I’m Sorry, What Was The Question?

This research-creation wants to hide under the epidermis and cuddle with the pus of your next pimple. It plays with the senses. It is visceral. It turns things inside out and illustrates the unseen. The work strives to disrupt the viewer’s perspective preconceptions by proposing audiovisual puzzles. Through juxtapositions in space and time each audiovisual experience proposes new connections between fragments that the viewer transforms into something that can be held within the three-pound flesh of our brains.

Psychologist and researcher Lisa Feldmann Barett explains how our brain works like pattern classification: we see similar things associated with the same word over and over again to create a concept that becomes our social reality. Think of the way a day-care teacher might repeat the word “Blue” to toddlers while pointing to a rainbow, while in Russia and China the day-care teacher has two colours that we would both call blue in the west. They do not confuse these blues, similar to the way that we wouldn’t call Barbie’s pink car light red or purple, it’s definitely pink. [1]Lisa Feldman Barett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, 2017, https://how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Categorization and … Continue reading The language shapes how we perceive colours in a rainbow though we know the colours exist on a spectrum. These are alternate perceptions of the same physical phenomena. Lisa Feldman Baett goes on to argue that our emotions are shaped this way and are culturally specific rather than universal and that the line between thinking and feeling is messy. My work seeks to discover and interrupt these perceptual boundaries where we split the world in either blue or green, and fail to see the blue and green, fail to see turquoise.

I figured out that art would be the perfect place for me because what’s encouraged is the invention of languages [2]David Altmedj, Interview directed by Catherine Tatge, Art 21: Art in the Twenty-First Century, Season 6, Episode 2, Boundaries, produced by Art21, Public Broadcasting Service, … Continue reading

David Altmedj

Cinema and the moving collage

In my application to the MFA, I propose to repeat an exercise I had where I create a moving collage equivalent to an art piece of a different medium. I had done this to an illustration by Michael Deforge in my 2 min film Deer DeForge. I did not take the illustration and animate it directly, but found ways to animate equivalents. The results enchanted me and I wanted to explore and develop this style of cinema. 

You consider that cinema?

He said in surprise before sucking on the tip of the cigarette outside the building of our class. Up to that point, I figured that if it played on a screen with synchronized sound it was cinema. Yet, my medium would come under question every time I explain it. My working definition of cinema was unaware of academic discourse. While theorists were debating over the whether sensationalist films or animation were part of, or outside cinema [3]Jeffery Sconce, “‘Trashing’ the academy: taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style”, Screen Magazine, 36:4, 1995, pp. 371–393. [4]Paul Watson, “There’s no accounting for Taste: Exploitation cinema and the Limits of Film Theory”, Trash Aesthetics: Pop culture and it’s Audience,  Eds by Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, … Continue reading [5] Susanne Buchan, “Animation, in Theory”, Animating Film Theory, Eds. Karen Beckman,Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2014, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11sn1f6.11, accessed on June 1, 2022., I was being handed Argento’s trashy Suspiria [6]Dario Argento, Suspuria, Produzioni Atlas Consorziate (P.A.C.), Rome, 1977,https://youtu.be/hPs2ExUL_bc, accessed on June 1, 2022. or Švankmajer’s partially animated Alice [7]Jan Švankmajer, Alice, Channel Four Films, Condor Films, Hessischer Rundfunk , Schweizerische Radio und Fernsehgesellschaft (SRG), Czech Republic, 1988, YouTube excerpt, 3 min, … Continue reading with the same respect as Bergman’s The Seventh Seal [8] Ingmar Bergman, “the Knight meets Death”, The Seventh Seal, AB Svensk Filmindustri, 1957, YouTube excerpt, 2min, https://youtu.be/f4yXBIigZbg, accessed on June 1, 2022. My desire to play at the boundaries of these disciplines and subvert perceived hierarchies is fueled by the debate. All the while, the ambiguity complexifies the task of describing my genre of cinema or perhaps its another medium.

In the same way that photography is to Cinema, what illustration is to animation, my work is more akin to a moving version of collage. It’s neither an animation collage, such as Terry Gilliam popularized in Monty Python [9]Open Culture, “Terry Gilliam Reveals the Secrets of Monty Python Animations: A 1974 How-To Guide”, Open Culture, November 6 2020, … Continue reading [10]“1974: TERRY GILLIAM on CUTOUT ANIMATION | The DIY Film Animation Show | Classic clips | BBC Archive”, YouTube video, uploaded by BBC Archive, from The Do-It-Yourself Film Animation Show, London, … Continue reading , nor a collage film in the method of Arthur Lipset. [11]Carolyne Weldon, “Inside the Disturbed and Disturbing Collage Films of Avant-Garde Genius Arthur Lipsett”, National Film Board of Canada, NFB Blog, Montreal, October 5, 2016, … Continue reading

Calling Turquoise a cold colour is too vague and overarching. Only a rare specialist would know what Pantone 15–5519 means and it’s too specific, excluding similar tones like Pantone 16–5421. The works plays and runs around in the fields of: animation, video art, live action, cinema, collage, film, video, projection, sound, audiovisual, installation, music, soundscapes, multimedia, experimental, puppetry, storytelling, internet art, digital art, comedy, the absurd, the grotesque, the uncanny, camp, psychedelic, figurative and abstraction. Somewhere in the middle of this laundry list the medium blurs into aesthetic description.

I have always bent live action footage, with extreme editing and layering appearing in my very first films, but I did not invent this medium. Shiya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: Iron Man from 1989 [12]Shiya Tsukamoto, Tetsuo: Iron Man, 1989, YouTube movie trailer, 3 min, uploaded by Arrow Video, https://youtu.be/ShJvheZHXdI, accessed on April 13, 2022. , Norman McLaren’s Pas De Deux from 1968 [13]Norman McLaren, Pas de Deux, National Film Board of Canada, 13 min https://www.nfb.ca/film/pas_de_deux_en/, accessed on April 13, 2022. and Vera Chytilova’s Daisies from 1966 [14] Vera Chytilova, “Scissors” from Daisies, Filmové studio Barrandov, 1966, Clip from YouTube, 25 seconds, uploaded by Film Struck, https://youtu.be/P_XXNTQwv68, accessed on April 13, 2022. to name but a few, played between animation, collage and live action long before me. However the digital tools have made it easier to bend, collage and layer video. As it has become viable to make an entire work with little live action or frame by frame animation leads to a proliferation of new work by many creators.

Aesthetics of unconscious perception

Why did the chicken cross the road?

The answer depends on whether you’re asking a neurologist, an endocrinologist, a behaviourist, an ornithologist, a zoologist, an ethologist, an ecologist, or the chicken. Where one might explain the role of neurotransmitters, another will talk about evolution. While each explanation claims to hold the truth and none are wrong, they will differ. The endocrinologist will always see the role of hormones, while the ecologist will struggle to add that lens to the preexisting understanding of environmental factors. They cannot remove their ecological lens. Each possible perspective is a fact and half-truth of a whole that cannot be seen in detail all at once. Though we ground science in empirical evidence, what we choose to frame and what we leave out of the frame is in itself part of subjectivity and skews truth. I seek ways to look at what we’re looking through and it is a messy lens.

It’s hard for me to comment, because I’ve never heard an Aldous Harding song. [15]Aldous Harding, “Aldous Harding live performance in KEXP studio” KEXP, Seattle, October 16, 2019, YouTube video, https://youtu.be/O-_yCMPNNEo, accessed on October 14, 2021.

Aldous Harding

I approach a project with the mindset of a juvenile delinquent and the Microsoft Excel module for creating charts from numbers. I play to turn abstract concepts into visual code and/or sounds. I want to discover new links between ideas in the same way the Excel pie chart exposes the links and the significance of the numbers without imposing an interpretation. In this way, I hope to uncover the categorization. This categorization is that lens that encodes, but distorts reality into something that can be held in our brains. I think of dreams as the language of the brain speaking to itself and I am attracted to cinema because, like Fellini, I believe that the experience of this medium is close to the experience of dreams: 

Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of images. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.  [16]Frederico Fellini, “Fellini’s Language of dream” interview by Jonathan Cott, Scraps from the Loft, December 5, 2017, originally published in Rolling Stones Magazine, February 1984, … Continue reading

Frederico Fellini

In dreams, we start with a feeling that creates an image. Perhaps you are stressed because of a looming deadline and tight finances and you dream of being chased by a shopping cart in the metro tunnels. Perhaps, after the deadline turns into a big success, you dream about eating mac n’ cheese in a hot tub with a young Lenny Kravitz. However, cinema works the other way around. Instead of feeling creating images, I must choose images in the hopes that it will tease out an embodied experience within the audience, and some people dislike Lenny Kravitz.

A geologist explains to you that turquoise is a rock and not a colour. You know that, but a rock can be the colour turquoise without being turquoise, the rock. The colour is not invalided because it’s named after the rock.  [17]Jacob Olsen, “The History of the Color Turquoise: Which Came First, The Stone or the Color?”, Color Meanings, Copenhagen, Denmark, https://www.color-meanings.com/history-color-turquoise/,  … Continue reading I get it, it’s confusing to say that my work is surrealist, as in the aesthetic principle that sways in between figurative and abstraction, without being part of the surrealist art movement, the group of artists from a century ago, even if the words are related. Like the surrealist movement, I am interested in dream language, psychology, perception, mind/body problems. However, I am from the age of neuroscience and cognitive science. I also do not believe that the unconscious is the gateway to freedom so much as a reflection of the mind’s inner workings. In fact, I think structural oppression sits on unconscious biases.
Despite our foundational differences, surrealism is a good descriptor of the form. Raphaelle Moine argues that within film criticism the term “surrealism film” transitions from movement to generic operator. These surrealist films exist outside the surrealist movements project, though that movement heavily influenced directors to tap into unconscious influences. [18]Raphaëlle Moine, translated by Pierre Taminiaux, “From Surrealist Cinema to Surrealism in Cinema: Does a Surrealist Genre Exist in Film?” Yale French Studies: Surrealism and Its Others, 2006, … Continue reading

Enchanting Puke

I didn’t know much about video art, so why was I being called a video artist? The theory of the grotesque was the key that helped me link my history in genre film to the fine arts. The grotesque connect the camp, the absurd, the alluring, the cross and the gross beyond divisions between figuration, narrative and abstraction. The grotesque is about the effect it created on the viewer. It wants to push and pull, creating both attraction and repulsion. It is unstable since it is this action that defines it, more a verb. It is an aesthetic principle that is culturally bound. What is grotesque here today does not remain grotesque tomorrow, nor elsewhere or for a different viewer. When we habituate or see only beauty or ugliness where we previously felt ambivalent, the experience is no longer considered grotesque. [19] Frances S. Connelly, “Introduction: Entering the Spielraum”, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2012. [20]Noël Carrol “The Grotesque Today: Premilinary Notes on a Taxonomy”, from Modern Art and the Grotesque, Eds Frances S. Connelly, Cambridge University Press, New York,  2003, pp. 291-311,   [21] Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund, Grotesque, London and New York, Routledge, 2013. [22]Philip Thomson, The Grotesque, Methen & Co Ltd, London, 1972.

Messages from Katia [23][…] Though profile pictures are meant to be gazed at, yours gazes at the onlooker […] But in a playful way, not serious, a questioning gaze half smiling And you do that a lot, … Continue reading

My research leads to Julia Kristeva’s essay on the abject. Abjection also exists only in the interaction between subject and object. It causes an emotion of repulsion at the encounter of the body in the process when the body loses its discreet form. It complexifies and creates ambiguity between perceived dichotomies: the interior/exterior, subject/object, individual/society, psychological/anthropological. The body is caught in a process as it seeks to explore the interrelationship between the forms it takes in deconstruction and reinvention. [24]Julia Kristeva, “Pouvoirs de l’horreur : Essai sur l’abjection“, Éditions du Seuil, Paris,1980, pp.145-148.

Knowledge Held Within States of Being

Reality is filled with nuclei surrounded by spiraling electrons; photons acting like a particle and a wave; and other truths that our ape brains were not designed to intuit or to understand. Our experience is an interpretation or hallucination of that physics. It is possible that the fuzzy way reality appears when we are not quite awake, or not quite sober, is holding information unavailable, but no less accurate, than the way things appear at noon on a well-rested Wednesday. Perhaps alternate states of perception are a part of a larger truth in the same way that each discipline explains part of the reason a chicken crosses the road.

“It was revealed, this great tension at the heart of scientific enquiry. It was revealed in this absurd pantomime. I was there tripping balls on this bed and laughing at these questions like ‘How do you rate your experience of infinity?’ How do you, at any moment, rate your experience of infinity? Let alone when you’re under the influence of government-produced, government-sanctioned LSD. […] This, of course, raises this really major problem for people who are going to try to understand the nature of the mind from conventional empirical scientific methods, because you can’t design an experiment to get inside someone else’s experience because that’s just, it’s a paradox that’s built in.” [25]Merlin Sheldrake interviewed by Russell Brand, “#177 Interconnection”, Under the Skin, March 19, 2021. Podacast, 1:19:58, … Continue reading explains biologist and mycologist Merlin Sheldrake. He was one among other scientists and mathematicians who were asked questions about infinity in a hospital room decorated in mood light and funky tapestries. My films are often described as psychedelic. Much like the scientists who were not tripping balls, I question what alternate states like on drugs and while dreaming reveal about the nature of knowledge and what knowledge is held within states of being. My research creation exists outside the bounds of “conventional empirical scientific method”, I believe it is an alternative way to explore consciousness as a subject. It delights me to engage with the paradox of the interaction between the material realm and the conscious realm through the interface of the body. 

Research Question

Armed with these aesthetic tools and with a focus on the hybrid medium I research through the creation of brainteasers where we understand enough to want to put information together, but the elements never quite add up. The work seeks to subvert structural categorization in the hopes of peeking into truths that are hidden to naturalistic perception, to help us believe through embodiment what we understand through cognition. The viewer is encouraged to question my sometimes divisive propositions that subvert perceived binary such as organic/digital, inside/outside, mind/body, gender/sex, rational/emotional, solid/liquid, material/conceptual, attraction/disgust, bad/good taste, collective/personal.

What do we learn from the juxtaposition of representations of bodies in transformation as both multiple and fragmented; both natural and constructed; both in the organic and digital?

Can help us resolve the multiple perspectives and truths that inhabit us?

References

References
1 Lisa Feldman Barett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, 2017, https://how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Categorization and https://how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Categorical_perception, accessed on April 13, 2022.
2 David Altmedj, Interview directed by Catherine Tatge, Art 21: Art in the Twenty-First Century, Season 6, Episode 2, Boundaries, produced by Art21, Public Broadcasting Service, Arlington, VA, 2012,

https://search.alexanderstreet.com/preview/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cvideo_work%7C2800659, accessed on April 11, 2022.

3 Jeffery Sconce, “‘Trashing’ the academy: taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style”, Screen Magazine, 36:4, 1995, pp. 371–393.
4 Paul Watson, “There’s no accounting for Taste: Exploitation cinema and the Limits of Film Theory”, Trash Aesthetics: Pop culture and it’s Audience,  Eds by Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whlehan, Pluto Press, London, 1997, pp. 66–83.
5 Susanne Buchan, “Animation, in Theory”, Animating Film Theory, Eds. Karen Beckman,Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2014, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11sn1f6.11, accessed on June 1, 2022.
6 Dario Argento, Suspuria, Produzioni Atlas Consorziate (P.A.C.), Rome, 1977,https://youtu.be/hPs2ExUL_bc, accessed on June 1, 2022.
7 Jan Švankmajer, Alice, Channel Four Films, Condor Films, Hessischer Rundfunk , Schweizerische Radio und Fernsehgesellschaft (SRG), Czech Republic, 1988, YouTube excerpt, 3 min, https://youtu.be/11831Y1y7eA, accessed on June 1, 2022.
8 Ingmar Bergman, “the Knight meets Death”, The Seventh Seal, AB Svensk Filmindustri, 1957, YouTube excerpt, 2min, https://youtu.be/f4yXBIigZbg, accessed on June 1, 2022.
9 Open Culture, “Terry Gilliam Reveals the Secrets of Monty Python Animations: A 1974 How-To Guide”, Open Culture, November 6 2020, https://www.openculture.com/2020/11/terry-gilliam-reveals-the-secrets-of-monty-python-animations-a-1974-how-to-guide.html accessed on June 1, 2022.
10 “1974: TERRY GILLIAM on CUTOUT ANIMATION | The DIY Film Animation Show | Classic clips | BBC Archive”, YouTube video, uploaded by BBC Archive, from The Do-It-Yourself Film Animation Show, London, originally broadcast 5 May, 1974, https://youtu.be/LaG_EiFX7a0, accessed on April 11 2022.
11 Carolyne Weldon, “Inside the Disturbed and Disturbing Collage Films of Avant-Garde Genius Arthur Lipsett”, National Film Board of Canada, NFB Blog, Montreal, October 5, 2016, https://blog.nfb.ca/blog/2016/10/05/arthur-lipsett-week/, accessed on April 11 2022.
12 Shiya Tsukamoto, Tetsuo: Iron Man, 1989, YouTube movie trailer, 3 min, uploaded by Arrow Video, https://youtu.be/ShJvheZHXdI, accessed on April 13, 2022.
13 Norman McLaren, Pas de Deux, National Film Board of Canada, 13 min https://www.nfb.ca/film/pas_de_deux_en/, accessed on April 13, 2022.
14 Vera Chytilova, “Scissors” from Daisies, Filmové studio Barrandov, 1966, Clip from YouTube, 25 seconds, uploaded by Film Struck, https://youtu.be/P_XXNTQwv68, accessed on April 13, 2022.
15 Aldous Harding, “Aldous Harding live performance in KEXP studio” KEXP, Seattle, October 16, 2019, YouTube video, https://youtu.be/O-_yCMPNNEo, accessed on October 14, 2021.
16 Frederico Fellini, “Fellini’s Language of dream” interview by Jonathan Cott, Scraps from the Loft, December 5, 2017, originally published in Rolling Stones Magazine, February 1984, https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/12/05/fellinis-language-of-dreams-rolling-stone-interview-1984/, accessed on December 7, 2020.
17 Jacob Olsen, “The History of the Color Turquoise: Which Came First, The Stone or the Color?”, Color Meanings, Copenhagen, Denmark, https://www.color-meanings.com/history-color-turquoise/,  accessed on June 1, 2022.
18 Raphaëlle Moine, translated by Pierre Taminiaux, “From Surrealist Cinema to Surrealism in Cinema: Does a Surrealist Genre Exist in Film?” Yale French Studies: Surrealism and Its Others, 2006, No. 109, pp. 98-114, London UK, Yale University Press, 2006.
19 Frances S. Connelly, “Introduction: Entering the Spielraum”, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2012.
20 Noël Carrol “The Grotesque Today: Premilinary Notes on a Taxonomy”, from Modern Art and the Grotesque, Eds Frances S. Connelly, Cambridge University Press, New York,  2003, pp. 291-311,
21 Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund, Grotesque, London and New York, Routledge, 2013.
22 Philip Thomson, The Grotesque, Methen & Co Ltd, London, 1972.
23 […] Though profile pictures are meant to be gazed at, yours gazes at the onlooker […] But in a playful way, not serious, a questioning gaze half smiling
 And you do that a lot, switching the expectations – in particular through de-hierarchization
24 Julia Kristeva, “Pouvoirs de l’horreur : Essai sur l’abjection“, Éditions du Seuil, Paris,1980, pp.145-148.
25 Merlin Sheldrake interviewed by Russell Brand, “#177 Interconnection”, Under the Skin, March 19, 2021. Podacast, 1:19:58, https://thepodcastplayground.com/podcast/177-interconnection-with-merlin-sheldrake/, accessed on April 12 2022.