Thomas Imbach’s documentary Well Done, offered to me by Désirée, called to mind a quote from Friedrich Engels, who wrote that “the machinery of modern industry degrades the labourer from a machine to the mere appendage of a machine”.
The film, dealing with themes of a global work culture, language, man-machine fusion, and an almost symphonic representation of the modern workplace, positions itself well within the context of a video exercise I produced during Sabine Groenewegen’s workshop Writing Through Editing.
I also connected this editing exercise to British filmmaker John Smith's The Girl Chewing Gum. In it, a directorial voice (which I make a direct reference to in my own work) shouts commands at passersby, who seemingly oblige to his every whim. While simply a play of sound and image, the viewer adopts the logic, coming along for the ride. This tendency to make use of the viewer’s preconceived notions of the film medium is an important formal reference, but his work stands often as a simple reminder to play.
My application to the research masters program made clear my years-long interest in exploring spaces we inhabit and the objects contained within them. Guided by the phenomenological writings of Gaston Bachelard and a desire to unpack family history through these spaces, my undergraduate thesis film Eudora served as a standard for my future practice. It also established, in my mind, the ability of cinematic language to transfer the histories and experiences of one to another. This point of reference, as I saw it, would help inform and define a process of research and discovery as I moved out of my home and into new spaces, objects, worlds.
Over the past several months in this program, I have come to be able to position myself within a constellation of artists, filmmakers, architects and philosophers. Having further clarified the place from which I speak, and a renewed urgency to develop this work, I feel as though I can address clearly the themes of this semester, and carry it with me towards a working methodology.
When I speak about culture, I must first acknowledge the subjective lens through which I view it, as a filmmaker from a middle class family in the United States. The frame through which I contextualize “culture” is heavily westernized, and my work has consequently found purchase in subjects that I can connect to my own experience. In a country whose exports of art, communication and social mores have acted as a globalizing force within the world, themes of cultural colonialism rise to the surface. With writings from philosophers such as Byung-Chul Han, Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek, I can position my work and research within a larger conceptual discussion of cultural universality and then explore it through cinematic terms.
The initial mapping exercise toward the start of the program was a turning point in how I addressed my subjects. I not only expanded my definition of what a space can be, but re-framed my study of it through historical and forensic terms. In Stan Liguzinski’s workshop on archiving, this led to the work of Forensic Architecture, a reference that offers up a more structural, process-oriented approach in which to view my research of inhabited spaces. His introduction of the container, meanwhile, helped to create a practical form in which these methodological investigations could draw connections through a visual map.
Historically, personal discoveries are presented through my process of making. I’m an artist, not a writer or philosopher, and ultimately this research must manifest itself through experimentation and play. Over the course of the program, I intend to develop test cases that explore all possible concepts of space and it’s possible representation through cinema, armed with an equal measure of evidence-based research and creative impulse. One particular subject comes from a recent article recounting the history of an US hotel chain whose attempt to export the excessive “culture” of American luxury to other countries in the 1960s helped to transform and redefine globalism. I’m interested in positioning the story within my research interests and creating a roadmap for how I may develop a larger project in the future.
This past October, I was in Bucharest exhibiting a commissioned film on the theme of labor and affect. As I sat on a park bench close to the gallery, a man walking with a bicycle approached and began speaking to me in a concerned tone. I told him I only understood English, to which he replied in a thick Romanian accent, “In the movies you’re alive, in the graveyard you’re dead. What a pity.” I stared back wordlessly as he issued a slight shrug and carried on his way, eventually vanishing behind the park foliage.
To explore a space, I must unpack not only the personal histories of its inhabitants, but the underlying structures of power through which that space came to be. Evidenced by my experience within the film industry and clarified by this past semester, I have drawn the following position: Our spaces, be they physical or digital, contain the DNA of a sort of superstructure; one so inconceivably vast and amorphous you would be forgiven to miss it while staring directly into its machinery. This is what the German philosopher Theodor Adorno called The Culture Industry. According to his work, it is what happens under capitalist systems when cultural artifacts become produced according to a standardizing plan, so as to be as profitable as possible. Those standardized plans produce that which has already been proven to sell.
It helps explain why virtually every commercial I’m hired to sound design includes this
We sustain this machine by following those plans, regularly outsourcing any deeper questioning to technocratic systems that help shield our minds from a world that’s become hopelessly confusing. Without an understanding of the underlying structures, we are destined to conform our lives according to it; we become pliable, distracted, confused. If culture is foundational to human experience, the implications of this industry are immense. But I believe we can decode it by revealing not only the power structures responsible for the production of these spaces, but defining the tools, material and blueprints employed in their creation. With this revelation, I’m then naturally drawn to the following question: How can we reveal and define culture through cinema?
When I presented the film in Bucharest, I was surprised by the audience members who thanked me for highlighting this topic, informing me that the absurdist storyline in fact mirrored their very real experiences. As a textbook workaholic, I know I can speak from the point of view of a product of the western world’s stance on labor. If I can unpack workplaces built upon exploitation and control based on my experience, I know that I’m speaking to an ever-expanding population. Regardless of the evidence, the concept of work, let alone an encompassing “culture” is multi-faceted and difficult to define; a process that will take me far beyond the boundaries of the program.
Critical Review III
How can we interpret lived experience through the spaces we inhabit? How can we reveal and define culture through cinema?
I live in a world where my decisions are shaped by such structures of power. They are varied, implacable, ambiguous; yet there is evidence of their presence everywhere. In the office buildings I’ve been employed at, the industries that produce the media I consume, the smartphone I communicate through, the art galleries I visit. In essence, the whole of culture I experience is shaped by and through them. But to what extent do they pervade our lives, and how are they linked to the spaces we inhabit?
By the start of the first semester at the film academy, I had already drawn these conclusions, but foundational problems remained. I still struggled to explain the urgency of my initial question, make sense of my subjectivity, and place my work within a broader discourse. Only slowly did new and more pressing questions rise to the surface; I would argue that it wasn't until my last two consultations and a deep reflection of my practice that a clearer focus developed. I will make an attempt to chart my course, beginning with the pressing issues that presently drive my research.
Once higher education was replaced with a necessity to support myself through the gig economy, my research, experimentation and personal creative progression was sacrificed on the altar of the US film industry. Whatever talent I carried with me was leached in service to commercial endeavors where old ideas were re-packaged for products, tech companies, influencers and utterly “marketable” films. It wouldn’t be an aberrant slip of the tongue to hear a director refer to their film as a product, essentially giving up the game. Years into the process, I internalized the mechanisms of this industry by comparing my competencies to others and doubting my individuality.
During this semester, I completed my most recent film, We Always Aim Higher: an interpretation of the authoritative structures of control that exist under surveillance capitalism. Using gathered surveillance media capturing factories and office spaces in multiple countries, I attempted to highlight universal threads of exploitation throughout the industrialized world.
Themes surrounding work underpin many of my research interests; inhabiting the physical and digital spaces I’ve explored, my researched texts on globalization and political theory, as well as numerous film references I’ve resonated with over the past semester.
In Yael David’s workshop, I was initially skeptical of its relevance to my practice. However, I found a great deal of connective tissue to my ongoing questions regarding the potential of our environments to act as mediums for our own minds and bodies. The shifts in my point of view during this exercise can be expressed in the small text that I wrote immediately following a period of meditative reflection on these body movements.
It wasn’t until the pandemic that I truly began to ask larger questions; a time in which I increasingly inhabited the digital realm. Initially I ignored it's connection to my interest in spaces until it became impossible to disregard. Hours would dissolve into mindless video clips, useless news articles and repetitive social media posts. My life became shaped by ritualistically drinking from a digital firehose, bombarded by visual and sonic pollution to take my mind off the absurdity of my last "bullshit" job. I began to question the forces that benefit from this consumption. According to philosopher Byung-Chul Han in his book Psychopolitics, “personal data are unceasingly monetised and commercialised. Now, people are treated and traded as packages of data for economic use. That is, human beings have become a commodity.”
Ultimately, I believe that the primary obstacles to social progress are cultural and psychological rather than narrowly political or economic. If we want to address these systematic problems, we must address the systematic causes. In an age in which the industrialization of culture and its mechanisms operate at a blistering rate, it’s imperative that these mechanisms are laid bare, and their intentions known. Only then can we affect change by breaking the cycle that keeps a society pliable, exhausted, cynical, distracted.
While attending an artist talk with Hito Steyerl at IDFA, she implored the audience to ask not just what exists within the frame, but what produced the frame. She then went on to explain that in order to dismantle and re-write concepts or narratives, it often necessitates the very tools that established them in the first place. This may well turn out to be a valuable mantra looping in my brain as I question the ethicality of a professionalized art practice as opposed to giving away my computer and becoming a farmer.
As a career, I work in film as a sound designer and editor. Like other modern trades and professions, mine has long since been industrialized. My actions are often repetitive, employing predictable cinematic grammar and conventions, all in service of guiding the viewer, like a parent pulling their child along, towards a determined emotion or reading. Countless days spent in darkened rooms endlessly tweaking sneaker advertisements and mainstream films has illuminated what Adorno said nearly 70 years prior, that “[the artist] has to follow the objective requirements of his product much more than his own urges of expression when he translates his primary conception into artistic reality.” In a sense, I speak from the point of view of both a consumer of industrialized culture as well as a willing perpetuator of it. For that reason, I consider both the tools of cinema, and the structures behind them, to be one of my entry points into this research.
Earlier that morning, I had been reading the work of researcher and filmmaker Paula Albuquerque, recommended to me by Janos. In The Webcam as an Emerging Cinematic Medium, Albuquerque introduces the concept of a cinematic mode of existence, an idea built upon Bruno Latour’s philosophical argument that one’s existence is composed of several “modes”. She also calls upon the work of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, who investigates the origin of this mode in a "profusion of and reliance on mass media." The conclusion drawn is that “the phenomenon of globalization, both unifying and fragmenting, has given rise to a series of global scapes: ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes.” I liken these scapes to parallel worlds that co-exist and interact with our own. For me, this idea echoes in the surrealist cinematic landscapes of my previous film work, in my current research, and in the words of the man with the bicycle; cinema is a reflection of our world, and the world a reflection of cinema.
The work of filmmaker Eliane Ester Bots and the ensuing discussion, helped not only to highlight critical questions of one’s perspective but to rethink the relationship between the subject and the maker. It was fascinating to hear her frame the act of transmitting stories and memory through film as a form of linking, coupling, sinking and deep listening. I left the discussion with a renewed interest in the foundational elements of my work: our spaces and objects, and the experiences we transfer into them. This raised new questions for me on shared perspectives, how to “listen” to our environment, and how to see stories as objects themselves. It's an avenue of questioning that developed further in the following workshop.
Using found footage material, I developed a choreography through sound design and visuals of workplace mechanisms. As a result, the line between the worker and the instrument blurs. The links I drew between Sabine’s varied references and her encouragement to express universality was considered heavily while editing my next film.
