Film | Sound | Performance
Essays
What Lies in a Fold
collaborator: Juan Manuel Chavez
10:29, MIT, 2023
This film explores the realm of the trace, or of the index, the remnants that are left behind, harkening back to a prior existence of a symbol, an object, a material, an action, that become a memory. It is a multichannel installation composed of 2 videos and a sound piece.
WINDOW 1
When does the mummy become a fossil?
Desiccation and drying, eventually fossilizing,
Despite efforts to grab, hold, represent, preserve,
all disintegrates.
Desiccation and drying, eventually fossilizing,
Despite efforts to grab, hold, represent, preserve,
all disintegrates.
WINDOW 2
A model of a house sits on a flat surface.
It is an icy substance.
It melts.
It is an icy substance.
It melts.
WINDOW 3
A photograph catches fire.
The index that became an icon turns into ash.
A new medium is born.
The index that became an icon turns into ash.
A new medium is born.
WINDOW 4
Upon contact, there is an imprint.
Multiple times over, it fades.
It is a timeline of impressions.
WINDOW 5
Framing everyday sounds,
Amplified, overlaid, distorted,
To sonify memory.
Amplified, overlaid, distorted,
To sonify memory.
Can we capture these objects and images in suspension? Between a represented idea and its trace after deconstruction?
What remains is a mnemonic trigger.
A trans-mnemonic portal transfers you from the world of the real into the world of suspended images, and then back to the real.
What then lies in that purgatory? And how can representation ever be real?
We recall the mummy complex – a fetish of preservation, that enables the commodification of memory. Embalming the image – a painting, a photograph, a video – is an act of desperation to immortalize and contain an object in time, and thus avoid its becoming a thing of the past, a distant memory.
This is coupled with the deliberate enframing (Gestell) and framing of objects and images on two levels, experientially (dispositif) and cinematically, or the “mode of ordering” an experience of reality that reveals or conceals itself.
This is how we attempt to capture, obstruct, and dismantle unfolding processes of decay and suspension.
In its hastening of decay, time is complicit; it warrants the material decomposition of physical objects as well as sound waves. A sound gradually withers, wanes, and weakens until its absence replaces it, and time guarantees this.
We challenge the difficulty of capturing and recording fleeting mnemonic acousma (auditory hallucinations). Our preservation fetish compels us to contain and embalm sound as it travels and resonates.
Through the desire to defeat death by representation, we attempt to embrace the state of constant flux in temporalities of sound - representing, reconstructing, and amplifying once-faint acoustemologies (sonic ways of knowing and being in the world).