I have always been interested in stages towards understanding that might become stages of a different kind. Robert Smithson’s example of entropy—of a boy running around in a sandpit of half white and half black sand where if the boy runs clockwise the sand becomes grey, but if he turns and runs anti-clockwise it will not go back into its distinct halves—is a concrete example that doesn’t exist but is intended to act as a transparent device, helping us to understand an abstract concept. What I am interested in is the status of these pretended materials and what happens when we probe them.
From this point I have made work that begins from case studies in risk assessment on a series of mysterious fires in the French Jura, to a psychoanalytical case study on negative hallucination, to memory palaces and their relationship to colorless vision, to stained glass as an early way to communicate with largely illiterate public, to my most recent work NIGHT FOR DAY,which looks at the film technique of day for night and reverses it as a way to reflect on technologies, control, and utopia situated in a contemporary Lisbon.
The strange permanence of images that outlast their use and recirculate might speak to us about many things—from historical materialism to the nature of material memory as well as the power of aesthetics when we refuse to consider them superficial. But I am also interested in imagined spaces themselves and why they help us to remember, understand, and connect. These can be the imagined spaces of the example, the case study, the metaphor, the hallucination, the utopia, or the ghost. They can be the ‘as-if’ imagined space that we improvise into, or the online school where we learn. Particular to these spaces is their dependence on a concretization that doesn’t ever materialize and yet depends on the idea of material.
The medium that I use always reflects the content of the work itself—so when I was working on fire (NO TRACE OF ACCELERATOR), I used improvisation to reflect unpredictability; when I was talking about memory palaces (THE PALACE), I worked with digital manipulation that made solid objects seem as though they were in a process of constant formation; and when I made the work SEA OAK with the left-leaning think tank in the US who looked into the use of metaphor in political rhetoric, I made an imageless 16mm film which starts with Eric Haus asking us to imagine a bird—an image that forms in the mind of the viewer as the only image present in the film.
NIGHT FOR DAY asks what an essay film might look like were it made by an algorithm.
NIGHT FOR DAY is comprised of interviews with people from two different generations who live in Lisbon, allowing the characters to speak for themselves and to verbalize how their own conscious and unconscious ideologies permeate their day-to-day lives. The Atlantic crossing of tech—pasting on the ideas of one west coast onto another—acts as a conduit to think about the non-space of utopia and its effect on materiality. This crossing also allowed me to think about ideas of gender as performativity and how that wave might break in a country like Portugal that did not experience modernity.
NIGHT FOR DAY asks what an essay film might look like were it made by an algorithm—comprised of fragments like those that often constitute narrative film—characters, locations, props—but struggling to understand the limitations of human relations and human experience of time. It is both freed from these constraints and limited by its own lack of body memory. This conceit reflects on philosophies, like OOO (Object Oriented Ontology), that have their genesis in the computer sciences and use the difficulty of computers performing simple physical tasks as a way to reflect on our own inability to approach the real. The narrator is perhaps human, but whether he is or not, he is struggling to know that which is in front of him.
The human body is represented in multiple guises throughout the film: as a life that can never be repeated, as a mechanical reproduction of an ideal, as a voice—generated through text to speech software and finally, with the famous aria from The Tales of Hoffmann, a love song, sung by a woman, pretending to be a machine that was pretending to be a woman.
Emily Wardill
