Break in the Chain of Light

I went to the Experimental Tuesday of December 2nd, 2008. I will be commenting on all the showings briefly, then go more in depth into two of the showings.

The first show was Three Hours, Fifteen Minutes Before the Hurricane Struck, a silent 35mm film with still images and text. The next was Elements of Nothing, a 35mm film of assembled layers of imagery with very music over it (piano, bells, and other like instruments), captivating the audience with its imagery. Third was The Breath, a silent film of various shots of bamboo plants. Fourth was Brilliant Noise, a 16mm film that mixes NASA footage mixed with ambient sound (if you can call it “ambient”). Fifth was Observando el Cielo, which mixes seven years of field recordings of the sky with various sounds. Sixth was What the Water Said 4-6, which we saw in class.

Brilliant Noise was my favorite of the films we saw. The sound, as I said before, could be described as “ambient,” although that description falls sadly short from what it actually sounded like (though, like most ambient sounds, it is hard to describe the actual sound in much more specific terms). The sounds of the film I would describe as the sounds of the sun, if the sun did in fact have a “sound.” The film was very grainy and, exposing energetic particles and solar wind, which appeared as white noise on the screen. Interestingly enough, this footage was unaltered in this aspect, exposing what images look like before cleaned up by NASA. The sound fit the white noise-graininess of the film, using a lot of the same kind of sounds that would come from a television set that was not getting reception very well.

The sounds of this film had a lot of the same raw aesthetic feel to them as Aaron Ximm’s did when he presented his sounds in class. Glenn, though not really specifically addressing the issue of authenticity, is very important to him. The sound in this film could definitely be described as authentic, though it also has the feel of distortion to it. I think its very interesting that author of this piece chose to call it “Brilliant Noise.” The program for this showing says that the soundtrack was created by “directly translating the intensity of the brightness into audio manipulation.” It’s not completely clear to me what that means (or how you directly transfer brightness into sound), but the concept is very interesting. Obviously, sound is not an afterthought in this piece but is truly one with the images of the piece as the author goes through lengths to try to create sounds of the sun.

Three Hours, Fifteen Minutes Before the Hurricane Struck was a silent film. This film, and other silent films during this showing, reminded me of John Cage’s 4’33” piece from 1952 (in which Cage wrote a piece which informed the musician to play nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds). What I realized while I watched these films in silence in the Union theatre is that there is never really true silence unless you plug your ears. The sounds of the fans in the room, the sounds of people shuffling in their seats, and the sounds of my own breathing were only amplified in this environment. It became the symphony of the piece. I became very aware of the sounds (and self conscious of my own as I watched) while this piece was being shown. Glenn Bach talked about this in his lecture (and in the readings posted), about how we go through life numb to many of the sounds we hear because we filter them out, and that is really the point of sound art and the concept behind what Aaron Ximm does. Sound artists are trying to get the rest of the world to realize the sounds around them that they have grown numb to, to focus on the everyday mundane noises and find beauty in them.