User:Aitantv/maca2023

30.09.23

Amsterdam, Apartment 111-3, jet black

Feed On ME - Event, MACA Residency

• 'A night of auto-ethnographic film, edible culture, & digestable discoure'
• elements: PbP (2023), artist lecture, live cooking performance, presentation of The Green Book
• 18:00 - doors open + drinks (or later? avoid the foody thing? keep it tea and baclava)
• 18:30 - artist lecture, screening, green book, game

Guestlist

• MACA community
• IHA - Renzo, Janke, Nikki, Joyce, David
• LBM - Cihad, David, Leslie + Leslie mailing lists + LB2 watsapp groups, etc.
• Murmur crowds
• Freerk + Hoekstras + Family Guestlist
• Film crew team etc.
• Programmers: Sarah Dawson (IDFA), Koen de Roeij (IFFR)
• Photographer (Garvan? + 28mm)

PbP (2023) + Artist Lecture

• green light on audience at all times - so always a feeling of surveillance, while screen is in total darkness or screen back-lit with green light
• synopsis print outs with schedule etc - single A5s.
• the lecture takes place while pot is simmering.
• need mic for PA system etc + spotlight on lecturer'
• secure permission from Renzo to use film still

Cooking

• Could have a ticketed tombola game. People are given green ticket stubs at the door. Numbers are later picked out of a hat and announced to collect their bowl of food. Once the food runs out, you're stuffed. Let's play: 'who's hungry?'.
• Artist is doing Q&A, meanwhile number is being announced and food dished out in a passive-aggressive manner - a little like a detention centre
• Why the game? Everyone is equal. But some people are more equal than others. Well I can't feed all of you. If I did, I'd risk becoming the starving artist - and thats not a good look. Also you've already feasted on the stew virtually (sight, sound, smell). In theory that should satiate your appetite for content.

The Green Book

• tiny manifestoe book (inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's character Jeremy Prokosh, a powerful film producer who reads philosophical platitudes out of a tiny red book. Compared to the miniature book he becomes totemic, a pretentious goliath, claiming to read from the source of all knowledge, which he contains in the breast-pocket of his gray suit. Prokosh's red book is a good metaphor for a manifestoe, a literary object which makes the beholders feel all-powerful. Manifestoes are of course written in a didactic and often dogmatic manner, designed to instruct the naive reader seeking guidance from a wisened source) x 100 copies
• could be presented in the black box - a small writing table in the middle with a green desk lamp on top - wireless speaker hidden under the desk projecting the sound?
• the reading of the green book - is a simple audio book - this could take place after the food game.

08.09.23

111-3, Sunny blue blue

when in doubt, insert the word 'function'

i collected my diploma yesterday. the official resignation of a chapter. a great accomplishement. did my family note this accomplishment? is it of value? is it worthy of consideration and praise? i don't know... i noticed they were very very forthcoming when it came to sharing their doubts, 'are you sure you want to do that?', 'but what are you going to do?', 'do you actually consider yourself a filmmaker?', 'seems a bit risky...', 'it's just so hard to make it, Jerry Seinfeld travelled to gigs in the middle of winter in Idaho in empty bars just to practice, have you got what it takes?' But not quite as interested when it comes to acknowledging thatmy art life can function.

I work at HA with RM at the helm. He's had a fruitful career. Different media become tools to allow for direct social critique, intervention, and eventually solutionism. Commentators and doubters (mainly Liberal Arty Trendy Elites who want to espouse the correct political position) take great issue with some of his work. Using plantation workers as bate to hold conglomeratres accountable for slavery and the plantation system; plantation workers as proxies, satellite craftsmen and spokespersons to create sculptures, documentaries, even museums; capitalizing, or at least generating personal income, from decolonization as a white Dutch art elitist. These fears and doubts are real. Can we trust this man? This single white figure posing as a healer, a self-espoused truthteller? It seems like an all too familiar case of white-saviour syndrome. Does the African continent need another messiah? How else should a white male artist in his 50s respons to this geography trauma zone? The need to intervene and solve is all too urgent. We cannot do the work of anti-capitalism and egalitarianism without taking urgent action.

There is a certain lethargy to the LATEs, who twiddle their thumbs on over-sized smartphones. They want to espouse the correct political position without (always) doing the difficult work of research and reckoning with their own complicity in larger systems of disempowerment, disenfranchisement, exploitation, and existential violence. I cannot rule out a solutionist attitude when peoples are being denegrated and economically enslaved due to mechaniations designed and establised by the disastrous human experiment of industrialisation and modernity. What hardship it brought to the shores of distant geographies, far removed from the centres of empire. Nordico has to live in this soiled underwear. The Global North has a debt to pay. If governments won't resolve to make reparations to colonized countries, then should an artist plug-in that function? Is it relevant to make work that only pleases the senses? Immersion, de-screen, multi-disciplinary, rhizomatic, becoming-, field recordings, 'artist-researcher', anti-white cube, these signals of woke political positionality, but how does it help?

LATEs spread across Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Paris, I'm afraid no longer want to be challenged. I hear reports from multiple colleagues in student and tutor positions in art schools that students are asking for trigger warnings before reading certain novels; that peers are hesitant to give negative feedback to one another in group crits in case it disappoints their comrades. It feels like we're shielding ourselves from the brutality of life beyond the confines of Nordico urban centres? This is a self-satisfied bean bag to perch on. Making art about sustainability - building hybrid utopia-apocalypses - as if renderings will prevent that impending mass extinction of humanity. Yesterday's presentation at V2, Rotterdam, included several works that played with the boundary between human/nature and tried to collapse the dichotomy. That a car is nature, that a robot is nature, that everthing is of this world so it is nature. But then what is synthetic? What is human innovation? Why is fracking bad? If we now abandon this dichotomy (for it is industrial legacy rhetoric) in favour of 'humanature' a symbiosis, then might we just say all our actions are of nature and natural? If everything is nature then this gaming laptop and wireless keyboard setup is also nature. So where is the problem? More manmade stuff = more nature.

• less stuffness, to dematerialise and engage
• conversation, discursive performance - flexible, timely, provocative
• let's speak about what is, not speculate what might be in a century - because we will all be obliterated
• camera as soul catcher - use with caution - fear the device
• sound as spatial - most suitable technology for meditating the dynamics of space
• drawing as methodical therapy - drawing as compositing lensing framing seeing reality anew
• pluralistic narrative strategies - horizontal cast with no discernible main protagonist - decentred dramaturgy - finding significance in every figure
• non-judgemental approach to subjects and interlocutors - sacred models and stories revealing their complexity
• voiceover recording to step out head - to hear yourself as others hear you - to make vocal archive
• the voice possesses qualities of the soul - invisible or visible the voice is still a character
• narrator as character - consider their posture in relation to time, space, and characters
• risk parasitising your film
• seed a sense of the inconsequentiality of existence
• a drawing must retain imperfections - cinema must contain imperfections

10.08.23

MACA, Overcast over-exposed

• a filmmaker makes spectators of the audience. an artist makes participants.
• do you want to look at an image or be inside an image? there's is not a discussion between flat and VR cinema. This is a levelling up of IRL over virtual.
• lets prioritise being over representation, get over the festish of objectification
• many people are comfortably atomised in non-participatory consumptive entertainment habits, i.e. VOD, social media, TV, entertainment cinema, holiday resorts, casinos, leisure centers, spas, eateries, etc. The challenge is to engage, illicit participation, turn spectators into participants. In the global north many of us have becoe too lazy and complicit in our own zombified half-baked waking life.
• the camera is an interceptor of relationships. It cuts between people. Some Kabbalists believe that the camera can see into the soul. Every frame you take extracts a piece of the soul. The camera is a soul snatcher. Do you want to steal someone's soul? Is your film worth that much?
• experiences instead of films. design experiences which may or may not be filmed. The camera (if used) must be acknowledged as an interceptor (a parasite) not an instigator of connection - not a facilitator of meaning - but an extractive technology for containing reality and interpersonal relationships.
• the cinematic frame - however wide and scoped and desqueezed or anamorphic - is always a crop/fragment/chip/flick/flake of an infinitely larger and chaotic whole. Sound as a recording system is far better equipped to deal with the temporal-spatial qualities of reality. The omnidirectional stereo recording setup is a superior method for recording a field. The cropped cinematic frame is a granular crumb of this detailed hi-fidelity sonic and spatial stereo omni-directional recording. Sound can dwell in the unknown, the 'out-of-field' and the 'visual not-seen' (Deleuze 'Time Image') and must always be acknowledged as a component of the visual image which substantiates the 'isness' of the cinematic frame with the feeling of beyondness.

R - need to research anthropology of camera (specifically anthropologists who have introduced the camera to remote peoples with unstoppable conseqeunces to culture).

W - Stranger with a Camera dir. Elizabth Baret

P - the manifestoe could take the form of Robert Bresson's 'Cinematograph' - an assemblage of divorced pointers to enrich the cinematic journey

P - does the manifestoe need to be written? Can it be sound?

I - raw materials Bruce Numan homage + Ed Atkins worm = live sound performance vocals + monotonous vocals based on hours of improvised alone time in a black box. in a time where the global north is turning in on itself and seeing guidance from the south, a new generous narcissim takes hold - ever the interior inhibited self-reflexive artist looking inwards to share with a hungry public. A false modesty/humility where the artist shyly suspends their thirst for attention behind a veiled humble posture.

• drawing as a good technique to train, untrain, retrain, the eye. To understand graphic cohesion and light/shadow. drawing requires patience and precision. you become the camera recording long shot.