Pre-session text:

[02/05, 21:14] Emilio’s email:

How to be author and spectator at the same time? How can an author control his or her ego without limiting imagination and creativity? How to be a spectator by exceeding our expectations and trying to grasp something that does not belong to us, that is far from our point of view and horizon?

By caring for the viewer the author can overcome his or her ego; by relying on the author the viewer learns to open the mind.

Here is a dramatic example in which the author and the viewer are linked by the presence of death.

“Sometime in 1992, during a trip to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, the filmmaker, writer and painter Derek Jarman was told his eyesight was fading. ‘Fizzy holes’ had appeared in his vision: the result of an AIDS-related complication that would, by the end of the year, leave him blind in one eye. In this growing darkness, to his surprise, he started seeing flashes of bright Yves Klein blue. This had always been his favourite colour – the blue of his boiler suits, or the skies over the Dungeness coast – and, during the last months of his life, it inspired his final, most personal film.” 

Lets watch Blue by Derek Jarman.

[20/05, 20:53] Camilo’s email:

Hello AULab friends… 

1) Thanks Emilio for inspiring the Incorporation with the greatest depth and simplicity together with your questions and audiovisual example. “Blue” moved me a lot… feeling immersed in its Blue and sharing a certain concern about the immensity of its narrative. 

This primary thread of audiovisual exploration overwhelmed my senses, I “hyper-felt” it, and that could be a sketch of a premise, right?… the radical exploration with which I want to resonate: Making videos to “incorporate something” of what was filmed. .. and watch videos to “incorporate something” from the author, and from what was filmed. Simple but enormous, free, intense intention: Incorporate. And for audiovisual creators who want to use such a “handled” medium, to transcend that technical exploration and achieve a moment with greater communicative connection, an authentic connection that allows “Incorporating something.” As a premise of the audiovisual task, “Incorporate the Purpose” or “the purpose of Incorporate.”

And it seems natural that the most primary exercise in making an Audiovisual is to have a Purpose, an Impulse that leads to giving life to a filmable “fact of my/your/they life.” We want to be “with”-Sensed by another being, by a spectator who can Incorporate You, Feel You by your images. Even for you to (re)feel yourself. But in the face of this modern wave-tsunami of images we reproduce ourselves without further purpose. Or with less sensitive, faster and more immediate purposes, such as money, or likes, in the survival of the ego-video, the eternal competition of “who is most viewed”, without further ado.

 

The superposition of audiovisual moments that confuse the Purpose of a message. Inevitably confuses our Senses. Next is my example of a video (with) Purpose, that in times of cultural Genocide, invites us to Incorporate the emerging (dis)connection of seeing Gaza live and direct. INVITATION: BREATHE “with” THE VIDEO

I can think of a couple of questions to keep in mind while watching any movie, video or image: How do I breathe? How does my heart beat? …

…and I can think of a couple similar ones to keep in mind when recording: what is my Breathing (=Purpose) like when filming/telling/writing)?

2) There was a second (and third, and fourth) thread of exploration to which your words Emilio invited me: “which kind of audiovisuals invite me to Incorporate?”… and I found this example of a musicogram while “digesting-Incorporating” your words: Have you heard about musicograms? I invite you to “live it” (follow it with your fingers), it is better than any explanation: Just to bring back game, movement, Incorporation through more senses while “watching”.

See you soon!!! chauuu 

[25/05, 16:14] Marlene’s email:

Hello friends,

thank you Emilio to share this beautiful piece, that really talks about life itself and through which you can really feel what we all have in common. The “blue” space is a space of embodiment. Of feelings with which we can all relate with, it is an epitome of all our fears, memories, the condensation of life itself, deprived of its shapes, and containing all of them at the same time. It is a work true to itself, true to the author, true to the viewer, true to what it means to “live” for real. If you were early talking about honesty, I don’t see any work more honest than this one. I imagined how strong it must had been to see that in a cinema room when it was made, to be surrounded by this blue and touched even bodily that deeply by its honesty and truth and straightforwardness of thoughts, deprived of any social/economical lie and of all the constrictions that fall upon us and that we incorporate in one way or the other, but we all have a sense of what we would be without. 

I was thinking that it is a paradox that it seems we are more able to get free from those when we get closer to death, or as we encounter it as it comes nearer to us. That all of what is unnecessary, starts fading away. We had some hints of it in the first periods of covid, when death started to come around even in the richest areas- that dont seem to remember what collective death is- (although they had wars not too distant in time). Then it faded away and the machinery came back, much worse and confusing than before. With the neursosis and disconnection trying to erase even very visible facts such as genocide.

Talking about incorporation/embodiment a video about an impressive woman came to my mind, Victoria Santa Cruz. You can watch it here.

It is a documentary by the Odin Theatret, it lasts 20 min and please watch it in its entirety because it is super powerful. Here audiovisuals really help us “engraving” in time, “preserving” a moment so to say, in which some powerful people embody their freedom, their inner rythm, and they do it collectively, with the force that comes out in sharing something which is also an ultimate fight. Fiercely adhering to what they are, to their rhythm.  Victoria says “the black was never slave because no one could enslave their inner rhythm” (and our friends Monwabisi and Angela video showed that too), but that a rhythm is not peculiar to the black humans only but to the red, yellow, white, all human beings. And that “you cannot communicate anything if you don’t communicate with yourself first”, and nobody can force your freedom only yourself can do it. “The day in which the dominator learns that having more of which he needs is death, it is the day in which he starts learning his rhythm”.

I leave you watch it.

Many thanks and see you soon!

Marlene

Emilio’s note: Barthes call inner rithm iodiorritmico (I don’t know if there is any English traduction) 

Marlene: The translation of idiorritmia in english is actually idiorrhythmy

Link to Recordings, Notes from the Zoom session with participants on May 29th, 2024