The Winged Victory of Samothrace, The Louvre, Paris, France, 19 May 1994
From the first day I ever owned and used a video camcorder in 1989, I spontaneously started making Actuality Films – without having the slightest inkling of that long-forgotten genre. It just felt like a completely natural way of looking at, and recording the world. I have written extensively about this and will link to it in due course.
The title is obviously an ironic jab at everything hip and “consumer-cultury”.
On the same day, I also recorded footage for a much more overtly, confrontational video – essentially about the same ideas, but very different – called – A.R.T.
Postscript
If you enjoy the contemplative nature of this video, I can recommend:
While en route from Calcutta to Frankfurt during the night of the 19th to 20th of July 2000, I ended up on a five-hour layover at Dubai airport. With my Panasonic DV camcorder I started recording stills of the airport. A year later, I finished and exhibited the resulting video – Nontope / Ontope (Angels in the Architecture).
To make the average short stay at an international airport as comfortable as possible, the terminal buildings more or less contain all the facilities to satisfy your needs and requirements – within the constraints of your transient state, and the operational demands of the airport.
On the odd occasion when you spend a longer time at an airport, the strangeness of this ‘habitat-simulation’ becomes more and more apparent.
As the hours roll by, your ‘in-transit’ persona begins to change, and your needs start expanding beyond urinating, eating, buying reading matter for the trip, or gifts for those, somewhere, awaiting your arrival. You become aware that you are starting to transgress the simulated, functional identity assigned to you as ‘person-in-transit’ – on some flowchart somewhere… and you start realising what a non-place this is. You sense that ‘Place’ means more than locus, for this lacks the ontological dimension of human existence – measured in an individual’s hours, days, and years. Statistically, the building is constantly occupied by humans – but no single person dwells long enough to leave a mark – and the building stays forever the functional shell that the architects, engineers and planners envisaged.
But strangely, this place creates a sort of meditational consciousness – maybe because you’re bored and tired – in an in-between time with no specific agenda. You begin noticing all the objects – animate and inanimate – which populate this shell.
On the one hand, they look as uncanny and distant as they’ve ever appeared – you sense that every thing around you, is just a ‘stand-in’ – an incarnation – of some item, or function, in an airport simulation.
Yet, on the other hand, you become aware that every thing – including yourself – shares the same statistical, functional existence within the system – and thus the trolleys, the utility carts, the elevators, the seats, the signs and the people, appear almost like long-lost friends – comrades – like angels in the architecture – and this place becomes a place of undifferentiated being.
In 2023, I decided to remaster the original video in Ultra-HD. Scaling an image measuring 768 x 576 pixels to 2880 x 2160 pixels is actually a ludicrous undertaking. The interlaced, blurred, noisy and extremely compressed original images added to the challenge.
I decided to ‘abuse’ AI image-processing software to scale, de-noise, and sharpen the images. The resulting, uncanny images had very little to do with the originals, yet I found the artefacts – or look – created by the process very stimulating, and in a sense very sympathetic to my original creative intentions.
Inspired by these ‘newfound’, ‘newborn’ images – including out-takes from the original shoot – I slightly re-edited the video by replacing four shots. In addition, I did a remaster of the original stereo soundtrack.
For this reason, I have renamed this video as it is a ‘remix’ of the original.
Postscript:
I have long been exploring the differences between a still image, and a static video recording.
If you enjoyed this video, I could recommend the following videos which are also based on stills: Seagull and Sunset
Recorded on the 25th of January 2000, near Wisemans Ferry, New South Wales, Australia. This is a chapter from my long-form video The Bodies of Nobodies.
Driving along a nondescript road along the Hawkesbury river, I noticed an electrical box with Lot 22 painted on it.
In my youth I had read Thomas Pynchon‘s classic – The Crying of Lot 49 – and felt compelled to stop.
With the car engine switched off, it takes a while for the droning numbness of driving to slowly give way. The silence of this completely arbitrary place in the Australian landscape descends.
Slowly your shadow catches up with you, and you become aware of your surroundings… So generic, arbitrary and nondescript that you can’t even describe where you are and what is around you.
Trees, grass, gravel, some sort of deserted building, an “electrical box” – I never know what those things are called, or what they actually do… A makeshift post box, a scattered letter, ants… The sound of a passing car, of gravel under my souls, of a kookaburra?
Some lines by Wallace Stevens come to mind:
“… The proud and the strong Have departed.“
or
“The greenhouse never so badly needed paint. The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition In a repetitiousness of men and flies.“
I love places like this.
This is what most of the world is like. This is what most of life is like: Not glamorous, not exciting… It just is.
But that certainly doesn’t make it worthless or meaningless. You get out of it what you put in.
If you give it your presence, your attention; it starts existing to you… And you start existing because it exists.
With apologies to Stevens, I end with a remix of the poem quoted above:
Little by little, the poverty Of this deserted place becomes A look, an acknowledgement.
Each thing completely touches us With what it is and as it is, In the stale grandeur of annihilation.
Giant grids of television beam God’s exile The surgeon of the nightsky restores dead things by the power of sound
From the Whole Megillah by Ira Cohen
It was after 2 a.m on a windy night in January 1997 that I stepped onto a 15th-floor balcony in Braamfontein, Johannesburg and started recording the deserted city around me. The serenity of deep night… It is a time out of time, a time for crossing over, a time for transgression and transcendence. In his book Night, A. Alvarez writes about electric light – which has enabled us to colonize the night; and it is there – in the pools of light – that one searches – almost longingly – for signs of life. It is an ambiguous longing – a longing for company in these lonely hours of the soul; but also a secret longing for a voyeuristic encounter.
The final shot is a slow zoom into a brightly lit office; revealing a desk, a telephone, a carpet… the zoom reaches its end – then blackness. Accompanying the black screen, a song starts up. A voice sings a world that once was. A world beyond the distant fly-overs where the city lights end.
A world which loss we sense when it is 3 a.m. eternal…
Also includes the sky and various types of cloud, frogs, pinkish flowers, the shadow of an ice-cream seller, the hum of the camcorder mechanism, a few static shots, a tropical house, three barking dogs, rusty cars and a caterpillar, a dirt road, banana plants, telephone lines, a catchy tune, an inquisitive van driver, numerous trees, a young oil palm plantation, a destroyed rain forest, a woman shouting, various bird calls, and some video titles. All that and more in six minutes.
You know, those four letters R-O-M-E and the dot, halfway up the boot of Italy.
You know, the Colosseum, Romulus and Remus, the Vatican, La Dolce Vita, the Trevi Fountain…
And then you actually go there…
During June, 1995; my wife Angelika and I went on an epic road trip – twice across the USA.
It was as clichéd and personal as all journeys are.
While some sites had the importance of pilgrimage to me, the route was broadly improvised – by simply looking at the map and selecting places which had some personal resonance or interest. Like all journeys, some places simply lay on the way to somewhere else, but turned out to be engrossing – unencumbered by expectation.
Against all the accumulated context, the neat narratives, all the expectations and preconceptions that we have of places, these six shorts are a study in the inscrutability of actual places – their stubborn refusal to look and feel like they’re supposed to.
I always relish choosing camera angles or recording durations that evaporate my preconceptions and force me to actually start listening and looking at places and all the things that constitute them – as fragmentary as that may be.
As magnificent, or as historically important as these places are, they very easily just become views seen in a million photos before. Leaving only the nagging question – which one of those views can I copy? And how can I prove that I’ve been here?
For isn’t that what it’s ultimately about, trying to nail our transience, our insignificance, to something eternal – significant.
But then, nothing lasts forever. Everything – from mountains to motels, become motes in the light shafts of eternity.
For a week around the Northern winter solstice 2010, I trawled the web for webcam feeds. Webcams typically have low frame-rates – resulting in very ‘staccato’ image sequences. By dissolving between the successive frames, I tried to re-create the lost continuity or ‘flow’. The resulting sequences, actually reveal interesting visual aspects of the entire process – from camera CCD, to compression and streaming artefacts. Since most of the cameras creating these images were operating in the dead of night, they are operating at their technical limits. The resulting grainy images are therefor as much a creation of the recording/representation process as they are a representation of the objects within the camera’s view. This then is a lyrical meditation on the “Aesthetics of Disappearance” – to borrow a phrase by Paul Virilio.
Recording the world with the detachment of a meditating monk – with a so-called Mirror Mind – viewing things as they are, with no personal emotions or desires projected onto them.
This video explores the complex relationships between looking and listening – the seen, and the heard. It tries to record Being – or even – the act of recording… perception.
Recorded in 2000 at Wat Phra Mahathat in Nakhon Si Thammarat in southern Thailand. Initially, my idea was to have the incidental, off-camera dialogue snippets transcribed and translated. However, I learned that the Thai language is fantastically ‘open-ended’ as regards verb inflection – which made translation into English subtitles almost impossible. Since this difficulty of translation resonates well with the intention of the video, I decided to make the Thai subtitles part of the image. Remastered in HD from the DV-PAL source footage. This video is part of a larger work called – The Bodies of Nobodies.
During March and April 2000, I travelled around the south of Thailand.
I spent many hours trying to record the Being of my tranquil surroundings.
As with most of my recordings, I would lock the camera on a tripod, and then record between two and five minutes of whatever happens in front of the lens and microphone.
I somehow naturally ended up using this Actuality Film approach to recording, because it satisfies a lot of my aesthetic and philosophical interests.1
Of course, audio would also be recorded – and plays an enormous role in the overall gestalt.
Almost a quarter century later, I reviewed this part of my large video archive. I could appreciate these recordings like old postcards – both to, and from myself – except, they were without any commentary.
I selected and edited these twelve shots – originally shot on mini-DV. I love what the machine-learning, upscaling software does to the images when de-interlacing and upscaling to UltraHD – the painterly artefacts and invented detail – almost a new world to explore.
Certain viewers might recognise the reference to Ten Ox-herding Pictures.
1: These interests include exploring the ontological differences and similarities between photography, painting and video; as well as the gigantic importance of sound. Generally, I love using video to explore the music of Being amongst the Ten Thousand Things.
Quoting Ronald Reagan and Francisco Goya; based on readily available internet video footage of US Predator drones and Apache gunships in action; this video aims to confront the viewer with the inherently dehumanising and misanthropic nature of technology and modern visual media.
This video has been remastered in UHD from the 2010 HD master.
Post Script
The essentially misanthropic nature of technology is a theme which concerns me a lot. Over the years I have made a few films and videos which address this subject both directly and indirectly.
I can say with certainty, that most – if not all of my videos – in their focus on corporeality – embodied, lived sensory experience – are a direct reaction – or even therapeutic intervention – to technology and its tendency towards the the virtual.
Of course, there is a paradox in me using fairly technologically complex media to preach an anti-technological message. But, refusing to engage with technology at all in some sort of luddite last stand, is a dead end as far as I’m concerned. Technology obviously offers interesting and powerful tools; but one should be extremely sceptical towards it at all times. It will certainly not lead to salvation of any kind… rather the opposite.
For viewers interested in exploring more of my works on this theme, I recommend the following films and videos:
For viewers wanting some relief after watching this video, I can recommend any one of many of my videos. As stated above, these videos can be seen as therapeutic interventions to the tortures of technology.
Welcome to the empire where the death-ray of vision and its image-making machines are always on. Where seeing is believing.
Collected over four years and two continents, the footage used for empire was filmed entirely from television. With watching television now making up for almost a third (1) of the average person’s waking life, those electric images have become our most communal experience – it is both the modern campfire and source of mythology… it is our waking dream.
As impassive or inhuman the stare of the CCTV camera appears to us, there is a compelling similarity to a viewer watching television. Like the camera, the television viewer has no control over the stream of images presented to them. What is shown, and how long it is dwelt upon, is decided by the anonymous editors of the forces of greed and control – the corporate creators of reality. Nothing that is not sanctioned, will appear in these myths.
These myths are created for their political and commercial expediency – reflected in their platitudinal, placative simplicity and banal iconography; but still, images have a life of their own, which sometimes escapes the contingencies of narrative or political programming. From almost 100 hours of footage, collected over four years, I distilled these images – many featuring animals. An attempt to rekindle some atavistic memories.
The final scene of Empire, is of a barn owl, ascending into the night – then blackness, accompanied by an electronic tinnitus – like the sound of a central nervous system. The fire has gone out and the darkness draws nearer. The shadows on the walls are gone and the cave is pitch black. The viewers, blinded, become listeners. What was a picture machine, a magic portal, is now a dead black box.
This is a slightly adjusted commentary text from 2004
(1) While TV viewing times have obviously declined, the viewing of commercial streaming services has drastically increased.
Imagine looking over someone’s shoulder as they use a brush with ink on paper – or spray paint on concrete. Whether it’s for calligraphy, graffiti, delineating a mist-shrouded pine bough, or a Twomblyesque doodle. Now imagine being at the tip of the brush – or nozzle of a can of spray paint – as it moves. A mini rollercoaster ride, following the strokes, swirls, loops and abrupt backtracks. You find yourself at the stroke’s leading edge, the point of creation. Intention and expression, medium and message blend into one – like the ensō in Zen art – In the flow of no-mind. According to Helmut Brinker – “A Zen work of art is : It does not mean.” But that absolutely does not imply that it is meaningless. I contest that, with the work ‘merely’ being – ie: not meaning, allows you to simply be. It is a profound opportunity. We must distinguish between Meaning, and the meaningful. My interest in using the camera in this way is definitely not only limited to the philosophy of Zen Buddhism. Most of my work has as initial formal goal to short-circuit any form of ‘reading’ – or thinking. In our information-flooded age, we are forced to only ‘scan’ everything we see or hear – trying, as quickly as possible, to extract the ‘relevant data’ – the semantic ‘meaning’ of the image. We simply don’t grant ourselves – or aren’t given – the time to just sit and soak up the sensory data – from the Latin ‘what is given’. In most modern video editing, shots are all subservient to the narrative – like words in a semantic structure – never is the shot given enough time to fully dwell upon – to evaluate and appreciate for what it is. It doesn’t have the time ‘to be’ – and therefore, neither do you – the viewer. Everything is experienced on a meta level. Our bodily, sensory reality, is completely neglected – repressed, in an atmosphere of ideation and ideology. Hence, a lot of my work is a rallying cry for a new Realism – to abandon any grandiose ideas and start appreciating the the overlooked, the neglected, the real everyday. In this spirit, I’ve always been interested in experimenting with the idea of using my video camera as ’seeing paintbrush’ – as being paintbrush. In 2005, not far from where I lived in Wuppertal, Germany; was large set of concrete stairs and retaining walls – completely covered in graffiti, tags and all manner of colourful graphic expression. It offered a perfect backdrop to experiment in the expressive, gestural, direct interaction with the camera and the world around me. I did two improvised takes – ‘painting’ to and fro, hither and thither – taking my inspiration from the graphic environment around me. In a few places my arm and hand – holding the camera – appear as shadows, as I traverse time and space in front of the colourful concrete backdrop – tracing invisible lines in space with the camera. In 2004 I started experimenting with software (Metasynth) that allowed me to turn colours and drawn lines into musical notes – MIDI data. This MIDI data I then used to play samples of classical instruments and choirs. The music used in this video, was created in this omprivised way – which very much corresponds to the visual form.
Part of a series of video experiments I made during the mid-nineties under the heading: Focus Improvisations. This was a completely un-staged, spontaneous, straight-to-tape recording. By pure coincidence, as I was recording random focus changes, a fellow tourist with a camera walked into frame. Since I wasn’t looking through my viewfinder, he must have assumed that I wasn’t recording, and proceeded to supply me with surreal footage. I have made many videos1 exploring focus and the meaning of blurred images. In time I will publish my thoughts on this intriguing subject.
This video was recorded at Muri Lagoon, Rarotonga, Cook Islands on the 18th of March, 1996.
Recorded on Tuesday, 7 May 1996, Nakhon Si Thammarat, Southern Thailand.
We are so conditioned to approach a film or video as a kind of text which is to be read – rather than really looked at and listened to. In this convention, the shots in the edited sequence are all subservient to the script or narrative – like words in a sentence. A shot is only held long enough to be ‘read and understood’ before cutting to the next1. By extending the durations of the shots into minutes rather than seconds, the viewer, after having superficially ‘scanned’ or ‘read’ the shot – expecting another shot to swiftly follow – is cut off ‘mid sentence’… dropped into a semantic no-man’s land. Nothing happens, and an immediate mental discomfort sets in… the hand reaches for the remote control to escape this unsatisfying state – but WAIT! The onus is now squarely on the viewer to extract value from this sensory input – this experience. You now have the time to really look at the scene presented and listen to the sounds criss-crossing and enveloping it. The more you invest of your attention, your own time – your being – the richer the experience becomes. What’s more, the scene becomes your own, since you can select what to focus on, what to observe or listen to. Yes, this is a mediated experience, but an experience nonetheless. Sure, you certainly don’t need to take in the ‘second-hand’ scene in this video. I would recommend that you sit down somewhere and simply watch the world go by. Take the time, give yourself the opportunity to enjoy the magic and mystery of every little thing in the real world around you. I hate sounding like some self-help guru, but I really aspire for art to make us love life in this world – in all its beauty and sadness – or maybe – despite all its beauty and sadness. I haven’t yet mentioned the formal elephant in this video – keeping the shot out of focus for extended periods of time, or slowly going in or out of focus. During the nineties I experimented a lot with soft focus – and what it means. I find it a fascinating subject and have written a lot about it. In due time I will publish those texts and videos2. PS: Viewers might be interested that on the same day, I also recorded the footage for another – very different, video – Bhumisparsa.
1: I urge the viewer to watch any movie or TV series with the sound turned off. Then simply count the cuts, and notice how short the shots are. 2: My videos Camcorder Viaticum, and The Photographer are good examples.
Using a flashlight in a darkened room and a video feedback loop; I set out to create a synaesthetic, electric stream of calligraphy – some sort of ‘direct expression’. The title was inspired by the trance-induced, bleeding noses of shamans and dying animals in Khoisan rock paintings. Direct, corporeal expression and communication.
For about a decade centred around the millennium, I was extremely interested in the idea of using my video camera as ’seeing paintbrush’. For a long time I’ve been interested in Buddhism in general, and Ch’an or Zen brushwork in particular. In this spirit, I was interested in the expressive, gestural, direct interaction with the camera and the world around me.
Helmut Brinker, in his book – Zen in the Art of Painting – describes the Zen painter’s ink line thus:
“The flowing ink-line, obedient to laws which, in the final analysis, have nothing to do with the object portrayed, does not conceal its generation; rather, it lets the viewer follow the process of its becoming, and thus take part in an act of creation which is at once timeless and fleeting.”
This for me, is a perfect analogy of what I was trying to achieve with these single-take works of pure flux.
Trying to short-circuit thinking and analysis in order to enjoy the moment of creation and sensory / sensual interaction with the world.
In March 2000 I was in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. One of the highlights of my journey, was a visit to the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia. It was there that my love for Islamic calligraphy was rekindled. I was also fortunate to meet Dr. Sulaiman Hj. Esa who graciously shared his knowledge of Islamic art with me.
Inspired by these seemingly disparate traditions, I went to the famous Petronas “Twin” Towers and recorded this video.
I made the music in 1999 as one of a series of one-take, straight-to-DAT, improvisations. It was made with a few samples loaded in my Ensoniq ASR-10. Spontaneously, without any multitracking or sequencing; I tapped the keys and generated this soundtrack – in the same spirit as the video footage.
The video was originally completed in 2001. In 2024, I remastered it in UHD with minor changes to the titles.
