The image here is subjectified and singularised. The image is in search of its own pace, negotiating between the calibration (its coming into being): oscillating between the measurable, optimised processes of networked standardisation (stability, transmissivity and visibility) and its unmasked, fragile and immaterial substance that threatens to be wiped out off the frame. Could there be salvation in such pathos? Can we think of such bodily or material failure as psychobiological phenomena? Tiredness, Sleep, Convalescence, Mourning, etc? Any such exhaustion is under the skin. It is this exhaustion that instigates the ‘animation’, the revolution if you like, of the image (and by extension, of the subject). The object is rendered into an ‘animic’ subject. But then, visually, a technical vulgarity occurs: the blatant application of the digital effects onto the screen! Luckily, this sacrilegious act is somewhat absolved by the narration which also is subject to a certain terminological (therefore technological) conditioning in reverse.
Sequentia is a constellation of sequences, a sanatorium really, of divergent geographies and conflicting spectra. The singularity of the narration (as in “There exists a boarding school…”) is an ambiguous agent, the figure for the multitudes: multiple times and locations of the depicted images (the latter standing in for the encountered subjects, events and scenes) that share boundaries, in other words, that have to live together.
Visual Notes (2013)
21 min, colour, sound
The narrative is a structure. It is an allegorical tool or a philosophical toy through which to converse. Fiction is a blueprint. Here, this creates an architecture for discursive collaborations. Could this become theatrised? With maybe a ‘film maker’ or so, a group or institution, here or elsewhere? Can such further embodiment take place outside of my presence and involvement?
The narration is “responsible” for a genesis: it sculpts an existence, it is the imperative Word. There seems to be a faintly forensic attempt to make sense, that is, to find orientation. There is the conflation of matter and ritual: permutation of ruins into monuments. Maybe this is the materialisation of the psyche in the Derridan sense: a philosophy as phenomenon that results from being in-formed; the remnant, the filtration of lived experiences. This thought differs from nostalgia on the one hand and self-messianisation on the other. Instead it is a re-surging of subtle phantasies, phobias and traumas that make up communal forms of life. Let’s call this the satellites of the mind; Solaris.
Perhaps then the ethical challenge of a maker is to betray, to portray and to translate these seemingly subjective experiences into more accessible objects, but inevitably paradoxical “universal subjects”?
I imagined that there is a subversive element of possession and appropriation inherent in the naming and listing of apparatuses, elements, ecologies, social structures and architectures. Along the way in this worlding, birthing or invention, a disfiguring moment that causes a disowning takes place. This potential autonomy of the event to-come is immanent, and it transfigures the space and the time of the event into a scene: a spectral place?
