Consider carefully the metaphysical intent of the 3 finalists in the Video category for the Flash in The Can 2007 People’s Choice award (links at bottom). These are 3 extraordinarily slick big budget advertisements; if this is choice, then underwear is toilet paper. The motivation for these works is money.
The planet's economy demonstrates two major inefficient uses of its talents: building weapons and making advertisements. If an equivalent amount of money was spent on research into how to put people in need in contact with what they need as they need it, then the internet could eradicate advertisements.
Instead, plain and simple sell tactics predominate, competitively dressed up in immaculate streaming video. Intricate, absorbing, intoxicating and ultimately sterilizing, indoctrinating merchants of consumption and lifestyle flourish. Luminary philanthropists they are not; enormous money goes into advertisements. Very very little goes into digital poetry. The field is neglected because in general it emphasizes the non-transparency of information and language: it is hard to sell ambiguity. My Flash video work sells peace using aesthetics; seduces the autonomic into reveries with non-linear affect. I feel that epistemologies of peace and awareness and indeterminate knowledge must be absorptive by bodies.
A lot can be learned technically from advertisements; they are mastering direct embodied communication online. The intensity with which these sites play affect within the reader is profound. Their technical virtuosity is superlative. A parody of Allan Ginsberg's Howl in that the best young minds of our generation have become advertisers. The entwined juice of cognitive science, psychoanalytic insights, demographic studies, and extreme branding aesthetics (3D modelling, chroma-keyed and airbrushed sets, vector tweens joyously sprouting like candy-coloured orgasms) create evocative yet ultimately banal and manipulative excursions into the human body. The human autonomic nervous system is largely beyond the conscious control of any human. These ads leverage that truth and ad-ject new parameters of respect, desire and goals into those who watch them.
Propoganda, poetry and advertising share the same evolutionary roots: the insistent rhythm of reality exporting its resonant thoughts to others.
From the 3 ad-sites mentioned above, 3 basic design principles can be derived:
Load swiftly.
Auto-play.
Allow choice, but reward inertia.
The ad-sites following 3 basic metaphysical principles need to be refuted:
Lie. Profit. Kill.
What is art’s role?
Truth. Give. Love.
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Their dishonesty extends even into their names:
Friends of Orbit Bright – a racistly-white parody site promoting chewing gum and chastity (which makes me think of sex! and you?). Painfully obvious perpetual brand placements. It's aimed at tweeners.
Outlook Theatre – a car made glamorous through association with video vignettes of a perfect family and immaculate romantic moments. Light fluffy and efficient consumers. It's aimed at the wife archetype.
UFC66 – an Ultra fighting championship labyrinth full of snarling warriors and big time money. It's aimed at soldiers, the dispossessed and anyone who needs to fight to survive.
Labels: choice, flash, illusion, interactivity, video
[+/-] 2046, 2057, and the presence of affect in fluids "Do you know what people did in the old days when they had secrets they didn't want to share? They'd climb a mountain ... find a tree .... carve a hole in it ... whisper the secret into the hole ... and cover it up with mud...." 2046, Wong Kar Wai
On the same evening as I watched Wong Kar Wai's epically beautiful 2046, I encountered an obese parapalegic woman in an electric wheelchair wearing a huge pink and orange poncho on the sky train. She foraged in a blue silk bag that had an ink stain; her feet were enclosed in maroon macrame.
Kar Wai's 2046 is populated by immaculately ravishing fantasia's of physicality. Love, loss, sex, and longing are exclusively practiced by this fortunate elite. But in reality, in life itself, every body type fucks, yearns, flirts, and falls in love sometimes with the wrong partners. The drama of romantic tragedy is opportunistic; it exists everywhere on the continuum of corporality.
In my neighbourhood of downtown Vancouver, there are over 1,000 homeless people. Many of them chronically addicted to street drugs, their faces ravished by scabs, their rivetingly thin limbs contorted by sustanied insomnia; they copulate briefly, harshly and tenderly in the alleys behind dumpsters stained in piss and inhabited by rats. The futuristic cyber-medicine realities portrayed in 2057 The body, an exceptionally beautiful documentary on the Utopian gleaming potentials of modern biotech obscures the dystopia margins which remain gleamingly hidden
beneath the 3D living tissue printers and nano-bot drug delivery. In our futuristic fantasia's both health and love are the domains of the physically wealthy.
Ecstasy, grief, desire, and passion, the full spectrum of affect, traverses all existent entities. Immersed as they are in the immense river of life, all beings experience these states. My goal with Thoems and Interstitial video projects was to offset some of the bias conventional narrative film has toward portraying the presence of affect in perfect beautiful people.
My logic for choosing to film fluids: If affect is pattern, and patterns are biochemical, and biochemicals are fluid dynamic systems, then fluid dynamic systems coalescing and dissipating can visually represent and convey affect. Potentially and speculatively, fluid dynamics constitute affect.
[+/-] Bill Viola : Egg & Buffalo I made Interstitial in the fall of 2006, a video triptych that features a dead cat decomposing in a river, a dragonfly nymph shedding its carapace, and swirling tidal stones and starfish. In Feb 2007, I saw Bill Viola's 'I do not know what it is I am Like'. In this 1986 , 89 minute long excursion, Viola traverses a wide terrain of meditative examinations of the profound and the banal. In one segment, a rotting buffalo corpse covered in flies echoes a very universal contemplation on death (like Interstitial's dead cat) ; in another segment, a chicklet emerges from an egg, the shell cracking and breaking in slow repetitive motion (like the dragonfly nymph emerging from its naiad : "Most of the life cycle is spent in the larval (naiad, aka nymph) form, beneath the water surface, using internal gills to breathe, and catching other invertebrates or even vertebrates such as tadpoles and fish." [ Wikipedia ].
Birth death identity, formal beauty, found sound: Viola's work is an evident precursor to my own practice. He has travelled thematically, examining how traditional aesthetic principles of form, balance, structure, light, colour and composition contribute to increased emotional impact. Impact that is achieved through activiating the viewer's contemplative capacities instead of stimulating their hedonic or adrenergic circuits.
Labels: contemplation, influences, video
