I Can Relate (Cornish Version)

Immobilité

"Every story is a travel story -- a spatial practice."
-- Michel de Certeau



I.



This is the view from my well-positioned perch on top of Woodlane Crescent. The location is Falmouth in Cornwall, UK, and is the summer headquarters for my next "foreign film" now in (post)production.

This second foreign film is called Foreign Film (Immobilité) and is being made using a Nokia N95 mobile phone ("multimedia computer" is how they hype it) and is being initially sponsored by the Tate Modern and the iRes lab at the University College Falmouth.

Immobilité is the second in a series of feature-length works of moving visual art that I am calling the "Foreign Film Series." The inaugural work, entitled Foreign Film (My Autoerotic Muse), is in the final stages of (post)production and currently has a running time of 85 minutes.



II.



For many years now, I have been investigating the concept of walkology which is a cross between Thoreau-styled woods-walking and Situationist dérive.

Issues of walkology, drift, roaming interiority, proprioception, and using scenic resources to generate philosophical imagery (don't ask, don't tell) are central to the early "treatment" of Immobilité.

Some of my scatternotes (off the cuff):

Mobility versus immobility.

Fluid movement of the body unconsciously generating new processural imagery versus stagnant inability to dream or creatively visualize the next scenic development.

But the binary is really not as black and white as it seems.

For example: the cinematic versus the photographic.

Is it really true that a cinematic approach to "making" relates more to lucid dreaming and a photographic approach is more a memento mori or an attempt to preserve a life captured before its inevitable death?

It would seem that these distinctions no longer hold.

The cinematic and photographic are embedded in each other and are swallowed whole by the high-definition videographic.

Not to mention emerging, mutant offspring of all of the above, such as the mobile videographic.

But back to mobility versus immobility and the blend therein.

Chris Marker's Le Jette is a kind of nightmare "still-life" in search of its cinematic other.

Technologically (mediumistically), the premise is immobility.

Narratively, it's something else.

A movement into the unreal nature of quite literally becoming nature, of virtually imagining nature as an image coming (before going).

Of making an appearance.

Walking out the door of my house in Falmouth, without even knowing whether I am coming or going, I move toward the ocean and in so doing, I catch a trail.

Walking triggers memories that soon turn into memoir that then gets remixed into pseudo-autobiography (fiction). The persona playing "me" in this ongoing story is "not-me" but at least I still feel comfortable in the role.

Naturally (creatively), I will transfer this state of being becoming something else to my actors who will hopefully experience something similar without even rehearsing for it.



III.



It is hard to tell if this trail I am on is simply part of a trek through my wooded neighborhood, a drift into the University College Falmouth campus across the street from my house, or some secret path to a beach that ends on a cliff that looks out to a vast sea.

The difference between these various locations no longer matters. It could be here, it could be there. It could be WAY OVER there (on the edge of a precipice sensing the beyond).

The important thing right now is that I am moving in it.

And I as move in it, I continue to capture more data, more source material for the story that awaits its own imminent arrival.



IV.



In fact, my immediate location can be situated in all of these words and image markers that facilitate the improvisational development of a script (mutating codework) that instructs the Director on how to behave (perform) while making (while "making do").

Suddenly, I am at once morphing into a simultaneous and continuous fusion of movements that is part search for grounded reality, part disorientation and part autohallucination.

"If I am not making this up, then who is?"

(That is the foreign film talking -- I am just taking notation).

The quest: to turn intersubjective dérive into autopoietic collaboration.

To use a mobile phone, a cluster of walking bodies, and an imaginary nature to capture what was once cinematic but has now become the dreamworld of international culture giving birth to multiple, mixed realities.


V.



Soon I will walk to the ends of the Earth and port myself to another space.

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Metadata: philosophy, walking, visual art, proprioception, artists, remix, Cornwall, cinema, psychogeography, mobile phone