Thematic-Chain Reactions

INTRODUCTION

CHAIN REACTIONS – A MACHINERY FOR NARRATIVE

Balance is most beautiful just at the point when it is about to collapse, Fischli & Weiss

Narrative is sometimes thought of as a sequence of cause and effect. But there are other ways of thinking about narrative that exploit how much it also relies on chance, risk and "tipping points". A popular modern genre is the “chain reaction”, consisting of a series of actions and reactions between objects linked in precarious and highly contrived ways. In this workshop we will explore how far we can use it as a general approach to narrative as an expression of creative uncertainty, balance and the "life of things".

We will trace its history from absurd Rube Goldberg machines, Hitchcock’s camera tracks, the work of artists such as Roman Signer, to CSI forensic plotlines, computer games conundrums and object animation. By drilling down to the illusory precise instant when forces may or may not go a certain way we explore a crisis in narrative around questions of control, contingency and historical agency. This concern with what film theorist Thomas Elsaesser has called “tipping points” ultimately connects narrative with contemporary epistemologies and anxieties ranging from how chance geological events might result in global catastrophe to the nagging worry that slightly too great a tolerance in a surveillance system might result in our face triggering a match that sets into motion a series of hostile police actions.

Some forms and sub-genres -

• The classic linear chain reaction - The Way Things Go
• Built from one particular element – domino toppling
• Rube Goldberg machines where chain performs a trivial task
• Necro non-sequitur (“Final Destination”)
• The Butterfly effect
• Problem solving in computer games
• Hierarchical – a pyramid scheme
• Trickshots (the camera can make events out of sheer noise or “failure”)

The goal of this workshop is to challenge assumptions about the Chain Reaction genre, that it must be:

• linear
• autonomous (self-propelled)
• mechanical
• meaningless (non-representational)

Over these three days we will work to produce plans, tests, prototypes and other practical works that try to push the chain reaction form artistically, technologically and conceptually beyond its assumptions. At the end of the third day we will each (or in groups) present what we've made.

Pre-reading

Please read this essay before the workshop begins.

Tales of epiphany and entropy: paranarrative worlds on youtube, Thomas Elsaesser. (In: Warren Buckland (ed), "Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies", Routledge, 2009)

Link here with pictures: https://mindthescreen.wordpress.com/2015/09/29/tales-of-epiphany-and-entropy-para-narrative-worlds-on-youtube/

Or pdf here: File:Tales of Epiphany & Entropy – Elsaesser.pdf

Elsaesser uses the phenomenon of “chain reaction” films to articulate the modern condition of risk and “tipping points”, such as ecological or financial. At the end he tries to extend this mode to describe how you stumble your way through networks.

Optional: “La Ronde”, Arthur Schnitzler, 1897. (script) Early modern example of a narrative constructed through a sequence of lovers meeting before one moves on to another liaison, eventually returning to the first character like a loop. Still very readable and open to many interpretations, although I like what it could say about an endless, possibly futile seriality in modern human relationships.

Resources

For classic domino toppling, this site has lots of tips. Based in Utrecht and linked to the Dutch Domino Day.

http://www.dominodomain.com/tips-tricks

Purdue University, host to world Rube Goldberg Competition, “Time Machine” - “a comically involved, complicated invention, laboriously contrived to perform a simple operation”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xdPDn1KUz_A

For materials visit the scrap foundation in Rotterdam! (It's cheap and run by a nice lady called Monique. Behind the train station, Zomerhofstraat 71, 3032 CK Rotterdam). “SCRAP (Foundation for the creative reuse of waste products)... sells industrial waste and residual materials to institutions, schools, artists and individuals.”

http://www.stichtingscrap.nl

The Blaak open air market is Europe's longest street market and has a junk section. It is open on Saturdays and Tuesdays, 8am – 5pm, on the Binnenrotte from Blaak station. (Saturdays may have more non-food stalls).

“Piekfijn” is a second-hand shop around the corner from the market in Mariniersweg. http://www.rotterdam.nl/voorziening:piekfijn_centrum

Pei Zwart may have some basic micro-controller components like arduinos, motors, Processing software...

For basic arts and crafts materials there is also the school store at WDKA.

SCHEDULE

MONDAY

10:00 – 13:00 INTRODUCTION

• Screening: “The Way Things Go”, Fischli and Weiss, 30 mins, 1987.
• Discussion: What are the Poetics of the Chain Reaction form? What is its fascination?
• Screening: “Honda Cog” advert, 2003.
• Discussion (class text): Tales of epiphany and entropy: paranarrative worlds on youtube by Thomas Elsaesser. His description of the “constructive instability of performed failure”.
• Examples of chain reaction performances, fictionalised, animation and algorithmic animation, collective action, micro elements, forsensics, media systems.
• Where does it start? How should it end? How to represent it?

13:00 – 14:00 LUNCH

14:00 – 15:00 WORKSHOP

• The goals of the workshop - to challenge the assumptions of the Chain Reaction genre.
• Remember: how to draw the line between “nerdy ingenuity and artistic erudition”?
• Remember: the chain is not enough – you must feel the tipping points, the “poetics of performed failure”.
• Some possibly useful resources and suggestions.

15:00 – 18:00 WORKSHOP

Notes

“Causality in these films operates at the familiarly middle-level and within human proportions. Rooted in Newtonian physics, the makers celebrate a visible, tangible world, fast disappearing into invisibility at both ends of the scale (at the macro-astronomic as well as at the micro-sub-atomic level), but also a linear causality vanishing in the media in which we encounter their work: the Internet and YouTube are, precisely, non-linear and rhizomatic.”

“I understand the term “constructive instability” first in its most literal form, namely as the property of an artefact, constructed and built for the purpose of drawing maximal use from the processes engendered when it collapses or self-destructs.” Thomas Elsaesser.

TUESDAY

10:00-11:00 STORY-TELLING, FACT AND FICTION

• Discussion: Is narrative similar to a chain reaction of cause and effect?
• Examples: “North by Northwest”, “Run Lola Run”.
• Documentary, investigation, explanation. System tolerances.

11:00 – 13:00 WORKSHOP

13:00 – 14:00 LUNCH

14:00 – 14:30 GLOBAL CHAINS AND GLOBAL FAILURE

• Discussion: Insurance, debt, climate and “tipping points”

14:30 – 18:00 WORKSHOP

Notes

The chain reaction makes even deliberate acts seem as accidental as everything else. So does narrative always disguise the contingency of reality, the “tipping points”, through immersion and identification?

Can you use a chain reaction to tell a story? Can we speak of “narrative” in the ordered procedures of machine, computer or digital operations? What about documentary accounts that attempt to make sense of factual events?

The classic viewpoint:

A Chronology: The King died and then the Queen died.

A Narrative: The King died and then the Queen died of a broken heart.

Resources

Don 't forget the Blaak street market is open today, 8 – 5.

WEDNESDAY

10:00-11:00 REACTIONS AND EVENTS

• Discussion: Chain Reaction and the nature of The Event.
• Trickshots – what is success and failure?
• The limits of the event – metamorphosis?

11:00 – 13:00 WORKSHOP

13:00 – 14:00 LUNCH

14:00 – 17:00 WORKSHOP

17:00 - 18:00 BREAK

18:00 - 21:00 PRESENTATIONS

Notes

The discontinuity of time as separate “reactions”. Narrative cinema extracts from reality only shots that give the impression of being linked. Duration becomes “events” as cinema's basic semantic unit and the “onlooker” becomes an “audience”.