Masticating Whorl

A wall of wet pink flesh with a hole opening like the end of a balloon spans across the 20-inch screen to my right. “See there?” She points to some markings on the wall of my cervix, “Your scars are healing beautifully.” They don’t have any Xanax to calm me. I glance up at the video coming out of the mechanical arm from between my pried legs. I search for the beauty in discomfort. I think the noxoproxe is working. I won’t know if it’s going to be enough for the pain until the biopsy. 

I hope Masticating Whorl also feels like taking a trip down a microscope to discover what has always been there. This 14 minute looped film wants to feel inside out, but hopefully, you find it easier to see the beauty. It is a film about the body without a body or, perhaps we are zooming out in space in the black nothing with synthesized sci-fi sounds. The film wants to feel as intimate, warm, familiar and inviting as it is invasive, foreign, malignant and strange. The image unravels as you bathe in the sound. They play with each other, passing connections. It is as organic and anthropomorphic as it is digital and constructed. It enters through the pores of your skin to tickle your bones.

Delta of Projects

Masticating Whorl is the direct descendant of three projects. I wanted to complete my looped film Crreeeeps with an oscillating visual narrative and I wanted to use the goo I was exploring in Video Sketch Series Spring 2021 to represent the inside of a chrysalis from my screenplay of the same name. Though this metamorphosis is an overused metaphor, we tend to focus on the outcome of the butterfly more than when a caterpillar’s digestive liquids are expelled, turning it to liquid so it might metamorphose.  ^[1]Ferris Jabr, “How Does a Caterpillar Turn into a Butterfly?”, Scientific American, Munn & Co., New York, NY, August 10, 2012, … Continue reading The melting putty I was exploring in the Video Sketch Series Spring 2021 was perfect to represent the liquefaction of a body. The goal was to validate the discomfort of being stuck inside without knowing when things will change or how they will turn out.

All of my work to date worked around the theme of transformation, but it took on a social perspective in the context of relentless covid waves. Though each individual had unique experiences, few escaped the uncertainty and cyclical nature of the pandemic. Rather than looking to a better future, this film seeks to honour a feeling of contradictory beauty/pleasure and ugliness/pain from inside the eye of this tornado. 

Controlled Randomness

The subject of the moving image is a single plum-sized white melting blob of plasticine that I began playing with it in Video Sketch Series | Spring 2020. This goo takes a few minutes to melt, so it is lit by a projector in order to create a slow fade to black from white. While I was at it, I experimented with colorizing the image by projecting various colourful clips of flowers, a plastic globe and other textures onto it. When I play the resulting melting goo images at much faster speeds backwards than forwards, it creates a visual rhythm, like a piston movement or flapping. The black fades on either end of the moving image create digital manipulation possibilities.

The putty melts on a mirror. It’s not a good one, it leaves triple blurred edges and it is layered with dust. The camera is necessarily off to the top side which, unlike a digital mirroring, makes the reflection imperfect. This gives us the impression that the goo is an object that has symmetry which lends itself to anthropomorphization. This blob has also accumulated dust, hairs, crumbs and God knows what else never to be removed.

I wasn’t sure how the shapes would melt, how they would interact with the mirror, or what would happen with time warping. I had plastic flowers, beads and buttons that I stuck into the goo, just to see what would happen. There was no eye when I stuck the button there, yet we now see a face. The film teases the brain as well as the body as the viewer figures out what’s what. The face you might see exists in your mind not in the objects filmed. The mirror creates the same effect as a Rorschach inkblot test where the viewer projects their own interpretation onto the shapes the putty takes. ^[2]Justine Sergent & Yitzchak M. Binik, “On the Use of Symmetry in the Rorschach Test”, 43:4 (1979), 355-359, DOI: 10.1207/s15327752jpa4304_3, https://sci-hub.se/10.1207/s15327752jpa4304_3, … Continue reading

These interpretations are nudged by the soundscape. At times the sounds are figurative, but never clearly diegetic. The viewer is left to interpret whether the sounds are sound effects emanating from the object, the ambience of the space we are visiting or a musical soundtrack. At times we identify instruments, but not quite music. The sound of breaths increases the anthropomorphic readings, while more abstract synthesized sounds lead to alien interpretations.   

Circularity and oscillations

A very simple cyclic pattern appears in the seasons, the lunar rhythm, the menstrual cycle, and a woman’s form of orgasm. ^[3] David Sonnenschein, Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice, and Sound Effects in Cinema, Michael Wiese Productions, Studio City, CA, 2001.

David Sonnenschein

David Sonnenschein was thinking about the musical structure of the rondo, with its circular phases of buildup and relaxation as a possible narrative structure, one that works in waves rather than the arc of conventional filmic narrative, that builds up to a single climax and quick resolution, closer to the male orgasm. Why have a single climax when you could have many?

I place the images on the soundscape loop of Crreeeeps with the intention of working like a music video, but the interaction of images and sound drives the piece into a different direction. I worked back and forth between image and sound. My process became cyclical or rhythmic. I recorded more materials and bounced from Premiere to Protools and back again. The pulsations of the images lent themselves to rhythmic manipulations. The images repeated and were overlaid to create patterns as though they are melodic phrases. Meanwhile, the soundscape links the images together and drives a narrative.

The sound and image enter in and out of synchronization. They blend and contrast. Each section contains its own pattern to decode that grows upon the last. This conversation creates a series of waves and multiple abstract narrative arcs. All of my previous sketches contained movement, without an overarching structure, like a visualizer or screen saver. However, Masticating Whorl incorporates a narrative where there is a sense of growth, climax and resolution, though the piece remains formal and circular. There is no single moment which stands clear above the rest. In the limited viewings so far, people have different favourite sections. Let me know yours if you find one. 

Reprojection, both in sound and image, was an important layer of this circularity. The soundscape was re-recorded off an analogue tape, through bad speakers of the tape recorder and inside the greenhouses of the botanical gardens. My friend Shelagh and I walked around the greenhouse with a small speaker and digital recorder to capture the noises of this space that is both organic and man-made. I filmed the image of the goo off a screen and as it was projected onto flipping pages, moss, snow and a miniature landscape which includes hair and nail clippings. These reprojection techniques juxtapose the organic materials to the digital distortions created. 

The kinks of the digital, analogue and organic are stressed. We notice the dust, the pixels, the overexposure and audio artifacts. Instead of using shallow focus and composition to direct perception as in traditional cinema, these attributes, the textures and framing are used to guide the viewer in and out of layers. You can look at the silhouette of the melting goo, but then you might be looking at the fingerprints or perhaps it’s the digital snow from an overstretched image that’s emphasized, then another face.

On Digital Resolution 

I remember the sensation of the camera: its weight, the mirrored image in the viewfinder and the feeling of the long trigger under my finger, but not the image. It was 2015 at the first “Grande Rencontres des Arts Mediatiques” ^[4] Great Meeting of Media Arts in Gaspésie as a part of the Percéides Film Festival where the experimental film screenings were divided between digital and celluloid ^[5] Grande Rencontre des Arts Médiatiques, 2015, https://archives.perceides.ca/festival-2015/grande-rencontre-des-arts-mediatiques-en-gaspesie/index.html, accessed on May 5, 2022. . John Kneller let me take a photo with his Hasselbad, so he could be in the photo. In the celluloid category, his film Axis stood out by its impeccable image with little dust and a lot of technical complexity: a rotating camera that takes 5 minutes to do in after effects should the film have been digital. Meanwhile, younger artists like Karl Lemiuex and Charles-André Coderre, were hell-bent on showing the celluloid, chemical degradation and sprocket holes abound. There was something fetishistic to their approach that only seemed apparent next to the work of a celluloid native like John.

The insistence upon analogue film as the sole medium of visual importance resounded throughout discourses on cinema, almost regardless of their ideological inflection. It never mattered that these high-end economies of film production were (and still are) firmly anchored in systems of national culture, capitalist studio production, the cult of mostly male genius, and the original version, and thus are often conservative in their very structure. Resolution was fetishized as if its lack amounted to castration of the author.  The cult of film gauge dominated even independent film production. The rich image established its own set of hierarchies, with new technologies offering more and more possibilities to creatively degrade it. ^[6] Hito Steryl, “In Defence of the Poor Image”, e-flux Journal, Issue #10, Brooklyn, NY, November 2009, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/, accessed on May 3, 2022.

Hito Steryl

Luckily, I cannot be castrated, I have a cervix. I began my work in video because it was the one I can afford. Though my new year’s resolution is often 720×480, I am not so much a defender of low resolution in and of itself. With increased demand for diversity and as more digital natives produce work, this analogue and digital opposition seems to be slowing down. At the same event, Charles-André Coderre collaborated with Raphaël Demers on a performance where celluloid interacted with video.

I am curious to know what the digital has to say for itself and how analogue principles transfer to digital materials. Jonathan Walley talks about how an identity crisis of the experimental film led to the structuralist movement where they tried to break film down to its material elements. ^[7] Jonathan Walley, “Identity Crisis: Experimental Film and Artistic Expansion”, October, Summer 2011, Vol. 137, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2011, pp. 23–50, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23014886 I would argue that the digital is also a material to be explored. In treating the digital medium with the same attitude it subverts the hierarchy that exists between film and the digital realms. 

As in Walley’s text, many filmmakers I know, myself included, sway between the idea of artist and filmmaker. Though it can be seen as a feature of our work, it presents us with many practical issues with regards to distribution and to what presentation context is best for the work. I started this piece because I was frustrated with people arriving midway through my linear films. This led to the creation of a circular soundtrack. However, when it came time to choose a space in which to present Masticating Whorl, I wanted a room that would display the maximum quality of sound and image. I wanted sound treated walls and an impeccable projection surface, because the pristine sound and image create the contrast needed to showcase the shift from high to low and showcase the kinks. I wanted all at once a cinema space and a gallery that people could walk through. 

 We would all rather avoid the pain bit, and sometimes morphine is better than noxoproxene, but a life without any pain is unnatural. It is a life without profound transformation or growth. Rather than trying to perfect and clean the image, I propose that the imperfections can be seductive in themselves. The dust and digital snow could be seen as a defect, but in Masticating Whorl they are underlined. In a media-saturated environment, the manicured image is regarded with apprehension as perfection is often perceived as fraudulent. The traces, artifacts, dust, distortions left in the film breathe life into the artwork. Like the scars on my cervix, all scars tell a story. These markings are integral to the body. They express the meeting of material to time and the environment. I value the honesty they betray.