High Brow Low Rez Real Life Cinema (A Diary-Fiction by Mark Amerika)

High Brow Low Rez Real Life Cinema (A Diary-Fiction by Mark Amerika)

Arrival
Salvador
Bahia
Sun rocks beach waves
Spirit rhythm smell dende wafts skin
Skin colors remix clothes tight heels hair
Afro Brazilian Afro Mysticism Afro Futurism
Slum dogs monkeys babies rabies Reais
Street fucking park fucking beach fucking
Used bookstore cum samba dancing bar
Beer caipirinhas more beer salsa samba rap
Music dancing reading drinking reading kissing almost fucking
Michael Jackson Michael Jackson Michael Jackson

Film festival seminar symposium convening
Panels on the image as erotic skin of language
The desire of the image to seduce
The politics of the image seducing
The manipulation of the image as destiny
Digital embrace digital abhorrence digital confusion
More panels on the image as sociological converter
The image as dissociated body seeking connection
The image as historicized fiction documenting the transformation of the image from film to pixel
The hotel five star 3.5 star two star full of stars
Real stars wannabe stars assistant stars star fuckers
Workaholic stars alcoholic stars meteorological stars
90% chance of rain but only sun with a few passing clouds
Winds picking up in the evening
Highs in the upper 70s
Where is the winter rain?
In Salvador this IS the rain

All fives senses sticking to skin
and lapping it up as if engulfing an ocean (of mystic-spiritual data)

Acaraje
Baiana white cotton dress two devoted women assistants
Frijoles deep fried in dende everywhere dende
Red palm oil puddling in everyone's stomach
Take a break eat a steamed one
now you have had abara
Film screenings Pasolini retrospective Theorem
An ongoing discussion on  
the raw presence of trance-sexuality as outsider knowledge
"This is the impetus of Amerika's film"
"But his film is not a film"
Now Amerika himself comes on stage
He introduces the work before it screens
"This is not a film per se --"
(he's talking about Immobilité)
"It borrows from cinema's past but is itself NOT cinema per se ...
In an ideal world the work would loop eternally
and you would be able to enter and exit the work whenever you want.
But this is not an ideal world"
Later the Italian critic says he loves Amerika's work
"The images are perfect," says the Italian (a top Pasolini scholar) --
"and you deal with all of the issues, the big issues:
love and sex and death and philosophy and of course cinema itself
but then you comment on these reflections as PART of
the same creative process so that we are always aware of the auteur --
the PRESENCE of the auteur"
Later the Pasolini scholar is making fun of the way the Americans
pronounce the names of theorists like
Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze
Later remarking how great it must be "to move around the world
making films with beautiful young women
and then getting invited to yet more exotic places around the world
to EXHIBIT and/or screen the works before international audiences
and then using these exhibitions and screening and events
as scouting trips to generate yet more contacts
with beautiful young women to make even MORE obscure works of moving visual thinking
as you [he's speaking to Amerika] prefer
to call these 'projects'..."
(& he claws his fingers for effect)

Amerika is listening to everything the Italian critic says
thinking the Pasolinian is experiencing some kind of
creative transference which Amerika can actually relate to
because Amerika is changing his own personality
right here right now in Salvador
a place he has always dreamed of immersing himself in
Amerika is now more fluid and intersubjective
as he watches himself slip inside the mystic-spiritual aura of
the various creative intellectual trance-sexual people
he intermingles with
because this way he can cease having to be something he is not
namely
himself

But what about the French film critic?
Is she really a film critic?
No she's actually a practicing French psychoanalyst
who just happens to excel at analyzing erotic art films
"Where is she now?" he asks his Bahian posse
and they say they think she's hiding in her hotel room
"Waiting for the Amerikan director!" says one of Salvadorian homies
who have successfully started holing up with him
in his oceanfront suite
in a different part of this stellar international hotel
where he's now musing aloud about this Lacanian psychoanalyst
whom (he tells them all) could easily be in his next film
if only she'd allow herself to truly play herself as is

("What is it about the erotic image that makes us cum so?"
"Comme ci comme ça")

Later at the closing party
the Lacanian psychoanalyst is drinking in excess
and feels more confident about her English speaking
"So often we hear the word moving as in moving image
but also moving visual art or what the American
referred to as moving visual thinking ..."
The Brazilian director tries to pipe in
but the French psychoanalyst is having none of it:
"Something more in tune with painting than film or video art --
but then what about the narrative?
The story is driven by the subtitles --
not translated-dialogue-and-superimposed-over-the-image subtitles --
but remixed text as subtitles --
white text on black background
suggestively inserted throughout the work
so that you are now literally reading the story
as if in the literary or philosophical mind of the writer telling the story
but also cutting away to the images captured
by the artist/auteur the text constantly refers to ..."
The Pasolinian wants to be part of the discussion too
and now appears out of nowhere saying:
"All of the images in the film were captured on mobile phone
which have a magical almost subterranean dreamlike quality to them
as if our memories themselves were made with
a lower resolution technology --
one that renders the experiential quality of the images
with an intentional bias toward the romantic --"
"But not the nostalgic?" (in French)
"No" says Amerika or the Pasolinian or is it the Brazilian?
"Maybe it's more like Chris Marker?" (in French)
"Yes" says one of the directors -- you could say that
And then the famous New Cinema Argentinian director
makes a rare and unexpected appearance
and the subject changes to What Comes Next
i.e. What Comes After Her Big Award at Cannes
She insists her next film is going to be released for free on the Internet
and that the British producers have already accepted these conditions
"There is no other way" she says
(or Amerika says) (or both simultaneously)
She says that this is what will happen with all films
no matter how much money someone wants to invest in them
and in fact IS already happening but with poorer quality versions
so why not put the absolute best version out there on your own terms?

The Amerikan agrees
"The rise of the Altruistic Producer Collector" (in French)
"Whatever that is --"

The final party
The final early morning hours
The core group of politicized cinephiles now looking over the bay
The best DJ in all of Brazil taking it up a few notches
The interracial anti-ageism vibe creating endless open source sampling
Mouths slipping from mouths into other mouths
and more mouths still coming
The drunk student assistants are now ready to fuck all of the stars
but their boyfriends and girlfriends are intervening
unless they too want to fuck the stars
the international stars

The international stars are leaving tomorrow
The international stars are leaving tomorrow
The international stars are leaving tomorrow

Who will turn all of this into their next international co-production?

Ocean of Data (Remix - by Mark Amerika)

(Original version published in May 2009)


These unconscious ontologies that permeate my every aesthetic becoming are being remixed, postproduced and/or creatively processed by my body as part of some ongoing desire to philosophically speculate what it means to be human in digitally networked culture. It's as if I cannot stop myself from collecting the most heterogeneous source material available to me everywhere, all the time, i.e. the unobtainable sum total in formation.

The sum total of Source Material Everywhere is never finally summed up as there is always the next instance or occasion of becoming that our bodies faithfully execute (remix, postproduce) without our even thinking about it even though an experiential version of the thought itself may cross our minds (and in crossing, layering our next inevitable becoming with more marked presence so that we can once again lose our creative selves in the process).

My practice-based inquiries into the philosophical nether regions of "wondering" seduce me into the adventure of ideas coupled with the lure of feelings that sweeten the pot while I bet my next reinvention of "creative self" as artist on a new direction I have yet to seriously pursue. This means that I must once again put my mind to it, but in doing so, embody the differance my next innovative performance is bound to become. Will I direct another formally experimental work of arthouse cinema steeped in the raw emotions of small yet personally significant gestures? Will I start my long-in-coming YouTube confessions? Or will I just finish the novel I started in 1998, the so-called Big Book, the one that details my quest for oblivion?

Perhaps I can reinvent myself as The Artist 2.0 ...

Everything feels awash in an ur-immersive mesh. I cannot secularize the elements of experience and thought that jab at me at from all sides any more than I can stop myself from remixing the various layers of intersubjective jamming I may have accumulated in the last 48 hours while conversing with 27 people who also tap into their own unconscious hauntologies while mediumistically rendering into vision all of their former, current and future creative selves. The formula I postulated in remixthebook still stands:

M = Many
One = Fluid Singularity
1 = Remix-in-process

and conclude

M = One + 1 (always becoming)


(In this scenario vectors gather strength
via an accumulation of causal feelings
+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1
feelings relayed into ongoing throbbing intensities
between occasions of aesthetic experience
forming a pattern of energetic transmissions
between vibratory events)

This is why art after philosophy after art can exclude nothing. The network of prehensions will not allow the un- and/or en-folding to happen any other way. Philosophical speculation has no finality because the dreamworld within the world within which the artist as philosopher speculates has no finality. How else are we to innovate our creative selves into the flow of events if not via the postproduction of presence? Before any work of systematization can even begin, the creative process of remixology (of perpetually perishing while "making it new") requires the living organism to continue forging its ongoing aesthetic assemblage into the most unexpected configurations. For me, it's a kind of on-the-fly mash-up of collage technique with montage structure that uses the affective nature of hyperconscious dreamtime situations to filter specific “patterned contrasts” from the flow of assemblages that circulate both externally in my socio-cultural relations but also internally via the customized patches I parlay in my ongoing sequence of deep interior shots. The cinematic quality of the art/life blur is pronounced and at times feels like a remix of articulated theatricality, writerly choragraphy, aesthetically manipulated philosophical speculation, and hungry lust.

Deep inside the actor's studio, there is a swollen tongue flickering away the signifiers and further whetting already damp appetites. As repetition subsides, appetition takes hold and projects my experimental adventure on to screens and walls and bodies and inner corporeal nerve zones like never before.

Philosophy begins with wonder and even when the artist is done speculating and has turned the mechanism off so that their agency may finally rest, the wonder itself remains. It is this remainder that always re-minds me that I need to continue creating once I feign wakefulness and begin prehending the ocean of data that engulfs my inevitable next becoming.

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Metadata: creativity, aesthetics, remix, postproduction, prehension, potential, performance