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critical reflection

so, the first thing I would like to reflect on is that unfinished state that the main body of work (the film) is in. on a purely objective level, and for the work itself, I do not see this as a bad thing. I feel that the work needs more time to mature and develop, that I can push it to be the best it can be. my ambitions are quite grand, and I hope that the work will one day be in a place to exhibit it, or distribute it.

however, this is, to some degree, a failure of ambition in that it is not complete and ready for the end of this module. this is the first time i’ve truly failed in a sense to scope out a project, and time manage accordingly. but, it has sort of been a choice of mine to leave it unfinished and not pursue a finished product - yes for COVID practically, but also for breathing space and time to reflect before calling it finished. I do also feel proud of what I have accomplished for the film during this time. diving deep into motion graphics and special effects was a learning experience that I have taken a lot away from, and I feel my work is richer and more developed visually and conceptually than ever.

instead, as I’ve chosen to present a few select images, and the four short stories, I’d like to reflect on those, their presentation, their successes and their failures.

knowing that the form of exhibition would be print (both digital and physical) - i already accepted that my work would not be as subversive as it could be within the form of a physical exhibition. image and text is what is expected in print. because of this, I have tried to embrace the form and produce something aesthetically appropriate. instead, the text itself has been taken far further into abstraction and experimentation than is usual for me, and I believe presents a challenging reading experience for the viewer. opening with the Dartmoor dialect Cassiterite piece, which is by far the most difficult piece, and has to be read aloud (as with my inspiration, as always, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake). the form of the text written down is visually cluttered and confusing, and only when reading aloud does the poetry and phonetic spelling make sense. i think this is successful, and i can imagine its successes when readers see it. the other pieces, that have more straightforward useage of language, i think may be less successful in this regard. as the language becomes more straightforward, the focus is pushed more onto the content itself. How successful is this content? this may be impossible to judge.

as Ursula le Guin says in her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, a feminist literature, or a forward thinking literature not as consumed with traditional ideas of heroism, would be where a story is a carrier bag full of smaller things rather than a spear, or rather, storytellers are foragers rather than hunters. this was an approach i tried to take. the stories are not stories of hunting, or of narrative spear arcs, but a bag full of smaller ideas. i hope that these ideas, points in a network, will be connected by alert viewers. but this is a hope.

otherwise? i chose not to include a statement. i feel the stories have enough ideas within them to prompt thought, however, i decided to caption the images in order to be more clear with some of the concerns. by routing the work in Dartmoor, and by calling upon an ancient time period, I hope that this explains well enough that the work is concerned with traumatic stories across time, linked by place and mineral extracted from place. ending the caption with “in search of mineral, // still, ” i hope evokes a feeling of ongoingness. the search for mineral never ends, and to end this caption on a comma continues this neverendingness. the “still” i hope is maybe also read as “digital video stills”.

in terms of digital and physical print, i tried my best to make these pages compelling. the imagery chosen is all Very digital in nature. CGI rocks, bad green-screening, or JPEG-artefacted google streetview landscapes. in print, the failures and glitches will translate into potentially blurry imagery, and the high saturated primary light colours backgrounding the stories will be printed in a duller tone. indeed, this has happened in the process of exporting the images. when exported digitally as a pdf, the images will be at true saturation again, and the glitched images will be visible in a higher resolution. i think that these decisions help to give the work a different feel and life in both the mediums it will be exhibited in.

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here is the film as it stands as a work-in-progress

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instead, then, for the PDF exhibition, I have decided to showcase the four short stories.

i feel these are the most developed pieces that are currently part of this body of work, and offer the most in a surrogate exhibition format. i’ve decided not to accompany these texts with a statement, as i feel there is plenty to read into and think about within the texts themselves. to explain my purposes further would be to explain the works without letting the audience have a chance. and to explain the texts as a fragment of the wider work would suggest an absence of something larger, when i hope these texts are read as works in their own right.

visually, i have laid the texts out as dense blocks. the vertical page and the thinness of the vertical column, i hope references the way we read texts through phone screens, or in thin newspaper/bible columns. each story also visually widens, suggesting some kind of acceleration. or, as the text in the final story is so visually spaced apart, suggests some kind of entropy at work, or loss in transmission.

i have shown, behind each story, the closeup keyed and coloured shot that accompanies the stories in the film. i want the high-contrast, high-concentration of pure light colour images to be here. and i want the original material to present in texture, as if the stories have been enscribed in this setting. for the future story, that in the film is described as being associated with the “west”, or an “absence of light”, i have printed behind the flash photo of the dusty screen, to suggest a dirtiness, or to suggest outerspace.

across the different stories, some of the text has been obscured by the brightness of the material.

on the other page, i have stills from the film showing landscapes, a fossil, and virtual stones. all of which i hope serve the stories with some visual associations.

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WHERE NEXT?

this is where the work on the film is stopping for me now. it is a week till deadline, it’s a heatwave and i physically cannot continue editing as things stand.

as my ambition has grown,  i have come to understand i do not want to finish this film in any time soon. i want to sit with it and develop it until it’s truly finished and as good as i feel it can be. my ambitions for the film are making it grow in length, as well. what initially would have been maybe 30 mins, i now hope to top an hour, pushing it firmly into the “feature film” category that would make it viable for festival exhibition.

next? 

- i want to make music for the work. i have purchased a lithophone (a xylophone made from resonant stone), and already own a steel drum that i want to use to make the music. percussion heavy music would fit best. i’m already interested in contemporary classical music and percussion, but conceptually, hitting and striking to make sound is what this film is all about, so making music from stone and metal seems totally appropriate. i also have an old desktop computer, that i hope to take apart and fashion into a drumkit.

- i am in the process of organising to go and film manufacturing processes happening at a quarry in devon, near the Tamar river. i will film these using my phone, handheld. i have the Filmic Pro app, that is used in professional film productions. but i want to use my phone, handheld, so that when there is finally real-life footage in the work, it feels truly grounded. as with Charlotte Prodger works, i think that feeling the presence of the camera will be impactful and help to balance out the otherwise very synthetic and virtual camera work

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so, Why did I decide to use Brad Dourif’s voice as the main narrator?

while researching the ethics and politics of the documentary and the documentary voice-over, i got really into the films of Werner Herzog.

his controversial stance, that “facts do not equal truth”, seemed to me to speak most truthfully to the inherent contradictions at the heart of this medium. indeed, everything we see in a film is deeply contrived, and in my opinion, like Herzog’s, the aims of cinema veritee are pretty poorly thought through.

in Herzog’s work, he aims for what he calls the “ecstatic truth”. a deeper, poetic truth, separate from facts, that he hopes to activate through the power of his cinematic images. in what i’ve seen of his work so far, i think this works! I find the poetry of his images very moving, and the invasiveness of his presence as a filmmaker to be quite enlightening. in Wheel of Time, for example, where he witnesses the buddhist Kalachakra inititations, the camera is right in the middle of the action, and actually gets in the way of the monks who are trying to view the mandala, for example. i really like this sort of probing. the viewer feels uncomfortable in their watching, as if they are intruding.

none of his films have impacted me, however, like The Wild Blue Yonder did. this film is a science fiction film, narrated by an alien played by Brad Dourif, who talks about hte failures of his own race, and the failures of the human race. the film uses footage of deep sea diving and footage on the NASA space station to be at once a documentary, and at once a fantastical narrative. i find this sort of thing very, very effective, and indeed this film has quickly become a favourite.

Dourif’s alien is blunt in how he sees and describes humanity. it’s humorous, but also deeply emotional. it almost sounds as if he’s crying when he talks about how much he misses his home planet. this sort of honesty, when juxtaposed with high-concept ideas like mass extinction, or deep space chaos travel, makes something altogether more powerful.

it’s also very funny to me, to have an alien presented as just a standard, maybe a little odd, white american man. again, this speaks to these biases to me. all the way from another galaxy, this alien speaks ot us, except he is also just another sad white man.

for all these reasons, and to reference all of this, i wanted to use his voice.

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here is the direction with which i am taking the voice over.

since thinking a lot about the politics and problematic history of the voice over in documentary film, i wanted to explore this idea in the work, whilst also avoiding taking part in a problematic practice myself.

instead of using my own voice, then, i decided it best to try something else - something other than human.

Colin helped set up an artificial intelligence for me, to generate synthetic speech. this AI has been trained on a dataset of voices. it seems as though this dataset was based around White American Male voices, as it always tends towards producing a voice that sounds like this. because artificial intelligence is a system, and thinks systemically, it also exhibits systemic bias. we can see this in artificial intelligence used to hire new employees, that follows system bias and hires only white male employees.

to play with these issues, i am generating narration based on snippets of famous voices.

in this test clip the voices are based on a combination of Steve Jobs, Werner Herzog, and Brad Dourif. (i’ll talk a bit more about why Brad Dourif and Herzog in a later post).

in the same way that glitch art reveals systemic brokenness, the ways in which this software attempt to reckon with unusualness in these voices produces interesting, broken results. Brad Dourif’s voice, as the clips i use have him performing as an alien, has a strange, gender-fluid quality, and an intense earnestness to his performance that the software has a hard time understanding. the droning background music from the clip i used is understood as anger in his voice, instead. Werner Herzog’s Bavarian accent is removed entirely and replaced with generic american. the long pauses in Steve Job’s product reveal has created incredibly long, breathy pauses in the narration too.

the mixture of all these voices is something deeply distrubing, i hope. the voices move between intelligible and emotive performances, to unsettling primordial rage and demonic murmuring. these are by far the most successful audio pieces i’ve tried so far. the battle between synthetic and organic is eerie and compelling in one way, and in the way this method speaks to the legacy of narrative voice over and its politics, is conceptually more relevant than my ASMR-inspired voice over ever could be.

technically, a more accurate synethtic voice accurate to the source voices could be possible to produce.  the software we use is capable of very accurate production:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OsRR7HIICU

however, for laziness (it would take a LONG time to generate a suitable dataset of audio to train the AI), and for ecological reasons (the sheer amount of computation it would take to do this. training artificial intelligence is one of the main culprits for computational power in advancing technology, and in mineral extraction needed for graphics cards), we decided not to try this. i am also far more interested in these disturbing glitches and the unreal, non-human performance of the untrained AI, instead.

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INSTALLATION AND WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN

in this post I will talk about the plans for the film’s installation, in a pre-covid world, in which this would have been exhibited in Studio 11. of course, because of covid, this shall not be going ahead. because of this, the ambitions of the work as a film have grown, and ambitions of the work as an installation have shrunken to become insignificant or invisible. i no longer would want to exhibit this work physically in any situation, but i shall cover the thought i had at the time.

the plans for this physical installation came some way and developed a considerable amount. sadly, since moving house, i have lost the original plans. this is emerging as a common theme. instead, i’ll describe best i can what i had planned and why:

inspired again by this notion Ed Atkins speaks of, of the power and lust of tech to encroach on the physical body, I wanted to physical installation of this work to overwhelm the viewer: 

- I contemplated sandwiching the viewer between two screens, so that in order to face one screen they would have their back to the other. i liked this idea of having something happening behind the viewer’s back, to disquiet them and put them on edge. I was thinking of presenting the Stones Throw software on one of these screens, so that intermittently, stones would be thrown from behind the viewer, making a loud noise and making them jump. http://psycho.sandgardeners.com/rocks/

- loud, loud volume was something i was contemplating. i was prepared to build a semi-sound proofed area of the studio in order for this to not disrupt the rest of the exhibition. the wavy pieces of foam soundproofing that look like landscapes will be used in some different way in the future, im sure.

- i was planning, then, on constructing either a whole room, (initially, Jessie and I were to share the bookable space - i would construct a small room using wooden batons and boards. Paul and i worked together to measure and plan out the materials I would need to purchase, and costed it within my budget. i would line the inside and outside with black fabric, as well as sound proofing on the inside), or in a scenographic way, construct a theatrical space within a room (it moved on to where I was going to have the Mac Suite as my space for the exhibition. I planned on using black fabric as curtains to caution off a large area of this room. areas of the curtaining would be uncovered, revealing the lines of Mac computers in standby on the desks, eerily out of view and beyond the boundaries of the navigable space.)

- the plan became then to show the Stones Throw software on a vertical screen, and the film on a horizontal projection opposite. a difference between a cinematic piece shown on projection and a software piece shown on phone-like vertical screen made sense to me at the time. (now i think it is a little confused, and would become very cramped and hot in the space. there would also be no place to sit down, and i think that would have been a mistake.)

- and then the idea began to change again. although this idea of projecting the film kept being suggested to me, i felt it a little incongruent with the original concept, to explore the material qualities and legacy of the Screen. i felt it would be wrong to show the film on a different material. especially given pieces of the work specifically refer to the screen in which the viewer is watching

- i began to feel that playing with the physical space could produce more interesting results for the viewer, and wanted to make the space feel more otherworldly and science-fiction-y to match with the direction the film was taking. i contemplated presenting some of the mineral material in the space, to connect the viewer with the physical rock. i wondered about lighting the rock on a plinth in the centre of the space. i wondered about presenting 2d work - perhaps some of the drawings or prints from the first part of this year.

-----

ultimately, this was around the time when corona struck and this had to be left behind. i’m actually glad this has happened. i feel that the work has matured and developed a great deal since then, and that the lessons it takes from filmic practices has strengthened the concept. i feel perfecting this as a film, and releasing this as a film, hopefulyl at a festival or exhibition, will be a better form for this work to exist in. instead of having multiple channels of video, then, i needed to compress them all together, edited together in a way that borrows from film rather than installation. since doing this, i think the work has strengthened again. the stones throw software, in the context of a longer film piece, works well to barrage the viewer and put them at unease. it almost works likea horror film, the way the slowness and anticipation of these sequences work

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VOICE OVERS

DISCLAIMER:

unfortunately, due to storage limitations and glitches with my computer during the editing process, I lost a lot of the drafts and practice cuts that featured some experimentation. I’ll try to instead describe the different things I tried.

-- voice over --

third person narration -----

the sections of the film that involve third person narrative prose describing scenes at odds with what the viewer sees. initially, i used my own voice for this, in a sort of rough cut just to help with pacing. using this rough cut made me think that using my voice was not the right way forward, just because i wasnt personally happy with the performance i managed.

last year, i did a lot of experimentation with my voice and vocal performance. i developed different techniques to explore the unhuman aspects of communication, especially through a lens of technology. i used a piece of software called Lyrebird to generate a synthetic vocal avatar - an artificial intelligence trained to mimic my own voice. at the time, i used this to distance my physical self and parody my inability to express myself.

SADLY, this software was bought out by some company and is no longer accessible as it was, and no longer for free. it’s hidden behind the facade of this other, new software that im not familiar with and dont care to learn. there are other methods of vocal avatar generation that i may investigate, but this ruled out this option at this stage.

instead, i tried to use some generic text-to-speech programs to generate synthetic voices. i hoped that this would help add to the eeriness of the film, and the feeling of it being abandoned and devoid of humanity. i used a white-sounding male-sounding British-accented posh-sounding voice, to parody this sort of David Attenborough nature/museum documentary. of course, this sort of voice being a voice of God in film, through tradition, speaks to bigotries and patriarchal authoritarianism. like, we need white men to tell us what the things we are seeing are. this was something i was back-of-the-mind-conscious of at the time, but hadn’t fully questioned it. although it’s maybe a conceptually sound idea, it didn’t at all sound good, or right. with this automated voice in particular, the film was lacking a human quality, i felt. there are no humans visually present in the film, and there is a stark absence of humanity in the way the stories are reanimated from the stone. my human arm has been digitally removed, and the traces are all that remain.

--

the next thing i tried was a more intentional and intimate style of performance, modelled after the recent trend of ASMR videos.

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), sometimes auto sensory meridian response,[2][3][4] is a tingling sensation that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. A pleasant form of paresthesia,[5] it has been compared with auditory-tactile synesthesia[6][7] and may overlap with frisson.

ASMR signifies the subjective experience of "low-grade euphoria" characterized by "a combination of positive feelings and a distinct static-like tingling sensation on the skin". It is most commonly triggered by specific auditory or visual stimuli, and less commonly by intentional attention control.[1][8] A genre of videos which intend to stimulate ASMR has emerged, of which over 13 million are published on YouTube.[9]

I’m interested in this form of vocal performance in the way it attempts to target and illicit a specific physical reaction. Ed Atkins has spoken about the way technology develops, seeks to conquer various physical senses, ie, IMAX cameras making screens too large for one person’s eyesight, or sound systems rattling bones. ASMR attempts to create euphoric physical feelings, comparable to orgasm. as such, there is a sort of unspoken sexual quality to a lot of these videos and to a lot of these vocal stylings. often, and indeed usually, the speakers or performers in these videos are attractive women. 

in this episode of the podcast Reasonably Sound, Mike Rugnetta makes the comparison between this sort of work, and the sexist history of the female voice assistant, in early telecoms and switchboard operators, up to the present, female Siri or Google Home. there are, maybe unsuitable or offensive, connections to be made between this sort of outsourced female labour, the sexual qualities of ASMR, and sex work. but, i dont think it’s really my place to touch on it. there’s just some interesting dynamics around service and power in this form.

the episode can be found here: 

http://reasonablysound.com/2014/10/02/whisper-quiet/

anyway, technically, this phenomena doesn’t really exist, scientifically. it does exist in the minds of people who watch this stuff. so, there’s a fun pseudo-science sort of thing here, that compels me too. like a sort of witchcraft to do with audio frequencies.

in this vocal performance, then, i tried to allow my voice to take on these ASMR qualities. i whispered the words into my microphone from a very close distance, to encourage uncomfortable mouth sounds, saliva pops, and microphone peaks. these sounds are ASMR triggers, but also betray the audio recording in a few ways. it’s uncomfortable for the viewer to hear mouth and body sounds so loudly. it reveals the work as an unprofessional one, working with what would be considered to be bad recording practices. it also brings qualities of a human body, and particularly gross qualities at that, to the film, lending it a subjective human presence.

--

i feel mixed about how this has worked overall. i think it totally creates the correct responses in a viewer, but there’s no denying that in being the Voice of God for this film, i am painting myself to be the God of this world. my narration, although at odds with what the viewer sees, speaks to my authorial power, and im not sure this is a power i want to be spoken about!! as a middle class, white man, i think i need to question more thoroughly what it means for me to give myself authority in this context...

this was something Dave Beech mentioned in our crits with him, recently.

this is all in my head as i continue to experiment with the narration and voice over in this film. i dont anticipate i will have brought this any further by the end of the project, but that’s ok. here is a video showing the current way my voice is sounding in this passages:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzgbVBFhvRc

first person stories ---

now, this is also complicated.

at the beginning of the project it felt very important to me that the stories would only appear visually, as text, and not as audio. in the writing i have gone to lengths to recreate, phonetically and visually, regional accents and period grammar. understanding my limited ability as a voice performer, i felt it would be gross and inappropriate for me to perform these texts myself. that it would be sort of equivalent to cultural appropriation, especially as im not actually from the South West (unless u go some ways back down the tree).

however, this being said, i ended up opting for a sort of version of a performance. i experimented with different styles of delivery, attempting accents and different styles of voice. i also experimented with isolating select frequencies. the OM frequency of the tuning fork is the one i chose to isolate, producing a distant-sounding voice that is hard to identify as mine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hQDgEWFRIM&t=41s

for a necessarily female voice, however, this proved to be tricky. immediately in the crit, it seemed people could identify the recording as a poor attempt at an impression on my part, even though i thought i had done quite well with my shakespearean old woman impression. i ended up taking this audio and distorting it even further. the vocal inflections and sentence patterns are still identifiable, and when watching the text it is easy to follow along with the sound, but it is so distorted and modified i dont feel it can be traced back to me anymore. the femininity and the quality of the accent and the age of the caracter are all identifiable as well, i feel. over the course of this video the clip becomes more distorted, as if the stone tape is losing its fidelity on playback:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2A6jY-C1UA

i find this absolutely successful, especially on the speakers with which i listen to it. although as i continue working i might go back on this idea.

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a long process of testing, rendering, waiting, and testing, lead to a text treatment that looks like this. the text has been given an artificial flickering quality to it, to simulate the kind of flicker an old CRT monitor has. I hope this conjures images of old computers for the viewer. i think the flicker also helps to give the text some energy. as well, the text has been given a shaking effect. this is a variable effect Colin and I developed to use in our software and video games. often we use it in an extreme amount to make text look really dynamic, but here it has been used very subtly, in order to give the whole thing this sort of organic quality, or unstable quality, as if the transmission could be cut short.

I decided to print this text over a close up of the minerals themselves, colour coded to match the primary colour associated with each material in the text at the beginning.

each line of text has been individually edited and timed to allow for the smoothest reading experience, and a visual experience that matches the distorted noises of speech.

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another sort of form of visual text i think i would like to emulate, to some degree, is this old style of typewritten documents used in court testimony and in official investigations. specifically, i like the way numbered lines are used in court documents. to me, it evokes a sense of poetry. i recall school poetry/shakespeare books with numbered lines, to enable quick citation or the following along of the whole class. the top image here is a top secret CIA investigation into the ancient history of mars, using a speculative psychic method. it’s an incredibly fucking weird document and i love the eeriness of the abbreviations on the side MON and SUB.

i think my attraction to this is the way in which text visually appears from a typewriter, or more historically from ticker tape printers, like Edison’s invention pictured here. there’s a history to text tumbling upwards as it is produced. perhaps it speaks to a liveness. i want the feeling that the stories in my film are being recorded and transcribed live from the sound emerging from the stone.

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this is an old work of mine! very old...

it takes the form of a screenplay for a short, tense dream sequence in a pub at closing time, v much inspired by the work of David Lynch. it’s actually pretty much a mashup of a scene from Mulholland Drive and the video game Kentucky Route Zero. choice, sparse audio effects are used to evoke the place, but many of the actions that happen in the text’s description are not accompanied with sound. the text itself types out in the style of a video game, or a visual novel. in that the text prints itself sort of as if it is being typed. punctuation marks are given very slight time delay, so that when a comma or a fullstop appear in the sentences, they break the flow, as human speech. as with video game text, the dialogue sort of tumbles upwards towards the top of the screen, where it scrolls away. this sort of thing also references the way we interact with text through social media - through scrolling. stage directions appear separately, fading in as title cards, again to break this flow, and encourage unease.

although this work is quite juvenile to me now (only 3 years old!!! - how can i consider this juvenile, i havent grown up yet), and a little obvious in how much it rips off its influences, i think this treatment of text, and particularly the pacing of text, is very effective (and better than anything i’ve tried since). i am very fond of this video-gamey way of text tumbling upwards. 

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in this software piece, Colin helped me fabricate a motion version of my end of first year work, These Roads... . This work initially existed as one long, punctuationless sentence, printed as one continuous line in a 1000 page book. To represent this sort of continuum, the work is presented as one horizontal line, that scrolls and loops over the course of 4 hours. Again, I like the slow burn of this presentation, and the way it forces both passivity and activity in the viewer. Passivity in the lack of control the viewer has over their reading speed (indeed, it is probably slower than their reading speed), but activity in that they have to be maintaining this flow of reading in order to stay with the work. I like this tension

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reflecting on some previous attempts to present text visually in moving image work, im going to share some previous experiments.

in this one i wanted to tease the viewer with a slow text crawl that leaves an uncomfortable amount of time between each new line. the slowly rising text was to represent this idea of slowly rising water levels. i think there is mixed success here. the big failure being, i think, the writing, which is a bit clinical, not necessarily emotive enough for how much patience it asks of the viewer, and is just a bit crap. however, i do like the emergence of the text in this way - as a block