CHAOSMOSIS
Ours is a world in constant flux. Life unfolds in a fog of conscious and unconscious perceptions, a chaos animated by infinite speeds. There is no distance, no proximity, no sense of foreground or background. We move through physical and virtual spaces with limbs still nimble – touch, taste and smell intact – but our eyes do not see, they reflect. The world comes to a halt as a pure staccato, a vision without space, without perspective, without context. Gilles Deleuze: “From chaos, Milieus and Rhythms are born. This is the concern of very ancient cosmogonies. Chaos is not without its own directional components, which are its own ecstasies”.
Chimera – Philip Hoffman
Canada, 1996, 16mm, 15:00 min
“Chimera is Hoffman’s most understated film that explores his two most common themes: death and chaos. And it is perhaps his most immediate film dealing with frozen moments, life transitions and fragments of memory. The shots are in constant movement and it makes the image blurred a good portion of the time; periodically, a readable moment will appear, just briefly, and then the movement continues. It’s a statement in chaos at its most heightened state. The world is blurry with only snatches of clarity—it’s moving fast with only glimpses of calm. You never know exactly where you are or what is going on, except for fleeting moments.” (Janis Cole)
Tramage – Jean-François Guiton
France, 1999, video, 12:00 min
“Rhythm is the theme as well as the form of this video. Its elements are constructed and played out through a time measure resembling the busy tempo of city life. To begin, stripes of light are drawn through the two sides of the black empty screen; their unpredictable crossings and untimely collisions lead to the appearance of an opening and closing tramway car door in the picture. Simultaneously, the rhythm unfolds in an unsynchronized sound bar. Squeaking, sucking, the noise of a passing train: all these different noises put together a soundtrack that sometimes falters, sometimes accelerates, diminishes and increases in volume, or simply falls into silence. Tramage’s interruptive and disruptive repetition of the city dweller’s impressions revives the moment of experience in our perception.” (Antonia Birnbaum)
Besenbahn – Dietmar Offenhuber
Austria, 2001, video, 10:00 min
Images of the city of Los Angeles, which has been shaped by the history of motorization and where moving perception has come to be regarded as integral to natural perception. The repetition and temporal reordering of sequences creates a stream of images that can only be read through the speed of the travel- ling camera. According to Offenhuber, in its fragmentation of the continuum of perception “the subjective geometry which defines space through intervals of time” can remain submerged because it is already so familiar. A work that explores the forms of perception transmitted by technological media.
Acceleration – Scott Stark
USA, 1993, video, 10:00 min
A snapshot taken in a moment of human evolution, where the souls of the living are reflected in the windows of passing trains. The camera captures the reflections of passengers in the train windows as the trains enter and leave the station, and the movement creates a stroboscopic flickering effect that magically exploits the pure sensuality of the moving image. Acceleration reads like a double motion study, examining the movement of its outward subjects (passengers and trains) as well as the camera’s own ability to produce illusions of motion different than those usually generated by the apparatus.
Still in Cosmos – Makino Takashi
Japan, 2009, 35mm > Hd video, 19:00 min
“I do not think that the word ‘chaos’ means ‘confusion’ or ‘disarray’, rather I believe it refers to a state in which the name or location of ‘objects’ remains unknown. For instance, if a bird escapes from its cage, the world it discovers outside will appear to be chaos, but if it joins with a flock of other birds, it will gradually learn to apply ‘names’ to various places – a safe place, a dangerous place, etcetera, thereby creating cosmos (order). When watching a film, the viewers all sit in the same darkness and receive the same light and sound but each sees a different dream. I believe this symbolizes a reversion to their initial state, that when they look at total chaos through newborn eyes, they give birth to a new cosmos. I sincerely hope that the violent chaos that exists in Still in Cosmos will give rise to the same number of new cosmoses as there are viewers.” (MT). Music by Jim O’Rourke.
Sync Up Element – Stom Sogo
Japan/USA, 2007, video, 23:00 min
“Since I was a teenager, I have an epileptic fit. I passed out twice in this year. It is like a memory flashback; wrapped by the various warm childhood images. In this movie, a bisexual boy and a girl are dancing, a kind of love. However; you may not see them though; a strobe light creates you to see the clear images inside of you. (…) All of my film and video pieces are in many ways the abstraction of feeling of people whom have been driven into a corner or stuck in their own maze. Sync Up Element is the cure vision in our data oriented digital lives. I mean I am not making a medicine but film viewing experience itself will open up many discoveries to our natural details in our memories” (SS). The soundtrack is based on a composition by William Basinski.