#vitalact

[amateur-broken-signs-blog]

LIGA family - sound forms

Intro

I have always been fascinated by the sound of a human voice, by the feel and impression that it leaves on the hearer. There are voices that fill you with warmth and comfort, other voices that impose sobriety and composure. It is not only the tonality of a voice, but its vibration, the metamorphosis of sound waves as it turns into coded meaning. What happens instead when the coded meaning does not travel through the standard channel (mouth-ear), when it has to materialise through the grain of the image (mouth-eye)? This is a question that I have posed myself when watching this scene.

Sound forms

Most home movies shot until late 60s were silent. Recording sound was not an option, especially for the middle-class amateur. Still sound appears in most cases almost as unnecessary.  Of course that this is largely due to body language: we can interpret facial expressions, hand gestures, body positions or the type of movements. In this case we can visually perceive the message, as the voice acquires its own materiality/visual corporeity. The voice, as it travels through a visually determined channel, adapts to and therefore borrows from the specificities/affordability of its medium. As it does so, we can note how the voice acquires a specific grain, a structure that operates through elements such as shape, surface and colour, as they become the bearers of the message.

Exploration of sound forms

Thinking of sound in terms terms of shape, surface and colour comes obviously with field-specific limitations: we set boundaries to what and how we can ideate and manipulate sound as a visual element. These are given by the affordability of the visual realm.  What if we try to break these boundaries and make the pixel explode? In which terms are we able to visualise sound then?

Notes

The manipulation of visualisation modes of sound-gestures performed by characters, determined an explosionof pixels. By overlaying versions of the same scene that highlighted different visualisation modes (movement-gesture/grain-form), and performing the function of subtraction on the overlaid scenes, revealed an essential form: a manifestation of sound. The process brings to light the essential and vital identity of the sound-gesture.  

[amateur-broken-signs-blog]

LIGA family - Interstices

Intro

The creative re-editing process of this scene contributed to a major extent to the emergence of the broken signs of the scene. After re-filming the scene with the mobile phone, from the angle I was interested in (mainly showing the gesticulating hands as a continuous dynamic horizon, giving life to the images) I tried to overlay it with the original scene cut from the home movie. At this point I realised that the re-filmed scene was 2 seconds longer than the original scene, in the conditions in which I didn’t alter any parameter, but just limited myself to ‘look’ at the scene through my mobile phone. What are those intervening spaces, those interstices interfering with time?

Reflections on Interstices

I can think about two explanations for the emergence of ‘interstices’. The first one is medium-related and therefore completely external as it controlled by the medium and not my will. The longer re-filmed scene can be explained through a delayed recording process. The delays generated by my laptop playing the original scene, plus the delays created by my phone recording the scene could have generated a total increase of the length of the final scene. Thinking though that I own an Apple system with quite a good processing speed makes me turn more towards a second interpretation, one that is rooted in an intimate perception process. This is an opposing perspective, which sees internal perception mechanisms as driving forces of time. According to it, time is shaped by our own perception of it.

Exploring Interstices

That time is shaped by our own perception is a well-known fact, circulated not only in philosophical and visual studies but also in scientific fields such as physics. In ‘Order of time’ Carlo Rovelli explains how time is not as much a subjective concept, as a built concept. Time is how we think of it and feel it; therefore how it reflects in and through our own lived experiences. Rovelli’s analysis of time is a perfect encounter of science and humanities and matches very well with my experience of time during the re-editing of the scene. Re-filming the scene and overlaying it with the original one brought to light an objective effect: that of time as a lived experience. Performing the merger of the two scenes through a dissolving effect brought to light instead another effect of time-perception: that of time as an intervening space, an interstice. The grainy effect of the re-edited scene is a result of the interstices manifested through the creative gesture.

Notes

Interstices are not completely subjective, nor objective, revealing or concealing; they are spaces in-between, able to represent both at the same time.  The creative process enabled the manifestation of interstices at an aesthetic level, affecting on the reception of time (length of the scene) and the visual feel of the scene (grain). Through the interstices of this scene I was able to grasp the vitality of the image as a genuine, primordial gesture.

[amateur-broken-signs-blog]

Liga family - geographies of resistance

Intro

What tends to draw almost immediately the attention to this scene is the light-heartedness and spontaneity with which the characters are attempting to stage a sort of dramatic love-story. Yet the gestures undertaken by their bodies seem to exert a sort of resistance to the act they are performing: eyes avoiding other gazes posed upon them, hands withheld from performing an outreach gesture, smiles withdrawing in expressions of amazement or anger etc. Looks like the story we are presented with is paralleled by a counter-story emerging from beneath the surface of the bodies.

Geographies of Resistance

Body signs are micro-gestures making up the intimate language of our bodies. An entire research area into body language tells us how we are able to tell a story ‘with’ and ‘of’ our bodies. What happens instead when bodies try to elude communication, to go beyond of what is expected of them to perform; in which realm do we position their gestures the if not in the sphere of creativity?

Exploring geographies of resistance

This counter-communicative position of bodily gestures I call geographies of resistance: a sort of maps into the more profound and imaginative sphere of our inner selves, one that goes against the grain of uniformity (or the commonly accepted understanding of bodily gestures as language) by expressing and capturing something non-identical: smiles that take up a rather bitter than joyful stand, downward-facing gazes defying shame, violently played-out gestures performed with the lightness of a caress. These are all gestures able to elude a more surface-interpretation (smile is a sing of openness/happiness) in favour of variation (smile is at times a bitter or reflective sign). They are freed from the labels language, thus from any kind of control.

Notes

The concept of geographies of resistance borrows from Deleuze’s concepts of difference and repetition. Applied to an intuitive exploration of my own motivations for selecting this specific scene, the concept of difference in repetition reveals body gestures as creative acts of resistance that are able to build new geographies of the human everyday life. By re-filming the scene and intervening on frames while editing, gestures become new spaces that open up to alternative points of view, perspectives that are nonetheless composing life as a vital and multifaceted process.

[amateur-broken-signs-blog]

Liga family - shadows

Intro

As I was not able to explain why I chose this particular scene of ‘play of cards’, I tried to write down some instinctive mental associations related to these elements: curious faces, shadow, fast pace, repetition, amusing, exaggerated gestures. Maybe the only element not associated to a more obvious interpretation of the storyline (play of cards) is the shadow. In the following I will try to expand more on the shadow on the wall, which captured my attention, a shadow that operates a vertical cut in the frame and seems almost to isolate the white-bearded man (the centre of the scene). The following is a loose/instinctive/metaphorical reflection on the shadow.

‘Where shadows run upright’

What is the logic of a shadow that runs always parallel, cutting into the coarseness of walls and not leaving any space or consolation for retreat? Youth does not understand the shadow, as it perceives it through its function as a shelter from the sun. Seniority instead looks at an example of evading time, always running parallel and never being able to catch up with. Its uprightness is an elusive gesture an example of running always side-by-side, like life and death. As the backs of the elderly sit upright, their attempt becomes a gesture to elude time, to escape the inexorable passage of life.

Exploring the logic of uprightness

Then maybe there isa meaning in the uprightness of the shadow. Could it be possibly grounded in its capacity to shape matter not according to perceptual senses but according to perceiving sensitivities? What does the eye record for which the mind seeks no explanation? An upright elderly body shadowed by youthful bodies, fervid and hasty hand gestures that are all partner in crime of the same deceitful act, faces into which shadows carve an identical pattern of time past are all deceitful perceptual acts. All becomes an endless game: what the eye sees, the mind cannot understand; what the eye understands the mind cannot see. Their real nature lies in the cracks between perception, logic and sensation, a nature that pushes the sensible domain of the image at its margins. Then how are we able to break into these deceitful acts? Maybe by rearranging our own position in relation to matter, by changing perspective, are we able to reach another sensitivity through which cracks we can begin to grab the notion of uprightness.

Notes on uprightness

This attempt is not that of revealing what lies behind the gesture of the filmmaker, his intentionality but to explore the sense of uprightness that the scene suggested to me from the start through the concept of shadow. Uprightness is only a word, void of its meaning, a vital metaphor that comes to represent something beyond, that cannot be defined but only seen. The ‘architecture’ of the term develops through a mix of casualty (seeing the vertical shadow running down on the left-hand side of the screen) and introspection (mind starts to ask questions why this shadow attracted my attention), a process that I tried to explore through an artistic/post-editing re-elaboration of the scene.