—
1971 / 2019
David Kamp
Soundtrack for The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, 2019
stereo sound, 32 minutes
Courtesy the Artist and Ed Atkins

A synchronous, naturalistic soundtrack for the 1971 Stan Brakhage film, “The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes”. Originally commissioned by Ed Atkins on the occasion of the show The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes at the Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin in 2019. This was audible on pompeiicommtment.org from July to September 2024, all throughout the Digital Fellowship.

It was performed and recorded by David Kamp, a professional composer, sound designer and sound artist based in Berlin. David Kamp’s soundtrack played in the upper room of the Schinkel Pavillon while Stan Brakhage’s film screened synchronously directly beneath, and the two could not be witnessed together.

It is the task of the foley artist to add in environmental sound that isn’t generally captured during shooting. Usually this is all created on a sound-stage to remake the sound of rain, footsteps, doors creaking. Audio is created with an invented variety of whatever means. Classic imitations include cornstarch for footsteps in the snow, or a potato-chip bag for fire crackling, dropping bowling balls in spaghetti for brains. This is entirely common, like all fx the best of it goes unnoticed. Films without this additional layer will feel awkward, fake: a jungle that doesn’t rustle, closing doors without clicks. Like no one touches anything. Foley reanimates, regaining the setting’s richness, its life—however artificial the means.

Brakhage’s 1971 film captured nothing of the sounds, there is none that remains from the Philadelphia morgue. Approaching 50 years later, Kamp has created what never was, the audio for Brakhage’s film. Hearing it now, peeled from their subjects, the sounds become stains. The ventilation running, a refrigerator pump, sinks in the distance, voices in walls, everything in unison. The sound of hospitals, of morgues, of care, of attention to tasks.

Little snips, wetness, metal gurney creaks. But mostly the soundtrack is a white void bearing the flotsam of a pathologist’s work. It consists oppressively of the quiet roar of our room’s various colours of noise: white, pink, or Brownian motion.

This pervasive hush of the soundtrack’s ambience has a cancelling effect. White noise is used by therapy offices and insomniacs as a means of making something quiet. Our brains are incredibly effective at filtering out this noise and any sounds within it. Perhaps one of the oddest parts of the soundtrack is that our heads are continuously trying to cancel a lot of it out, and so we dig like sand through it. Hard to mind what is continually deleted. And within this cancelling effect are the bodies and lives as an elegy to it. You hear what feels like things disappearing. The audio form of the dust to which we shall return.

If Brakhage’s film is all about the immanence of our red-umber plumbing rooms, then the soundtrack contains all its ghosts, spirits, and voices in the noise. The soundtrack forces imagination of an elsewhere. A room full of ghosts, people.

The orchestral climax of bone saws comes early in the third. A grating, almost welcome reprieve from the tapes that sound like they’re eroding. It is, of course, a requiem. However artificial.

—
1957 / 2024
Ed Atkins
Copy of Victim 32, 2024
digital file
Courtesy the Artist

Copy of Victim 32 is a digitally reworked version of a historical unedited photo from the Archaeological Park of Pompeii archive. The photo is maximally upscaled to 30,000 pixels across at 300 dpi. Details prevail and are 100% visible and explorable. These are AI speculation, a universe of jagged textures, guesstimated incrementally, where every grain of earth, every pixel, takes shape.

Various AI tools were used to upscale, colourise, clean and ponder the granular information regarding what is absent from the original photo. Photoshop’s neural filters, manual spot cleaning, cloning, and generative fill tools, along with Topaz Photo AI, were used for most upscaling and restorative actions, and Palette.fm was used for the colourisation. Palette.fm employs text prompts to guide the colourisation process, and in the case of Copy of Victim 32, the following text prompt also serves as the work’s caption:

“Generate a colour photo of an archaeological dig at Pompeii in the afternoon of March 16, 1957. The scene captures the discovery of Victim 32, a male aged over 20 years, found between Tower II of the walls and Porta Nocera, at the foot of the walls. Victim 32 lies close to Victim 31 and not far from Victim 33. The body shows traces of a thin fabric around the waist and buttocks, with rolled-up drapery on the left thigh and right arm. Perhaps there are remnants of a sandal around the left foot. A ring lies near the body, its carnelian gemstone engraved with a bird having escaped.”

• * An original caption was given to ChatGPT to reform into a useable text-prompt for Palette.fm. This original caption was sourced from Osanna, N., Capurso, A., e Masseroli, S. M., 2021. I Calchi di Pompei da Giuseppe Fiorelli ad oggi: Studi e Ricerche del PAP 46, p. 395-6, Calco n. 32.

from

• Anonymous, Cast of a Victim, n.d.
  photograph
  27 x 24,5 cm
  Archaeological Park of Pompeii, inv. D424
  Photo Archaeological Park of Pompeii Archive

—
1926 / 2022 / 2024
Ed Atkins
Voilà la vérité, 2022 / 2024*
4K video loop with sound and colour
Courtesy the Artist and Cabinet, London; Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; Gladstone, New York; Dependance, Brussels

Voilà la vérité is a short video that reworks a single sequence from the 1926 silent film, Ménilmontant, directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff, digitised from a 16mm print loaned from the collection of Arsenal — Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V., in Berlin. This was screened on pompeiicommtment.org between July and September 2024.

A woman (Nadia Sibirskaïa) sits on a bench in a Paris park in Spring.
She recalls images from a now closed-off life.
An older man sits beside her and shares his lunch with her wordlessly.

A new soundtrack of naturalistic sound was performed and recorded by the foley artist David Kamp, along with non-diegetic elements by Ed Atkins. Two voice actors, Rivka Rothstein and Héctor Miguel Santana, provide the screen characters with new voices that do not speak but do sob, sigh, and eat. The film has been digitised, cleaned, colorised, upscaled, smoothed, frame-interpolated, focus-pulled, and otherwise re-rendered using a raft of artificial intelligence-employing softwares and techniques. The resulting video is haunted. The title, Voilà la vérité — ‘This is the truth’ — is the only discernible text in the film: a fragment of a headline on the newspaper that wraps the food.

• *This is the second version of the work. Updated softwares were used to achieve greater fidelity to an algorithmically homogenised reality.

featuring the voices of

• Rivka Rothstein and Héctor Miguel Santana
  audio post-production
  Studiokamp

foley

• David Kamp

mix

• David Kamp

extra sound design

• Ed Atkins

processed using

• Dustbuster+ DIAMANT-Film Restoration, Topaz Gigapixel AI and Topaz Video Enhance AI, Adobe Photoshop colorisation neural filter, Adobe Photoshop depth of field neural filter, DAIN frame interpolation app, RIFT frame interpolation app, Warp stabiliser, Virtualdub 2; Deshaker 64 bit, EbSynth beta, Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Audition; DaVinci Resolve, and Fairlight

from

• Ménilmontant, 1926
  38 minutes

Directed and edited by

• Dimitri Kirsanoff

starring

• Nadia Sibirskaïa

Ed Atkins
Voilà la vérité, (video still) 2024
4K video loop with sound and colour
Courtesy the Artist and Cabinet, London; Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; Gladstone, New York; Dependance, Brussels

—
2017
Losslessness

I’d like to talk about loss in relation to the digital, and, in particular, to the digital moving image. Different kinds of loss will get confused in this brief text: psychological, corporeal; the deliberately spurned, the unknowably gone. Loss will be apprehended both literally and figuratively, oftentimes in a welter of the two. I’m going to lean most heavily on a psychoanalytic figuration and a mortal, existential literalism of loss: two of the limits of loss’s sense. In thinking through some of this, I hope to sketch a particular kind of ethics of literality and figuration, with emphasis on how these two modes are at work in the digital moving image.

I should say that loss, here, should be understood in the possessive. As in, all of what follows should be inscrutably caveated by autobiography.

The title of this text is “Losslessness,” loss’s cybernetically bred correlative. Losslessness, in all its awkwardly appended vernacular, refers to a category of data compression algorithm that allows original data to be perfectly reproduced. Losslessness, part abstracted, implicitly invites a mistaking of technology’s progression with a fantasy of immortality. Built-in obsolescence prosaically confused with death: loss proper. Losslessness explicitly pertains to a limitlessness regarding the possible reproducibility of a thing, but it also speculates an end to loss as a precondition of everything. Speculates because losslessness is conjectural and hyperbolic—a relabeling of loss. Empirically, losslessness, as some kind of paradoxical annexation, is itself always already lost to experience, is simply another category of loss. Literal empiricism, however, is an ever more rarified position. Contemporary digital reproductions’s persistent demonstration of a lossless material promise sufficiently ironizes loss’s hegemony over The Inevitable (and over experience’s veracity), particularly when reality’s already dubious actuality has become so fantastically subtended by the digital, enough to shift loss’s proximity to materially personal experience. Loss, felt, gets repressed at a clip equivalent to the refresh rate of an infinite reproduction, dissembling loss through its immortal figuration and, with it, those things that might previously have been mourned when lost.

Loss, in the technological, specifically digital sense, has all but shrugged off its physical, etymological forebears. Like rendering, capturing, processing, etc., loss is a negative effect of a now welcomely obsoleted failure of tech. Losslessness is a solution to a problem concocted inside the language and its particular tech semiology, a kind of problem modeled, coolly, according to some successional capitalistic paradigm, rendered a weird sort of natural—a kind of evolution as in-built obsoletism. A disinterested suspension—as if of insuperable nature—apart. Such disinterest permeates seeming technological straightforwardness, too, saturating not just its lexica but also our presumption of the innateness of its processes. It’s a sleight that conflates capitalism’s waveform of progress and dissimulates certain desires and meanings behind planned obsolescence, differentiated from, say, the evolution of Galapagos finches away from whatever Galapagos finches were before they were Galapagos finches. Insofar as it sticks evolutionary process with the motives of design, tech’s natural world has a distinctly creationist hue, a tack that could be the MO of certain consumer products: user-friendliness more often than not pervades in order to maintain ignorance and to support economically justified mollification. The kind of capitulation that a spiritualistic natural world might ethically urge needs either some sort of heuristic detachment or a comfortingly justifiable disregard of material and mortal experiences and consequence. Experiences and consequences of loss, in our example. In a so-called natural order of things, technology is in thrall to other, larger celestial movements. This means that left uninterrupted, in due course it’s liable to be straightforwardly disposed of—according to the logic of capitalistic progress—at the altar of obsolescence and its erroneous determination as “natural.” On these terms, mortality confers only the loss of value and timely replacement. Mortality, here, is a pejorative. Or a violence allegorized, even as it burlesques the truly mortal by pertaining to inevitability. This violence divests mortality of a great slew of attendant undertakings: care, mourning, intimacy, affective recognition, all of which are in direct correspondence with mortality—but only if mortality is understood as ontological. Only if mortality is a condition of life rather than of economic process—and only if it is understood literally rather than figuratively.

The relationship between the literal and the figurative is fraught. A given literal meaning is more often than not in disagreement—if not political conflict—with the figurative meaning. This paradoxical inherence is rehearsed at every stage of the stuff I make and, I would argue, is at the heart of my practice’s attempt at a document: its attempt to encounter and afford the paradoxes of its seeming contingencies in order to better propose how it might break or resolve certain misplaced ironies and dissimulations, to in turn affirm a kind of caring application of the literal and the figurative.

In the videos I make, I want to underscore my attachment to the vicissitudes of the technologies that describe the works’ limits, to make conspicuous the necessity of any technologically incumbent artist’s attachment to the vicissitudes of their chosen medium. An artist’s first approach to some glistening new tech will more often than not be to cleave to the edge of the tech, to trace its perimeter in order to figure whatever aspect ratios or resolutions and all the other hindering apparatuses of apparent A/V fidelity as literal. This is initially for the purposes of exposition and, latterly, for the particular elucidatory pleasures of finitude. In so doing, an artist might be seen to be incorporating the tech. As in, making it corporeal, analogue, mortal. Moving toward the world with a Freudian lope, sadistically, preemptively: the subject/ object relation seemingly built entirely around sadism’s hegemony as ur-relation, a presumed preventative feint just to be sure.

This literality is a rebuttal of the desires of the tech—its apparent correct usage and, at the other end, its specialist unpacking. The artist’s relationship to the use of a piece of technology, the complexity of which makes its parameters far more restricted than, say, a pencil, is to reject the very idea of use. And because so many of the desires of a technology relate to upholding its inconspicuousness, one of the first things an artist might do when wielding it is to retrieve the technology from whatever quagmire of figuration it had sequestered itself in. Whether that figurative hiding place is representational verisimilitude or disappearance from the field of view by extreme intimacy or extimacy to its user, the technology constantly seeks to be lost. The consumer-grade portion of tech finds some figured endophytic relation to its user, whereas the specialist piece of kit is figured alien—almost state-level alien, like the military or industry or space or whatever other intangible. It is, perhaps, hyper-objectivised: pushed to a point of irretrievable unwieldiness. The exponential growth of these relations is cybernetics proper, even if for me, it’s perhaps more appositely considered through the mutable lens of psychoanalysis. To reiterate and to be clear: loss is our exemplar. Both poles of proximity (consumer/ specialist) vanish the tech to the general populace. Certainly to ideological ends, but also for more convoluted reasons. The tech’s vanishing is part of a maintenance of a fantasy of holism, coherency. Or perhaps the loss of the tech obtains the seeming maintenance of the ego and the ego’s correctly deluded place, hierarchically speaking.

“Correct usage,” as regards a piece of technology, is a pragmatic normality that bleeds out into ideology, social determinism, and so on. The artist must first set out to find the technology. Or rather, the artist must first understand the technology as lost. This finding is cast metaphorically, although there is, relatively speaking, a movement toward the literal in this retrieval. If unacknowledged absence is the precondition of technology’s successful ebb, then the figurative act of finding is, at least, a literal act of making present. In this account, technology proper is always already lost, and by disingenuous design. Ignorance is a kind of pall to appease guilt. So, the subject bypasses the need for the object by regarding it as a loss beyond the reach of the self: the subterranean of the tech—its reality—is apparently beyond impactful range. The loss is never understood, simply repressed. Insofar as the lost object becomes internalised through its dissimulation, the relationship is neurotic, according to Freudian psychoanalysis.

In most cases, where the ethics of corporate industry, factory conditions, state violence, environmental horror, political doctrinairism, etc. are known (and this, really, is most of the time —if not at least suspected all of the time), the consciously oblivious loss of technology is entirely desirable in order to repress the trauma of the technology’s fact. This kind of imperative repression—imperative in order to function coherently, according to all kinds of vast, contractual mores—creates a kind of aimless melancholy or shame. An awful, disinterested shrug laps the melancholic. In contrast, acknowledging the lost object sets in motion a shift from melancholy to purposive mourning. By example, acknowledging the bodies traumatised in coltan mines and sweatshops retrieves those bodies, allows the possibility of mourning them, of witnessing their loss.

More banally, sufficiently acknowledging that the movies are constituted by a procession of lifelessness—that the moving image is an illusion—simultaneously finds those intestinal coils of celluloid and the ideological engine behind that illusion. Mourning might best be thought of as a way of properly tracking and acknowledging loss, whether in death or knowledge or empathy or truth. Suddenly the camera is visible in the mirror. The VHS tracking remains permanently, deliberately unresolved, becomes rhythmic. Music and foley buzz and keel, then abruptly cut. The world and its representation are distinguished; imminence evades narration. Melancholia transmutes into mourning and the real work can begin.

Literality can only be a functionary of recouping the mortal when such recoupment relates to matter. Structuralist approaches to the moving image understand the difference between effect and reality. By uncovering the workings, whether celluloid or shutter, one analogies the “uncovering” of other realities. One repudiates illusions of all kinds by repudiating the illusion of the moving image. Making literal, here, flows into the figurative, while analogy or metaphor must appear in order for the act to mean beyond whatever microcosm. The process is parabolic, requiring significant relation between, say, persistence of vision and propaganda. Fundamentally, both the structural and deconstructive methods require that there be a thing of which it is possible to expose the structure. It subsequently requires that the illusion either remain or be put back in place to allow sufficient function to sustain critique. And, really, a particular order of movement between literal and figurative is necessary for structuralism to function.

Clearly, this pertains to the mortal analogue above, insofar as uncovering the workings of the living body means violence or can better be described via abjection. As regards the moving image, illusion is a condition of its being: a suspension of disbelief is a condition of its encounter, even if that suspension of disbelief is in turn suspended by the insistence of its partial dismantling for the sake of structural comprehension. In other words, the simultaneous and continued functioning of structure with its surface, while they are simultaneously observed, is essential to the reading. Like understanding how a cat works by observing its innards while it continues to work, engine purring. If retrieving the lost object of a moving image technology lies in exposing its material reality as well as the lives, processes, and politics that flow into a materiality deferred by the illusion that defines the medium, then acknowledging it is made possible by structural revelation simultaneous with continued function. Critically, this happens in a movement that is more or less against the desires of that technology. Insofar as this process is political, it also abounds with agency: deconstructing the object confers the freedom of the subject. The literal is asserted in order to re-find figuration.

Figural to literal to figural: the lost object is acknowledged as lost in order to counter the neurotic consequences of repression and to begin a reparative move from melancholia to mourning. Mourning is mantric, inasmuch as it involves the naming of an object through the description of its absence, while literalisation is equivalent to death, where both find their subject, retrieve them from the disbelief of a life, of figuration, while affirming the absence of the very thing of which they affirm the finitude. Literalisation renders loss rather than the thing that was lost. Literalisation describes the figurative as such: it delimits its existence by divulging its immanence.

The literal is the end of language. And all of this is profoundly complicated by the digital. If technology’s implicit desire is to disappear by a movement of natural progress, the digital pushes that figurative idea towards the literal. The digital borders, both figuration and the literal, unmooring both, disrupting how the two might move between one another and be recognisable as one rather than the other. Digital technologies seem so fiercely figured and so wholly welcomed and afforded as a kind of ethical relief, the combination of which is most conspicuously capable of eroding the capacity to tell the difference between what is and what is not. Or, more opaquely, what is and what is also, with that “also” a fine print of terms and conditions to unspool in great, abject reports from far away and next door, to be scrolled blithely through in order to reach the “I agree” checkbox.

A confusion of literality and figuration means that “the cloud” remains a cloud, literally, while also operating as an image of a cloud—the one obliterates the conditions of the other, sending clouds, along with whatever acceded personal details, to some weird no-place of fug and ignorance and clouds, literally. The digital does not have literal analogues. To return to mourning and melancholia, the digital represses its lost object by literal figuration, and those neurotic symptoms that riddle the melancholic become a condition of the digital. Somewhere over there, countless acres of bunkered server farms wolf inestimable amounts of energy, overheating and strobing and storing and producing illusions playing out thousands of miles away, out of sight and out of mind.

Melancholia suffuses and neurotic tics of shame and guilt play across faces quieted by an ignorance advanced by those impossible, labyrinthine convolutions that constitute digital figuration and its disappeared literal structure. Losslessness abounds, and the mourning made possible by naming it—by affirming it in order to process it—is made figurative, literally.

Writing this, I’m struck by the queasy clarity of my own neuroses, as well as their positive motility: how I’ve almost always wanted my videos to firstly be analogous to people, to bodies, to experience, to loss. For my videos to stand as a kind of metaphysical surrogate for what I long for: the finite holism of a person’s existence. For years, I rehearsed the idea that the videos I was making were dead men, albeit figuratively speaking. Descended, psychically, from that literal dead man who began this whole sorry mess for me. Making videos became about reparative mourning, though not therapy, per se—extending outwards from mourning’s most literal, funereal wellspring to address a whole host of melancholic, neurotic attachments and transposing them into aspects of my life that could be understood—if never, importantly, got (there is nothing of applicable use or value here, at the wake). Most importantly, mourning intuits the moving image in a way that felt like forcible congruence at first, but which has expanded to encounter the structure of the medium, its affective modes, its burlesque of substance dualism— its striving for representational cogency. Immanence, as the loop of every video I make asserts, circumscribes fidelity and stands against losslessness. Loss is the sublime condition of any experience.

• * A version of this essay was originally presented as a talk at TKTK. Verbier Art Summit, ‘More than Real’, 2018, itself gleaned from a piece for the catalogue of the show, ‘Generation Loss: 10 years of the Julia Stoschek collection’.

—
2019
The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes
Stan Brakhage, David Kamp
Curated by Ed Atkins
Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin

Taking its title from the notorious 1971 film by Stan Brakhage, The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes is an exhibition about how intellectual and sensory deprivation might conspire to heighten immanence, by empathic and also abjectly corporeal means. There is no reprieve and no redemption, cultural or otherwise –– there is only the seeming differentiation of your senses, and the recognition of death and life. Some time later on, this exhibition might productively be thought of as an actual cadaver.

In the basement of the Schinkel Pavillon, Brakhage’s 16mm silent film shows the activities of forensic pathologists at the Allegheny Coroner’s Office in Pittsburgh sometime in 1971. It’s part of a trilogy of films Brakhage made at state institutions in Pittsburgh that year. The other two were the city police force and the West Pennsylvania Hospital (Eyes and Deus Ex, respectively). “The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes depicts the entirety of multiple and overlapping autopsies. The bodies are abstracted and the film is 32 minutes of alabaster and ebony cadavers, latexed hands and gore. The Pittsburgh pathologists go about their business like farmers. It is horrific, normal.”

“Despite its [naturalism, veracity, verity] Brakhage’s film is not a documentary. There is no pedagogical respite. There is no moral. No instructions for how to deal with it. Instead, a silence that is claustrophobic.” The absence of sound serves to deafen you into a kind of submission to your immanent reality, rather than the seeming reality on-screen, reflexively revealing your interiority. In the silence I hear my thoughts as pounding blood; silence describes my body.

Sound is a presumption of veracity within the moving image since the advent of sound in cinema, so silence becomes a trope of anti-illusionary film-making –– a way to stress the impossible gap between a representation and its subject. In this way, the subject’s integrity is affirmed as irrecuperable, and while ‘reality’ is deferred, in doing so it is also emphasised.

The film will be screened at regular intervals.

Upstairs, in the octagon-shaped hall, a new naturalistic sound effects track will play in perfect sync with the film in the basement. Commissioned especially on the occasion of the exhibition, the soundtrack will be performed and recorded by David Kamp, a professional composer, sound designer and sound artist based in Berlin. “If Brakhage’s film is all about the immanence of our red-umber plumbing, then the soundtrack here on the higher plane is crowded with its spirits and voices, buried in the noise” of refrigeration irrupted by violence. “The soundtrack forces imagination of an elsewhere. A room full of ghosts, of people. These sounds were made in December of last year. It is a requiem, of course.”

These two separate works – Brakhage’s film and Kamp’s sound piece – cannot be experienced simultaneously. They will remain materially disjunct, only ever speculatively sutured inside you, who is miraculously alive.

                        * Quotes from Contemporary Art Writing Daily’s information panels for the exhibition.

Notes

1.

• I’ve thought about adding a fake soundtrack to a silent film for a few years now. Not a new musical score but fake diegetic sound, asif whatever scene had been miked and recorded concurrently with the image. Convincing noise, inconspicuous in its accuracy.
• The desire arises from soundtracking my videos, which are, like all animation, constitutionally silent; sound as a dupe to rationalise. Appending the animated imagery with homemade foley, library effects, and great spans of establishing ambience has come to be the most elucidatory part of making videos, since sound, uniquely describes bodies.
• Computer Generated Imagery without the addition of sound feels weightless, scarcely there. Sound lends heft. More than that, the symptomatic sounds of things meeting other things is irruptive, uncomposing and so very substantiating. Sound animates stuff, literally vibrating the stereocilia in your head and the panes of stained glass similarly. Sound is immanent in its form in a manner that the visual is *resoundingly* not. In making work whose principal effort has often been the enigmatic production of a ponderous body, sound’s singularly tangible register has become very important to me.
• The sound I add to my videos is often slavish in its fidelity to the cgi image’s faithless reality. It’s also absurd in its gratuitous stressing of any object’s material index: Like a thrown punch prosaically verified by the mimetic whip of a car aerial, followed by the sharp drub of a cauliflower head. Synced perfectly with the image. It’s here, in the mix of measured gratuity and devoted representation that sound functions hyper-realistically, in a way that can be insistently intimate and alive with a conviction that feels providential but clocked only unconsciously –– like life. Retrofitting sound to a historical, silent film, I thought, could be both necromantic and somehow restitutive. –Restitutive of both experience and empathy, rendering a film proximate in a manner freshly alive and, essentially, corporeally relatable, if not actually tangible.
• History is mute but symbolically vivid, whereas lived experience is very often strident incoherence. The important thing is maybe constancy? Constancy and accuracy. At least technically, temporally. Synchronicity promotes a holistic perception; sound and vision are one (another of those false, pseudo-Cartesian dualities), they constitute a fuller account together.
• (What can sound summon? What does sound possess, in the quasi-supernatural but also incorporating sense? Then, what kind of empathy gets incorporated and how? How is an image leant figurative weight by the figured literal weight of the image’s subject in sound? How, too, are the tropes of historic dissociation within representational moving image (black & white image, silent, inter-titled, the up-tempo flurry of 16fps movement played back on modern projectors) collapsed and reformed by the addition of realistic sound? Sound applied like, um, de-fibrillation?
• (The voice has often been profoundly present in my work: Possessing the CGI figures as Apollo did of the oracle, perhaps. The lineage of auditory possession / control / power / animation going back at least that far.)

2.

• The first idea was to add sound to a silent feature film. Menschen am Sonntag (‘People on a Sunday’), by Siodmak and Ulmer, was the first film I gave proper consideration. I’m not really sure why. The film’s peculiar straddling of documentary and drama felt right, I think. Somehow. It’s also a film made at a time and in a place that pointedly no longer exists –– nor is in many ways imaginable –– Berlin, Summer 1929. The necromantic, reanimatory aspect of adding a steadfastly realistic soundtrack to Menschen am Sonntag felt like it might be apposite, embracing something of the lovely, material pleasures of the people that populate the film, and helping shed a little of history’s accreted apathy by incidental sound’s contemporaneity.

3.

• Loss stunts the relation of viewer to subject here, I think. ––‘Loss’ as in death or technological obsoleteness; technical, representational progression’s incessance. Maybe loss stunts or maybe it simply defines by necessary limit. The presumption of loss in finitude. Reanimation requires death like an autopsy requires its subject to be dead, otherwise it’s murder by postmortem, a bad paradox. And of course. Adding sound is adding fake life or, like, unning death.

4.

• The scale was wrong, however. Practically speaking a feature-length film with so many locations would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to soundtrack as closely as the basic idea seemed to require. Other things felt off. As with any pre-talkie film (at least, pre- the global ubiquity of the talkie), Menschen am Sonntag is diegetically silenced by technical necessity rather than by design. It felt to me like there was something essential in the selecting of a film to soundtrack that required a corresponding gesture within the chosen film itself. The act of soundtracking seemed like it needed to encounter at least the idea that the original film had in some way removed sound from its image; that sound was technically possible, if not expected, for the film at the time of its making. (This, perhaps, is in large part a rather muddy ethical sleight, and one that has in the end foundered in action.)
• Regarding the choice of what silent film to sound, however, a defining compunction in me was to find something that might recognise, speculatively speaking, what it was that I wanted to do. Recognise, like approve. An unsuspecting Menschen am Sonntag or –– to follow suit from the worthy musicians that’ve live soundtracked various Eisenstein or Lang classics –– would feel somehow cheap, an obtrusion. Conceptually, silence does not mean the same thing to the technically constrained film as the film made without sound by choice and in full knowledge that this film could have sound. In the latter situation sound materialises through its excision, if conspicuously elsewhere: the filmmaker heard the sound of the world with their own ears and decided not to record it. I needed a film for which silence was a negative weight of analogous heft to the materially rousing and intimate sounds I intended to accompany it.

5.

• **To choose silence is, by degree, political. Sound is scarcely resistible as a presumption of veracity within the moving image, so silence becomes a trope of anti-illusionary film-making: a way to emphasise the impossible gap between a representation and its subject. As a result, the subject’s integrity is affirmed as irrecuperable; ‘reality’ is adjourned and, perversely, stressed. The absence of sound serves to deafen the viewer into a kind of submission to their immanent reality, rather than the seeming reality on-screen – revealing the viewer’s interiority to themselves in an entirely reflexive manner. In the silence, I hear my thoughts; silence describes my body in a manner awaiting enunciation or in a language forbidden by the tongue, forbidden sonic intimacy. Sound possesses the body in waves**, animates it, captures it. Unlike the salubriousness of sight, sound penetrates unintentionally; sound is leaky, it gets everywhere, oozing in a kind of squib of materialism. Sound conspires with desire, with immanence, with accident. The blurt of farts, pit squelches, *burp!*. Sound is excessive, certainly cognitively. Sounding the world is more often a symptom of material contact than a deliberate act. The quality of the silence in the silent film that I would soundtrack had to be hysterically lacking, I suppose. Shrill silence, tinnitus-intimate? High, as in overripe.
• Stan Brakhage’s The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes became both the only possible candidate for the project, and also the project’s singular confutation: the film’s newly commissioned, naturalistic foley soundtrack will never be heard with the film.

6.

• The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes is a literal translation of the term, ‘autopsy’. The Stan Brakhage film of the same name shows the activities of forensic pathologists at the Allegheny Coroner’s Office in Pittsburgh sometime in 1971, and is part of a trilogy of films Brakhage made at state institutions in Pittsburgh that year: the city police force, the West Pennsylvania Hospital, and the Coroner’s Office. Brakhage filmed inside these institutions in a manner seemingly disinterested enough for a kind of moral extrication, and lyrically enough to grant a reading of the films’ subjects metaphorically: allegorical portent principally, across all three films, in relation to sight. Also –– and avowedly so, according to Brakhage’s own stated wants –– the film is beautiful. Bright steel instruments and purpling viscera framed like Cotán. As with so much Brakhage, colour is both luminous and substantial: the blooming technicolor of the film stock leaches corpse juice and sunlight.
• Each of the three films is revelatory, though seldom in an intellectual, denotational manner. Rather, the films’ revelations are more often reflexive (and meta-, in relation to the medium and the subject), phenomenological (as regards the audience’s experience), or base. In the case of The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, the reveal is almost entirely abjectly bathetic: a person’s face pared off to reveal shining red meat. This movement, of figuration to literalism and, often, back again, is at the heart* of all three films, if most overtly with The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, whose title’s an economy that belies the film’s astonishing experiential excesses, and whose clarity serves as a portentous, empiric sort of frame for everything that follows. It’s a title that apparently enjoins the viewer’s equable attention only, even and especially as the film might more apparently coerce tears or retching or flight.
• The title is laid bare (figuratively speaking) inasmuch as it has already been etymologically autopsied. The prospective viewer is spared interpretation’s intuitions in favour, presumably, of the freedom to feel, intellectually unfettered. At the same time, the title’s irreducible adequacy feels pompous to say the least; the definite article’s off-putting self-confidence eschews empathic appeal for didactic superiority. Still, it’s a film that, perhaps more than any other, might feasibly lay claim to such a title, being as essential an experience of seeing as one might expect to encounter in representational cinema.
• If a large part of Brakhage’s practice is fundamentally anti-illusionary, as regards reflexively retrieving and revealing the material truth of film-making, then the title, too, seems to desire at least a kind of semiotic equivalence. Language, like state infrastructural process and cinema similarly, is opaque (a term whose ocular origins speak to Brakhage’s poetic terrain) –– specialist forms more so. ‘Autopsy’ mantles ‘the act of seeing with one’s own eyes’; it’s a terminological pall whose effect is ameliorative, if only by a coincidence of common ignorance. Brakhage’s desire is for the truth, a truth that lies beneath and behind whatever agreeable or baffling veil.  Truth, at least in The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, is contingently abject or is revealed through a process of abjecting: truth is inaccessible without abjection.
• As viewers, we’re given precious little by way of information besides the processing of bodies and Brakhage’s extraordinary, painterly camera work. We’ve no idea why the cadavers in the film are being autopsied, for example. Nor what facts might be gleaned from these […] processes. Nor, conspicuously, who these people were in life. What are their names?
• Brakhage’s truth is as much about what is left out or deliberately hidden as what is revealed.
• What is present in industrial moving image by default (narrative, purpose, morality, identity, context, sound, etc.) is exceptionally extracted here, for the purpose of drawing attention to something else –– some commons, spiritually humanist, that it may be harder to accept today than when Brakhage made the film. Spiritual truth? A material mimesis, too, perhaps –– as involuntary a response as socially cued vomiting. Certainly for me: I’ve never watched the whole thing. Which feels like a strange failure on my part. I feel too wretched, too spent a person to muster the seeming strength required to ‘see with my own eyes’, in a manner to tolerate this kind of beautiful truth.
• My mother is drawn to and can merrily stomach the most gratuitous hospital reality tv. On the other hand, she cannot stand movie violence. I’m the other way round, and because of the ethical failure that feels implicit to my preference –– my incapacity to bear reality; my appetite for fictional extremity –– I am mortified at my flight from the screening of Brakhage’s film, my closing of the browser window previewing it, despite the fact that it feels involuntary, a reptilian scutter. I am a corporealist intuitively, and a kind of literalist coward in effect. Bad. If I know it’s fake I can see the disembowelling, though perhaps not with my own eyes?
• I can bare almost anything that’s made up. If I know it’s real, however, my body just wilts and I turn away or I close my eyes or whatever. I fail to bear witness and I recede.
• I would like, ultimately, to not simply bear Brakhage’s film but appreciate it. Just as Brakhage himself must’ve eventually appreciated the terrible beauty in that morgue, able to move past the death and horror, the abjection, the terrible calm, the brutal bedside manner, and maybe even emerge from behind his camera to use his own, unmediated eyes. Perhaps I am simply afraid like Brakhage, it’s just that I cannot challenge myself like that. Afraid of dying and offense and the irrecuperable and remembering my father as he died again, broken, rather than as the image from a few years previous that I’ve worked so hard to restore. Images of death that cannot be unseen; confrontations with endings that cannot be escaped. An ideal viewer of The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes rises to Brakhage’s casting as a disinterested but passionately attentive witness; a higher viewer registering the dead bodies with a calm, disentangled lucidity to permit a micro- and macro- kind of attention. An attention and an appreciation for the burgeoning death; the cadaver’s base gorgeousness –– its miraculous construction and revelatory deconstruction. Perhaps just someone who has finished mourning.

7.

• (One of the most striking things in the film, to me, is how terribly inventive approaches to the dead body seem without the benefit of any kind of elucidatory information.)

8.

• To soundtrack this film is to mar something of Brakhage’s phenomenological forensics. If sounding something is to bring it closer – to scupper, somewhat, its ascension – and to contemporise its affect (and materially), then David Kamp’s new soundtrack re-renders the film, in fundamental ways, particular and earthly. Mortal stuff, desecrating? Brakhage’s immortalising of the image of death, which is in itself a living death. For this reason, among others, it felt imperative that the new soundtrack and the original film not be merged into one. The connection between the two, in the end, must remain a fantasy. I think the push and pull of persuasion and dissolution is essential to maintaining the project’s precarious complexity. Simple solutions = death. Going through with appending a new soundtrack to The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes –– performing a surgical baste of sound strip to a print of Brakhage’s vision –– concludes and solves and gets many of the ideas in this project. Brakhage’s original film must maintain its integrity. I mean this materially, of course, but also in how the film’s singular phenomenological evocations and profundities connive to absolutely insist upon the plane of immanence for life and the moving image, with the latter an apology for the former. Neither of them even momentarily afforded the levity of illusion or disbelief or compensation for any tacit failure of experience. Likewise, and perhaps perversely, Brakhage’s commensurate sacrilisation of the pathologist’s labours, of bodies, dead –– a respect clinched by the silence, by that vast lack of information, of ground, of establishment. What’s not there performs like ignorance or superstition. Not knowing who or why or what or being given any way to deal simply, is to be overcome, hopefully with grace.
• I suppose there’s a sense that immanence’s irreducibility or non-representability is simply death, so that even when the symbolism is avowedly eschewed, the place where it was – enwrapped by the reverent, contemplative, even pious silences above all else –– still echoes with historic, theistic nowt, sublime affect, goosebumps, retches, the expressing of a few tears?
• “In [previous Pittsburgh-trilogy film] Deus Ex I have an honest but terrific symbol or metaphor in this flower because it sits in a pot in a window in the hospital, and yet I really use it for much more power that is in the symbolic area. It really isn’t a symbol of anything specific, it just carries that kind of power. Whereas, making the film in the morgue that kind of occurrence doesn’t happen.  I didn’t cut away to any pots of flower or to anything of that sort. That kind of power symbol occurs, but it occurs very subtly right within the images as they are moving, as you’re seeing all other levels of them. In The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes you see everything exactly in the order in which it was shot. There is very little cutting.”
• ––The absence of choice, of discrete sources of symbolism, respite, redemption –– these require their phenomenological analogue of silence. Adding sound would be sacrilegious, and is not something I am willing to do.
• Successful foley is usually determined by its inconspicuousness –– it simply serves to authenticate when snagged by the unguarded ear. The particular sensorial ignorance that this is predicated upon is of no use here; it bears no resemblance to Brakhage’s anti-illusional techniques, rather capitulating to a standard that creeps unnoticed. If Brakhage’s film is what it is to really pay attention, both literally and figuratively, then perhaps the exhibition is attempting to extend that act, further incorporating and animating it. The splitting of the two works across two floors is a crude deconstructive analogue, but it certainly creates the space for actually apprehending the possible presence of so many things that could, if left unchecked, rush to fill it: ignorance, God, representation, resolution, death, fear, wretchedness, abandonment. The schism between Brakhage’s film and Kamp’s soundtrack is spanned, instead, by you living people who are profoundly immanent in your labour –– climbing and descending the stairs –– and profoundly metaphorised in your fantastical, reparative role, impossibly restoring what’s irrevocably lost.
• Gore general
• Gore detail
• Close-up cloth
• Distant cloth
• General ambience
• Human presence
• Trolley movements
• Fridges
• Voice (my own, for the dictaphone)
• Cotton shirt
• Duvet cover
• Plastic bag
• Leather shoes
• Electric saw
• Bananas
• Tomatoes
• Strawberry jam
• Celery
• Chicken breast
• Scalpel
• Zipper
• Liquid transfer pump
• Water and sink
• Examination gloves
• Meat scissors
• Large knife
• Squeeze ball (gel-filled)
• Syringe, 100ml
• Stainless steel medical tray
• Stainless steel trolley

Stan Brakhage
The Act Of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, 1971
16mm film, No sound
32 minutes approx

“[O]f what might be a man’s body, or a woman’s;
it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig.” 

[This is cruel.]

As the signs near you are likely pointing out, what you are about to see is *explicit*. Brakhage’s film, in his signature collaging, depicts the entirety of multiple and overlapping autopsies. The bodies are abstracted and the film is 32 minutes of alabaster and ebony cadavers, latexed hands, and gore. The Philadelphia pathologists go about their business like farmers. It is horrific, normal. This, you will see, is us. Institutional preparations for explicitness won’t mitigate impact; the film makes knowing meaningless. Between this ostensible comprehension and witnessing is a gulf that is the film’s tension:

“The one contradiction we’re fundamentally unable to reconcile: that consciousness, the great messy expanse of human experience, can somehow be contained in this unglamorous arrangement of flesh and bone and blood. […] You see meat.”

[If this wall will be made to put forth an argument for why you should watch such a mess it is, paradoxically, this:] Brakhage’s film provides no narrative. Despite its [naturalism, veracity, verity] it is not a documentary. There is no pedagogical reprieve. There is no moral. No instructions for how to deal with the film. Instead, a silence that is claustrophobic. The film handles its subject with the same unlearnedness as you. Whatever learnedness as you. Dealing with it at the same level as its subject, the cadaver, an image, materially immanent, cut and re-edited into a collage of disfigured cubist violence. The coroners do Picasso’s justice. At any moment, our sight might be made red; we might be made in the theatre red. Without sound to provide the air we might breathe.

We are never treated to a full overview of the body, continually cropping the remaining segments, preventing any god’s-eye view that would prove our independent vantage, any objectivity.  The film does what its apparitional pathologists do: dissect, measure, and weigh the flesh. The bodily becomes all the more horrifically apparent, a thing, reducible to nervous meat. There is no subject but the body and its reduction plumbing, to simple thereness, to you.