ON GENERATIVE FILMS

ON GENERATIVE FILMS

The affinities between art and digital technology find their fullest expression in the possibility of creating generative, evolving processes. For me, computer language draws upon a “poetics of the living”, insofar as it offers the artwork a unique dimension: the capacity to generate an autonomous life of its own. To experiment with dynamic forms of literary, video and sonic writing within a generative process is to consider another temporal experience of the work, to explore a particular vocabulary and syntax, and to invite an intuitive reading at the boundaries between several forms of expression.

A FILM WITHOUT A FORMAT

The temporal experience of a sonic or visual work is generally defined by a duration. We know the “format” of a video or a musical piece, and its editing is conceived to “inhabit” that span of time as fully as possible. Since 1998, my installations have consisted of interactive and/or generative video films shown across multiple screens, with one central question:

Can a film without beginning or end, without format or duration, exist and take shape by generating a life of its own from its centre, rather than from its endpoints?

For my films, I have developed a process of generative editing governed by chance. Using a custom programme and a dedicated computer connected to a video projector, it presents films across several screens, assembling them from audiovisual loops and title cards lasting between one second and two minutes.

Each film draws upon a database containing several thousand editing units, amounting on average to eight hours of video and sound. Each loop is randomly selected to play on one of the screens, for a randomly determined length of time.

The sound sources are composed so that, through looping and layering, they form generative rhythmic and harmonic sequences shaped by chance. They combine characters’ voices, voice-overs, found sounds, electronic sounds and instrumental samples.

THE LOOP AS A “UNIT OF CHANCE”

The generative process calls for experimentation with a particular literary, visual and sonic vocabulary and syntax. Rather than sequencing my films according to the conventional principles of linear editing, I have chosen to use the loop as a “unit of chance”.

To compose with loops is to transgress linear time and the very notion of the present. Through repetition, the loop alters the perception of whoever reads, watches or listens to it. It surprises and holds us in a time where the present wavers, caught between retention and anticipation.

Whether a motif is repeated in images, literature or music, it touches upon that poetic dimension which is “each time, neither quite the same nor quite another”. Repetition allows a flow to develop, carrying thought and consciousness into a dimension where sensations continually change through their recurrence.

In my films, this phenomenon is heightened by editing a single sequence shot into several almost identical loops, or by using sound loops that repeat with slight variations. These minute differences bring about shifts in perception, creating an impression of coherence within the “discourse”.

SUGGESTING ONE OR MORE LATENT MEANINGS

My films are founded on a constant interaction between the written, the visual and the sonic. This interaction is amplified by the simultaneous presentation of video loops across several screens and the continuous mixing of different sound sources.

The need to understand and construct the world through a model of causality draws the viewer towards an intuitive reading and understanding. To provoke and stimulate this intuition—or this illusion of intuition—is to suggest one or more latent meanings, emerging from encounters between images, between text and image, sound and image, sound and text.

To introduce tension into the discourse and allow it to surface through synchronicity or serendipity requires a vocabulary with a combinatorial syntax: discursive writing must be “dismantled”, and possibilities for movement between signifier and signified must be built in. Each sample then becomes an open interface of actions and reactions, combinations, transformations and shifting connections with other samples.

IN SEARCH OF A FILM THAT INVENTS ITSELF

The search for these spaces “between”, these “interzones”, has led me to experiment with several forms of writing that bring reality, narrative and fiction into confrontation.

When, for example, I choose to follow and film a New York mover or a photographer roaming Tokyo through the contingencies of their journeys (Man with van and Bribes), or when I use an interview with a man recounting the story of his grandfather, a worker at the La Seyne-sur-Mer shipyards (Image tangage), I place my work within a form of writing closely bound to the real.

But when I subsequently bring this writing “of truth” into contact with one or more fictional narrative threads, I seek to unravel that reality, to lead it astray. To unsettle the relationships between text and image, writing and narrative, narrative and fiction, is to seek out what remains unintelligible in things in order to draw closer to the world.

When I heighten the play of confusion and possibility, when I set traps and lay lures through the strategy of secrecy and questioning peculiar to fiction—Where are we? What has happened? Who is speaking?—I pursue the search for a film that invents itself, builds upon itself, and can hold the viewer’s desire suspended in time.