The written reflection I offered following the exercise re-affirmed several core elements of my practice, particularly:

“my methodological need for control, and how it presents itself in the making process from conception to realization: the building of sonic and visual worlds from the ground up, the reliance on staging objects, machinery and spaces as opposed to improvisational actors, the need to develop and craft my own fantastical narratives, removed from or running parallel to any historical and archival material I choose to incorporate.”

Additionally, I considered the philosophical texts as well as my previous working methods to frame my practice within a larger discourse:

I certainly didn’t expect this second semester to begin in my kitchen, stuffing shredded jackfruit into a mason jar. But this is my first masters program after all, so it had the element of surprise. The first exercise was a refreshing introduction to the semester’s shift toward method and methodology, as it reinforced the concept of associative memory, and re-awakened some long-dormant artistic processes.

Given my perceived command of the aforementioned making methods coming into the semester (sound design, world-building, development of set and atmosphere), I felt I lacked a firm understanding of the larger patterns. Something that provided me with a conceptual framework that would, in a sense, allow for a self-generative filmmaking practice. The last paragraph of my written reflection indicates one such framework suddenly occurring to me:

I intend to research through making, ideally through collecting evidence of a space (blueprints, advertisements, photographs, archival audio, descriptive text). These elements will then be incorporated first into a series of sound “sketches” that help to form a sonic signature of a space; this may also help to develop “characters” similar to those developed through the tasting exercise. Meanwhile, I will begin developing the visual world by collecting physical objects that help represent or interpret the subject of my research. I will then open up a dialogue between these sonic and visual worlds though the edit, propelling the story forward. For lack of a better term, I’ll call my methodology Ouija board filmmaking. What I have come to appreciate about this approach is that it runs counter to conventional filmmaking, an incredibly limiting approach which necessitates a fully realized and often closed vision before production even begins.

The following assignment provided me with yet another opportunity to sonically and visually articulate my insights from the Ouija board method. As raw material, I drew from a test case that had been discussed in my previous critical review:

Aiming to resurrect a space representative of American cultural hegemony (the InterContinental hotel) through the media that helped to perpetuate it. 

Given the prompt to develop physical, sonic and visual iterations of an initial “food” tasting, I found that I was primarily driven by sensorial flashes of personal history, namely my father and I fishing off the coast of Massachusetts.

Fleshy mouths pierced on a diesel soaked vessel, slithering metal chains caked with salt. Just us boys, baking in the sun.

The first step was to collect ‘evidence’ of that space so I could effectively channel it.

By merging the InterContinental project with Kate Briggs's workshop on weather writing, I felt as though I was wandering outside of my element. After all, I had never once finished a written script, nor had text-based imagery ever found purchase in my visual lexicon. And while I didn’t emerge from the two weeks with some fiery manuscript, my writings did help reframe my methodological process through the concept of object oriented ontology.

A speculative writing piece of mine paired with Kate’s reaction helped to clarify the position I take in regards to an object's hierarchy over the human character, as well as propelling narrative through causal relationships that often represent larger power relations. Below is an excerpt in which a luxury hotel is besieged and eventually destroyed by nature:

Mold proliferates up the stairwells

as fast as marching fire ants.

Cabinets, corners, archways of gold leaf 

suffocate under a blanket of fuzzy blueish green

Dark water surges through the dining hall.

Chandeliers shiver and shrink.

Goosebumps form on the velvet tapestries.

The walls now weep for the dinners

it will never live to host.

Through pure exhaustion, the grand estate sleeps. 

Delirious dreams bookended by grainy blackness

flood like a river into its weary mind.

There are lucid flashes of glory and splendor 

Martini laughter and patterned silk

It feels warmth once more.

I suppose this is a fitting metaphor given the frame of my research, but the writing of this critical review has felt a bit like moving out of a house. The process is incredibly chaotic, as belongings are fiercely uprooted and thrown like carcasses into corner piles. That is until, miraculously, you manage to pack everything up in the final moments. I might have mistakenly placed some kitchen supplies with the linens, but such is life.

Now someone needs to come in and check the place to make sure I didn't break anything.

The final workshop of the semester felt as though it had been carefully tailored to my needs and desires: a sound workshop run by Carlos Casas, whose work has profoundly broadened my understanding of what the sonic world can offer us in and beyond film. Through a vast assemblage of resources and references, Carlos helped highlight the unusual harmony between the esoteric and the scientific when it comes to making sound work. He revealed not only how sound can help us to practically understand our world, but offer up a more ethereal way of perceiving sound as representation of individual and collective memories. It was in this space that I felt comfortable pushing beyond the boundaries of a typically “produced and packaged” filmmaking to create a live experience, something that has always existed far beyond my comfort zone.

Admittedly, the clarity that the first semester provided me necessitated a long, arduous search. Through a process of self-questioning and deep reflection, I developed a better understanding of the place from which I spoke, and could place myself in a constellation of relevant works within my particular frame of research. I expected my brain to put up a fair bit of mental resistance to this because, after all, I came into the program believing I already knew the how, just not the why. As a maker with a developed style and cinematic toolset expanded by years of film industry experience, I was relatively comfortable in the space I occupied. Coming into a second semester in which existing and potential methods were to be tested, I felt as though I had already mined those depths; I gathered as much as I needed to know about my process. Emerging from the other side, I’ve learned to be considerably more conservative in my usage of the word “know”.

In spite of this, I would like the form and subject matter of my critical review to serve as a concrete guidepost in the ongoing journey of my artistic research, and as a snapshot of a particular time in which my artistic methods have been developed and re-affirmed. While I personally think the idea of mastering one’s methods is like standing at the edge of an endless horizon, I will attempt to outline the major insights and reflections of this past semester.

“I’m not sure how many narrative poems you have written before, but it is remarkable how vivid and compelling this one is. I love the way you have removed all human agents: the hotel is a hosting place for humans, but they are not present here; it is the building that is taking on / responding to / having its own grandeur destroyed by the greater power of the weather.

Reading this, I am intrigued to know whether it sits in a space entirely apart from your film-making (as an exercise, a one-off experiment) or indeed whether your films operate like this too… as spaces where the inanimate becomes animate, where imagined settings become thick and real through surfaces, textures, sudden details (here, “goosebumps on the velvet tapestries”)? Regardless, what is so successful to my mind is how you have adapted the drama and duration of the storm which I semi-recognise from the Elizabeth Bishop poem, and made something epic: it gathers and builds and acts. This is brilliant: ‘Stains become puddles, and puddles make holes.’ And then we are returned to quiet, but meanwhile everything has changed.

It is a lesson in how a ‘plot’ can be generated through interaction: a storm and a hotel. And then how both can be layered with further meanings: power versus power.” 

I realized that this pulling of the audience both in time and space was a critical methodological element within my practice.

I decided to use this triggered memory to construct my own interpretation of that day, instinctually shifting perspective to the voiceless, the non-human. 

I did this first as an auditory landscape, which allowed me to develop the sonic characters through a spatial journey in the water's depths. 

“I don’t know what I think until I’ve written it down.” - Joan Didion

“In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Exploring the World of Perception’, of which we read to help frame the week’s experiments, he discusses both space and the objects contained within those spaces; this, coincidentally, sits at the core of my filmmaking practice [...] I was, and continue to be, drawn to an almost hypnotic exploration of elements, objects, spaces and realms as a way to activate our histories and experiences through an entirely new framing. As Nduka pointed out in the discussion of my final image work, there were clear connections to an excerpt from the text that discusses water. In it, Ponty describes water as “insane, given this obsession, this fixation, the hysterical need to obey gravity alone.” In a sense, I wanted the viewer to obey the journey of the water, inextricably linked to the shifting, churning, surging world emanating from the screen and accompanying sound waves. This desire to use the cinematic tools at my disposal to pull the viewer deep into the worlds I’ve created is fundamental to my artistic process.”

Belit offered an interesting comment in response to my audiovisual piece, suggesting that I seemed to reject “visual primacy” in my work. The sound was almost foregrounded and, in keeping with my previous work, treated thoughtfully and meticulously as a fully realized soundscape. To me, it seems a natural methodological process to eliminate the hierarchical sound / image relationship, both in a finished work as well as through the process of making. I believe the sonic language has just as much of a role as the visual language in seducing the viewer into coming along for the ride. And by segmenting the exercise into a series of experiments in which sound preceded the visual iteration, I was essentially developing a test case for part of my artistic process. 

This insight was later reinforced in filmmaker Janis Rafa’s workshop In Search of Non-Logocentric Narratives. It made clear to me that a sonic language is never meant to subordinate to the image within my work, and the tendency to suppress dialog in favor of non-diegetic soundscapes allows the viewer to free-associate more.

When I discuss the Ouija board, I’m describing a device supposedly used for the living to communicate with the dead. And while essentially a form of spirit writing (a practice that dates back centuries and has remained enshrouded in occultist mystique), it may also offer unique access into our unconscious mind’s memories, desires, histories. Through a psychological phenomenon known as the ideomotor effect, “your brain may unconsciously create images and memories when you ask the board questions. Your body responds to your brain without you consciously ‘telling’ it to do so, causing the muscles in your hands and arms to move the pointer to the answers that you — again, unconsciously — may want to receive.” I believe this appropriately speaks to the dual nature of my artistic practice: a desire to purely and spiritually channel the embedded memories and histories of spaces, whilst bound to the unconscious influence and direction of my own. This uneasy negotiation between the esoteric and the tangible will serve as both a propellant and hurdle as I move forward in my research.

Carlos also presented his body of work through a captivating journey of research, a form that had such scope and detail that it provided an inspiring example of how artistic research can actually manifest itself. He rejects the notion that any one work must “finish” once it’s put out into the world. Instead of looking at my work as some sealed product with a determined life cycle, the entirety of my making can and should remain porous and open to dialogues with the future. Looking forward to the following year, I’m compelled to consider his methodology as a suggestion to remain open to such change, experimentation, and dialogue.

The Cliff - Work In Progress

A conjuring of distorted memories, The Cliff brings you into view of a lost hotel whose siren song rings out in the darkness. Through the roving eye of the lens, promotional images of a tropical island resort become an otherworldly medium, resurrecting a space of commercial luxury and forgotten western fantasies through the media that helped to sell it.

The second iteration was a visual experience, guided by the framework previously laid out by the sound piece.

How I created the effect: Gaffer tape, trash bags, my hands and a bathtub.

Object Performance - Excerpt

Archival evidence of The InterContinental Hotel, Tahiti

Moving Image on Method - Lens Test

My first attempt to “activate” these images was a purely digital endeavor. Diana re-affirmed the power of sound to transport the viewer, or more appropriately the listener, to a completely new world. I knew I was channeling something, though I did not yet know how to carry these static and petrified images from the realm of the archive into the present.

The device I used to create the search effect, taking inspiration from the planchette used in Ouija board sessions.

Given the re-affirmations that experimentation and play were central to my developing research, the prospect of participating in a ‘thinking through making’ workshop with Albert Elings and Eugenie Jansen seemed the next logical step in the curriculum. Through a vast series of making methods offered by the guests and fellow researchers, it was made abundantly clear to me that the physicality of the material I work with is needed in order to truly begin exploring and revealing layers of history and memory. Just as a seance falls flat over zoom, the objects must be palpably guided. It was also through these tactile interventions that I began to consider my presence in the work. 

Moving Image on Method - Excerpt