Painting the Walls

I'm back from my expeditions, and in the deep woods of the virtual, I've found my first materials to create something. While I am still exploring, reading, and collecting, I felt the need to make a first attempt at putting together some flashes of images that started forming in my head. So here I want to share that attempt at an audiovisual piece. It's formed out of images I found, and then I resculpted them and weaved them all together. It's mostly an exercise in form and imagery, but I do hope there are the first traces of a narrative and reflection of my research. It's titled I'm Starting Over.

Here's the link: https://youtu.be/DFYC8tvFPfw

"Bro this is like a dream I had"

It mostly consists of images I borrowed from the internet. It's found footage in a way that it's very recognizable from where I 'found the footage', that way I hope to create a sense of familiarity for people who in some shape or form have lived on the internet. Although I do feel that the word 'escape' is different for every individual - that's why some images are kind of niche to my personal experience -  there is a sense of 'alone togetherness' on the internet that I did want to reflect in choosing some more recognizable images, for example, the last to clips of my video. Images spread like fire in virtual woods, and that sense of an inside joke, a meme, that wholly consists inside the virtual is always been fascinating to me

In this piece, I do want to kind of play with that recognisability. Like the comments on videos that are titled Weirdly Familiar Places *SCARY* that say "I feel like I've been here before..." The popularisation of nostalgia is a very big thing on the internet, and I do really love those videos, but it has come to a point where it is starting to romanticize loneliness. And like all things that become big on the internet, it has transformed into a capitalistic trend. So with my last image, the slow zooming out of the macOS X screensaver - a very recognizable and nostalgic image -  and Adrianne Lenker's music (which I'll come back to later), I try to poke fun at that, while at the same time trying to achieve exactly what I'm condemning.

Restarting yourself

Right before that, we have the montage of the white, typical liminal space-esque image of the people moving across the screen, which starts to buffer and go to white. We hear Lenker say "I'm starting over", which are subtitles and my title screen at the same time, and then a YouTube loading screen. The video kinda breaks here. It's an interpretation of a machine buffering and breaking down, like the rainbow-colored circle that keeps on spinning, the unmovable screen. It's something we're confronted with all too often, but this whole idea of systems breaking down has been given a totally new connotation since I started my research on this project. In my video, I celebrate it in a way. Here it's not the end, but an opening, a new beginning. I make the connection between humans (with the use of Adrianne Lenker's voice) and machines, which are not so different when it comes to breaking points. I of course took inspiration from Legecy Russel and what she wrote about the glitching of machines and people. The way that "Inside of this beatific brokenness and as travel beyond it, we ask: What's next? Where to go from here?" It's an ode to shutting down, turning yourself off and then on again, and magically working after that.

YouTube loading screen

The virtual is a cabin in the woods

The music was there from the beginning. It lay underneath as an audio track from the first image and helped construct the rest as I went forward in my timeline. I always wanted to make something hyper-digital with a very acoustic, natural sound. Far too often I see internet-inspired audiovisual works that have this beating, pulsing, hardcore techno sound. It's very digital-like of course, but for me, that is not what that sounds like, or at least not from the angle I'm approaching it from. The soundtrack is constructed from a musical piece called music for indigo by Adrianne Lenker. It's an instrumental outtake from her album songs that she recorded entirely in a cabin in the woods, which you can hear in the way the outside birds and leaves ripple through in the music sometimes. Very Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago-like. Here I took inspiration from Outer Wilds and how it integrated acoustic music into its sci-fi premise. The music is a contrast with the image as well as an infusion of the ideas I'm trying to lay out. It's dreamy, very gloom-core, and puts the viewer at ease. Slowly taking them by the hand into the universe that is constructed on the screen. But also circles back to this idea of romanticization of loneliness and nostalgia. It's very cliché and didactic at points, which I actually kind of like. It makes a fairytale out of virtual landscapes. 

 zombie girl music video, Adrianne Lenker (2020)

And with this magical music thread that is woven beneath the images, I do hope there is a sense of optimism that's apparent in the video. That in all its bizarreness, silliness, and disparity, virtual worlds do give me hope for a better reality. It's why for my end credits I use images of the frutiger aero aesthetic; it's at its surface a literal mixture of nature and the internet, but also reminds us of a kind of digital optimism of the early 2000's, which then comes back to nostalgia. It's a hopeful encapsulation of everything I'm trying to say.

Next steps forward

I'm going to put this video to rest for now. I like having a rough, impulse-based attempt at something that I can always fall back on. It also taught me that moviemaking can be very much like sketching, quickly putting some things down, and assembling images, and is much more improvised than I thought. It gives me comfort that sometimes approaching an audiovisual work is not far removed from sculpting with clay. But for now, I want to fall back into researching. I feel like there is much more out there that I haven't explored and want to take a small step back in that regard. I want to take what I've laid out here and move to a little bit more typical way of making an audiovisual work; I want to take what I've learned and going to learn in the near future and merge it into a scenario of some sort. I feel the urge to write a standalone text and make it into a semi-narrative piece. I’ve mostly transformed my ideas into a visual, esthetic-based work witch contains some element of research, but now I want to start from more tangible ideas and try and pour it into a somewhat concrete script. Each day I'm coming closer and closer to something like Jane Schoenbrun's We're All Going to the World's Fair and how they combine digital footage and internet-based images with a more classical way of storytelling. Their way of making a hybrid movie that tiptoes the line between the digital and the physical is something that inspires me endlessly. And with the images I created here, and a maybe more thought-out plan, I can make my attempt at something like that. Until then I hope I can enjoy the way there.

Gabbro in Outer Wilds