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.