Program Diary 3: Mechanical Laughter & Waste Re-appropriation: 13th 25 FPS Expanded Cinema

While visiting the Chinese ghost town of Yujiapu, Karl Lemieux, a prominent young Canadian celluloid enthusiast, and BJ Nilsen, a Swedish composer with an ear attuned to industrial soundscapes, scratched on the surface of monumental metal tracks and concrete blocks, empty shells that forgot their once planned use. 

This is the stage of a project that was supposed to engender a monumental Chinese financial district, similar to Manhattan, but naturally it fell through under the weight of its own megalomaniac desires and left behind a trace of reinforced nothingness. Where does a nothingness get the right to stand so defiantly in space and time and what are the parameters of such a post-apocalyptic waste – these are the questions that bubble through the audiovisual performance of this Canadian-Swedish duo, consisting of sights and sounds from the location, designed in the manner of a layered nightmare for twelve 16 mm projectors and a French pavilion in Zagreb.

The Yujiapu performance marks a return to expired things, much before they even seemed to have an expiration date – akin to the concept of a 'return to suppressed idiosyncrasies of outdated things', as theorist and author Evan Calder Williams, the founding father of salvagepunk, put it. Essentially, the underlying idea is that new, better worlds instead of the current decaying one cannot be built by alienating from the mess we made. The only place where we can achieve anything like our utopian projections of gutlessness is the hollow shell of the same chaos we live in.

Celluloid excavations in a symbiosis with abstract combinations of white noise and percussions are the method the masked Swedish duo SHXCXCHCXSH and the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Maia use to build their vision of decay. While discarded pieces of film tapes stumble over one another, cacophonic sounds fly over them like vultures, sometimes attacking them directly and other times only jumbling around them according to their own mysterious free will. Sound, as music scientist and musician David Toop claims, is like a spectre: it works by haunting us. Accordingly, a listener takes the role of a medium that extracts the content which doesn't exist (anymore) in the material world. Imperfect Film, an epic of a downfall and of ghosts abiding in it, abounds in moments when the visual and sonic elements overlap and complement, which could only be an illusion caused by our panicky efforts to bridge the gap between structure and the abyss of nothingness.

These efforts, although in a seemingly more derogatory tone (which could also only be a defence mechanism against unpleasant stimuli they cause), are in the focus of the Berlin-based duo OJOBOCA, represented in this programme section with two performances. Now I Want to Laugh is trying to depict Dr D. Frome's actions, mysteriously hooked on the 'deficient mechanism of human emotion'. We witness a simulation of doctor's hypothetical, never realised 'feeling machine'. A humanoid face is staring at us, scratched and systematically distorted with an entire series of optical tricks. Distorted identity is gaining momentum and bending in a spastic attempt of laugher, while a forceful but rhythmical industrial noise, read in the same context as what we see, becomes an eerie artificially induced attempt at laughter. OJOBOCA's performances make us hostages to 'a reality created by artificial minds', as the description of their second performance New Museum of Mankind says. Artefacts, mostly excerpts from porn magazines, flicker from the big screen, their newly chosen medium. Anachronous bodies in unequivocally carnal positions are recaptured, plucked out of oblivion, trapped in time (or, graphically, in 'the shadow of their flesh'), processed by optical filters, augmented, fragmented and mechanically displayed on the left or right half of the screen, taking it in turns or side by side. All this accompanied by the mechanical voice of an imaginary curator who is allegedly giving us instructions for the construction of the said museum, until it breaks down into an anaemic sing-along, accompanied by a stroboscope. The point is, perhaps, that artificial minds don't find it easy to coexist in mutual harmony, or maybe that we are not capable of perceiving frenzied mechanoid curators and mock-laughers as anything but a bunch of unnecessary glitches, which will achieve their purpose only as waste and fossils in a distant future. Either way – and this is also someone's quote which I'm only mechanically paraphrasing – only when we have no idea what the thing we perceive is supposed to mean, we become aware of the very act of perception.

Danijel Brlas