The Shane Denson reading for this week draws attention to the idea of post-cinematic affect. My attention was drawn to the idea that technology and camera apparatuses can alienate the viewer by creating a distance between what is diegetic and non-diegetic.

Denson explained that, “structural homology—between spectators’ embodied perceptual capacities and those of film’s own apparatic “body,” which engages viewers in a dialogical exploration of perceptual exchange; cinematic expression or communication, accordingly, was seen to be predicated on an analogical basis according to which the subject and object-positions of film and viewer are essentially reversible and dialectically transposable.”

The 2016 film, Ghost in the Shell, is essentially a case study in this reading’s argument.

“these cameras therefore fail to situate viewers in a consistently and coherently designated spectating-position.”

The original animated film seemed to be a human story, as human as it could be given that it focussed exclusively on cyborgs. The camera positions and cinematography are entirely logical for a human spectator. In this video (“How Not to Adapt a Movie”), Evan explains that the new film breaks all kinds of diegetic rules by placing the camera in impossible places, and presenting entirely un-human forced perspectives. If immersion is the practise of essentially forgetting ones own self for a moment and being taken into a piece of art then alienating cinematography is inherently distracting and makes the audience feel even farther disconnected from the characters within the film in a story that desperately needs to pull its audience in.

 

This week’s reading comes straight from our very own tutor, Darrin Verhagen. The reading addresses and successfully makes explicit what I think many artists attempt to play on; that which is unprocessed by the viewer. In my first post, I discussed the idea that psychological expectations are responsible for the way in which we consume information around us, in this reading Darrin walks through the idea that any sound that enters the mind via hearing is processed in any of three ways, “(i) sounds which it pays to focus on (ii) sounds which can be left to a subconscious subroutine/”Zombie Agent”, and (iii) sounds which can be completely ignored.” Of course, Darrin acknowledges that this theory doesn’t simply apply to sound. This also applies to vision as well. I think Darrin is principally responding to two things in the reading: Synthesis and Attention. The way the mind is actively creating meaning vs. the way the mind is ignoring things to create meaning from.

I personally, loved the idea that by using extremely familiar sounds or by familiarising the audience with a sound using another medium (in Darrin’s example motion graphics). One of the things I’ve really started to notice is subtlety in the creation of tension.

In the theatre show I’m working on at the moment, myself and the audio engineer created this beautiful sub-drone from low-passed rolling waves crashing on the shore. The production is Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel which is set on the New England coastline in the late 19th century. The suspense it adds to the protagonists death scene is extraordinary.

The key was the ten minute fade in over the course of the scene. The distraction of the dialog on stage meant that basically the audience didn’t realise how tense the atmospheric sound was getting underneath the scene. Mostly it was just an excuse to use the ridiculously large subs we hired in for the show.

Immersion is very much that tension between attention and synthesis. The mind ignoring and filling in the gaps. As creators, we’re very much trying to interrupt the process imperceptibly wherever possible and that is I guess crucial to whether something is immersive or not.

I recently encountered a Ted talk by neuroscientist, Anil Seth, in which he proposed, “we’re all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it ‘reality.'” His reasoning was that our mind is simply conditioned by its environment to understand the impulses it receives from our senses. And that perception is really just a process of impulses being compared to previous experiences that subsequently form our expectations of the world (The video is at the bottom of this post). Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival is a film that explores this idea (kinda). The protagonist, a linguist, by the end of the film is experiencing “reality” or dreaming (it’s not abundantly clear) outside of time because of exposure to an alien language that isn’t necessarily arranged or contained within any kind of temporal system.

Image recognition technology has advanced to a level that Facebook is now helping blind people see their families through intelligent descriptions of the contents of imagery. I have wondered for some time if a similar thing might be possible with music.

Seth in his Ted talk also described the process of experience from the inside out instead of just the outside in; the idea that we constantly experience not only the world around us, but also ourselves within the world. I know that could sound very simple, but I think immersion (at least in my own opinion) occurs when I forget the latter. When I forget that I exist within the world around me and for a brief moment, the world exists without me, or the thing I am immersed in takes over.

In the same way that something as simple as the THX chord can signal to your mind that you are heading into the world of a film, I would love to create a soundscape that is inherently musical, captivating and that still retains the physicality of a space, something that’s more than just music. To create a piece of music that at some level encodes a three dimensional space or a frame of video and yet still can be partially understood as that thing. (Goal 1)

I would love to create a video sketch that manipulates the feeling of consciousness within the audience. (Goal 2)

And finally, I want to create a media artefact that does both, that explores how music and imagery can combine to not only recode information from other formats that could be so alien, other or new that for a moment the audience might completely lose themselves in it. (Goal 3)

I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the assessment declaration.