Audio: Deux ou trois choses.....

from DrSonique, 14.08.09

Deux ou trois chose....(que je sais d'elle).

Fictionalising Fiction!. In the beginning; As a thirteen year old lad I was once left to kick my heels for the day in central London, along with a couple of friends. Being both wary of getting lost in the capital and having little or no money we decided to visit the cartoon cinema that in those days was housed on the main concourse of Victoria station.

Somehow, our encounter was not, as we had imagined, with Bugs Bunny or the Invisible Man (as it was each Saturday morning) but with something indescribable and utterly alien. I left the cinema with mixed emotions no longer an innocent for I had seen Godard and my experience of cinema had been changed irrevocably!

Many years later (in 2003) whilst a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University) I constructed a miniature audio project entitled ‘One or Two Things…’ which was subsequently exhibited at London’s South Bank Centre as a feature of the ‘School of Sound’ festival (April 2003).

This work consisted of a series of seven miniature reconstructions of my favourite scenes from Godard films, each reconstruction encased in a small glass dome mounted atop a vintage wooden camera tripod and equipped with a hidden audio transducer. Visitors were provided with a hand-held device sporting a magnifying glass (to better view the miniature scenes) and a loop-antenna that was designed to ‘pick-up’ the audio track accompanying each scene.

The issue at stake was how we deal and engage with the fictional spaces and narratives of cinema – in fact how we incorporate and ‘carry’ these fictions within us. During the construction of ‘One or Two Things’ I realised that I held two wildly inaccurate assumptions.

Surprise number one; as I attempted to locate the scenes and sequences that I recalled so well, I was to discover that they, for the most part did not actually exist in Godard’s works per se and the images that I had internalised (and held so dearly) were hybrid forms, embroidered, imploded and super-imposed; this was somewhat sobering!

Wildly inaccurate assumption, number two; again, as I attempted to transpose these filmic narratives into (miniature) sculptural dioramas a second form of slippage occurred as I realised that the discontinuous narrative that constitutes film proved only uneasily congealed into a sculptural tableau.

A filmic event constructed via montage appears strangely like a Medieval ‘continuous narrative’ frieze when it is recruited as a three dimensional form.

Likewise, in the sonic domain – soundtracks were re-constituted on the Procruste’s bed of my memory and neatly sutured into place with digital surgery.