Fragments
It has been quite a while since I became interested in using text notations, and it has been a strange relationship governed by my interest in their algorithmic capabilities and reservations towards narrativity. It is almost impossible to go to a cinema, even an art house cinema, and see something that is not dictated by narration. I feel that narrativity is severely limiting the breadth of all arts, from film and video to literature to music and installation art. There are even infamous treatises on installation art that are built on the paradigm of stage dramaturgy.
The typography was chosen to match the one used in the Spokes element, inverting the colours however, with black text on red background that becomes a source of light in the inner space.
{group: licht}
The textual layer can be a very powerful and interesting medium in its own right, if it manages to deliberately break narrativity. We recently watched the famous 1969 film "The Color of Pomegranates" by Armenian regisseur Sergei Parajanov, and I wondered why we don't see this kind of cinema any longer. It has precisely a narration that is reduced to a rhythmic support structure. Today everything seems infected by a request for a "story". You make an application, you need to provide a story, ideally a "success story". The fashion wave of socially engaged art, making things "participatory", likewise contributes to a contraint on works that need to be able to "explicate" themselves, and if the explication is not directly in the work, let's add a big text panel next to it. Entire research projects on narration are being funded. I thought we were done with the fear of ambiguity in modernity, as Zygmunt Bauman has called it, and through with the remixing of stories in the post-modernity. But instead we seem to have gone back to a new reductionism, entire empires are ruled by 140 character narration now.
Text becomes interesting when we break it, when we put it to oscillate between semantic residues and space-time rhythms. This video miniature is about fragments from my notebook that I gathered during the research phase of the project, that is across ten our so months. They work as insertions between the other video miniatures, insertions which infect the preceding or succeeding video with a conceptual or a rhythmical shard. The text fragments were picked by flipping through the pages of my notebooks, giving the selection some potential of chance, but each reflecting somehow on the thematics of algorithms, human-machine relationship, and dreams. My written and digital notebooks contain dream diaries that I collect whenever I am in the situation that I find time to take notes after I wake up. In the final selection of sixty-four fragments it is not always apparent any longer, which of the fragments originate from dreams and which from "regular" notations.