Month: January 2010

YES, it’s that time of the year again. The 2010 edition of the Courtisane festival will take place from March 17th till 21st, on several locations in Gent.

As always, Courtisane 2010 will present a broad selection of recent Belgian and international film and video works, bringing together an exciting mix of up and coming young talent and established names. On top of that, two thematic evenings will be filled with performances, installations and screenings. Thursday 18th March will be devoted to ‘Night Vision’, exploring the dynamics between visibility and invisibility, light and darkness, seeing the night and seeing in the night, with among others Paul Clipson & William Fowler Collins, Phantom Limb & Earth’s Hypnagogia, Disinformation and Pieter Geenen. ‘Surface Tension’, on Friday 19th March, has Dominique Petitgand, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler & David Cunningham and Paul Abbott with Seymour Wright & Ross Lambert investigating the folds and fissures between perception and conscience, experience and meaning. This year we have three “Artists in Focus”: David O’Reilly, rising star in the animation community, Morgan Fisher, whose work sits between avant-garde cinema, film industry and contemporary art, and David Gatten, who explores the intersection of the printed word and the moving image. ‘Digest Sound’, the exhibition, focuses on the sometimes successful, sometimes failing marriage between communication and technology, featuring work by Matt O’dell, Barry Hale & Joe Banks. The limits of communication will also be subject of the programme ‘Vital Signs’, with films and videos by Katarina Zdjelar, Gary Hill, David Gatten and many others. Our friends from KRAAK will also present a series of concerts during the festival. Get a foretaste with Carlos Giffoni and Oneohtrix Point Never on March 14th !

What follows is a kind of informal and incomplete preview of what’s coming. If you want to be kept up to date, please go to www.courtisane.be, or just keep checking this blog.

EVENTS

Night Vision (Thursday March 18th)

Paul Clipson & William Fowler Collins
Paul Clipson’s Super 8mm films are shot and largely edited “in-camera”, in an improvised manner that brings to light subconscious preoccupations in the hope of allowing for un-thought, unexpected visual elements to reveal themselves. He often works in collaboration with experimental music and sound artists, exhibiting his work in live performance, screenings and installation. On the occasion of the Courtisane festival he will present a new piece, consisting of night footage, with a live soundrack by William Fowler Collins, whose work has been described as a cinematic fusion of dark ambient, noise and black metal. Collins records for the Type record label and has additional releases on Root Strata and Digitalis. His 2009 release, ‘Perdition Hill Radio’ received international critical acclaim and was listed by Boomkat as one of the top 100 albums of 2009.

Pieter Geenen
“In resistance to a demystification of things and as an anti-image of traditional media Pieter Geenen explores the subtle, hidden and ‘slow’ characteristics of things. The audience needs to complete the blurred ‘gestalt’, decode the spatial ambiguities, assume presences and see trough all omissions and shortenings. Between the hasty atmospherical, though everlasting, almost frozen cinematic moment rules a strong individual sense of space and time. Geenen explores the vague boundaries of the visible and the audible (and how they relate to each other), and moves on the thin line between the moving and the static image. Listening and watching becomes intense, intimate, alienating, contemplating and almost tangible in the context of an undisturbed stillness.”

Phantom Limb & Earth’s Hypnagogia
Phantom Limb & Earth’s Hypnagogia is the project of Jaime Fennelly (of Peeesseye, Evolving Ear Records) and Shawn Hansen (who also has releases on Evolving Ear). The two join their forces here for an epic ride through the volatile moments of twilight. A synaesthetic kind of excursion, inspired by the deepening shades of light and dramatically rendered through the warm, swelling tones of Farfisa organ and analog synthesizer. ‘In celebration of knowing all the blues of the evening’ in all its moody and cinematic drive could be the quintessential ‘soundtrack for an imaginary film’… Together with visual artist Nate Miner they have been working for years at a movie project of the same title.

Disinformation
Disinformation (aka Joe Banks) is a research, installation and sound art project, active since 1995, which pioneered the use of electromagnetic (radio) noise from live mains electricity, lightning, laboratory equipment, trains, industrial and IT hardware, magnetic storms and the sun etc, as the raw material of musical and fine-art publications, exhibits and events. Sci-Fi author Jeff Noon wrote in The Independent that “people are fascinated by this work”, and The Guardian commented “Disinformation combine scientific nous with poetic lyricism to create some of the most beautiful installations around”. At show is ‘The Origin of Painting’ – ” electromagnetic sound and shadow wall, autodestructive portraiture and experimental painting installation”.

+ film- and videoworks by Deborah Stratman, Jeanne Liotta, and others

Surface Tension (Friday March 19th)

Paul Abbott, Seymour Wright & Ross Lambert
One of our recent discoveries is the work of musician and video artist Paul Abbott. His videos are fascinating conundrums of language, image and sound, disquieting disjunctive structures whose covert syntax refuses to be unpicked. Abbott is also one of the participants in Eddie Prévost’s weekly improvisation workshop in London, now in place for almost a decade and with a remarkable 250-plus musicians on its past and present roll. Upon our instigation, Abbott will set up a dialogue between visual and auditive elements, in interaction with saxophonist Seymour Wright and guitarist Ross Lambert – two key players in the London improvising scene. Seymour has described his playing as “enquiry into saxophonic actuality, through the potential inherent in, for instance, imagination, re-proportion, inversion, transformation, juxtaposition, construction, deconstruction, reconstruction, permutation, truncation and extension”. Lambert has been described (by Brian Morton) as “that rare individual these days, a jazz musician who doesn’t necessarily have any formal founding in the tradition. He admits to listening only to important records and then rarely, and considers a focus on the politics and practice of experimental music more important than documenting his work. If all this, and the fact that he plays guitar, which has often been a fifth column instrument in jazz, smuggling in energies from other forms, suggests a man who has declared his own Year Zero and separated himself from any existing performance practice, the impression is faulty and incomplete. Whatever its source, Lambert’s music belongs in a long community of practice on this hearing”.

Karen Mirza, Brad Butler & David Cunningham
Karen Mirza and Brad Butler make film and video installations that question the filmic, sculptural and architectonic qualities of the moving image. Mirza / Butler install their films in architectural configurations, frequently presenting them across two or three screens, the questions of past and presence, framing and projection are interrogated and expanded notions of these are proposed. Their work aims to blur the distinction between film and sculpture, art and cinema. For their piece ‘The Space Between’ they collaborated with musician and installation artist David Cunningham, who has worked with an eclectic range of people, such as David Toop, Michael Nyman, Martin Creed, Cerith Wyn Evans, and Sam Taylor-Wood. Cunningham’s soundtrack mirrors the open structure of the film with looped, repeated and pulsed sound.

Dominique Petitgand
Dominique Petitgand’s works are arrangements of sound elements that connect with and strain against each other. They place listening at the centre of the creation process of meaning. “For me, the search for form takes place at the level of perception, at the level of what is going on inside the head of the listener”, Petitgand remarks. “I don’t have the impression of creating an object; rather, I set in motion mental perceptions, acts of reflection, of thinking, memory and imagination. My work is closer to the phenomenon than the object”. Silences seen as spaces of montage, the combination of various temporalities and numerous narratives in a single work and the spatialisation of time also emphasise the listening experience. “I like the idea that you can play with listening the way you can play with looking”.

Lis Rhodes
While firmly rooted in the history of experimental film, Lis Rhodes’ films cross into performance, photography, writing, and political analysis. Her expanded cinema piece ‘Light Music’ (1975-77) is one of the results of her investigation into the relationship between shapes and rhythms of lines and their tonality when printed as sound. “The film is not complete as a totality; it could well be different and still achieve its purpose of exploring the possibilities of optical sound. It is as much about sound as it is about image; their relationship is necessarily dependent as the optical soundtrack ‘makes’ the music, It is the machinery itself which imposes this relationship. The image throughout is composed of straight lines. It need not have been.”

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ARTISTS IN FOCUS

Morgan Fisher (Saturday March 20th)
Fisher’s films are an exploration of the film apparatus and its physical material, as well as of moviemaking production methods : from film’s standard gauge (35mm) to the use of production stills, the narrative role of inserts and the invisible importance of the projectionist. Fisher plays with the concepts of film, cinema and filmmaking, creating a unique and intimate view of cinema and its physical representation. ” One thing my films tend to do is examine a property or quality of a film in a radical way,” he says. “Being radical is a modest form of being extreme. They each examine an axiom of cinema and say, ‘What if ?'”

David Gatten (Sunday March 21st)
Over the last ten years Gatten’s films have explored the intersection of the printed word and the moving image, while investigating the shifting vocabularies of experience and representation within intimate spaces and historical documents. Through traditional research methods (reading old books) and non-traditional film processes (boiling old books), the films trace the contours of both private lives and public histories, combining elements of philosophy, biography and poetry with experiments in cinematic forms and narrative structures.

David O’Reilly (Wednesday March 17th)
Tags: “animation, computers, internet, 3d, cats, chronic depression, stories, independent film-making, more cats, trauma, low-art, Berlin, talking animals, theory, dreams, drama, compression, nonsense, rendering, artificiality, aesthetics, suicide, symbolic representation, narrative, experimental, cats, paper, computer, software, bsod, error, mspaint, lofi, sss, author, auteur, pop culture, fine art, narcissism, pretentiousness, dramaturgy, love, hallucination, jpeg, mov, mpeg, Ireland, Kilkenny, 1985, serial gen, crack, torrents, cinema, anarchy, color-space, z-space, real time, anti-aliasing, aliasing, xxx, walt disney, simulation, distractions, internet etc.”

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SCREENINGS

Vital Signs
Apart from the selection of recent works (see this blog for regular updates), we will present the video and film programme ‘Vital Signs’, which will focus on the the formation of the meaningful, exploring the edges of meaning and the boundaries of communication. With works by Katarina Zdjelar, Imogen Stidworthy, Anri Sala, Gary Hill, John Smith, David Gatten, Guy Sherwin, Pavel Medvedev, Kathrin Resetarits, Peter Sulyi and many others.

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EXHIBITION

‘Digest Sound’ investigates the sometimes successful, sometimes failing marriage between communication and technology, featuring work by Omer Fast, Matt O’Dell, Jean-Luc Moulène, Erik Bunger, Joe Banks & Barry Hale…

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CONCERTS

Organised by Kraak. Some confirmed names:

Oneohtrix Point Never
The Wire wrote this about his record ‘Rift’: “A concept suite about astronauts lost in outer and inner space, Daniel Lopatin’s solo synth explorations were both full-on retro fetishism and a highly inventive reworking of futures past. With virtually no beats, just chorused, arpeggiated oscillators drifting freely through space, ‘Rifts’ chimed in with Noise’s current reflective phase, the new-New Age of The Skaters and Dolphins Into The Future, and the hazy 80s memories channelled by Hypnagogic pop. Lopatin has accomplished something many musicians making so-called experimental music fail to do: open our ears to new sonic possibilities and, more importantly, force us to reconsider and rewire some of our most basic assumptions.”

Carlos Giffoni
The Wire again: “In interviews, Brooklyn noise head Carlos Giffoni often talks about striving to avoid repetition. So far he’s kept his word: while his work has a clear consistency – no one could mistake it for anything but noise – each of his albums is distinct. 2005’s ‘Welcome Home’ contains super-detailed electronic pieces, while 2007’s ‘Arrogance’, made on analogue equipment, eschews miniaturism for widescreen sound. ‘Eternal Noise’ (2008) is another left turn, offering simple pieces that change gradually and sometimes inaudibly. As the title implies, Giffoni here views noise as a constant stream he can tap into without obstructing its elemental flow. He hasn’t crafted these tracks so much as channelled them, funnelling basic tones into lengthy sonic rivers.”

More to come!

“I know very little about the Ruhr Region, in fact it is hard for me to pronounce its name – and I’ve never shot High Definition before. Yet I believe I have made a film true to my feelings of this place. Ruhr takes a look at some of the labor performed here and the processes controlled by that labor. It is about things that reoccur and the subtle changes that happen. It asks you to look and to listen.“
– James Benning

James Benning has been one of my favorite filmmakers ever since I saw his ‘California Trilogy’ (1999-2001) and the magificent duo ’13 Lakes’ and ‘Ten Skies’ (both 2004), that were screened as part of the Argos Festival 2005 (where I was working at the time). Although Benning has been making films since the beginning of the 1970’s and has produced several wonderful film works since 2004 (Notably ‘Casting A Glance’ and ‘RR’, both finished in 2007), these particular films, as Scott MacDonald wrote in his essay ‘James Benning’s 13 Lakes and Ten Skies, and the Culture of Distraction’ (in “James Benning” ed. by Barbara Pilcher & Claudia Slanar, 2007), can be considered as “an epitome, a quintessence, of his career”. These explorations of the American landscape are certainly among his most accomplished – in Benning’s own words – “attempts at seeing (and listening to) rural, urban and savage environments as ‘places’, presenting these places in aesthetical, socialeconomic and political terms”. At the same time, continued MacDonald, “they may signal a kind of conclusion”. In 2007, Benning stated that he was growing tired of the film medium and wanted to start exploring the digital area (he’s not the only one: see the recent work of Ernie Gehr, for example).

This is an excerpt from an interview MacDonald did with Benning around that time (‘Testing your patience‘, published in ArtForum, 2007):

MACDONALD: You’ve mentioned that ‘casting a glance might be your last 16-mm film.
BENNING: I would say my use of 16 mm is going to end soon. It’s become so stressful to finish a film and go to the lab and try to get good prints. Then it’s even more stressful to go to screenings, because I’ll get a good screening, an appropriate screening, one out of every five times, and three out of five will be god-awful. The projector will have a lot of movement in it, or it won’t focus across the image, or the sound will be garbled, or the gate will be all dirty, or they’ll scratch my film. A print lasts about five or six screenings now, which is expensive and frustrating. On the other hand, once in a long while, a screening will be perfect, as it was the other night at Colgate. I see that and I think, “Well, 16 mm is still possible.”

MACDONALD: You’d move to digital?
BENNING: Yeah. I am depressed about feeling forced out of my craft, but I’m also excited to try to learn a new trick, at my age. The change will make me contemplate a whole different way of imagemaking. I’m sure I’ll be frustrated, and who knows, I could come back and make a film once in a while. But I suspect that soon 16 mm just isn’t going to be there.

Here’s another excerpt from an interview with Cinema Scope, on the occasion of the release of ‘RR’ (‘Trainspotting with James Benning‘, 2008)

SCOPE: Is it true that this is your last film on 16mm?
BENNING: As far as I know, yes. I don’t want to shoot 35mm as I don’t want to get into that kind of money. I’ve always been against spending lots of money on projects, and I sometimes think that if a lot of my films were 35mm or 70mm they might turn into a coffee-table book. There’s something about the small gauge that makes them more real for me. But now, yeah, I’m disturbed that I’m being forced out of my craft by new technologies that are developing that are getting more attention, that means there’s less attention on what I’ve been working in. And nobody’s aspiring to be a good 16mm projectionist except James Bond in Chicago, there’s nobody else who even can fix them. And the labs, they make believe they still do good work but they don’t pay attention to it at all.

SCOPE: So you would still shoot in 16mm if there were good labs and good projection then?
BENNING: Yeah, I probably wouldn’t even have thought of getting out of it. But in a way I’m kind of glad, because I could just do the same thing for the rest of my life. This is going to cause me to do a complete rethinking of image making. I’m both mad and excited at the same time.

The result of this decision can now be marvelled at on the big screen. ‘Ruhr’ is not only Benning’s first foray into digital filmmaking, it’s also the first work he shot outside the US. It presents his perspective on the Ruhr district in Germany, a region formed by coal mining, industrialization and its working class inhabitants – a environment he feels connected with, having grown up in Milwaukee’s industrial valley (see his film(s) ‘One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later’ (1977-2004). In order to get to know the place, Benning set out on small trips and documented his findings on High Definition digital video. About 20 shots were taken, but only 6 of them ended up in the film, which Benning doesn’t consider as a portrait, but rather a “deep map” of the Ruhr region.

The switch to the digital medium also had an impact on the structure of ‘Ruhr’. The shots he composed for his earlier 16 mm films were limited to a duration of 11 minutes – the maximum amount of film that can be recorded in a single take on a 400 foot roll shot at 24 frames a second – which was a determining factor of many of Benning’s rigorously structured works (for example, ’13 Lakes’ and ‘Ten Skies’ are both composed entirely of ten-minute takes). With modern card storage systems, however, shots can last up to several hours. Benning investigated this potential in ‘Ruhr”s last shot, the image of a coke plant’s belching smokestack that slowly fades to blackness. The shot, that lasts for one hour, seems continuous, but was actually edited: the sensitivity of digital video does not only render the movements in the image more subtle, even more “dramatic”, but also makes it possible to “completely hide the ellipse of time” with dissolves. Other shots in ‘Ruhr’ have also been manipulated in that way: certain moments are edited out, in order to focus on the iterations and heighten the awareness of the spaces.

Perhaps, as Michael Ned Holte suggests in his review (ArtForum, January 2010), for Benning, “the true promise of HD lies in its capacity to capture images at durations that push the limits of the viewer’s attention toward an almost-inhuman scale of time—albeit in a physical way that an all-too-human viewer, seated in the theater, will surely register.” It’s a promise that brings him – and us – a step closer closer to the cinematic ideal that MacDonald has written about: an ideal, “that functions as a metaphor for one of the essential quests of life: our desire to make the most of the perceptual opportunities provided by the moment to moment incarnation of the sensory and sensual world around us in the face of our inevitable decay and mortality.”

Listen to Benning talking about ‘Ruhr’ in this interview.
Also of interest: Benning has stated that there will be a DVD publication of some of his works, in collaboration with the filmmuseum Vienna. He is also planning to offer his films as free downloads on the internet.

‘Ruhr’ is coming soon, I hope, to a theatre near you…

In the meantime, here’s a small tastemaker: the trailer Benning created fo the Viennale. For this film, Benning took the steel rolling process, that takes about ten minutes, and condensed it down to one minute by cutting out portions and hiding the ellipses in time with dissolves.

Just saw a rough cut of ‘Mnemosyne’, the impressive new film of John Akomfrah. For this project, produced as part of “Made in England” (a partnership initiative developed between Arts Council England and BBC English Regions), Akomfrah was given access to the BBC’s television, film and sound archives and chose to explore the migratory experience and memory in the West Midlands.

Akomfrah established himself as co-founder of the Black Audio Film Collective, a British workshop collective of filmmakers, active in the 1980’s and 1990’s, who addressed issues of Black British identity, exploring the post-colonial decline of the imperialistic world order, the disastrous socio-economic effects of Thatcher’s doctrine and the meaning of the diasporic condition. Their first film, directed by Akomfrah, was the seminal ‘Handsworth Songs’ (1986), a truly impressive, deeply resonating piece of work (shown as part of our ‘Somewhere in Time‘ program last year) that explores the origins of the riots in the Birmingham district of Handsworth, where the local black community rose against a political policy that they considered as a return to colonialism. In contrast with the didactic panoptic impulse of the documentary film tradition, Akomfrah chose an open, polytonic structure where eye-witness accounts, mediated voice-overs and a mosaic of sound intersperse with a poetic montage of archive footage. The inherent historical discourses are dismantled, and in result the impressions of the past gain a new place in the constellation of the present.

In some ways, ‘Mnemosyne’ feels like a companion piece to ‘Handsworth Songs’ (but there also seem to be echoes from ‘Testament’ (1988)), as it unfolds a dialogical space between image and sound, language and music (fragments from Arvo Part, Marian Anderson and many other sources) to explore feelings of disjuncture and alienation. This is also reflected in the narrative discontinuity of the film, moving between archival footage from 1960-1981, contemporary portraits of Brirmingham and shots Akomfrah filmed in a remote snowy landscape. Throughout the nine ‘chapters’ of the film, snatches of Homer’s ‘Iliad’, with its themes of journeying, alienation and reconciliation are narrated in voiceover. Each section is named for one of the Muses, all daughters of Mnemosyne, the personification of memory in Greek Mythology. Akomfrah has also sampled snippets of poetry by Beckett, Milton and others, pieces that “suggested a kind of solitude, what we used to call a sort of existential space in which people could exist (…) The idea was to suggest some sense of an unknown space, of both Brittain and the Carribean or Africa as terra incognitas from which people might then emerge into the England that we know. And I wanted that space to be marked – marked by, if you like, a sense of a fall.”

He has talked about the film as a “tone poem”, suggesting “the lateral journeys within Mnemosyne that play on the main theme of fragility, the burden and the excess of remembering.” In an interview with BBC World Service he said “there isn’t an obvious referent to memory. (…) It’s a project of both emotional, intellectual and physical recovery of things and that is a bittersweet exercise. And it seems to me that the ethical responsibility that those in the present face when they look at the past – images in particular of the past – is to say to themselves: ‘what else is being left out? And in what ways can we get what is now left to stand in for all those other forgotten, misremembered, repressed stories?’ (…) I wanted images that suggested intimacy. I wanted images of people of colour that seemed to suggest that there might be another story beyond the one that those images were used to tell in the first place.”.

The discovery and recovery of a memory that is forgotten, oppressed, silenced or disavowed, is perhaps the main thread in Akomfrah’s work. In a previous interview, published in the magnificent publication ‘The Ghosts of Songs. The Art of the Black Audio Film Collective’ (2007), edited by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar (aka the Otolith Group), he talked about this in relation to ‘Handsworth Songs’.
“For us, the project was always a kind of investment in memory. The return to the archive was indisputably, in our case, connected with a return to the inventory pf black presences in this country. The investment in memory, I would say, took two distinct forms. It seemed to me that, at the time, all projects around the notion of memory had to deal with two things, the question of presence and, obviously, by implication, the question of absence. In the case of the black archive, the question of presence had to do with the fact that official memory denied you a certain kind of intimacy and solitude. You know, when you watched those newsreels, they seemed to not even be about people, they seemed to be about statistics. You know, ‘Oh, here come the darkies coming of the boat’, – it just seemed to lack any understanding that the people you were looking at, people of colour, might have a trajectory that was not just to do with them being a statistic. On the other hand, there were also crucial absences that one had to deal with, and some of them were even to do with the ellipses of our own kind of languages. I remember listening to Howlin’ Wolf, to his famous song about the .44 pistol with that lyric: ‘I’ve worn my .44 so long, it’s made my finger sore.’ And you are listening to it and think, ‘Well, why is this guy angry, what the hell is he angry about?’ Because what is animating the song is actually not present in the song itself. And so much of what constituted black presence was also underscored and overdetermined by these massive absences. So that was one thing. The second thing about the memory was that it seemed to get us out of a number of possible cul-de-sacs. If you were educated in the mid-to-late 1970s, at the time when postmodern orthodoxies were at their height, one of the things you noticed more and more was that people would say things like, ‘Oh well, this is about trying to avoid inferiority’. In other words, there was a sort of hostility to the question of identity itself, which became crystallized around a hostility to what people call identity politics. And you realise that we could not do that. We did not have the luxury to be hostile to a question of identity because our very moment of becoming is tied to the question and the politics of identity. You could not avoid it. So, the notion of memory was a way of sidestepping some of what you might call the implications of the formalisms of certain practices. You needed it as a kind of corrective gesture to the Lacanian delusional orthodoxies, which were the ones which we were being given as the way forward, theoretically. But the idea of memory also seemed to me a way of posing questions to what one might call the official discourse. Because the official discourse insisted on narrativising black lives as migrant lives, insisted on treating black subjectivity as simply either criminal or pathological or sociological; there always seemed to ba a category which came before you could get to that identity. And the recourse of memory was, for us, a way of sidestepping that. It was not simply about going back to the past, because, clearly, what we were talking about was trying to secure legitimacy for present subjectivities. But you needed to question the way in which those subjectivities were positioned in several discourses of governmentality in order to be able to get to the new, the now.”

Here’s a small excerpt of ‘Mnemosyne’. Coming soon, I hope, to a theatre near you…

One of the works that will be shown in the Courtisane 2010 exhibition – titled “Digest Sound’ – is Barry Hale’s ‘Blackout (The Antiphony Video Supplement)’ (1997), a video which was produced as part of a project by Disinformation (Joe Banks) and conceived as supplementary to images taken by photographer Julian Hills which appear on the sleeve of the Disinformation ‘Antiphony’ CD (Ash International, 1997). The video (later more or less copied by several other artists, notably Tacita Dean. See Brian Dillon’s article ‘Listening for the Enemy‘) is an audiovisual survey of the so-called “sound mirrors”, acoustic detection early-warning devices designed to pick up sounds from approaching enemy aircraft. The structures were devised by the British air force in the 1920’s, as part of a plan to install a chain of “concrete ears” along the coast that would peer out over the English Channel. The plan was never completed, but some of these decaying structures can still be seen alongside the UK coast, at Abbots Cliff between Dover and Folkestone, West Hythe, and on the Dungeness shingle at Denge. Reportedly there were three types of sound mirrors: “with the circular, concave 20- and 30-foot-diamater concrete bowls, movable, cone-shaped metal sound collectors were used, connected by tubing to stethoscopes worn by the operators. The other type were strip mirrors, curved in elevation and plan of 26 by 200 feet. With these structures, microphones were placed on a concrete forecourt in front of the mirrors and wired to a nearby control room. All the sound mirrors were located in positions that attempted silence. A 1924 report suggested that the sound mirrors were ten times more sensitive than the human ear, and they were tested by blind listeners in 1925.” (Steve Goodman,’ Sonic Warfare’, 2010)

This is what Joe Banks wrote about Sound Mirrors in Sound Projector, Issue 5 (1999)
“Following promising experiments in the grounds of Binbury Manor, near Maidstone, Kent in 1916 – in which a Professor (probably FC) Mather sculpted a parabolic sound mirror into the face of a chalk cliff – Dr W S Tucker of the RAF Air Defence Experimental Establishment experimented extensively with sound mirrors as passive acoustic early-warning detectors, designed to provide directional fixes on the sounds of incoming enemy Zeppelins, planes and ships. Mirrors were installed at several sites on the Kent and Yorkshire coasts – the awesome monofiths documented in the ‘Disinformation Antiphony Video Supplement’ by Barry Hale – and at Baharic-Cahaq in Malta and plans were drawn up to extend the UK coastal network and build similar chains for colonial defence in Hong Kong Singapore, Gibraltar and Aden. Tests were conducted using aircraft, ships, and also concrete tubes projecting low frequency drones at frequencies below 50Hz to simulate aircraft noise. Dr Tucker also designed an active sound mirror to project an acoustic beam – guiding aircraft to safe landings on fog-bound runways; these experiments were abandoned after a number of serious accidents at Biggin Hill aerodrome. lt is tempting to speculate that, should this prove to have been the first experiment with blind-landing Dr Tucker may have been in effect the unsung father of controlled airspace and contemporary air traffic control.
ln his booklet ‘Mirrors by the Sea‘ Richard Scarth reports that the decision to abandon the sound mirror early-warning system was made by the Royal Engineers in May 1939 – they had been rendered obsolete by the increasing speeds of hostile aircraft and, more importantly, by the invention of radar. Nonetheless in January 1940 Dr Tucker conducted ‘experiments to investigate the nature of the disturbance produced by explosions in large, concave, concrete reflectors’ at the Greatstone site near Dungeness.”

Banks also explored these ideas, suggested by the imagery of his ‘Antiphony’ CD and the ‘Antiphony Video Supplement’ (later retitled “Blackout”) video, in an article that was featured in issue 6 of Sound Projector, under the title ‘Antiphony Architectural Supplement‘. An excerpt:
“During the WW2 nocturnal Blackout procedures were tantamount to a policy of compulsory mass hyperacusis. Venturing outdoors at night, particularly the urban population, already hypersensitized by fear, found their hearing heightened still further by immersion in levels of darkness which were unprecedented since the introduction of street-lighting.
The basic hypothesis here is that the experience of defensively listening, consciously and unconsciously, for the dull-thud of explosions, the whistle of rockets and bombs and the roar of planes is the mechanism by which such autonomic states encode, at a fundamental neurological level, as conditioned, reflexive responses to ambient low frequency sounds. These high states of arousal are necessarily those in which individuals are most receptive to sense-data. These responses are also culturally transmissible – primarily through the medium of cinema. It is worth noting that extreme sensitivity to sound (of the exact sort idealised by the composer John Cage) is not only a state of heightened aesthetic awareness, but also a recognised medical condition, often associated with debilitating phonophobia and the onset of conditioned tinnitus – and during the war advertisements in Picture Post magazine suggest there was a roaring trade in sedatives, not only for people but also for household pets.
In the light of this hypothesis it seems natural that sound should be an ideal medium for abstract representations of war – so it is not surprising that some of its greatest sculptural representations rely heavily on the effects of sound. My interest in these sculptures originally stemmed from recognising the cultural primacy of visual images over intellectual concepts (“people eat with their eyes”, “a picture speaks 1,000 words”) and therefore the commercial necessity and challenge of finding visual analogues which could encapsulate and advertise the Disinformation brand-name noise repertoire.
The solution was provided by an article by W. Harms in Shortwave Magazine, which described a series of massive concrete monoliths which still stand, slowly crumbling into waste-land at a site near Dungeness in Kent…”

The Sound Mirrors are also mentioned in Steve Goodman’s (aka Kode 9) recently published book ‘Sonic Warfare, Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear‘, an excellent read about the use and impact of sonic tactics and acoustic forces. Like Banks, he also draws heavily on some ideas Paul Virilio offered in ‘War and Cinema’ (see earlier posts). Some excerpts:
“Just as Virilio found the logistics of military perception within the history of cinema, especially the emergence of cybernetics in the postwar period, we can locate, updating an ancient history of acoustic warfare, an undercurrent of research into sonic tactics guiding a symbiosis of noise, bodies, and machines. Across the continuum of war, from sonar to nonlethal acoustic weaponry, this logistics of perception in its vibratory, resonant, affective, and virtual sonic dimensions is now assuming new permutations in cultures mutated by the impact of global terrorism and assymmetric warfare.
This logistics of (im)perception does not merely seek to intervene in the “normal” functioning of psychophysiological circuitry, but, in McLuhanist terms, also involves perceptual prosthetics: an extension or an amputation. Conceived differently, for philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the focus shifts from what a body is, even in its technologically extended sense, to its powers – what it can do. The body of sonic warfare is therefore always a speculative question, which does not return home to a pregiven human, corporeal demarcation. The episodic history of sonic warfare’s perceptual assemblages can therefore equally be found in electronic and electromagnetic cartography, the distributed nervous system of technical sensors that feed it, and the flood of information these systems produce.
In the cybernetic phase of martial evolution, which emerged out of the detritus of World War II, turning this data flood into workable knowledge became as important as the efficiency and accuracy of weapon systems. The logistics of perception has been confronted by the ravenous information hunger of military systems, generating a chain reaction of problems in the gathering, transfer, and processing of data. The more sophisticated the military’s distributed nervous system, the more overpowering the sheer weight of information to be dealt with. And as an unavoidable corollary, the more exposed the battlefield becomes, the more appearance gives in to an array of camouflage, decoys, jamming, smokescreens, and electronic countermeasures. To be percieved is to be “taken out”. So investment in forces co-evolves with the investment in their concealment. Stealth, secrecy, and the logistics of perception signal, for Virilio, that the war of images has in fact superseded the war of weaponry. Whether we agree with Virilio’s historical argument or not, his insight is to draw attention to how the evolution of weapons and armor is paralleled by the co-evolution of visibility and invisibility and, by implication, of audibility and inaudibility.”

Follow Goodman’s research on his blog.

Images: Julian Hills

Interesting read in the online NY times this week: an article by filmmaker Errol Morris, titled ‘It Was All Started by a Mouse’ (part 1 and 2), on war and photography, prompted by the sheer number of images of child’s toys amid the ruins of war.

“Why are there so many similar photographs? How did all these toys come to be photographed? What is the viewer supposed to infer from such a scene? Is it simply that the idea of children and their toys ratchets up the drama of a war photograph? The juxtaposition of innocence and destruction in one image? Is it just anti-war? Or is something more sinister involved? Is it disguised propaganda with a definite bias towards one side or another?”

The article is, in some ways, a follow-up to his essay ‘Photography as a Weapon‘ (NY times, August 11, 2008 – the title of the piece is inspired by John Heartfield, by the way), in which he explored the manipulation of photography, in particular the photo of four Iranian missiles streaking heavenward, first published on July 10 2008 (on a sidenote, see also Oliver Laric’s video ‘Versions’) .

“For me it raised a series of questions about images. Do they provide illustration of a text or an idea of evidence of some underlying reality or both? And if they are evidence, don’t we have to know that the evidence is reliable, that it can be trusted? (…) The problem is not that the photograph has been manipulated, but that we have been manipulated by the photograph. Photoshop is not the culprit. It is the intention to deceive. (…) We should remember that the power of photographs comes not only from their ability to copy reality, but also to alter reality. Photographs can be used — to borrow Heartfield’s phrase — as weapons. They can be used to warn us about the dangers of impending war. They can also be used to ratchet up the blind forces of rage and unreason that drag us into conflict.”

In the article, Morris also wrote: “You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption“, referencing the photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003. “Photographs that were used to justify a war. And yet, the actual photographs are low-res, muddy aerial surveillance photographs of buildings and vehicles on the ground in Iraq. I’m not an aerial intelligence expert. I could be looking at anything. It is the labels, the captions, and the surrounding text that turn the images from one thing into another.”

These issues are also addresses in ‘It Was All Started by a Mouse’, in an interview with Ben Curtis, Chief Photographer/Photo editor, Middle East, of the Associated Press, who has been criticised for a series of photos which appeared to be staged (see the article ‘The Reuters Photo Scandal. A Taxonomy of Fraud‘). Talking about the need for veracity and objectivity in photojournalism, Curtis refers to the “the Reuters incident” -the distribution of a doctered photo showing the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on Beirut – which was uncovered by Charles Johnson on the Little Green Footballs blog (Johnson also coined the term “fauxtography”).

“I read the Reuters website after (the incident), and there was a lot of handwringing and reevaluation of their procedures. After the war, I read that Reuters was working with Adobe on some software component for Photoshop that would keep a record of all the changes that had been made in Photoshop, so that editors could see exactly what had been done to an image. It would aid in preventing manipulation of photographs. I found that quite interesting from a technical perspective, and I could see how such thing could be useful in the work flow of maintaining accuracy of images. This was one of the things that was in my head when I was writing the “in defense of captions” post — while that’s useful or could be useful, a technical solution alone is never going to solve the problem of accuracy in the media. You could take a photographer’s image straight from the camera, not even processed with Photoshop, put it on the wire, and it’s the caption that provides the accuracy for that picture. The caption is the place where it’s easy to mislead the reader.”

Here are some more excerpts taken from their discussion on the ethical issues surrounding the Mickey Mouse photograph (not posed or manipulated in any way, but, according to Morris “nonetheless a photograph that telegraphs a message”). Its caption read “A child’s toy lies amidst broken glass from the shattered windows of an apartment block near those that were demolished by Israeli air strikes in Tyre, Southern Lebanon, Monday, August 7th, 2006.”

Morris: “…Are we saying that there’s no damage done to these apartment buildings? That no children were killed? Even in the clearly Photoshopped image of the smoke over Beirut? Are we saying that Beirut was never hit by a bomb? That there were no apartment buildings leveled by Israeli drones? Is the crime posing? Or is the crime creating an image — even if it was produced ethically — that leads the viewer to a controversial conclusion. A photographer makes the decision to take a picture with a Mickey Mouse toy in the foreground. Is that a crime? Is it a crime if he found the toy and didn’t place it? Is it unacceptable because it suggests that children were killed?”

Curtis: “Yes. I’m looking at the Mickey Mouse picture again. A reader might infer from that, that a child had been killed in the attack and that this toy belonged to some child who is dead somewhere. Okay, you’re a reader, you can infer that if you want. But we’re not saying that. I’m not saying that. I’m saying it’s a child’s toy lying in the middle of a street after an air strike. That’s all I’m saying. If you want to infer from that what you want, that’s your prerogative, but you can’t then criticize us for that, you know? If I knew who that toy belonged to, if I knew his name and where he was now and what happened to him, that would be great. I’d include it in the caption. But I’m running around and I’ve got 10 minutes to get in, shoot pictures and get out of there, before maybe they’ll launch another air strike.”

…
Morris: “It’s narrative compression.”

Curtis: “It’s very compressed. You’re really trying to compress a huge amount of things. An air strike. Destruction. Some humanity. You’re trying to convey all of that in a single image. And, frankly, it’s pretty hard, especially when there’s not many people around.”

Morris: “Yes. Your stories are endlessly interesting, because you’re telling us about the exigencies of photography, that photography requires us to do certain kinds of things. The way in which stories are told by newspapers, by photographic convention, all influence how photographs are made, how they’re distributed, how they’re printed and published and disseminated, etcetera, etcetera. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, but it’s interesting to take a step back and to talk to a photographer, particularly when we’re dealing with a controversial photograph, a supposedly posed photograph, and attempt to contextualize it thoroughly for the first time”.

Morris concludes:
“Photographs can give us a glimpse of the specific, of the particulars in a cauldron of seething politics. And yet, the meaning of what we’re looking at remains unclear. The Mickey Mouse photograph can function as pro-Arab or as pro-Israeli propaganda depending on the text it accompanies. Not just the text, but the mind-set, the mental captions, that inform how we see it. Mickey Mouse after all is “so human, that’s the secret of his popularity.” Images are plastic, malleable, and lend themselves to any and every argument.

Errol Morris on Twitter