tv

Is it possible to make play exist coherently on a tv?  Because at this moment it is looking like the camera is a work zone, though I know that good ol' JJ, our resident surveillance artist would disagree.  I call her resident because our community is ephemeral at all times, and I feel in many ways that everybody's who's passed through here is still part of the larger disembodied community of Elsewhere, hundreds of artists turned ghosts rummaging through the toy bin at all hours of the night.  But with JJ specifically, I'm on some level convinced that she's still looking at us constantly; surely among all this stuff it wouldn't have been too difficult to plant a small camera somewhere that to this day remains unnoticed, transmitting to her current location in Missouri. 

I owe her a letter.

Look:


There I am, photographing her video setup a day or two after I met her.  I was told to take a photograph of her for a promotional postcard two days after she arrived; these images are all from that photoshoot.  There I am.  She did a good job of disrupting the usual photoshoot dynamics in a way that still proves instructive.

Single lens reflex cameras, like the Canon that put me deeper in to debt than my truck, allow the seeing of the other through a series of mirrors and prisms at an angle that doesn't demand any degree of self-reflexivity, unlike most mirror-based devices.  It is a machine designed to see the other and put them on display; as my friend Eliza, a former Elsewhere intern wrote me last night (seeing as she is psychic),

"the similarity between photography and taxidermy

is suspended in a terrifying ambiguity of kinetic possibility
is a sphinx in a laboratory coat
reeks of authority
programs the celebration of death (of deadness?)
...consider mount rushmore
...consider the stern museum face of cultural hegemony
...consider the procession of endlessly renewing resignifications by which the objects are inescapably haunted."

My project at the moment is to figure out how to translate a play in to a work.  City is several years of activity in a space by many members of this community- it's made of the buildup of signification of architecture, a button currency system, internal politics and underhanded dealings and revolutions, trials, mafia, legitimate enterprise, beauraucracy,  businesses, beach, press, emergency services, mass transit and more.  It's a process of play, of dynamic signification of the endless signs present in this space, and can only happen in this space.  Perhaps more to the point, it's a dynamic resignification that happens too fast for a camera to follow; a big part of it is a fluidity of role of both person and object that is inhibited by the taxonomic eye of the camera.

It is shimmering, polymorphous perverse, a huge pain in the ass, the most beautiful part.

So we have to make a film about this thing that makes it make sense to an audience that has never seen the thing and is unable to participate.  We've tried taking pictures of this zone of play but the act of taking pictures transformed the thing in to work, because to look without the other's looking being memorialized on an equal level makes the camera's frame in to an instant, portable proscenium stage, with audience and performer in fixed roles.  One of the major political points of this whole project has been to break down lines between self and other, interior and exterior, scientist and experiment.  So are we really going to be taking out the voice of myself as the cameraman, imposing a third person narrator who knows everything about what is going on, a voice of God issuing forth from the projection machine?

Science has known this for years. I remember vaguely from my physics class in high school that there are particles at the atomic or subatomic level for which you could not know both the velocity and the location, because the surveillance method for determining velocity changed the particles location, and the surveillance method for determining location changed velocity.

Ethnography should have known this for years, but since social science is a less quantitatively certain discipline with a necessarily larger amount of hand-waving, it's been a slower process of noting the social realities dictated by technologies of reproduction.  My longest paper in college was twenty seven pages on Robert Gardner's documentary Dead Birds.  I quote from this paper:

His style is described as poetic, mythological, sublime, heresy, manipulative, immoral, and as art disguised as anthropology.  Though frequently criticized for a strange disregard for the representational concerns of his subjects, Gardner’s voice is a unique one in Ethnographic [sic] film, one that is concerned above all with finding common metaphysical ground between subject and viewer.

...

When Gardner revisited the Baliem River Valley in 1989 to produce a sequel to Dead Birds, he was sad about their adaptations to the tourist industry that was, in fact, largely driven by reaction to Gardner's film, tourists eager to see the primitives in person.  Gardner chastises his former subjects in an unpublished version of his article The More Things Change: "Part of me felt they had shown themselves to be all too willing collaborators in the business of change.  How could they tolerate so much compromise with what had been such a compelling life?"

...

Gardner projected Dead Birds for his subjects in 1989 after the film had been in circulation for years, realizing only too late that the language barrier would prevent them from understanding the film.  Furthermore, Gardner understands little said by the Dani except for their requests for Western goods, like a radio and pants.

...

Later, the death of Wejakey is avenged by the killing of an intruding enemy, and the enemy’s corpse is shown immediately after a shot of a bird.   During the final scene of celebration of the killing of an enemy pig thief, we see a lone bird flying in the sky. Immediately after showing the corpse, we see Pua is eating a dead bird by firelight and putting bird feathers in his hair, while sounds of celebration are heard distantly in the background.

...

This idea of manifesting invisible psycho-cultural and ritual forces on celluloid is an important one for a film about spiritual warfare, and it is worth looking at Gardner’s ways of providing visual evidence for ghosts, the invisible, unfilmable, archetypal entities who exert a  force on the lives of the Dani.   Says Gardner’s narration, “The ghosts, which more than anything else rule the lives of these people, work mostly in the dark.”  This work consists mostly of spoiling food and accosting passerby, throttling them to death.

...

Watchtowers are protected with magic charms, such as a toy bow, to prevent vengeful spirits from interfering with the work of the watchmen.  Um’ue does magic to keep the ghosts away by making a bundle of fragrant grasses and raspberry attached to branches, which boys carry through the village’s paths to sweep the ghosts away.   Villagers build a fenced enclosure during the preparations for the feast as built as a temporary resting place for wandering ghosts, and a path is drawn in the dirt to the fence’s doorway so the ghosts can find the entrance.  When preparing Wejakey for cremation, he  is bathed with pig fat, that the ghost of Wejakey “might not feel neglected.”  Much of the evocation of ghosts is verbal- Gardner informs us that the men leave battle while it’s till light out to avoid ghosts, he explains that the Dani avoid going out at night to avoid unneeded encounters with the ghosts, and so on.  However, film is primarily a visual medium, and since we cannot see the thing itself, we are presented with its effect on the physical existence of the Dani.

I read this stunned at how applicable this stuff is to what I'm thinking of these days.

My question is this; is is possible to look at the other effectively without looking at the self?  It has been a disengaged few weeks for me, and it is time to reinsert myself fully in to this process.