work can be equated with a whole man’s life. For an industrial proletariat their work, their labour is what they sell in order, having worked, to buy the means to live." (Berger 1980) The separation between labour (artistic, intellectual, manual, reproductive, domestic) and the means of survival (food, shelter, sanitation, medicine, community) turns work into an act of speculation. Berger continues, "For the proletariat, work, therefore, is equated with paying a ransom to the future. The increased division of labour in industry encouraged the same way of thinking. Each job only made sense at a later stage." (Berger 1980) As a freelancer, I adapt to different economic roles to sustain my artistic practice, a safe space of poetic deliberation and practice. Money generated as a bartender, camera-for-hire, or commerical director, feeds the hungry artist who is doomed to starve unless his work gains commercial or institutional recognition. I am hosting a hypothetical audience at all times. My artisitic labour is a ransom, credited by freelance work, that will hopefully 'make sense at a later stage'.

It is unlikely that my artistic output will, in economic terms, 'make sense at a later stage'. It will not balance itself financially. A poetic or ethical balance sheet is required to justify artistic labour. The satisfaction of a spectator connecting with the work. I don't believe my artistic work will feed me. As part of a carefully devised eco-system - consisting of a variety of commercially rewarded 'creative' labour - my space for artistic expression is protected.

• Berger, J (1980) The Success and Failure of Picasso. Pantheon, New York. (Download: https://archive.org/details/successfailureof0000berg)

29.01.23

Amsterdam, Grey Mushy Sky

Holocaust Memorial Day 2023. HMD'23. Hmmmmm dat day of commemoration. We gather in swathes at this park with a large technical team broadcasting the procession proceedings to the soggy Dutch nation. The cold calcifies my bones as the soppy violin transmits trembles to the crowd. We want to mourn, a collective wale. Our image is reflected back at us on the LARGE LED screen. A multi-cam TV broadcast is being edited before our eyes: A-CAM punch in a bit on the wrinkly sad eyes of this H survivor; B-CAM sweeping gib dolly zoom, pull focus from pebbles on H monument shattered glass panel installation, each of six panels presumably quantifying 1 millions Jewish persons who were abducted, transported, stripped, hosed, shaved, worked, fed, laboured, dead. The whole thing is a big BIG splendid show and it makes me feel strangely PROUD. But I also wanted a mishmash of folk, all the folk that were trampled on and exterminated by NAZI death machine. What if we were all here - all these colors - gays, queers, Roma, triangles, stars, disabled all here, like a 'Where's Waldo'cartoon - in this park, under this big dreary tree I feel stands for something. The grey slushy sky is suitably sombre and perfectly silhouettes this droopy, haunting tree which I feel stands for something. Is it a sort of tomb for many souls (that I never met) but whose eyes I keep seeing in the contemplative gazes around me.

My feet are cramping up, legs wearing thin, shoulders crunching. I huddle with J, we're huddling in the cold. It feels like some sort of intentional masochism. We huddle together like a pack of penguins like the H prisoners huddled. Once a H survivor came to my primary school and told us the best place to be was in the middle. If waiting for a ladel of soup (stock with some putrid chunks of potato) you waited in the middle of the line/pack, that way whichever end they started on you had a chance of a bit of grub. The hunger is horror. If left in the cold as a punishment over night, the concentration camp prisoners swarmed to the middle of the pack. The pack would circulate and swarm towards the middle to keep warm. In the centre was a nugget of hospitality. On the periphery you're exposed to the brutal elements. On your own on the periphery, the artist needs to clamber towards the centre, to recognise his (my) limitations. Become part of the pack, find the warmth at the center, survive.

Black coffee made earlier this morning dropped in temperature to tepid, now 900w 01:13 in the microwave, its dewy vapours fog up the top half of the glass. The earthy brown muddy metallic ionised brew oily slick down my throat keeps me buzzed through and through so I can keep nattering on this LCD. This monitor my score. This pane, this tablet, live feedback loop between mind, finger tapping, (soul) oily brew. I'm loving it. This can work. What if I were to fast once/week. The absence of food? There was always Yom Kippur growing up, the annual fast day. This was a thorough chiseling of the inside asophogus all the way through to the rectum. A tightening, like that phase 20minutes into an athletic sesh when your abdominal muscles are tort and keeping your muscles limber, fluid, choppy. The absence of food, an aesthetic sharpening, heightened senses, can see more clearly, strangely satiating. Become the void, being empty, instead of rushing to load the gullet, guzzling calories only to sit to tap tap away at the shiny reflective panes. Feeding a disassociated body, feeding only on cue, because it's scheduled like a googlehangout. Not eating for the sake of physical exertion or labour (okay a little yoga, swim, or jog around the park). Feeding because it's necessary, it's scheduled, right? Feeding a disassociated body to support a brain soul finger tapping mechanism proselytising out to the screen.

07.02.23

The possibility the impossibility of translating an others experience.

08.02.23

08.02.23, 21:58, Amsterdam, jet black sky

I experienced Steve McQueens multi-channel cinematic installation Sunshine State, at the Depot. Every detail lined up perfectly. It's a personal work, the narration relying on a story McQueen's father Philbert told him on his death bed; a story about coming from the West Indies to pick oranges in Florida in the 1930s, and having a racist confrontation which almost led to his death. It's a universal work, the image of the sun, the giant red star with all its explosive streams of solar gases, appearing twice during the loops accompanied by immense sub-bassy sonic rumbles. The sun at once a reference to 'the sunshine state', Florida, the incident of the crime, the lynching of Philbert's two friends, and human fragility, vulnerability, mortality. "Shine on me, SHINE, SHINE, SHINE, shine on me Sunshine state," utters McQueens in a humming prayer. In dialogue with the monumental cosmic metaphor of the sun, is the first black-and-white 'talkie' ever made, The Jazz Singer (1927), in which Al Jolson plays a struggling entertainer, Jack Robin, who after running away from his Jewish family becomes a Jazz singer performing in blackface. Through visual effects and color reversal techniques, as Jack applies black polish to his hair and skin, he is physically erased from the film; becoming black is erasure from history, the archive, the white social structure.

I couldn't deny my double discomfort in witnessing a Jewish character-actor performing (appropriating) and erasing blackness. It's interesting to consider whether Warner Bros. considered this on-screen atrocity acceptable because it's enacted by a Jew: 'Well Jew's aren't exactly white so maybe...uhh...I guess that works'. Or was this trope so familiar that it went unquestioned. It makes me consider Jewishness and how fraught identity is. There is no singular entity that can be defined as the Jews. There are many Jews who all perform Jewishness in a spectrum of (sometime conflicting) ways. I come from many countries, but it doesn't mean I have access to all these cultures, languages, codes. There is no 'black people', 'the Jews', 'the Arabs', 'the Muslims'. Each of these singularities subsumes a set of multiplicities and infinite sub-categories there-in.

I can shapeshift - I can get through the doors of a mosque or a synagogue or a kebab shop or turkish supermarket after getting hammered in a club the night before without a trace - but only to an extent. There are constraints on what I can get away with - although perhaps Jews are able to test those boundaries better than most given the often delocalised, diasporic and nomadic history that comes with the territory (or lack there of). What about Isreal? There's a mapped out clearly defined borderland that is (un)disputable. That definitely complicates matters. How can you claim nomadism, ethnic minority-victim- post-holocaust status when you have a gleaming empire in the navel of the middle east glaring back at you. Even the term middle east is a British colonial export. It's all so fucking riddled with explosives you have to tread very delicately.

23.02.23

23.02.23, 12:39, Amsterdam, light-gray paper-thin overcast

I encounter Sokurov's ELEGY TO A VOYAGE (2001) during Etienne Kalos' essay film seminar. There are three ways Sokurov appears in this revelatory travel log steeped in doubt and uncertainty: from behind, as when he lays down to sleep; partially, such as his feet drifting through the snow or his hand reaching out to touch a leaf; or in the distance in a wide frame, a black silhouette against a concrete cityscape or a bright white frosty field. His voiceover narration is grounded in the "I". I've been running away from the first-person singular while making my film PARASITE BY PROXY (2023). I created a dialectic between HOST and PARASITE, an oppositon to create tension or friction, push and pull. I play both these CHARACTERS and keep them distinct. For the film to work - to speak an expansive language, to move beyond the frame, to hint to the eternal - I need to firstly be honest. Fiction doesn't need to be manufactured. The film I'm making doesn't require a protagonist and antagonist, good and evil, to rely on pre-conceived opposing archetypes; HOST/PARASITE. The act of hitting record - suspending chronological time for the duration of a take - is a performance. Each time digital footage is accumulating, reality is being extracted and contained.

There are fears, doubts, questions, emotions, blind-spots, assumptions, and ignorance at play in accessing my history. I write about embodying the hungry, disenfranchised, displaced, diasporic Jewish artist, but I have never known inescapable hunger or thirst. Hunger has only been self-inflicted on Yom Kippur, the ritual fast, the day of atonement, a rite of passage, for 25 hours each year I don't eat or drink to embody the angelic state, to get closer to God. But am I being an angel or a ghost? I commune with Jewish people in hunger, in the knowledge that a feast awaits the end of the fast. After restraining from earthly delights - oily fats, syrupy sugars, milky cheese, pickled vegetables, citrus fruits, glutenous bread, tart wine - and experiencing absence, abstenance, negation, void, I can devour the contents of my larder.

Hiding/revealing, hunger/feeding, other/self - these dialectics are in me. I incorporate self and Other. I have been othering my self, smoothing over inconsistencies, and contradictions. But I am these things. I acknowledge the competing elements that compose my being. Becoming is my former method: becoming host, parasite, insider, outsider, alien, foreigner. These are guises, characters, or masks that separate pieces of my identity into disparate performative entities. Instead I propose one body, one being - me, I, self - which contains these contradictory elements. I am native/foreigner, imperialist/alien, host/parasite. I am hungry and full.

27.02.23

Amsterdam, 15:39, bright with puffy clouds

I stumble through this jewish cemetery. The dry weeds crunch underfoot. Half of these headstones are delapidated or recovered from the turf. Who are all these folk down under? it's strangely rural here... a break from the concrete controlled dutch urban surface...

there's this data center looming over us.... Equinix...equinix... "a digital gateway to Europe" they claim, "the most cloud-dense network offering low-latency connectivity to the rest of the world".... The information oils the machines inside. The servers are full of hums of fascination. They rifle through my content, preserving it, containing it in the cloud. I'm in the cloud so I can't see it.... That explains the mist over everything... the haze, the distance from the people I'm trying to resurrect.

12.03.23

Crypto Jews hiding their religion in plain sight...Like the Conversos, Marranos, in Spain during the spanish inquisition. Their were Jews and Muslims who converted to Christianity. Well in Mashad, there were Jews who converted to Islam, but kept quietly doing their thing; quiet as mice.

This is my story - according to oral histories. But look at their neck ties. They look pretty well to do. They're not practicing in underground networks. "Hiding babies under black chadors, to keep their children in the dark". Here is a beautiful family portrait. Here is a legacy. Here I am, speaking to you, narrating this illustrious history.

I can hold on to this trauma, feeling entitled to grieve . Or I can mourn, feel the pain, bury the misery, and empathise with others. We all have a wound to suture. Who are today's conversos? Who's hiding in plain sight? Is it you? It's not me. I've never had to hide. I take poll position. I have never faced poverty, insecurity... I want for nothing. I have barely suffered. I haven't physically suffered. Only internally (imaginary?) angst. Playing victim. Paying victim.

I'm making this stew to conjure my Persian ancestors - the ones that hid their religion. A ghost is a soul without a body. This stew is their body. I make these ghosts corporeal to deal with my inherited pain OR... to inflate my marginality, for career growth, better prospects. I'm not marginal. I'm central. This is my stage, my spotlight. You are listening, if you are still there, beyond the screen. Perhaps I lost you when I stopped being the displaced wandering Jew, the Jew of color? Is that off-color. Does this stream work?

This thickly layered stew (with all my ancestors nose hairs floating around) I know you can't eat it, but I will eat it. At the end of this film I'll feed myself. The stew is a sort of transsubstatiation. A christian process. Like those dry wafers in the church, how they literally become Jesus. This stew actually becomes my ancestors - let's say my great Grandmother (this one) - this stew is her. So at the end, when I eat the stew, I eat her.... So I'm a cannibal. No it's auto-cannibalism because it's like I'm eating myself - all the parts - the nose hairs, the lungs, kidneys, intestines, ribs, ear, nose, nail, lips, tongue - I gobble it all up - my great Grandmother, Leah Davidoff, I gobble her all up... So now her soul lives somewhere in me. So she is not a ghost (a soul without a body). She is made flesh in me. So I am my grandmother and me - I'm an incest baby autocannibal 'oh and I'm an alien' because aliens are actually cool and I'm not (quite) from here - I'm a 'stranger in a strange land'....

+ Heterogenous - What if the visual is me hiding, finding different ways to blend in, while the VO explores all these tangents?