Impermanence

Kyalo Searle-Mbullu

Audio-visual/mixed media, available to view: http://bit.ly/2jMf0SN

It is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them.—Baudrillard, 1981

The artwork was created as a response to the “phases of the image” posited by Baudrillard (1988)—the copy of the original, or simulacrum, representing the successive reflection, masking and perversion, then absence of, a basic reality (1988 This is manifested by the gradual disintegration of a video file of a closeup, blinking eye. Using the music editing software Audacity to process the raw data of the stock footage yielded the resulting unpredictable, data-bent artefacts. Each successive loop was then individually processed again and again (48 times, precisely) to make up the nearly 8 minute long piece. Concordantly, the audio element was constructed from a frozen guitar loop, employing granular synthesis techniques to further mould and sculpt the soundscape from a single source, “using tiny snippets of sound that can be manipulated individually and are recombined to generate the final output” (Price, 2005). The combination of the audio and the visual components results in a short film which subsequently disseminates the idea of repetition as transferral of value between individuals and how that value is communicated.

In this case it can be contextualised as a Platonic interpretation of representation – the artwork is self-aware in that it is a warning of the illusory nature of signs and images: the eye can signify a range of cultural and psychological connotations, including – but not limited to—surveillance, moral conscience, spiritual awakening, divine omniscience and cyclopean sub-humanism. Using this classic symbol of visual perception therefore creates a self-reflexive relationship with the viewer, in turn making them the subject of the artwork’s own literal gaze:

… when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you. (Nietzsche, 1886)

The piece also provokes and brings into question our perceived judgement and understanding of things. Can an entity or object be understood without comparing it to another thing? It stands to Kantian reasoning that the representation, image, or simulacrum, is not the thing in of itself.

The Treachery of Images | Rene Magritte, 1928-9

It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo that fact that we are surrounded by it… We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves… constituting what is present to us as we are. (Berger, 1972: 7-9)

White (2006) contends that we are continuously ascribing value to things with reference to what they are not; how else could we understand big without small, red without blue, good without bad? Likening something to another thing, or being reminded of a similar thing, enables us to make sense of what we are looking at and thereby elicit an emotional response. This is what allows us to create “primary value judgement”. Shrivastava (1996: 97) expands on this notion of representation:

It is not clear how and why the Imaginary fails to organize [sic] perception (meaning/signification) … When we look at something, we perceive that thing; then, when we look at something else, we perceive something else. A change takes place but we still perceive without any help from an entity.

The sonic aspect of the artwork can be similarly discussed in that the looping samples and phrases are an inherent abstraction of the original. Inspired by Basinski’s Disintegration Loops (2001), the soundtrack is “an appropriation of an appropriation… a simulation of a musical work, a copy of a copy, with the original obscured.” (Leaman, 2015) This approach can be interpreted as deriving from a Warholian process of “the dissolution of the real by the image” (Dinallo, n.d.) and ascribes the concept of simulacra to both audial and visual elements. With every blink of the eye, and every playback of the hypnotic guitar loop —the “unique and accumulative damage” (Leaman, 2015) is demonstrated:

as a wholly new work based on the previous passage through the machine… Each loop is to some degree heterogenous, unrelated to the previous loops and yet fundamentally altered and influenced by that which precedes it. (ibid)

With further reference to The Disintegration Loops, Guimond (2007: 127-8) also postulates that “each loop—each ‘sub-work’ of the whole recording —[contains] its own past and its own future.” The very process of the creation of the artwork requires a transformation and adaptation of the pre-existing components. This is in accordance with Kreitler (2009), “as the piece progresses it can no longer be said to be a sequence of loops, but rather a continuous rearrangement and destruction of shards of sound.”

Maloy (2010: 10) eloquently surmises; the “recontextualization [sic] of the audio snippets spells the death sentence of every reference and becomes a simulacrum.” This process of replication results in the interminable decay of the source material:

initiating the new work’s own destruction… it is destroyed as the recontextualisation process is documented… it never again resembles its hypotext fully, resulting in an uncanny, ostensibly meaningless work in its wake… any truth or sense of the real in the original is now lost, leaving behind a work that is not real in itself, yet is still derived from the real… It retains, to a certain extent, the aesthetic properties of the real, yet sheds itself of any of the semantic content that previously tied the original work to the socio-cultural context whence it came. (Leaman, 2015)

This brings us full circle, back to Baudrillard’s “dissimulation” (1981). It is not what the constructed hyperreality “(doesn’t) signify, but the sense of hyperreality itself.” (Leaman, 2015). Ultimately then, it is the process of degradation, rather than the audial and visual content, which becomes the focus of the piece:

To an ever-increasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility. From a photographic plate, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. (Benjamin, 1936: 24-5)

The physical act of ‘reproducing’ the tape loop through the machine is what causes the disintegration, exhibiting the process of an artwork’s reproduction causing its own destruction. It is thus not a reproduction of an artwork, in the conventional sense, but what we might call a ‘deproduction’, a destruction of an artwork—or, more accurately, the production of one artwork documenting the destruction of another. (Leaman, 2015)

And so finally, the inspiration for the title? All of my recent audiovisual experiments exist in a digital, online capacity. Imbued with a sense of hypnotic wistfulness, the common themes running throughout engage with ephemerality at their core. White (2006) asserts that the degradation of signifier and signified will “perhaps… be reduced to such a degree that it becomes unintelligible data, an unfinished thought.” I believe this approach to temporality to be a positive outlook, inherent to a mindful mode of being:

To feel the scourge of impermanence and loss and to appreciate it at the same time profoundly as the beautiful essence of what it means to be at all.” (Fischer, 2012)

 

Bibliography

Baudrillard, J. (1988) Simulacra and Simulations. In: Poster, M. (ed.) Selected Writings. Stanford University Press, pp. 166-184

Benjamin, W. (1936) The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. In: Jennings, M. W., Doherty, B. Levin, T.Y. (eds.) Harvard University Press, 2008. [Online] Available: https://monoskop.org/images/6/6d/Benjamin_Walter_1936_2008_The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Its_Technological_Reproducibility_Second_Version.pdf

Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. Penguin Books

Dinallo, L. (n.d.) Thesis: Warhol’s work expresses philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the extermination of the real by the image, a phenomenon that is an outstanding feature of our mass-media shaped culture. [Online] Available: http://concordiaproject.tripod.com/essay2.html

Fischer, N. (2012) Impermanence is Buddha Nature. [Online] Available: https://www.lionsroar.com/impermanence-is-buddha-nature-embrace-changemay-2012/

Guimond, D. (2007) Intermediality: The Sounds of Disappearance. [Online] Available: https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/im/2007-n10-im1814928/1005556ar/

Kreitler, B. (2009) The Music Was Dying. [Online] Available: https://brooklynrail.org/2009/06/music/the-music-was-dying

Leaman, G. (2015) Memorials Without Mimesis: Abstraction and Intertextuality in William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. [Online] Available: https://disposableeverything.co.uk/2015/05/17/memorials-without-mimesis-abstraction-and-intertextuality-in-william-basinskis-the-disintegration-loops/

Maloy, L. (2010) “Stayin’ Alive in Da Club”:The Illegality and Hyperreality of Mashups. In: Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music [Online] Available: http://www.iaspmjournal.net/index.php/IASPM_Journal/article/viewFile/372/560

Nietzsche, F. (1886) Beyond Good and Evil [Online] Available: http://www.holybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/Nietzsche-Beyond-Good-and-Evil.pdf

Price, S. (2005) Granular Synthesis: How It Works & Ways To Use It. [Online] Available: http://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/granular-synthesis

Shrivastava, V. (1996) Aesthetics of Sound: Critical Analysis of Sound Design in Television and Motion Pictures. Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company

White, R. (2006) Decontextualisation of the Art Object: Making Nothing Out Of Something. [Online] Available: http://www.counterwork.co.uk/writing/decontextualisation.pdf