PRACTICE

Between November 10 and 23, Friederike Plafki & Maria Scaroni have spent two weeks to work on their PARALLAX proposal. Here’s what they are coming up with to sum up their residence:

Intro
Looking for words – theory – blah blah to mobilize thoughts – thoughts to find images. In another time, hundreds of years ago, I would have simply said to inspire the creation of the work of art. But nowadays these words are funny dismissed objects.
“So, who or what is tickling the ticklish subject?” The answer, of course, is : the object – however, which object ?  The difference between subject and object can also be expressed as the difference between the two corresponding verbs, to subject (submit) oneself and to object (protest, oppose, create an obstacle). The subject elementary, founding, gesture is to subject itself – voluntarily of course […].
If, then, the subject’s activity is, at its most fundamental, the activity of submitting oneself to the inevitable, the fundamental mode of the object’s passivity , of its passive presence, is that which moves, annoys, disturbs, traumatizes us (subjects): as its most radical the object is that which objects, that which disturbs the smooth running of things.
Thus the paradox is that the roles are reversed, (in terms of the standard notion of the active subject working on the passive object): the subject is defined by a fundamental passivity, and it is the object from which movement comes  - which does the tickling. But again, what object is this? The parallax object.

STANDARD DEFINITION OF PARALLAX: the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight.
[…] It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are “inherently” “mediated”, so that an “epistemological” shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an “ontological” shift in the object itself.
from Slavoj Zizek  - The Parallax View

We found this book “The parallax View” and bought it on Amazon, in English and German, because it had the word Parallax in the title and in the online blurb it mentioned the subject/object question and we assumed it could somehow had to do we the perception of reality.
It partly does and also has nothing to do with it. Finding out about Slavoj Zizek hallucinatory stile and speech pattern, the perverse guide to cinema, his questionable reputation as a thinker, the schizophrenic public character he is, his carnival of thoughts. The fascinating aspect of this reading is how he proceed. His practice. The use and abuse of things he likes and admires, thrown in to use this objects to say what he has to say. From Francis Scott Fitzgerald, to Marx to Hitchcock and Lynch and Rilke and Brecht, and a lot of Lacan and his friends.
Cultural or personal objects, to create this object that is a book that is called The Parallax View.

Refrains
Things we like. Recurrent things we, individually, adore, are obsessed with, subjected to. They came into our life, fell into our hands and pulse like a neon light. We recognize them coming back over and over again. Repeating their presence.
Sometimes I think they come from a previous or future life. Fragments. But returning fragments.
Objects I put my eyes on and they hold my heart and breath tight. They have different nature. And connect with each other.

WORDS

Mediation
Media television message Mc Luhan the medium is the message
The body is the medium
The body is the message
HOWISTHEBODYHOWISTHEBODYHOWISTHEBODYHOSISTHEBODYHOWISTHEBODYHOWISTHEBODYHOWISTHEBODYHOWISTHEBODYHOWISTHEBODYHOWISTHE
{How are you? Tired most of the time. How is it dancing? Secret and unnoticed. Feels like a conspiracy. Why? Just curious. Thank you. Keep doing that. Thank you keep doing that.}
Media are kept alive by electricity. Electricity, electric guitar, vibration. Heart beat. Heart transplant. See Tim Etchells’ THE DREAMS in “Certain Fragments”. What moved me? The body finds its strategy to save itself. And if it’s not the body saving itself the it’s its dreams.

Transmission
Trans-mis-sion n.[L.transmission-, transmissio, fr.transmissus, pp.of transmittere to transmit fr. trans-across, over + mittere to send] [1765, used to speak of electronic signals. 1869, telegraphic signals.] Transference of a physical phenomenon or of its effects when this transference implies one or several intermediate factors capable of affecting the phenomenon.
Put me into a trance. I ask my collaborator. I ask my body. I ask my body to treat me as an object.

See Joy Division.

Radio, live transmission.
Listen to the silence, let it ring on.
Eyes, dark grey lenses frightened of the sun.
We would have a fine time living in the night,
Left to blind destruction,
Waiting for our sight.

And we would go on as though nothing was wrong.
And hide from these days we remained all alone.
Staying in the same place, just staying out the time.
Touching from a distance,
Further all the time.

Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio.

Well I could call out when the going gets tough.
The things that we’ve learnt are no longer enough.
No language, just sound, that’s all we need know, to synchronize
love to the beat of the show.

Expression
To press out.
A lot of arms.
A lot of eyes.
A lot of torso.
A lot of lungs.
And dreams and memories. The birds, the deaths, the teeth, the himmliche voice. The abuse, the organic, the hanging. The mystery man watching.
“Love, despite its toxicity and violence, can bring us closer to the possibility of expressing human tenderness.  If one is ambitious enough to want to create a shared history, then one must be willing to risk an impossible dance, one that pivots on a desire to outmuscle exhaustion, a desire alive to our wavering capacities to bestow and receive responses, and an apparently insatiable desire to question these capacities and what motivates and blocks them, repeatedly.”
In an article by Peggy Phelan

Do we stay in the gap, in the mediation, in the fragile space of attempting a signification? Can we pretend to make meaning?
Theater has always been about that. Life still is, somehow.
How does the drama look and sound? How does the container look, while it is feeling meaningful?

The meaningful objects
Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,
By Friedrich Ruckert, set to music by Gustav Mahler.
Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,
Mit der ich sonst viele Zeit verdorben,
Sie hat so lange nichts von mir vernommen,
Sie mag wohl glauben, ich sei gestorben!

Es ist mir auch gar nichts daran gelegen,
Ob sie mich für gestorben hält,
Ich kann auch gar nichts sagen dagegen,
Denn wirklich bin ich gestorben der Welt.

Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel,
Und ruh’ in einem stillen Gebiet!
Ich leb’ allein in meinem Himmel,
In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied!

English translation
I am lost to the world with which I used to waste so much time, It has heard nothing from me for so long that it may very well believe that I am dead! It is of no consequence to me Whether it thinks me dead; I cannot deny it, for I really am dead to the world. I am dead to the world’s tumult, And I rest in a quiet realm! I live alone in my heaven, In my love and in my song!

Watching Blue Velvet by David Lynch (1986). The dance of the eyes. The over the top emotional state. The script.
PRETTY PRETTY
YOU ARE FUCKING LUCKY TO BE ALIVE
LOOK AT ME
DON’T BE A GOOD NEIGHBOUR TO HER
I WILL SEND A LOVE LETTER
STRAIGHT FROM MY HEART FUCKER
YOU KNOW WHAT A LOVE LETTER IS?
IT’S A BULLET FROM A FUCKING GUN, FUCKER
YOU RECEIVE A LOVE LETTER FROM ME
YOU ARE FUCKED FOREVER
YOU UNDERSTAND FUCK?
I’LL SEND YOU STRAIGHT TO HELL FUCKER
IN DREAMS I WALK WITH YOU
IN DREAMS I TALK TO YOU
IN DREAMS YOU ARE MINE
ALL THE TIME
SOUND
It all becomes a soundscape, an installation,
a limbic place for trance and parallaxing,
playing with the frame, playing with background.
Falling into images. An image is by definition the mediation between the physical and the metaphysical. It is the gap.
Throwing stuff in, moving the waves, Breaking the Waves.

Ulf Langheinrich GRANULAR SYNTHESIS
Hentschlaeger and Langheinrich apply and extend the primary technique of granular synthesis to transform the gestures and voices of human bodies, particularly human heads isolated by video from their bodies, into recombinant, alien screen-based creatures that move and express themselves through suprahuman performance.  By breaking down video recordings of human models into split-second frames of video and sync-sound audio, and then reconstructing these models from these fragments, making them whole again (but giving them a new range of behavior that dislocates them from their pre-granular nature) we witness humans evolving into machines.
Granular Synthesis’s performances isolate and dislocate appearance and behavior from the cause and effect logic of cinema, television, video, music and our perceptual experience of ‘full motion’ life itself.   Time-based technological media, film-video-music, are generally programmed to run parallel to and analogously alongside ‘full motion’ physical reality. While there is an extensive history of time alteration in film-video-music, the time-based arts–we’ve learned to read flashbacks, flashforwards, the instant replay and more and more variations of time/event compression and density Granular Synthesis’s machine goes further and is designed to totally shatter the ‘full motion’ status quo.

Coda

Practice is a place for being practical
For failure
For reminding ourselves that there is nothing to loose
That there are things we like
that other people are also failing and like their things.
The container is fascinating.
The content is vital.