Vanessa’s email [10 April 2025 23.13]:
Dear All,
Thank you for your sharings.
I completely agree on how the general violence desensitises us and also gets us used to a certain violence. Normalising it, subtly.
The word violence in audiovisuals reminds me of Lars von Trier who enraged me when watching the film “Dancer in the Dark” when he had the protagonist “ Björk” hung and showed the whole damn thing.
The blatant lack of using the public’s imagination or any form of art to tell a story was in my eyes a form of violence. It lacks poetry and I consider it a highjack. It is a way of showing everything AND then kind of guaranteeing the shock effect. It says nothing about the skills of the filmmaker. I found it a strong form of violence and intrusive .
It came to mind
Greetings from Amsterdam,
Vanessa
Ako’s email [11 April 2025 10.00]:
Hello everyone!
Thanks for adding me to this conversation.
Reading your opinions and narratives has been quite insightful. It has made me consider how the media and arts could be violent in two ways:
1. When in a good number of cases, they are an imposition on the reasoning of their audience– where viewers, listeners or readers are subtly compelled to see things from the author’s perspective, or are in fact, limited to a single story.
2. When they show or report violence in ways that erupts triggers in their audience.
Whether the violent influence of media and arts takes the form of suppression, deception or trigger, the fact remains that for a long time, many works have successfully manipulated the public in nuanced ways.
A friend of mine sank into depression after watching a movie, swearing that she would never go juggling again during early morning hours because there were videos that blatantly screened violence and conditioned her to think of dangers hiding in the corners of empty streets.
But what can be done to change the narrative? Perhaps producers, journalists, authors, artists, musicians, advertisers, etc should be more thoughtful regarding the contents they push out and messages they sell.
How can we, the Audiovisual Circle of the Ecoversities Alliance bring these to consciousness and cautiousness?
Perhaps, we can produce a video that enlightens producers of the potential risk of violent content as well as educate consumers on the need to be selective and objective in their consumption?
I’m enjoying this conversation and looking to read more insights and perspectives.
Warmest regards,
Ako
Ibadan, Nigeria
Sierra’s email [12 April 2025 19.47]:
Wow, what a powerful thread. Thank you all for chiming in, very enriching indeed. My whole life I have felt the violence of audiovisuals. I was raised with no TV and only saw movies occasionally with cousins and friends, there are scenes that I was exposed to that gave me nightmares and still haunt my mind’s eye for years. I never understood why others could enjoy such things, and couldn’t imagine how affected I would be by R rated or horror films (I have never watched these). I still get very disturbed on planes when people around me are watching movies with intense scenes and I struggle to not watch.
In some countries explicit language in music cannot be played in public areas. However, over the years it seems like it has become more accepted for explicit or violent content to be played in public spaces
and younger and younger children seem not to be bothered, there is even often a sense of pride in being able to handle it.
Perhaps it is a matter of intention. Learning as I do from my own body’s sensation and inner reaction, I’ve found I’m not affected in the same traumatic way by documentary films that show and expose violence in a respectful yet honest way. My nervous system reacts differently when there is an earnest intention behind the audiovisual to move the audience to positive action which is sometimes only possible through awareness of horrifying realities.
I’m very picky about what I watch and the content I create. What we put into our bodies, whether audiovisual or gastronomical impacts us. Shifting audiovisual culture is necessary for healing collective trauma, we can’t keep ingesting things that harm us and expect not to get more sick.
In conclusion I would propose
1) CONSENT: collective agreements around content we find acceptable to share in public and do our best to support provide that choice that Luz mentioned
2) SELF CARE: support individual reflection, observation and self care especially with young people as they navigate what they choose to expose themselves to
3) INTENTION as audiovisual creators have our intentions clear and take responsibility for what we produce. Just like in the food industry we can offer more nourishing and satisfying options with organic ingredients that make it easier for people to shift from their junk food habits 😉
With love from the sky
Vishva’s email [18 April 2025 05.15]:
Watching Batman, the dark knight… Heath Ledger plays Joker and…
master bruce, some people just love to see the world burn
~Alfred (something like that)
The will to act, the will to justify violence..
Taking, intention, volition and agency… Just in case you want to know the schema
When I watch a movie, and in this case when I watched Heath Ledger disappear in the character, well the other way around… The make up, the tone, the magic moan…you see it was a revelation to me, that it was an actor I adored.
To bring something to life on a screen is sensational in many regards on both sides of the screen and in a way while watching a movie I don’t think, I am just present to the next instance. Staying true to my intent of watching a movie.
The art of losing yourself in the question and the answer, or finding your balance in the question or the act of adhering to the answer you chose.. to stay in the instance, in stance…
Why was language created?
Maybe that is a completely different reality than you may when you ask
Why was audio-visual created?
But the question of answering would be insane, and to answer by question the question at hand, is it profane..it just rhymes had to let the rhythm decide…yes, there is but one reality but multiple realities, when I can give in to yours entirely woh…oh…ho, then I am not addressing my own chime of letting, the question refine.. or am I just ..staying in formation, is like hop scotch… Throwing a stone and finding your line.
Every color, every shape, every sound and every scape that changes with stage, you are present too without examination, the mind does not arise, movies are sensorial through and through in that way. The other side is finding your line, once you know you know then you just do as you flow, but if you know your line, you know how to align…most people can not see there lines..
For someone like The Joker, his line was defined and he just aligned and in that I say there is innocence if you may not align with non-violence… Nirdosh, un-mist-ak-able presence of the line… Life is also such a line, the word made us deviate by preventing… By reminding in distance to the sensorial suspension..
I am intellectual-analyzing, I wish it is analysing.. that it comes in time, my point essentially being that the capacity to act, the will to persist and the ardour of staying in-formation, need momentary suspension and movies afford such lines of flight..
When I now read Ako and Vanessa, first I have to congratulate us to not break step or process that minds this circle,
To process the sensorium well, another realities and the art of being a suspension.. you see we are all but suspended in stance, instance to instance.. I seriously believe in pop culture, all of our bubbles pop, you just stay in some longer than others, if you may..the bubble, a bubble and all the trouble can be synergiesed…
What if I could deflect this subversion of sensorium and allow for seeking an insight or more essentially let it unfurl deep and unearth the germinates seed, the opacity of reality, has given way to porosity of reality only if we could recontextualise, the art of not letting anything take hold..of finding the inner quietness in suspension from one instance to the next.. it is all make believe either ways..
Camilo did we succeed in not breaking your schema and integrating into the ebbs and flow of the circle, I wonder what more is in this line.
Circular thinking is still linear thinking done in a circle. When we are ready to fold onto ourselves a spiral arises..
When I say make believe? The battle of frames and capture arise that is violence.. if you may not fight, the fight within, the frames in your own mind, there is something more subtle that resides…easy said yet another easy one..atleast for some pop culture is our ways of life explicitly alchemized, and hence in that line, away to refind and a way to refine
Vanessa’s email [18 April 2025 11.18]:
Thankyou Ako and Vishva ,
Lucky somewhere to have been protected . I tried with my son with video games however now he is 19 and I don’t have much influence .. on him wanting to
Play war games .
Another thing came up after a conversation with a fellow filmmaker.
The diarea of pure nonsense content to make money. Flooding the net with “nothingness/noise “ this is violence.
Another form of violence is related to the film I have been editing about the Mamos, I had been asked to edit the documentary in 5 days .. it took more like 17 days . When I finished I heard that the person who organised the thing was dropping the project. He didn’t want to have anything to do with it anymore .
For me this is violence . You cannot go places and then take material with promises of helping a people with their existential messages and then once it’s finished change your mind. I am still awaiting to see what happens but I have offered to help with any last tweeks or whatever’s.
Film has always shown me such weird situations that I cannot imagine any new scenarios, I will have to add this one to my 11 pages conditions documents .
Vanessa v. Gasselt
Vishva’s email [18 April 2025 13.45]:
Un-mist-ak-able
Nirdosh
Ahimsa or non-violence in intention, action and impact that is the foundation of the living culture I was born into. Nothing absolutely nothing is not violence and hence to cross the barrier into the realm beyond birth and death becomes paramount.
The curse of not knowing how to cast a pleasant presence, let that be of our own making or otherwise, these words in essence ask the question, what to do?
And then in process I have learned to see what does it tell, and to see what does it tell me! A movie as violent, maybe but everything is painted in it, not a single step you can take makes itself available without violence in the cosmology of my home ground.
And in warm data I learned to hold it closer than I have ever seen even when I stood stoned. You see intention is a tricky thing, and in the overall scheme of things is absurdly incomplete. With warm data initially I had felt it absent, I mean the mind and then somehow to draw deep on stands of reality that make the simplest of things possible, how do we know the voice of our mother, how do we shift gears and all of a sudden think in images. To see, to smell with such eccentricity that immense intelligence we call life, has never been quite accessible to retrain. The tree and the bee, the flower and how I see we all share the same foundation. We are all made of atoms.
What is made of us? What are we made of? And ask me ask you again, what is made of us?
How to think in relationships, well it’s more like how to cringe in relationships for our times.
The major problems in the world today are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think”~ nora’s father Gregory Bateson writes
Is an atom intentional, is a cell, we are so where did it arise and how do we align?
Where one side of my practice relies on yoga and dissolution and I unintentionally got here and seeds for it lay scattered in my wake, warm data makes me available to evolution those seeds are here too and they both initially may look incongruent but lead you down the same rabbit hole.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, let it be dissolution or evolution, ways to blunder are many and the guru asks me to stay extra-ordinary. I really don’t know how to stay there, in alignment with my capacities and in alignment with atoms in there unpredictable line of flight, and yet with unlimited insight. To move with everything or to be unmovable, with no ultimate but striving for it. Did I forget to say changing your intention is the first line of violence, and impact and action weave the loom… What is it that looms?
Vishva’s email [3 May 2025 14.12]:
What is staying true to the past? Where is the future? Where does it start? Violence as we speak to, what to bring to the show and tell.. well, I have seen a lot of violent movies and series, they don’t give me nightmares or disturb my sleep at all. Well if I stay awake to finish that is different in a way that they hook 🪝 me in, when I see a movie for the 2nd time now knowing in some regard what is to follow, I wonder did I know what is going to happen next the first time, well well well… Not really I was just engrossed, difference in tone from director to director would reframe something in my daily life but I don’t know what they do to me, those differences in tones, doctrines.
I heard a line in the passing, the fantasist falls if they fall inline to a doctrine…or something like that, I can delve on it but this is what is called thoughting… Taking something from somewhere and not knowing what is going into it.
Sensing, thinking, intuiting and feeling. Violence and silence. Some of these go silent in watching movies in my case. And all of them are recalibrated in relation to relation to relation. What do I bring to the show and tell?
Vishva’s email [4 May 2025 14.14]:
I have a cacophony of ideas in my head, so let me start with a story on beauty… Beauty and the beast
The beast of clarity is something I came up with as an expression in the last REC.. I was thinking about unleashing it, and that could only be done in the right relationship to relationship.
Now, yes…I was walking for a beauty stroll. You know go out look at things that are beautiful living in a city first you look at trees and than you look up at them and slowly you see the color of the sky! Which is not just blue, btw here me ask you..
What colors are trees?
Well so this beauty stroll brought brings us squarely down to Camilo…Camilo…Camilo
You see everyone is always in a hurry and I am rookie in feeling beauty, appreciating beauty in people makes me a bit queasy. No I take the 3rd last turn back towards home, you know our walled enclosure that is the prescription that took beauty for bounty. well admiring the sun, that is getting high was a part of it all and what do I see. I see long hair, and not just that someone taking care of there long hair from behind.
Well longish hair, for a man in our times in my place of origin quite long.. so the assignment is to take pictures of beauty and I do that but neither can the guy see me, neither can I see his face. And that is okay because I am awkward to make him taste a sense of attention. I put my phone down and look at him while I move, he might have slept under the open sky, he might have had no other option unlike I and then our eyes met and they glowed so bright and it made me smile, it made him smile. I did not take another picture maybe I could have, maybe I should have, maybe I would next time I see him on stroll.. I hope we exchange smiles… Well I knew how to look at him centered in beauty, grateful for his slowness, and the stitch of time that brings him alive.
Camilo’s share
Agarrando pueblos
All I want to say about that, the clapper 🎬 in front of the child, it was process to keep things organised, maybe we saw it only because they short the child the least amount in others eyes, we see they see what we see, maybe
Vishva’s email [6 May 2025 15.16]:
I don’t know if it is progress or flak but the show of shows that gave me access to some deeply held stack of impression on violence has come back.
Today while watching an episode I was able to step into fright you know when you have an animal backed to a corner in a cage and there is someone who is sensing the more than them in the fight, that became accessible through this girls indecisive character at first about what to do.. she was just observing everything that was sublime.
I have a good mental hygiene and movies are my guilty pleasure I let them in without any reprieve, Emilio this is my reply to your video now…
Do I learn to own my own state or go into Yoko Ono’s observational bass, the rhythm that lays it all flat and inbetween the two, because I am not using the scissors, how is the live different to the recording. How is a recording of a recording still the same while being different? Then what is the cut of difference!
Here is the video shot on Emilio’s mobile phone of Yoko Ono’s performance and the original video of Yoko Ono’s performance…
Vishva’s email [7 May 2025 16.10]:
In the end it’s not about the sting or the honey. It’s about milk and money.. Venessa keeps on telling me I need to do away with rhyming my lines, the Poly crisis and the climate emergency, coming at us as if it is an existential reality, peppered with the spice of exponential technology,
hopeless romantic, me and my sister we used to watch this particular genre, called chick flicks.. What does that mean no chance to make me anything else everywhere you go you define, you make me, refind the heart, so close and the shadows so bold, in this movement there is a dose of giddy stupor, an ecstasy untold.
Then there is ayn rand, atlas shrugged, I gobbled it up all the same, the heat of the tension of what happens next fully involved and unclearly never seeing the bigger patterns at play until I watch them the 2nd time wishing to look for them, you find what you are looking for, and then there is sometimes when you are just looking…and still there is something you are finding and that is what i have come to know recently as sacred, the unknown sprawl that layers how things make sense in all this haze…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdb4XGVTHkE Vanessa shared a video and asked us to start at 2:40 and it steps into a long walk across the dessert in pakistan and then steps to mislabeling a role, response into the chaotic cacophony of language,.. When I spoke of intention being violent even when it was not event intended to be so, the thing that my path has been informed by the longest is non-violence, Gandhi ji gets it from my cultural premises, it is based in ultimate libration..and I have to thank my father because he kept himself away from rites and rituals, at least by an arms distance while I was young, in a way he let me walk my own path and not enforce one on me, are movies taking my sovereignty away or are they imposing something on my sensiblities in a violent way, who all do I count in the intention that brings this into play!
thanks…
https://isha.sadhguru.org/en/wisdom/article/nishchala-tattvam-creating-unwavering-intention
ZOOM SESSION NOTES, RECORDS AND LINKS
- If you prefer just to listen the Audio Record as a “podcast”
+other audiovisuals shared through the zoom conversation:
- A cell phone video from Emilio
- Recommended by Vanessa, documentary HUMAN Extended version VOL.1, fragment from 3.55min to 6.55min
- The Shocking Life & Performance Art of Marina Abramović (Full Documentary)
- … and trailer “Visages du Sahara”
- Camilo commented a fragment from “Agarrando Pueblo”, colombian false documentary
- Vishva brought a scene from Vikings, TV series
NOTES ON THE ZOOM MEETING
E. Violence is something very present in our time that we need to take into consideration.
C. Festival. Presence of violence in our media, media exploiting the violence. How do we observe and question violence? Are we able not to reproduce violence in our videos? How is violence around? What do we want to bring to our festival from this discussion?.
Va. Contractual violence. Audiovisuals are sensitive material, ex. Some indigenous think that part of the soul is taken when we film someone. Ethics of filming and investing time.
Vh. I’ve been studying beauty as a feeling. Looking at things closely, what’s in them, what’s not. Trying to involve that through your skills. Now I can ground myself in beauty, I can feel it, see the colours differently. I have unlearned how to see only one colour, labels limit the shirts to one color. A lot of my memory is coming back from the past. Something I felt from the past, sensing and feeling familiarity.
Also I watched one of the most violent shows. Passive aggressive social media. War that could be between India and Pakistan.
A. Are we really contributing to social problems, to create a better society?
E. Different kinds of violence 1. Representation of violence: in which way a director or author presents violence to an audience 2. Real violence may be in the process of making the movie.
3. Other violence beyond cinema, violence that is always present, wars that are always present.
Another Example:
Metaphoric violence in the contemporary art scene where many videos are presents, sometimes they are documentations.
Documentation of video documenting a performance by Yoko Ono.
Violence here is not an excess of blood. Feminine condition and violence on women represented by the metaphor of the scissors.
Va. Morbidity and depression reflected in the contemporary artworks, the meaning of art has changed through the years. Beautiful how you filmed zooming to her face, her expression not knowing where this all goes. The other woman is a co-perpetrator. Under their power.
Va.Human documentary, 100 interviews. Vulnerability, violence permeating humanity, but it also talks about love.
C.Lots of stories full of love and full of beauty but immersed into so much violence.
C. I was in the mountains and I followed some alive beings (especially not human) that are next to me and I tried to see how violent they can be.
Then I wanted to film the day by day of the city, understanding more the violence of the city that is full of misery. I found myself hiding. How do you film? I thought of just putting the camera down and be the most honest possible. Concern about the ethics of filming. I don’t know how to express the violence it is very hard for me.
Film “Agarrando Pueblo” In english they called it “The vampires of poverty”. Eng. In spanish it means “Taking out from the people”. Most honest Colombian movement in Cali. False documentary. “Taking out” images from the misery.
Maybe beauty is the next step! That beauty full of respect and moral.
L. Filming the misery of the city there is no possibility of seeing the beauty! Taking pleasure in filming the misery of the people is really violent. Comment on “otherness” and the sense of superiority for Europe.
E. False documentary the goal Is the opposite of what it presents and through this it wants to show how Europe, or people in general, show violence while filming.
L. The movie tries to criticise all that, a critic of how we distort reality.
L. I wanted to film the gentrification in Puerto escondido. Sand black from the pollution, nature has been displaced, consumerism took over. I don’t have pictures of the before and after. Want to add a poem. Hotels they want to show themselves as perfect but there was a lot of imperfection in the construction and the trash. Don’t know how to show the contrast.
Vh. On Vikings: Reanactment of history close to it. Hyper vigilant state, spinning trying to stop but it keeps spinning. Not able to transition. State of abandon cause he knew he was going to Valhalla, that there is a party if he dies. Belief in afterlife.
On Yoko Oko: Public was allowed to come and participate. If I had the scissors what would I do? What about what the other people will think? Was it performed once or more? Was it an experiment for her as well, to see how it changed every time?
C. What is our intention as a group when we film something? Or when we show a piece? What’s the intention for our festival? What are we learning or unlearning. Today I am taking with me: beauty.
E. It is important to highlight relationship between author and viewer. Looking for the intention of the author, if they are honest or if instead they want to show their images only to people who “drink” everything, people looking without intention but with the sole aim of watching.
If something is made with the Hollywood cinema intention, for instance in Viking, I don’t need to see that violence. It provokes instinctual reactions, these are the tools through which cinema manages your consciousness. The viewer has to have an intention.
Maybe it will be interesting to inquire this relationship between beauty and violence.
What is the Ecoversities AULab?
A space for those who are interested in delving into the art of filmmaking, this unconference generates ideas for analysing paradigms together within the Ecoverse. Each month we propose a new theme related to filmmaking, searching concepts that are the basis for an interpretation of the dynamic image realm. Participants selected short films made by themselves or other authors that were relevant to the proposed themes and share them in the meeting, so that they could speak through images and unlearn, re-think, re-assemble, and discuss together the audiovisual language, coming up with some new ideas and threads to follow!