Plagiarism as Thought

Most artists, being obsessed with being original, police their little kingdoms of creation to keep it clean of any overt signs of influence. So many conversations about tracing the date when X saw this, Y saw that, in order to deduce whether or not they came up with the idea/concept on their own. Whether Raymond Red was aware of Borges or Kafka before he made Ang Magpakailanman (He was not, which, according to Art's traditional grading system, makes his film more original, and therefore more excellent.) whether Z painted like that before he saw A's copy of Juxtapoz etc, etc, etc.

This is not an exceptional state of affairs, of course. The entire idea of art as it is presently conceived, with all its Renaissance-to-Romantic era notions of genius etc, enshrine originality as the foremost criteria of quality. When originality is gold, it is no surprise that so many people obssess over it.

The rise of sampling and appropriative art methodologies have put these old assumptions/metaphysics in question, but probably no one has summed up the alternative viewpoint quite so powerfully as Jonathan Lethem does, in the article found here:

http://www.harpers.org/TheEcstasyOfInfluence.html

Check it out.

The Maw of New Media

As of this writing, it is still possible to think of Art as something that is the opposite of Science, the opposite of Technology. Never mind that this was an illusion from the start. (What are brushes, paints, chisels, and violins?) It is still possible to find people who delight in confessing that they fled to the arts because they couldn't handle trigonometry, physics, etc. As the years pass, this conceptual division is going to become harder and harder to understand. It's going to sound like that ancient Chinese taxonomical text that Borges said Franz Kuhn unearthed, which divided the animal kingdom according to a scheme we find manifestly nonsensical. (1. Those that belong to the emperor. 2. Embalmed ones. 3.Those that are trained. 4. Suckling pigs....)

Art historians say that the rise of photography and mass-media technologies caused the world to be flooded with images to such an extent that photographic images now constitute a primary element of our environment, which is why so much art takes off from media iconography. Now: The world is not going to become less technological. Microchips will continue to burrow into every available surface, probably including human skin. Microcontrollers and programs will become a basic stratum of our environment. Their presence/stimulus/fact/irritant will demand response and critique from art, meaning that what we now call "new media" and still hold at arms length from "traditional art," will become coextensive with all of art. It will become art itself.

Imahe Nasyon at Robinson's Galleria!

Imahe Nasyon, the omnibus digital film that includes my SF short "Local Unit," is showing at "Indie-Sine" i.e Cinema 3 of Robinson's Galleria, starting today Feb 21 till Feb 27. A one week run at a real theater. Though who knows? If enough people show interest, it might show at other places. I will of course, post here when and if that happens.

Imahe Nasyon (Image Nation) is a digital omnibus film, 20 shorts by 20 directors.
The project was inspired and occasioned by the 20th anniversary of the EDSA revolution, which does not mean that all the films deal directly with the revolution (or citizen-backed coup, if you prefer) itself. The shorts range from experimental to MTV to narrative. Watch it and take away what you can.

I naturally have favorites and anathema among the films, but as part of a team, I can't be expressing them here, punk critic or not. You guys are on your own on this one.

;-)

Raymond Red's Camera Obscura

Just saw Raymond Red's installation Camera Obscura at the NCCA gallery. It's up till the end of the month, which means about a week from the day of this posting. In theory, it is not a conceptual coup: it's essentially a room-sized pinhole camera, something that used to be set up regularly in the 19th century. It's said that one Ibn-al-Haitham built one as early as the 10th century. That Leonardo Da Vinci described one in the Codex Atlanticus is a matter of public record, and so on. Still, everything is obvious once it's been done, and the fact remains that no one living in the current art/filmmaking/photography scene remembers of one ever having been set up. Second, several artists and filmmakers who saw the work remained under the impression that the image was being created with a video projector until suitably enlightened, in spite of the hole being clearly visible, and the hypothetical projector being clearly INvisible. Third, it's a whole different thing to experience the damn thing.

Who knew that a pinhole camera would produce a black-and-white image? Some time ago an unconventional photography teacher had the idea of getting his students to make pinhole cameras out of Nido cans, and stick photo paper in the things. I think Jerry Tan or Roberto Chabet had the bright idea of displaying the prints in Megamall. Of course, it is chemistry lab hell to hand print color prints, temperatures have to be maintained, it involves at least thrice as many chemicals as black-and-white printing, etc etc etc. In short, that the prints were in black and white was no indication that the the live image produced by a pinhole camera would actually look black and white to the human eye.

Of course, the light on the wall contains all the colors of the rainbow. The reason that the image is in black-and-white is that we have 2 kinds of cells in the eye: cone cells and rod cells. The cone cells can process color information, and require relatively large amounts of light to do so. The rod cells can only process brightness, work at low levels of light. In fact the photoreactive pigment used by the rod cells -rhodopsin- breaks down under high light levels. It takes time to re-form. The amount of time it takes for rhodopsin to stabilize is the amount of time it takes for our eyes to become adjusted to dark environments. Now, the light levels in Red's camera obscura (Latin for "dark room") is so low that only the rod cells can work. This is why we cannot perceive color in the image it produces. This also means that it is highly likely that you will not be able to see anything at all upon stepping into the room. Be patient. Enter, close the curtain and wait.

It is a calming, meditative space. The image of the street outside is (aside from being black-and-white) upside-down, and spread out not only upon the wall opposite the hole, but upon one the wall on the left as well. Cars speed up when they cross the adjacent wall, an effect of the keystoning/foreshortening produced by the tilted projection surface. Street sounds are muffled. This inaudibility, coupled with the black-and-white aspect, can give the impression of looking into some fragment of the 19th century, an impression which the passing cars do not dispel, and which the odd calesa* (remember we're in Intramuros, the old walled city. ) heightens. I wouldn't mind having a room in a house dedicated to such a view. Maybe a motel ought to set up a bank of camerae obscura, for lovers of a melancholy bent.


---------------

* Horse-drawn carriage

PS Although "obscura" means "dark" in Latin, "obscure" of course means "hidden from view" in English, an etymological detail that seems to resonate with the fact that this installation is located in the NCCA. For those of you in topographical darkness, the NCCA gallery is the lobby of the NCCA building, and the NCCA building is in Intramuros, on General Luna Street (the street on the right side of Manila Cathedral) between Sta Potenciana and Victoria. Camera Obscura is inside the glass-partitioned space to the left of the Main entrance. There are ancient cameras on display inside said glass-walled space and a looping display of Raymond's contribution to the full-length digital omnibus film Imahe Nasyon (see next post). Unfortunately, the NCCA is only open during office hours on weekdays. Cheers!

PPS Raymond says that if you see it at the brightest time of the day, ie late morning till late noon, enough light enters the room for the eye to make out colors: the blue of the sky, greens, (trees?) and bright reds.

Boredom as a Work of Art

I think it was John Cage who said something like "every object hides another." The reason why much new art can bore is because the artist is removing something in order to reveal something behind it. The audience comes to a work of art with a set of expectations, looking for something that they believe the artwork should contain, melody, plot, climax, perspective, figures, humans, harmony, whatever. The history of modern art is filled with stories where these expectations are violated by an artist, who thereby reveals a whole new world of pleasures, and instigates a flurry of investigations into the territory he has discovered/revealed.

If you come to a work looking for something that never comes, you can react with anything from puzzlement to fury, but if the artwork involves duration, (music, film) then it is much more likely that much of your reaction will consist of boredom. The thing is, this boredom often due to the fact that the artist wants to show you something ELSE, a something else that the artist finds interesting/fascinating/enthralling. The good artists are not TRYING to bore you. They are trying to show you something interesting SOMEWHERE ELSE. Boredom is an accidental, and ALWAYS regrettable side-effect produced during the period of initiation/familiarization. (That or art death. But more on that later.)

The idea sounds obvious, but it apparently isn't, judging from the number of times I've heard fellow artists (some of them jawdroppingly brilliant doing what they normally do) tell me that they want to do something new, something that will BORE their audience, wouldn't that be great? I tell them that the deliberate production of boredom is territory that should be reserved for the mediocre and talentless. Boredom is the easiest thing in the world to produce; it's about as rare as vacuum in the universe. How is it that people can actually mistake producing more of it as a good idea? What is it in the logic of our culture that makes it possible for even good artists to contemplate such an act with anticipation? I suspect the following as making up the two premises of a disastrous (and logically fallacious) syllogism:

1) Catholic anhedonia. Pleasure is bad and discomfort is good, or at least more serious.

2) Many boring artworks are praised by critics and historians as serious/brilliant/revolutionary /seminal.

There is a famous illustration that appears in psychology textbooks to illustrate how perception relies on distinguishing foreground from background. It appears to be an extreme closeup of the silhouettes of two people about to kiss. After a while the people become the background and you see the space between them as a wineglass. The notions above are like the silhouettes. The idea "Therefore boredom is high artistic practice" is like the wineglass. It is the what the notions imply.

Criticism and aesthetics are silent on why and how art dies, ie becomes boring. Either it is a non-issue, or it is assumed that the bored person simply lacks the proper education/perspective. I agree that a little background can go a long way to making the boring comprehensible, but the fact must be faced: art can die. The energy an artwork contains for the viewer is a product of energies and cultural tensions/issues that the viewer's milieu have engendered in the viewer. The English director Peter Brook tells of a magical moment in a bombed-out basement in London in the 1940's: a clown on a stage recited the names of dishes he yearned to eat. According to Brook, the clown reduced the starved and rag-swaddled audience to tears. Then the war ended, and grocery lists lost their power to induce lachrymal reactions (in English audiences, anyway). An artwork is a wire between concentrations of social energy. When the distribution of social energies change, the artwork becomes a wire in a vacuum. (This is also the same process by which old art might reacquire power/relevance) Criticism refuses to put the following into words: that although an artwork can galvanize entire generations, that same work can become a boring curiosity. This silence has had the apparent effect of enjoining the viewer to construe the tedium that history deposits around "great works" as content. It is why we confuse creating serious art with creating serious boredom.


PS: The article I mentioned in the last post, in which I wrote about my experiences at the 2006 Ogaki Biennale, is out. The magazine is called MANIFESTO, and features, among other things, a brilliant and outrageously romantic article by Erwin Romulo. The magazine is technically free, but you have to buy a copy of EVO to get it. In theory, anyway. I asked the tindera in Magnet SM about it and she said that the delivery boys had taken her stash of Manifesto back, who knows why. I don't know how they're going to market the next issue, due out "sometime in April." I'll post here when it materializes. I should have an article about Lyle Sacris' short film Self Portrait in it. Cheers!

Shift Register

Apologies. Been what, about 2 months? Sundry friends have been on my ass to put something new on the damn page. Truth is, I was ironing out the bugs in a media installation for the 2006 Ogaki Biennale in Japan. This is a festival dedicated to "New Media" which, includes sound installations, video art, and what is now called "media art", which is stuff that uses computers, sensors, etc. Suppose bio stuff could be there, but mostly isn't yet. At any rate, I had to buckle down. Then I went to Ogaki, where I was usually too drunk or too tired to post. Then I got back, but couldn't figure out how to break it all down into little pieces. Well, I got started when I finally started writing the stuff down for a magazine. It's a new magazine, no title yet, but I"ll post here when the maiden issue comes out. Above is documentation footage of my work SHIFT REGISTER, which my curator tells me should be described as a "media installation," and not "computer video installation" as I had been telling everybody.

The work is a tunnel, equipped with sensors, a modified webcam, a computer, and a video projector. You go inside the tunnel, and then your face pops out at you, and then it melts your face. The staff of the festival actually built a tunnel for me, but with characteristic Japanese serendipity, they used the outside walls as projection surfaces for some of the other works. The title "Shift Register" is the name of a digital circuit that computers use to count with. I had the idea of a work that grabbed your image and then melted it, and put it together. I chose the title because it seemed as if the work was something about surveillance. Now I wonder if it couldn't also be about being addressed by a kind of alien intelligence. Someone/something suddenly looking at you. Sometimes the images that I pursue are just as mysterious as other people's works: open/floating metaphors that you try out, this way and that, to see what other things they could attach to...

Ka Elmo

I received a text this afternoon that Elmo Redrico, or Ka Elmo, as he was called by his friends, passed away. Everything is still in flux: the text was received at the remove of who knows how many branchings of an original text (SMS) flurry. The text, received at 2 in the afternoon, said he died at "2pm," so whether he died at 2AM in the morning, or yesterday afternoon is still unclear. No mention of how he died, although I know he was on a regular regimen of heart medicine. Didn't show it though: Ka Elmo was a spry old fuck. Smoked, drank, on the perpetual lookout for a buffet table. Used to be among first to show up at the Furball Christmas parties at the 18th street compound. Drove Mads nuts. More information should be percolating through soon. In the meantime, this.

The still is from Local Unit, my 8-minute segment in Imahe Nasyon (Image Nation), an omnibus digital feature produced by Jon and Carol Red for Viva Films. Should be coming out in a month or so. (I think Ka Elmo was in a couple of the other segments as well.) His character is a black-market brain merchant/surgeon. I was a bit startled by this frame, grabbed from a shot in the video: he actually looks handsome. Good bones under the crumpling of age. I never noticed. I suppose his perpetual clowning obscured that from me. Now I regret I never got to show him the final edit. He was good in it too: looked wily and tired, like an old dog, hints of madness at the edges. A good actor, under all the shtick.

A real pity, as his tireless appearances in independent shorts seemed about to pay off in his breaking through to becoming a recognized character actor in the Filipino mainstream. He played a cop in the cult juggernaut "Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Olivero." He has parts in some 3 other features still in production. He was so transparently pleased to be able to say "I can't go tomorrow...I have dubbing..," so glad to be in the loop and working.

Ingat, men.

The Passing of Mowelfund, Part 1

I came upon Mowelfund in the early nineties. Now, it is possible to identify it as a time of transition, when the waters of film had begun to shrink under the rising sun of video, but desktop editing had not yet become available to the general populace. Super-8 had died. Kodak Philippines had discontinued processing it, and donated the behemoth developing machine to the Film Institute.

It was a purely symbolic gesture. The Institute had no use for it any more than Kodak did. It was a small, thirsty factory of a machine: built like a tank, designed to hold tens of gallons of reagents and process hundreds of rolls at a time. By the time I turned up it had already been rusting for a few years by the door of the converted house that sheltered the entirety of the Mowelfund instrumentality, an industrial-sized omen of the fortunes of celluloid.


Super-8 was dead, though it was to be a few years before LARRY MANDA was to confirm the truth with his film Goodbye Miss Super-8. Hardcore users like NOEL LIM and RAYMOND RED still ordered their Super-8 stock from friends and relatives living abroad, and mailed their rushes off to Japan for development. It was a risky and dispiriting way to work. A month could go by before you discovered that your camera's light meter was screwed or that your stock was greenish, by which time your actors might have changed their hair, graduated or flown away. Welfare office shared space with the film institute in an atmosphere of sleepy Filipino nothing-doing punctuated by sudden bursts of fevered activity, as when Erap would hold free clinics for movieworkers, or around Christmas, when wave after wave of guild parties would ripple across the compound. Nobody knew that film was dying.

What was to take its place? Surely not the video that Surf Reyes' students were reduced to using in place of Super-8. True, Mowelfund had a full-fledged video editing suite in the back, that could do everything a suite in a commercial television station could do, but that was jealously guarded. People with an in like Patrick Purugganan or Mel Bacani could edit their opuses there, with frame-accurate sync, time-base correctors, genlocks and character generators, but most workshoppers had to make do with the consumer-grade cameras and video decks reserved for them. Linear Editing by pushing play and depausing the record function.

There must be an entire generation now who are unaware of how difficult it is to even perform a match cut on this kind of setup, or that it was completely impossible to perform a dissolve. Even the Super-8 guys had no dissolves in their arsenal, although JOEY AGBAYANI demonstrated in his film Eye in The Sky that it was technically possible to perform in-camera double-exposures in Super-8. (Super-8 didn't come in spools, but cartridges. You had maybe a half-an inch of exposed film that, if you were crazy enough, you COULD try to inch in the wrong direction in a dark room for a couple of feet before the cartridge would seize up. I don't think even Joey tried this more than once.)

That was then, when NICK DEOCAMPO would imitate a particle accelerator in his classes, slamming 3 or 4 streams of postmodernist film theory with Filipino politics, hoping to flush the magnetic monopole of Third World Cinema Praxis from the chaos of his improvisations. He was the boss as well as the primary propagandist and fundraiser for the Film Institute, aside from being articulate, passionate, militantly gay and steeped in the theory of deconstruction. Nobody within a 200 kilometer radius with the balls to call him crazy, though I wonder if he didn't feel a little lonely, alone with all those philosophical toys that nobody else knew how to operate.

That was then, before the money finally came through and Nick was finally able to raze the old house where all the art-scum independents like ROXLEE and YAM LARANAS would while away the afternoons, raze it to the ground to make room for the building that would house his dream of a film school, which would serve as the nexus of film study and training for all of Southeast Asia, maybe even Asia. The man had nothing if he didn't have vision.

That was then. Before computers fell on the independent scene and blew it up.

Ambiguity as Feedback

It is possible to describe artworks (and man-made objects in general) in terms of ambiguousness. At one extreme, you would have highly ambiguous things whose meanings or uses invite a great deal of user improvisation, such as alphabets, balls or building blocks: things that you are free to use to make up your own stories/games/objects. At the other extreme, you would have things whose uses and/or meanings are highly specified, such as mathematical equations, a 3/16ths inch nut or an ash-tray shaped like the Eiffel Tower, i.e. things wherein the maker tried as much as possible to restrict the range of possible uses/interpretations. In that sense, one could also describe artwork A as being more or less ambiguous than artwork B. One could say, for instance, that Lyle's Luwalhati't Hinagpis, (his 3-channel thesis with the infamous talking vulva) as being more ambiguous than Reincarnation (his 8-channel work), which is clearly anchored in existentialist themes by the spoken text.

It is not necessarily the case that the more ambiguous artwork is the better one, or even the more inspiring one. While it's true that the more ambiguous object will (by definition) be able to sustain more interpretations than a more specific object, there comes a point when the increasing the number of possible readings makes it seem more and more pointless to make a reading at all. Making a reading is to assert the primacy of a specific meaning in the work. When the work is so ambiguous that it can mean anything, then there is no point in asserting that it means anything specific . Infinite interpretations collapse to zero.

I've been circling the image of guitar feedback as a metaphor for the particular kind of aesthetic experience I seek, and want to engender. As any electric guitar player quickly discovers, there are "sweet spots" to be found that produce feedback: fortuitous arrangements of guitar, amp and fretting, when the elements lock together: output feeds into input, setting up a little self-sustaining sun of sonic energy. When you tune a work to the right mix of ambiguity and specificity, you reach a point when it seems bursting with intention, a mute gesturing urgently in the dying light, from the other side of the highway.

After all, the mind's activity of reading, or deriving meaning from signs can be described as semiotic amplification. Under the proper conditions it should be possible to set up semiotic feedback loops in the mind, where

1) the meanings the mind has produced become signs to be read again, or

2) the meanings the mind produces changes the meanings of the signs it had produced earlier, or

3) both

Screening at the Ateneo

Last Thurday, I screened three of my films to a film class at the University of Ateneo.The class is taught by Quark Henares, the director. I screened Hulikotekan v. 2.1; Sausage; and The Retrochronological Transfer of Information (RTOI for short). Chipper, intelligent bunch of kids. It was Experimental Film Day and I showed my stuff alongside Lyle Sacris and John Torres.

Quark made a stab at differentiating our approaches. He said that John Torres (who might be described as carrying on the film diary tradition that Kidlat Tahimik pioneered here) made "personal" films, I (whose films are made in the light of questions like "Would it be possible to make a film that was not the record of an event, but the actual event itself?") made "conceptual" films. Lyle (a director and professional film cinematographer famed for bravura lighting and camerawork) made "visual" films. Not strictly true, of course: Lyle often intends his visuals to express personal sentiments, and John often bases his decisions on the visual lyricism of the image, the "visuals." But not bad as a rough guide as to where we place our primary emphases.


I discovered that it was a good idea to first show 1 film, and then to talk about it, which is what I did for each film. And although this carries the danger of extinguishing the process of engaging the work by giving easy "answers" to the viewers' puzzlement, I think it is possible to use the platform to give "user guides," hints as to the places in the aesthetic universe you (the artist) think the work occupies/engages/makes connections to. The perception of order produces pleasure. In the Philippines, artists either unintentionally give too little information, or flat-out intentionally use silence to cover up the confusion in the work. The trick is to talk just enough to service the work....to frame the work with right quantity and type of information to encourage imaginative participation. To point the puzzlement towards fertile courses of speculation.

A girl came up to me afterwards, and asked about the religious attitudes behind Sausage. Gave a polite polysyllabic answer, ending by saying the "the film IS meant to be blasphemous..." Next time I ought to cut to the chase and just say "O yeah, I hate Jesus. Always have."

Making Sausage

In this post, I'm going to write about what I was thinking about when I made Sausage in 1996. Sausage is a 12 minute experimental video, which I will try to make available for download on one of the free file hosting sites on the web. It was shot on a consumer Video8 camera, and edited on a pair of consumer-grade VCRs, no computers, no nothing. I will be talking about the subject and structure of the video, and so spoil most of it for anyone who might want to watch it afterwards. I don't like this idea, (especially since it seems to be successfully traumatizing Filipino catholics to this day....like a little robot that escaped from the lab to scuttle around the city, biting someone in the ankle every month or so), but A) most people wouldn't be able to watch it anyway, B) All readers are free stop reading now and download/watch the thing first (yeah, right) and C) almost no artist writes about this stuff, and I, for one would love to read about it. So I am publishing this in the hope that others might do the same. Now: to the chase.

The core idea for the video came when I noticed that "Jesus" said backwards, sounded a lot like "sausage." I don't know why, but the conjunction seemed fascinating. It seemed credible that this relationship between the sounds were not a trivial accident, but the perceptible sign of some secret and essential relationship between Jesus and sausages, between Jesus and pigs. A wealth of facts that seemed to corroborate the idea, to resonate with it.

In the first place, the pig is considered a dirty animal. It's a term of opprobium, even if we eat a lot of it. It would be in keeping with the "the last shall be first" stuff for Jesus to incorporate something of the reviled in him. Second, pigs are slaughtered without thought or mercy. This is in keeping with the theme of sacrifice, the dying for your sins stuff. Third, there is something terrible and nightmarish in the shapeless-ground-meatness of sausages. Unspeakable additives and obscene organs buried in the blandness of the stuffing. Urban legends of human fingernails turning up in hotdogs. Then there is the ritual cannibalism that is the core metaphor of Communion. Many, many centers of energy twinkling away in the dark. (I wonder if this kind of thinking is what Dali called his "paranoiac-critical method"? Even if he didn't, it appears to me that paranoia --seeing looming patterns in the universe-- is a good methodological foundation. For art, anyway.)

However, I was sure I didn't want to make some kind of strict parallel, something that said "pigs are like Jesus, we kill them everyday, barbeque is just like the Host." In the first place, that's about a bath away from some kind vegetarian plea which I am very far from making: I love pork. In the second place, I abhor that kind of "committed art" messaging. Politics and programs are such scrawny universes. An artwork is most fascinating when the images seep into the everyday world, and vice versa. Tufted fragments from the work parachute into the folds of the brain, lying in ambush like little nano-commandos, jumping out and performing hit-and-run surgery on our perceptions when we least expect it. Things in the real world we never noticed before suddenly seem part of a conspiracy. Things in the artwork seem to be hinting at something about a person we just met this afternoon. What I love is when the artwork and reality invade and modify each other, and it is precisely this process of seepage and epiphany that an explicit message stops dead in its tracks.

The premise was: would it be possible to make a film that did not "explain," or give a meaning to the Jesus/sausage sonic artifact, but which amplified the implications lurking in it? Would it be possible to make a film that attracted meaning in such a way that more and more Jesus things seemed like pig things, and more and more pig things seemed like Jesus things? THAT was the problem/goal. How to set up something that would promote the cross-contamination of the ideas we had of Jesus and pigs. (Of course, I did not actually put these ideas into words. It wasn't until a year or so ago that I was able to state what I had been aiming for. At the time, I could only have verbalized what I did NOT want to do. )

Dummy Head Microphone

headmic LS
Originally uploaded by angermitano.

A stereo microphone I built. Microphones mounted in a dummy head is actually an old and respectable stereo recording technique. Recordings made with such mikes were supposed to sound fantastic over headphones, because the headphones reproduced the exact audio information that two human ears would receive at the recording environment. Some orchestral records were recorded this way, using grey and featureless heads. The technique lost popularity, probably because it would sound like shit over speakers in a living-room. It'd make perfect sense for recording stuff intended for mobile mp3 players though.

I found the doll's head in a park. Didn't wash the mud off because I deliberately wanted to make a tool that was not self-effacing, anonymous and clean, but obtrusive, meaning-laden, and dirty. It works as a microphone, but seems eerie, loaded. I'm not sure what I'll incorporate it into, but it seems to invite shamanic usage: using a magical object to record sound in order to incorporate magical properties into the recording. Maybe.

Market States: Lolas in Metallica T-shirts

It's not because they're really cool lolas. It's because the knockoff Chinese Metallica T-shirts were the cheapest thing in the bangketa, the cotton was thick, and since they were extra-large, they got more fabric for their money.

This is refugee style. Or more strictly, this is not style, but necessity, the resultant of the vectors of poverty.

The process of making meaning is short-circuited. Was it Langer who defined Man not as the rational animal, but the symbolizing animal? Consumer style/market style is not style: it is victimhood. When what you wear or use is determined for you by the market, you have lost the ability to create meaning, of making your being and environment legible. Under the onslaught of overruns/remainders/dumped goods, appearance becomes the record of the state of the market. The chaos and chance fortunes of bargains and default.

Of course, everything chaotic becomes legible in time. the cheapest things in the 70's are not the chepest things in the 90's, in the millenium. The cheapest things in Bombay are not (yet) the cheapest things in Manila. We find we can differentiate between types and moments of unstyle, of market states. Making flashbacks and period films in a third world country is all about identifying the style of a particular moment of chance, like studying the details of a car wreck until everything wrought by chance becomes transformed into visible/identifiable detail.

nanoapocalypse

Speculation: Art is dead.

By which I do not mean that no one is creative anymore, or that things were better in the past, etc, but that "art" as a certain cultural category has become bloodless. The paintings and painters --which is only metonymic for art and artists-- that made up the pantheon of modern art are starting to look like the saints and relics of a waning religion. The heaven that they occupied has become a painting, and is peeling from an old and crumbling ceiling.

A violently polychromatic era displaces the old sepia world of the Lindy and flappers and cubists and Russian Futurists in bright yellow vests, a world cybernetic, plague-ridden, violent, pornographic, and tribal, which has as much room or need for artists as they were conceived in the nineteen-twenties it as it has for tallow-makers and stagecoach drivers. Less and less does anything that has to do with art seem to have anything to do with the primaries of joy, despair, abandon, plague and ecstasy that color this age that seethes with crystallographic sciences and barbaric excess. Perhaps Jimi Hendrix can still be recognized as an artist, but more and more it seems that whether he was or not is irrelevant, as if one were evaluating Einstein as a clerk in the Patent Office.


What seems more important to say of Hendrix (say) is that he channelled new and violent energies. Even so, he was still a known man, a genius standing lone on the stage, and in this most like the Romantic vision of the tormented artist. Perhaps the millenium's powers will be channelled by teams of dreamers and programmers, all masked and faceless, slaves of instrumentalities drilling for money and so releasing the hordes of Cthulhu from the caves of data.

Brian Eno once said that people often did their most interesting work when they were not thinking of their activities as art. Maybe we have to begin with the admission that we do not know the shape and quality of the energies that time is releasing around us, we have to stop assuming that they can be released, captured, or shaped by those things and stories we find in museums. Museums and theaters were altars and we see now that altars are not built, but grow out of and crumble back into the ground of time like the anthills that we Filipinos call punso and regard as irruptions of power.

Camp and Existence

James Tailoring. Petal Attraction. Yehey. The legal, registered names of Filipino business establishments. Filipinos are supposed to celebrate these names as more proof of our creativity. They are certainly creative, the way jokes are creative. But why joke in the first place?

It is a commonplace observation that humour usually has roots in pain. Comics make schtick and routines about things that irritate and oppress them. Laughing is a kind of psychological judo, by which the mind overcomes/shelters from that which obssesses and oppresses it.

I find it more and more credible that these jokes are meant to overcome an abiding sense of falsehood. I do not mean "falsehood" in the sense of a lie, but in the sense of being an imitation. We feel oppressed by the sense of living a copy of real life. Real life being, of course, everything that happens 1) in America 2) on television 3) in English. This is the irritant that joking about buying something in "New York - New York,Cubao" refers to.

I am beginning to wonder whether our vaunted Filipino wordplay is actually a form of camp. Camp has been historically defined as gay sensibility. Drag queens practice a particularly pointed form of camp: A drag queen imitates a female, while making it obvious that he is NOT a female, but an imitation, a copy. He oscillates between longing and irony, aping femininity and mocking his efforts to do so.

It appears to me that Filipinos have generalized camp. We have taken the oscillating strategies of camp from the context of gender, and used it as a response to the psychological pressures of imperialism. To the pressures of economic inequality so deep it determines existential assumptions.

The jury is still out on whether camp is an empowering or self-defeating sensibility. That is what worries me. More and more it seems like the humour of those without hope.

The Bosch Effect

I name this effect in honor of PEPITO BOSCH--- who was, until he died in XXXX, a kind of elder/wiseman/shaman figure in the Philippine art scene. More on that some other time. The Bosch Effect is this: When a fifty-something year old hangs out with twenty-to-thirty-somethings, he automatically becomes their wise man, IRRESPECTIVE OF HOW WISE HE ACTUALLY IS.

This is not meant to impugn Pepito Bosch in any way. This is an observation on the role of roles, and how groups create structure within themselves by apportioning roles to the likeliest candidates. The same effect can be observed currently drawing haloes around ROX LEE, TEDDY CO, and PEPE SMITH.

I observe this effect among creatives: musicians, filmmakers, painters and so on. One wonders whether it works among people who do not see themselves as rebels. Probably. It probably works among any group of people who see themselves as a group. A tribe.

The effect seems to indicate that when an assemblage of people begin to see themselves as a group, it sets up a drive in which they seek people to fill archetypal roles. The wise man seems to be a common or necessary role. One can easily think of 5 to 10 more which are not as often filled: The king, the princess, the martyr, the enemy, the traitor, and so on.

The interesting thing about the Bosch Effect is how like a dance it is: it takes two to tango. Just as the young are attracted by the need to look up to someone, the old are attracted by the need to mentor the young.

Okay, there are exceptions. The first one is: The older man CAN be given other roles. Sometimes he becomes The Fool. However, it seems that he must actively play the fool to get this identity. If he just keeps his mouth shut, wisdom is the first image the young project on his silence.

Connection Theory

Order And Pleasure

The perception of order produces pleasure.

A hand reaches between two pillows, and pulls out an earring. This shot can be the high point of a movie, producing thrill, shock, recognition, and awe. In a rush of understanding, we realize that X has died, that Y was lying, that Z was having an affair with A, that B is innocent, etc, etc, etc. We feel pleasure as an avalanche of dramatic information washes over us, in stark contrast to the scantiness of the shot’s visual content of hand, pillows and earring. Our pleasure comes from the connections we have just made.

Connections in Narrative Film

The viewer’s eternal question of “What does this mean?” may be restated as: “What am I supposed to do with what I am seeing, hearing?”

Audiences are constantly processing information, ie making connections between signs. Realistic narrative exploits the huge store of shared connection-making power we soak up just by growing up in a particular culture: A heavily made-up woman in a miniskirt is kissing a man. She pulls his coat open, revealing a collar of a particular shape. We use our glimpse of the collar –no more than a strip of white—and make our connections: the man is a priest, the woman is a prostitute, this is a forbidden act, and so on. The woman pulls off her wig and groans in a deep voice. More connections. From the deep voice and wig, we conclude that “she’s” a man, and this one kinky priest. A door opens. We hear laughter and party music. In comes a Pharoah and a Cowgirl. They say “We were looking for you, Eddie.” The priest smiles sheepishly. In a split second, we reweigh and revise the connections. It’s a costume party. Eddie the priest is probably not a real priest, this is probably just a little role-playing, and so on. A skilled director controls the flow of screen visuals and sound to provoke our connection-making powers in exactly this way.

We make connections so automatically it’s hard for us to see the processes.We do it so naturally that even describing what we do as “making connections” feels somehow inaccurate. The phrase reminds us of things like algebra, translation or computer programming: abstract, intellectual, step-by-step operations; in contrast, we seem to take in film by near-instantaneous processes that feels like how we imagine telepathy might feel like. Seeing the simple strip of white of the clerical collar in the abovementioned scene instantly floods us with interest and/or uneasiness, in spite of the fact that there is nothing essentially dangerous about whiteness or collars. The danger we feel is the result of us having completely internalized the culture that associates that cut of collar with a thousand other things: ideas about priesthood, Sunday masses, the ten commandments, sexual taboos, other movies about priests, and so on. Our mastery of the meaning of the sign of the collar makes it difficult to see the simple geometric shape of the collar apart from everything we associate/connect with it. In the same way, it is nearly impossible for us to see the screen as a two-dimensional plane filled with differentiated light. The speed and invisibility of the sign-reading process contributes to our inability to see what narrative order might have in common with the order that underpins nonnarrative films, or even atemporal arts like painting or sculpture. This essay is an effort to make those connections clearer.




Internal and External Connections

It is useful to think of connections as being divided into two types: External and Internal connections. The connections we make with the collar is connection external to the scene. In spite of the fact that the scene does not include an anthropological documentary about the customs of the Catholic church, we know that that the whitecollared man is not supposed to be what he is doing. We connect the white collar with ideas about priesthood, celibacy and sin as a result of information we have accumulated from the life we lead outside the movie. On the other hand, the way we learn that the priest is not really a priest, is through an Internal connection, a connection established within the scene through the juxtaposition of party music, a Pharoah and a Cowgirl, the word “Eddie” and so on. (Wheels within wheels within wheels. Making meaning is a very complex affair. Thinking about how meaning is made makes you think of fractal graphics, designs that display the same level of detail and complexity no matter how much you zoom in. You can always zoom further in. For instance, the way we connect the sounds we hear in the scene above with “music” and “parties” is an external connection, as is the way we connect things like the girl’s big hat and string tie with “cowgirl” and so on. The more you think about it, the more you are put in awe of the sheer amount of information you must already have at your fingertips, in order to even begin to make sense of the simplest things.)

Internal and External are adjectives. They work exactly like the words inside and outside. A connection is either Internal or External depending on where you put the border. In the last scene of Blade Runner where Rick Deckard spirits Rachel out of his apartment, he sees a little paper crane on the floor outside his apartment door. We realize that the detective with the pock-marked face has been there. We know this because earlier in the movie, we saw the same detective making little figurines: a matchstick scarecrow, an origami dinosaur, and so on. We make a connection to a piece of information that is internal relative to the movie Blade Runner, but external to the scene Spiriting Rachel Away.

The more familiar/traditional an art form is, the more it can draw on external connections.The less familiar/traditional an art form is the more information it has to establish internally, for connections to be drawn. A story about sex taps into universal experiences. A science-fiction dystopia must internally establish the laws and taboos of its fictional society. A film about the life of a nine-year old female Untouchable in Uttar Pradesh cannot take anything for granted if it hopes to be understood outside Uttar Pradesh. And so on. (Put this way, it becomes easy to imagine someone wondering to himself: Would it be possible to create a film that had absolutely NO external connections? Perhaps something that used only fields of color. It would move from light to dark. Perhaps it would begin as one unified field of yellow and end with an image of a million little shivering worms of black. We could call it Zebra Crossing. And so on. This is the sort of problem-based thinking some experimental filmmakers do.)

Of Warriors, Punks and Silence

Three interesting comments from fellow artists about Abakanism, which seemed to throw lights interesting enough to comment on:

1) Stanley says he is disinterested in "competing". He will talk about his art to those who seem sympathetic, but thinks that this is something the artist can choose or not choose to do. The artist is not OBLIGATED to explain, still less to shout anyone down.

2) Erwin (filmmaker) says that whenever he tells people what this bit or that bit derives from, is reacting to, is inspired by, etc,
he gets labeled as "pretentious," and finds that the less he says about his work, the more positively people seem to respond to it.

3) Lyle (filmmaker) says he can talk about his stuff, but doesn't think he can write about it.

To which I warmly pontificate as follows ;-)

1) Well, yes, nobody should have to do anything they don't want to. I know a couple of gentle souls myself, who have no verbal claws, and no wish to grow any. I would not wish them to change a hair either, and so I have secretly decided that I am their champion and protector, so let the evil and thoughtless beware, mwahahaha. But Abakanism is a polemic position, a warrior's code; naturally its internal hierarchy places warriors on the right hand of God. Samurai think civilians are kind of cute, but soft.


2) I didn't mean, when I said that real artists should explain, that they should tell ALL. I meant that they should be ready to impart whatever information is necessary for the work to become legendary. It is possible to curate with silence.


3) I wonder if Lyle (whom I find to be consistently insightful, funny and articulate in person) is laboring under some preconceived notions about what "good writing" should sound like. What if good writing DOESN'T have to sound like what you think it should sound like? What if it just has to do the job and sound like you? I sound like I do basically because I 1) put in the big stuff and 2) leave out everything that it would bore me to leave in. This doesn't GUARANTEE that you'll produce something good or even readable, but it's a good place to start. I would like to see texts/manifestoes/clarifications that were not "literary" in the sense of being polished or slick. I want to read punk criticism! (You read that here first!)

CURATE YOURSELF!

Why? Why explain the context of your work?

The short answer:

Because if you don’t, somebody else will.

The long answer:

An artwork is typically the tip of an iceberg. It is like the punch line of a joke: it concentrates the energies of an existing context. Folk/Traditional/Folk/pop musicians typically don't have to explain their work, because their work usually sits in a context/history most people are familiar with. On the other hand, anybody doing conceptual/”avante-garde”/new work is usually trying to make a point in a different context. Perhaps he is even trying to invent a new context altogether. Such an artist naturally has to contend with people looking for things in his work that he was trying to leave out on purpose, and so on. --For instance, many modernist composers deliberately did not write harmony into their pieces, because they were trying to find musical structures ASIDE from harmony. Unless the listener understood the context ("I am trying to compose a new music without harmony") it is possible that the listener might think that the composer a) didn't know how to write harmony b) was joking, c) was insane, and so on. If you are an artist working in a new context, would you rather have a hand in making that context known, or would you rather hope and pray that somebody else does that task correctly?

ABAKANISM!!

Anti-Bahala-Ka-Na-Ism. A NEW MOVEMENT!!!

In Tagalog, Bahala ka na, which roughly translates as "It's all up to you," is the artist's stereotypical response to the question "what is this work about?" ? I have no idea how the rest of the world does it, but in the Philippines, artists are taught that it is improper to "explain" your work, that to do so is to some how violate the integrity of the work. In practice, I've gotten some fairly thoughtful answers from artists who saw me as, well, if not an ally, at least someone who was not a complete idiot. Still, this is the status quo, the partyline: THE WORK IS NOT MEANT TO BE EXPLAINED.

EXCEPT, that is, when some kind of curatorial statement is called for, typically in some art magazine, or on a sheet of bond paper glued by the door, or over the price lists. Typically this is some near-incomprehensible gobbledygook larded with abstract nouns and postmodernist buzzwords. And I say this as someone who has actually READ some Derrida. The works by Tagalog or Taglish speaking artists, snorting with good-natured laughter over pop-art references and limp jokes, must be framed by the most ornate, gilded, otiose, fringed,beribboned, sequin-spangled, curlicued, velvet chiffon french-english lark's vomit. Apparently the old-school writing principles of using concrete nouns, favoring the short word over the long one, the direct over the indirect, must be completely reversed for the purposes of talking about AHT.

If I were completely paranoid, which I am not, yet, I would suspect that this strangely claustrophobic state of affairs --where the artists seem either trained or determined not to speak about what they do or think, and yet are framed and legitimized by texts made indecipherable precisely by doing the OPPOSITE of what makes good writing-- to be the product of a deliberate conspiracy to defraud artists of the right or power to speak. It's like some paranoid fantasy out of Burroughs. The Puta Mayan Rice Caper. Alien Centipedes have taken over the control room and have cut the lines to thought, forcing all Filipino artists to talk like Cheech and Chong, and released a virus that infects ink, causing all written texts to grow prolix to the point of unreadability in order to keep the people under the control of the High Puta Mayan Centipede Priests.

WELL FUCK THIS!! ALL LINES FALLING, MGA PUTANGINA KAYONG CENTIPEDE MAYAN MOTHERFUCKERS AT RUNNING DOG LACKEY LOGOVIRUSES!!!

THE FIRST DRAFT OF THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF ABAKANISM:

1) The artwork exists in a context. It is like the punchline of a joke: it needs a setup.

2) The context is a web of ideas surrounding the work. In a time of whitewater, white noise makes it difficult to perceive the context. Therefore it is the artist’s duty to make that web known and visible.

3) Explanations do not detract from the experience of the artwork. Explanations enhance the experience of the artwork.

4) It is possible for an explanation to be bullshit. It is also possible for an artwork to be bullshit. It is possible that both or that neither is the case. Therefore it is necessary to experience both the art and the explanation to know what is what.

5) A real artist is not afraid to talk about his intentions.

6) A real artist does not have French postmodernist intentions.

7) A real artist is not afraid to speak for his work.

8) A real artist is not afraid of criticism. A real artist welcomes all attention, even negative attention. That which does not kill him only makes him stronger.

9) A real artwork is not afraid of explanations and contexts because it has the power to exceed all explanations and contexts.

Woo-hoo!

TAKE BACK THE WORD!

PS Cheech and Chong don't talk like Cheech and Chong. Read the Playboy interview.