AMIF RESPONSE: ‘Hermit’ - Tom Varley responds to Duncan Marquiss’ moving image programme
‘It’s not hard to consider cinema expanding into a deafening pale abstraction controlled by computers.’[1]
‘The ultimate filmgoer would be a captive of sloth. Sitting constantly in a movie house, among the flickering shadows, his perception would take on a kind of sluggishness. He would be the hermit dwelling among the elsewheres, forgoing the salvation of reality. Films would follow films, until the action of each one would drown in a vast reservoir of pure perception. He would not be able to distinguish between good or bad films, all would be swallowed up into an endless blur. He would not be watching films, but rather experiencing blurs of many shades. Between blurs he might even fall asleep, but that wouldn’t matter. Sound tracks would hum through the torpor. Words would drop through this languor like so many lead weights.’[2]
At first, I see only a black rectangle interrupted by heavy strokes of text. Then, orders and washed-out ochre. Straight in. Pale golden lines connect the upper edge of the rectangle to the bottom, shivering and shaking from side to side in endlessly shifting patterns.[3] I step into the luminous screen. I hear orders: proceed in a straight line. This simple geometry is thwarted by verticals on a y-axis at right angles to the horizontal x-axis that I attempt to traverse. I’m wading through a marsh, thick with rushes and reeds. The intersecting lines I push through are lateral shoots connected to a continuous stem – a rhizome[4] – growing underground, perpendicular to the force of gravity. Any point of the rhizome can and must be connected to any other[5]. I push through for minutes on end, and hear more orders, until open space advances towards me through the density. Clearing. Keep it[6] low. Don’t want too much sky. Don’t want too many big, flat, untextured spaces.
I keep it low. I am underground, inside a cave[7] [8] [9] where people compete for prizes. I see an armour-plated alien disembark a hover-car. I hear an Australian accent emanating from a fleshy, pink orifice beneath a helmet and beady black eyes. I hear heavy breathing. I see a military man, a soldier. He guides the alien on foot through the labyrinthine cave and asks it questions. In the middle distance, I see more soldiers. They fire their weapons then vanish instantly, teleporting elsewhere. Spaces are woven together ever more tightly by more and more lines of transport and communication. You can transform any part of the world into any other part of the world; you can bend one point in space to connect to another.
High above me I see an aperture and the flat, untextured sky shining through. I climb the cave wall, through a beam of light, towards its source. Looking back, I see projections where the beam of light meets the ground[10]: I see flickering black and white figures, converging on nothing and dispersing beyond the edges of the rectangular illumination, into nothing.[11] I see a rubber plant[12] revolving with organisms swarming, photosynthesizing perhaps. Bodies swarm across the plant’s leaves like mitochondria in a cell, propelling it around and around, and dispersing beyond the margins of each leaf. Repeating. I see figures flickering, converging on nothing and dispersing into nothing. I see a rubber plant revolving, bodies swarming across its leaves. Repeating[13]. Revolving. Abscission.
I see the bare branches of deciduous trees depicted in carbon and ash; the residue of sticks and branches, burnt and compressed to varying densities, traced across rectangles of pressed cellulose pulp, derived from deciduous trees; I see a sylvan setting. I see fractal canopies – lines splitting into lines splitting into lines – pulmonary systems drawn by hand and then rendered (again) in the grains of animal gelatin[14]; I see celluloid film.[15]
Black and white figures flicker again. Swarm again. I’m not sure if they’re the same figures as before. Another soldier, not the same one as before.
“What I’m doing is creating an environment – creating an environment whereby people feel involved. To what extent do I allow this to be totally spontaneous, maybe chaotic, and to what degree do I exercise control?”[16]
An ultramarine sky fills my field of vision as I reach the aperture and step out onto the ledge. I hear music to my left and then all around. As the melody descends, a mountain range rises up in front of me. Flat, untextured space fractures into unknowably complicated roughness[17] – convoluted and peculiar. I throw myself over the edge into the void and am swept high above the landscape on thermal columns. I find myself in free flight[18], scanning the valleys and mountainsides like a bird searching for food[19]. What I feel is not quite déjà vu, but there’s something oddly familiar about how the land looks from here: geometry mimicking geology, mathematics mimicking millennia of glacial erosion and tectonic plate movement. ‘Somewhere at the bottom of my memory are the sunken remains of all the films I have ever seen, good and bad they swarm together forming cinematic mirages.’[20] I see the ledge. I see a shark[21]. I see a teapot[22]. I see blurs of many shades.
Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules repeated without end, says Benoit Mandelbrot.[23] ‘What seems to be without order, often turns out to be highly ordered. By isolating the most unstable thing, we can arrive at some kind of coherence, at least for a while.’[24] So I fly straight towards the snow-capped mountains, isolate a single snowflake and dive into it.
I see a human face for what feels like the first time in a long time: A female face, close up.
I am in room 2D-506 of the building where the future I now inhabit was invented.[25]
She plays contrapuntal melodies, manipulating patterns of sound with machines built for the manipulation of patterns of information. She generates real-time output operations on voltage controlled equipment. She patiently answers questions asked by a voice behind me. Interrupted. The same question repeated.[26]
Her face is framed by two sets of parallel lines. I become aware of the edges.
I become aware that the voices I hear are in fact in front of me.
I realize I am motionless, mute and impassive.
I see 360 degrees of darkness surrounding a luminous rectangle.
The rectangle turns black.
[1] Robert Smithson, A Cinematic Atopia, Artforum, September 1971.
[3] Des-/Trans-/En- cription of SWAMP, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, 1969, 16mm Film, 6 mins.
[4] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari transposed this terminology in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia Project (1972-1980) to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation.
[5] In a procrastinatory reverie, I imagined this entire text typeset in one continuous line, printed on a long scroll. Notes (like this one) to the body text and other pieces of ancillary information would be printed perpendicular to the length of the scroll, directly above the word or phrase that they annotate. Zoomed out, the entire document would resemble a cross-section diagram of a reed bed.
[6] It = the camera. Jean-Luc Godard famously said: “A camera filming itself in a mirror would be the ultimate movie.” Smithson’s ultimate filmgoer (see 2) is a response of sorts to this quotation.
[7] Des-/Trans-/En- cription of This Spartan Life: Episode 4 (Interview with McKenzie Wark).
[8] Towards the end of A Cinematic Atopia – the essay which this text ‘inhabits’ like an endoparasite or a Xenomorph facehugger from the Alien films – Smithson describes an unrealized work: he plans to build a cinema inside a cave. The only film shown inside the cave would be one documenting the cinema’s construction. He describes a shot from the film: the camera moving slowly from inside the tunnel, towards a pinpoint of light emanating from the cave’s entrance.
[9] I’m not going to reveal the extent of my ignorance of classical Greek philosophy by attempting to summarize Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. I invite readers who are up on The Republic to *insert own footnote* here, or...
[11] Des-/Trans-/En- cription of Gummibaum, Thomas Bayrle and Daniel Kohl, 1993/4, 16mm Film, 5mins 30sec
[12] Gummibaum is the German word for rubber plant, grown around the world for ornamental purposes. Despite a diversity of trivia relating to its cultivation and uses (in parts of India people guide the roots of the plant over chasms to form living bridges for example, or more obviously, the fact that its leaves contain a poisonous, white latex, previously used to manufacture rubber), its symbolic significance in this context (i.e. 12) seems uncertain. My best guess is that the rubber plant’s global ubiquity is what’s important here. It evokes banal, non-places – offices and institutional environments, the same the world over.
[13] Imagine visual krautrock.
[14] An aside: Before researching this text I’d never really considered the fact that motion picture film contains gelatin. Due to my personal beliefs relating to animal welfare, this revelation prompted soul-searching and Google searching. I was relieved to discover that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) ‘does not actively campaign against watching movies or taking photographs for pleasure’.
[15] Des-/Trans-/En- cription of The Role Of A Lifetime, Deimantas Narkevicius, 2003, Various formats transferred to video, 16mins
[16] In addition to this short paragraph culled from the interview with filmmaker Peter Watkins that is the focus of The Role Of A Lifetime, I wanted to include the quotation: “We as human beings try and be complicated in our memories and our feelings, but not in the pictures we see and sounds we hear. We put images and sounds together, but we never discuss what it means to do this (…) What effect is this having on society? On history? On our personal feelings? What effect is this having on the way we think about time, space, structure and process?” More words dropping through the languor like lead weights. Words that I cannot synthesize.
[17] Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010) argued that the opposite of regularity is ‘roughness’, rather than ‘irregularity’. Mandelbrot created the first-ever theory of roughness, advancing ‘fractals’ as a way of explaining and describing non-smooth, ‘rough’ objects in the real world. A fractal is a curve or geometric figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole. Fractals are useful in modeling structures (such as mountainsides or snowflakes) in which similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales, and in describing partly random or chaotic phenomena such as crystal growth, fluid turbulence, and galaxy formation. Fractals are also found in human activity, such as architecture and stock market prices. Mandelbrot believed that fractals, far from being unnatural, were in many ways more intuitive and natural than the artificially smooth objects of traditional Euclidean geometry.
[18] Des-/Trans-/En- cription of Vol Libre, Loren Carpenter, 1979-80, CG Animation produced to accompany a SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques) lecture demonstrating how to synthesize fractal geometry with a computer. The world's first fractal movie, it uses 8-10 different fractal generating algorithms computed on a VAX-11/780.
[19] I originally wanted the bird in this simile to be a waxwing, as a kind of homage to Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. The structure of that particular novel (i.e. an enormous excess of ancillary information, relating to and vastly outweighing a comparatively formal, lyrical piece of writing that is ostensibly the ‘main event’) was in the back of my mind as I was planning this text. The sky in the first sentence of the paragraph would have been ‘azure’ rather than ‘ultramarine’: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain, by the false azure in the window pane.” It turns out, however, that waxwings live in forests, subsisting on a diet of berries, insects and sap. The majestic, aerial views of panoramic mountain ranges simulated in Vol Libre would be totally outside of your typical waxwing’s ken.
[20] Robert Smithson, op cit
[21] When sharks and other ocean predators can’t find food, they abandon Brownian motion, the random motion seen in swirling gas molecules, for Lévy flight – a mix of long trajectories and short, random movements found in turbulent fluids.
[22] From Wikipedia: The Utah teapot is a 3D computer model, which has become a standard reference object (and something of an in-joke) in the computer graphics community. It is a mathematical model of an ordinary teapot of fairly simple shape, which appears solid, cylindrical and partially convex. A teapot primitive is considered the equivalent of a "hello world" program, as a way to create an easy 3D scene with a somewhat complex model acting as a basic geometry reference for scene and light setup. Many libraries will even have functions dedicated to drawing teapots. The teapot model was created in 1975 by early computer graphics researcher Martin Newell, a member of the pioneering graphics program at the University of Utah.
[23] Benoit Mandelbrot, Fractals and the art of roughness, TED Talk
[24] Robert Smithson, op cit
[25] Bell laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey was the research and development arm of American telephone monopoly AT&T Corporation. Seven Nobel prizes have been awarded for research carried out at Bell Labs and work completed there is credited with, amongst other things, the development of the laser, the transistor, radio astronomy, programming languages, information theory, various computer operating systems and charge-coupled devices vital for digital imaging. Ostensibly, the purpose of the facility was to invent technology that the parent company could ultimately profit from, but by all accounts, in the 1960s and ‘70s much of what went on was closer to pure research. Bell Labs involved itself in the interface between cutting-edge technology and avant-garde art, engineers collaborating with a number of artists and musicians, including Laurie Spiegel.
[26] Des-/Trans-/En- cription of Laurie Spiegel interviewed at Bell Laboratories 1984 (Part 1/2)
