Manifestos |
So ovulate your tender eggs -- every object, code and law -- into the mucous of interconnection. Soak tendrils of thought and gesture in an ethical jelly of feedback. Infuse phantoms and facts with equal measures of visceral significance. Creep along the rivulets and curls of writhing truth. Breed turbulent creatures in mongrel jungles of plasma, machines and minds. Embrace these creatures, these worlds, these hives. Keep that which is lively, and that which sustains life, in succulent focus. May the stagnant metaphors of art and science evaporate in our green and feral heat. At this end of blind evolution, of unfounded forms, we are drunk with life, with that which seems alive, with lunges and startled presences. We fuse with the objects of our love, becoming everything we encounter, becoming love itself. We transmute mind and matter into a zoology of spirit. Dare to suckle this wild vapor, this infant gleaming, this wilderness. Convulse and clutch in waves of milky wonder. Siphon every atom, and theory of atom, into the folds of our collective screen, our flesh. Melt into the monstrous, grooving spasm of the infinite wiggling. Nurture the wiggling, for that which wiggles
is amazing. Ephemeral Cinema 'a fixed image is the basic mortality error' Consciousness demanded cinema. This technology is an extension of the mind's awareness. But not of the preservation drive. That was archaic impulse. A tired concept shuttering itself from the inevitable. The mind that created moving visual thinking was cognizant of its mortality. It wanted to create a dialogue with existence, recognizing death and transformation. Consider this the mystic cinema: motion. change. illusion. belief. These are the true subjects of film. Appearance. disappearance. transience. The haunting of the image & its fragile trace. A radically counter, parallel path of cinema: not memory, record or preservation, nor story, history, or narrative, but the living object, aging skin, and decaying body of the material. The unique form that admits its changes. Its scars & discolorations, its degeneration and eventually, its death. But this ephemerality is alive and trembling. It is the phenomenal present. A medium more analogous to human consciousness than we often realize. More responsive to change and reflexive thinking processes. Fugitive and unpredictable. Closer to the uncertainty principle that acknowledges our transitory existence - but with joy - not mournful Egyptology with its investment in a resurrection machine promising eternal false hope. Ephemeral cinema is the flicker of the breathing moment. An expanded cinema that experiences light as a tangible medium, palpable & rejuvenating. It began with flickering light. All these experiences in the pre-history of technology: Pure phenomena of smoke & fire. Shadows through the fog. The flash of heat lightning and its aftereffects. Or sunlight beaming through moving foliage. The original dreamachine. Reflections from rippling water. Or mirrored in unstable liquid surfaces. ‘What I love is the beauty of contradictions.’ This begat a consciousness of nature's trickery & perception
of its slippery ways. The goddess of accident flirting & teasing
with the puck of curiosity. And serious meditation on all the illusive
lightplay of the universe: star patterns & meteor showers.
Constellations & galaxies. Eclipses & moon phases. Rainbows & solar
shifts. Perception and imagination often work in tandem. Not to
mention, mirages, hallucinations & hypnagogic visions. And
always the sky. The aurora borealis. The metaphysics of ephemera. ‘…that splinter of intelligence
is substance. Perhaps, this ephemeral cinema is best experienced as a performative act, where machine and human unveil the operations of optics and mechanics, where the apparatus, material and manipulations are revealed, standing naked in the chamber of projection, a camera obscura turned inside out, demonstrating the workings and its effects as a magic lantern show with all of the wires and gears exposed. The sleight of hand & trick of the eye examined and scrutinized for the beauty of its possibility, its knowledge explicated, and its reflective vitality celebrated. Its inner workings, proof of the science of sublime insight. Teach the petrified forms to dance by singing them their own song, says Marx. This is us - and our cinematic prosthesis, reinventing perceptions: lens, shutter, iris / pupil, retina, cornea / flicker & blink. Our sacred technology revealing to us the marvels of our making. ‘The history of all the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’ Another consciousness desires the stopping of time. The freezing
of memory. For it, the appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death.
But, nonetheless, every photograph shows us death at work. That
which changes reflected in the mirror of our own face. But for
most, it doesn't halt the irrepressible urge for a vampire cinema
that subscribes to the idea of an infinitely renewable corpse:
a cryonic print from the sepulchral, vaulted negative, as eternal
as the reborn in heaven. A delusion of the mummy. |
