I like thinking about unflattening—about the way a work works revealing itself in a dynamic stickiness of thought.
I like thinking about metrics through the lens of thick things & thin things - the translucent slick of slippery thoughts, wet surfaces.

A salient still is an image that never existed. It represents a frame of many seconds. During that time the camera may have zoomed and panned, and objects in the scene may have moved. The image is nonetheless crisp, without blur, and perfectly resolved. The still photo’s contents reflect to some real degree the filmmaker’s intentions by putting more resolution in places where the camera zoomed or by widening the scene if it panned. In Bender’s method, quickly moving elements, like a person walking across a stage, drop out in favor of the temporarily stable ones. This example of multimedia involves translating one dimension (time) into another dimension (space). A simple example is when a speech (the acoustic domain) is transcribed to print (the text domain) with punctuation indicating some intonation. Or, the script for a play in which the spoken lines are accompanied by many stage direction to establish the desired tone. (Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte)

Anne Friedman’s observations into early film relates how making and observing cinema revealed a way of seeing the world. She references Irigaray, Baudry, and Decerteau’s observations towards the gender of the observer, (the flaneuse) as having very different theories of the body and the visual, but what all have in common is that
THEIR THEORIES CONVERGE ALONG THE ASSUMPTION THAT THE BODY IS A FICTION, A DECORPOREALIZED SUBJECTIVITY SLIDING FLUIDLY AMONG A VARIETY OF POSITIONS.
If cinema removed the body, statiscized it, modern technology and the screen exacerbated the removal even further, although perhaps this liberated the body from the convention of the engendered Male Flaneur by providing another way of fluidly moving among a variety of positions. If this is the case, what is the body’s place in this century considering the abundance of screens. This year, my work seems to flow through the space between architectural apertures, windows and doors, and their technological counterparts, screens, through tactility and acoustics.
And so it is that I wrestle in order to create a catalog of seeing. Not yet a completed piece of work, but a way to discern the shot of the Flaneuse, a mobile observer, from the Flaneur, the idle gazer.
I’m wrestling with whitespace (in which I mean the strangeness of normative homogenous space), care, and intimacy, of being in contact with another, of being human, of becoming other through the layers of stitching required in its construction, the stitch of a body to another, the stitch of a man-made skin, the stitch of the shot on screen.
Maybe I owe these most recent thoughts to Corso’s Haraway reading, A Manifesto for Cyborgs, in which Haraway offers a new criteria for becoming or the strategy of territorialization. Maybe we’re all cyborgs here, plugging in and out of each other, shifting thought by the things we reveal, the ideas we share and so my cyborg self sings a lullaby to dream.

FOR THE CINEMATIC OBSERVER, THE BODY ITSELF IS A FICTION, A SITE FOR DEPARTURE AND RETURN.

To do it right would be to do it over and over and over again.
I’m disciplined.
I’m trained to eliminate risk.
I spend an extraordinary amount of time
totalizing images, anticipating outcomes, and sorting information.
I come with a sleek surface, contained.

NO,
THAT IS NOT UP
PLEASE PULL YOURSELF UP AND BE SEATED
DON’T YOU SEE
THE INFORMATION IS SORTING
TO MITIGATE YOUR POSITION
SCROLL DOWN TO RETRIEVE THE INFORMATION REQUESTED

If orientation is lost in the drone image (loss of horizon per In Free Fall - Hito Steyerl), there is an opportunity to shift the point of view to a likeness to a Dream-state, to enter into another kind of flow only if the drone is powered by forces other than a driver/pilot. Can the point of view be transferred to another entity (an A.I?) How would an A.I. corroborate data to inform it’s perspective?
Central paradigm of modernity - central perspective (1-eyed immobile spectator) - which is then empowered by the central eye of the observer who’s eye informs the perspective, and at the same time the observer is expendable. (the worldview is enforced and destabilized at the same time)
The idea of free-falling is different than a floating image like the aerial view/google maps/drone shots. These types of images make us wonder whether we are subjects or objects leaving us in complete stasis.
What is the self (subject) in screens? Loss of tactile images. How does pre-internet tactility (traditional sensory information) change within the ‘screen’ environment?
What is the relationship between simulation and orientation?
Simulation slows or speeds up time, therefore orientation —->
To be in a drone simulation - a loop, flowing.

My latest film project, based on the mono-myth, The Hero’s Journey, establishes a nearly hyper-linear narrative structure of visual time and space that coexists against another parallel yet incongruent linear acoustic image. A narrative resides within this image as well. However, the effect (and perhaps additionally affect) creates friction between these two images only really ever existing in time, but not space. The acoustic image overcomes the visual through time, a transition akin to a handoff of the baton in a relay race where perhaps both images exist for a second before one takes over. The presence of one’s own body in this camera obscura (or peepshow) becomes enhanced, accentuated. Where cinema theaters of the 20th and 21st centuries create the sense of loss of body (static in time and then space), the body here is not possible to forget. The scale of body to screen, to tangible tactility in material (light and fur) is in such close physical proximity that it is impossible to ignore, one wants to touch, to feel the surrounding enclosure. The image on the screen within the box is nearly life-size, a comparative tool to measuring both scale and intensity of the bodies relationship with the visual image. The acoustic image asks about virtuality and the creation of tactile images. Quite simply does the body return an affect, or tactile quality within their body as a return feedback mechanism through the taking in (seeing) of the acoustic image? Like pornography, the input of the visual image tends to stimulate arousal - the act of seeing. While I’m less interested in creating or making pornography for pornographies sake, the experiment is an inquiry into the creation of image within the theater of the mind. Does arousal occur within the creative process - the creation of image, how is memory linked to physiological processes if the acoustic image here is meant to turn the body on, to activate?

In this world, the white, white (David Bartlett, Chromaphobia) of the mise-en-scene depicts a whitescape of normative space. It is here that the linear visual narrative aids the creation of a homogenous environment and calls into question the relationship between narrative structure more broadly and commodification of architectural space and environments through the way that we see.

It was my attempt in the structural creation of this film to relate the camera movement and perspective of the image to the architecture itself. Through the out/in penetration of each doorframe and the subsequent horizontal progression, the camera glides along the space like a hand would across its lovers bodily surface. The relationship between the camera and the architectural space it occupies reinforces the whitescape not necessarily through its technique per se, although that might be argued, but primarily through the congruency to the narrative and character engendered within the visual image. I see this as a problem for the film in general as if the issue is to push past normative space and ideas rather than to reinforce them. However, as this is an experimental film the one might look at this from the context of revealing these relationship that are naturally embedded in the social values of society. There exists a restraint, a reservation in both the visual image and the acoustic image.

For Descartes and later Heidegger, “standing in front of” is equated with a philosophical position, a Weltbild, or a worldview which transformed the world into a measurable object. (Virtual Window, A. Friedman) One questions what is being measured here both literally and figuratively. The video stands erect in a vertically rectangular position proportional to the 16:9 aspect ratio of a handheld cellular phone screen. The shot of the door frame is not proportionally exact but not at all dissimilar to the rectangular video. The space in between these frames is occupiable and places us between the real and the fantasy. Here our bodies become the standard of reference to measure all other objects. The senses take over and we feel the closeness of ourselves in the enclosure. The on screen bodies are not only a scalar reference against our own, but also an engendered reference.

I want to first say that my interests are multiple, varied, although they have taken form most recently through observing and watching bodies, more specifically people connecting whether through physical space, a tactile image, or touch. I’ve struggled with abandoning resolve in the work, so I find myself attempting to build in mechanisms that allow for chance, surprise, or discovery, however inadequate these perform. They take shape through unscripted narratives revealing interconnections through time with the site or subjects or frameworks that I feel compelled to establish (the bodysuit, the peepbox, the brotherly relationship, an embrace).

This [book] is a collection, an assembly, revealing its order by examining process through collage, through inquiry of the ‘body’ in relation to film, sound, and performance. It is not a chronicle and therefore has no hierarchy in regards to time, but may be read by weaving emergent themes that ground how the work was thought about — rather than what it is.

PULL YOURSELF UP PLEASE
DO NOT DISPOSE
IT IS OPTIMIZED AND CONTAINED

WE’LL STAND BY
MOVE TO THE SIDE
PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT TO GET ORIENTED

I like to think about the continuing disuse of tactility, of touch in our everyday experience, the relationship of our bodies to technology in an ever-increasingly flattened image. How do we evolve through time in a world that asks our bodies to remain static. What does a world of the future look like as the body is increasingly removed from our interactions - the face becomes flattened through screen. The mouth, ear, eye through which the voice exits and nutrients enter, through which sound is absorbed, and light enters is flattened into a visual black hole morphing through space and time in video and frozen as shape in the photograph.

I like thinking about unflattening—about the way a work works revealing itself in a dynamic stickiness of thought.
I like thinking about metrics through the lens of thick things & thin things - the translucent slick of slippery thoughts, wet surfaces.
I like thinking about the way the body acts as surface - a space to contain sound - the empty void in a musical instrument - the space between the body and the voice - the reverberation of the things we feel - I like to think about the private concerns between us, the transformation of the voice into sensation, and the way that materials break and fail.
I like to think about sound images, the creation of image through the voice, through language or sound and how the information in those differ or communicate with the interface—the body.
I like to think about what it means ‘to image’ rather than ‘the image’ — the flatness of the screen image, printed image, and the action of the image.

Unflattening refers to the process of flattening and unflattening both physical structures and thought structures. The diagram is used as a tool to organize information and investigate dynamic relationships between seeing (the idea) and saying (the work).

Sound, Dreams, Lucid Things is an investigation into the relationship between language and image - audible typographic images, sound images through language and recording, and the construction of the dreamlike lucid image.

Foldings investigate topological surfaces - insides and outsides of thought and space.

Becomings operate like wolf packs, not in what they look like, but how they function through contagion, intensities, and the imperceptible.

Unmooring is the process of moving from one condition to another, becoming disconnected, moving into the unknown.

I exist in this space between a window and a door for the duration of my time here.

I think quite simply I’m interested in the way that we see. And while that seems to be a simple enough thought, I’m convinced more and more that the future is concerned less and less for it.

There’s this feeling that I get, like a glimpse, a flicker of not knowing what this work is doing exactly. I can’t put my finger on it, but it seems like I’m reaching out grasping for it. It’s on the tip of my tongue yet I can’t say it. All I know is that the work is bad in a way that makes me feel good about it, maybe even authentic — both regarded and awkward.