Abstract
A programme of short films curated by Catherine Fowler in response to "Semiconductor: The technological sublime" and screened at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi Tuatara Open Late, May 2019.
Enchantment can also issue from the chant as a sonorous repetition. In their earliest collaborations Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt used computers to create animations that they described as ‘sound films’. There was a randomness, a sense of chance and playfulness, in some of this work that was often created during live performances, as real-time processors of audio-visual data created the music and animated imagery. This interest in sound is on show at City Gallery, and it becomes the excuse for the first screening programme. Acoustic Geometries explores ways in which audio-visual relations can ‘send … the body moving; the mind dreaming; the air oscillating’.3 It begins by pairing Semiconductor’s The Sound of Microclimates (2004) with Len Lye’s Particles in Space (1966). In both, light—in the form of blurs of colour or specks of white—becomes animated. Light floats, dances, and pulsates, escaping the frame and creating patterned afterimages or acoustic geometries.
Pattern turns to pulsation with Clint Enns’s Let Me ASMR You (Canada, 2014) and Mirjam Bromundt’s Hold Your Breath (Austria, 2014). In both, we are reminded of how sound waves pass through our bodies, reverberating in cavernous spaces, creating synaesthetic effects or quotation marks around our breath. The pleasing orderly rhythms of the first four films is disrupted by the second video from Semiconductor, A–Z of Noise (1999). Like the lighting of a fuse, we should anticipate an explosive ending. Voiceovers dominate the next two films. In No Stairway (NZ, 2006), Stella Brennan adapts a text by Henri Michaux that tells of claustrophobia and psychosis. Yet the emotion of this drama is twice removed, first by an automated voice and second, by a camera which undulates and circles, ascending vertiginously across patterned wallpaper. Anri Sala’s Làk-kat (which means ‘gibberish’), shot in 2003 in Senegal, features a lesson in which three boys repeat words spoken in Wolof, one of the local languages. It is important to know that all the words the boys repeat have to do with darkness and light, blackness and whiteness, and also that the starting point for Sala came when he learnt that many of the Wolof words for colours had been lost from the language. Finally, in Nikolai Nekh’s Half-Cut (Portugal, 2014), soundtrack becomes a weapon or bargaining tool between public transport workers and their bosses.