Leo Goldsmith: My first
question was going to be a banal one: to ask you about all of the
different types of images you've included here and their provenance. But
instead, perhaps something slightly more abstract/pretentious: can you
say something about found footage as a material/medium, as a cinematic
practice (with roots in collage, montage, etc.), and as a horror genre?
Graeme Arnfield: I’ve
always had an interest in mediation, the event, the representation and
the repercussions of that representation’s creation. Found footage is
the ideal form to deal with those ideas, it’s an unavoidable part in
their use. On top of this I think it’s important to better our
understanding of the images we currently have, rather than allow their
logics to flourish without notice. We should reconfigure these artefacts
of the past in order to create better conditions for a more ethical
future. Not alter them, but to throw light on their undisclosed
politics. This is especially important for images like those that
populate my film, whose capital has been based off their sensational
value, and relationship to fear mongering apocalyptic visions. Which is
to be expected, as you mention horror cinema and cinematic genres haunt
these images. It’s hard to watch them and not think of the rush of
handheld faux evidence horror films that still kick around cinemas. Even
the scientific reason for this sound’s appearance suggests the return
of the repressed, one of horror’s favourite themes. On a personal level,
as someone who finds filming in public or organising actors an
incredibly panic inducing experience, the safety of re-use is sometimes
the only way I can face making a film. With other people’s footage that
crushing spell of disappointment that often accompanies the creation of
images isn’t there. I can accept the images as they are and think about
what they are doing, not what they could have been.
LG: You use a lot of
compositing here: pictures within pictures, almost like having many
windows open on one's desktop. What is this strategy's relationship to
other (maybe more modernist?) ones like montage or collage? Do you see
this aesthetic strategy as particularly useful in approaching the
contemporary and/or the Internet?
GA: The experience
of browsing the Internet, the logic of hyperlinks and the algorithmic
curation of YouTube in particular were definitely some things I was
considering when working out the composition. In YouTube’s network,
images are brought into attention by the viewing of previous work, often
filmed by different people, at different times, in different places
which are nevertheless grouped together by shared tagging and spit out
as a form of continuity. In this sense the past dictates what is watched
in the present, leaving a trace of this past on the screen, allowing it
to literally frame the current film seemed like a way of aesthetically
highlighting this experience. The thing with YouTube is that it demands
that all images become insatiable; they ask for suggested sequels and
spiritual successors. So if the videos of people filming the sky have a
capture all logic, then my film has a case of rabid auto-play, coupled
with a nasty case of multiple browser tabs, which start to colour
readings of the videos. This auto-play extends to the point where these
various mobile phone videos were actually dictated by YouTube’s
algorithms, the order in which they appear is the order that the videos
appeared to me, one after each other, feeding off the search term
“strange noises in the sky”. Of course I had the say on when to start
and end this survey, but I think it still shows a good cartography of
the network. But this networked programme is one thing; there are always
more browser tabs. There is continuity, and there is distraction and
temporal reduction. These days I am never less than five tabs open at
once, emails from dead friends rub against soundcloud techno mixes which
rub against clips of the latest catastrophe; it is everything all the
time. This nature of distracted vision was something that I tried to
embed in the film through the text passages and the other images.
LG: In working with
images taken from others, both individual video-uploaders and
corporations (like Google or YouTube), how do you characterize your
collaboration? Do you consider yourself as having certain
responsibilities? Rights? On a more practical level, do you contact the
the makers of the videos you use?
GA: Responsibility
is always a tricky one and depends on what you are using, how you are
using it and for what purpose. At least for this work I felt I had a
responsibility to these individual filmmakers not to take their work
wholly out of context, one as their context is what I’m really
interested in, and two to allow people to speak for themselves. I wanted
to find room for both our voices in the same image. I don’t know if
I’ve fully done that, but I tried. The important thing is that I have to
disrupt, renew and critique these images but I also have to be able see
myself on the street at their creation, equally confused as the
filmmakers were. I have the privilege of distance; they had the panic of
the event. It would be wrong to speak down to them. With this
responsibility I tried to make myself complicit in my own myth making.
In this sense of complicity I mean to say this is a speculative
document, its science is shaky, its history is tear stained. Especially
in the latter sections, where the language drops its guard and I start
to fill in gaps of understanding with my own emotional investment and
interpretations. But I hope even with these speculations the videos
still stand for themselves and the original filmmakers don’t feel
misrepresented. Curiously though some of these videos are re-edits or
re-uploads by others. The original accounts are gone; so all is left are
the copies of their circulation. Reposting and appropriating is a major
factor in the success of films on YouTube. The philosophy of ripping a
video, writing a more algorithmically appealing title and uploading it
for some quick views saved some of these films from oblivion. In a way
the identities of the people who shot some of these videos are now as
shaky as the origin of the sound they were trying to document.
LG: You use images
of a sort of sci-fi gaming environment a 3D-simulation, of an alien
landscape, which in some moments seems complete, at others partially
constructed. My first thought was that these images suggest the
extraordinary expansion of the ways in which images are generated and
circulated now and that they are an index of image circulation of which
this is just one example. But my second thought was sort of the
opposite: that in fact this was an example of one sort of worldbuilding,
and that your assemblage of various images, textures, and orders of
reality was another. Briefly: do you consider your video as a kind of
worldbuilding, like that of these simulated CG environments?
GA: Worldbuilding is
a great term for it. Along with the flow of hyperlinked mobile phone
images, I wanted to include side plots, things that on the surface seem
disconnected. But on closer inspection all come together, just in a
discursive way. Connoting multiple browser tabs if I’m keeping up with
my own clumsy metaphors. The images from the video game and Apple Maps
are an example of this. They are both attempts to make a world, but one
whose stitches and cracks are showing. In the game world through turning
the tools of development inwards, in this case using the developer
console inside the game the player can enter “god-mode” and float
through the complex maths, surveying the hollow mountains that float in
grey nothingness. While video games are actionable, the engines they are
built on allow for non-proscribed forms of action as well. I believe
there are new worlds to be built out of these hidden images. I certainly
am interested in this worldbuilding in my own work, the credits
sequence at the end which list all the filmmakers almost sets a
challenge for people to de-make my film, float through it’s surfaces and
expose it’s hollow mountains. It is a world filled with my ideologies
and politics, no different than any other construct; one like any other
world that should be challenged.
LG: Since this video
is partly composed of videos found online and will be viewed online,
could you say something about the exhibition of this work? Do you have
any preference among the varying potential contexts for viewing this
work, e.g. cinema, gallery, laptop, phone?
GA: I think the
ideal way to view it is in bed, on a laptop, 3am, unable to sleep,
falling into one more link, letting your pupils dilate and your anxiety
keep your muscles from settling. Or at least these were conditions of
its production. If possible I would love people to stumble upon the
film, have it come up in their own searches for “strange noises in the
sky”. To have it embedded in the culture it is about would be fantastic.
After all there are a myriad of videos compiling these type of videos,
mine isn’t so different, it just has a more critical eye. Ultimately it
is adaptable work though, I can’t afford to be specific, and so wherever
people want it I will curiously see if it works. I have no real
preference for where it is to be seen. I am just happy for it to be
seen.
LG: While watching
your video, I was at first seduced by the variety and texture of the
images, but given the subject matter of the videos you draw from the
mysterious drone I became increasingly aware of your sound design,
making use of as many sonic layers as you do visual ones. I also started
to think about this idea of a strange sound coming from
nowhere/everywhere, one that links disparate locations around the globe,
and also, more generally, the concepts of recorded sound, of
synthesized sound, of disembodied sound. I wonder if (any of) these
ideas of sound were a guiding principle in your treatment of the images,
or vice versa?
GA: I tried to treat
sound as its own thing, tying it to the images, as much as the images
are tied to the sound, neither of them being privileged over the other.
The films I’m archiving do take a stand on this though; they are often
incredible non-visual in some sense. These people were filming sound;
this was one of the aspects of the videos that initially seduced me.
Here were people enacting ritualistic gestures, point cameras into the
sky, something not unlike the films Peter Gidal made, anti-illusionary
in their own way. It makes perfect sense, this is the age of
high-definition smart phones so why just record the sound when you can
produce an image as well. This is increasingly our first response, at
the first glimpse of interest our phones come out; they are an extension
of our nervous system. Along with the sounds of the event I want to
complicate things further though scoring the film, blurring the line
where the event and the representation meet. It was important to me to
use an instrument that was tied into the themes of the film; as such I
started experimenting with synthesizer samples. The sounds of
synthesizers are tied to distant planets and far off futures. Yet if
anyone has had to lug one around they know they are very much of this
present material world.
From Videodrome October
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