The Chronos Project
Malcolm LeGrice, London 1995
Chronos, the Titan who came to rule the Universe, is Time -not the clock-tyrant measuring every quartz-accurate second as commodity - but the one-way flowing medium in which eventscome into being, mature and decay. It is the separator of moments and the reminder of mortality. We sense it indirectly through the rhythms of our bodies, the rotation of sun and moon and the ever quickening cycle of the seasons. The passage of Chronos is cursed in the unrelenting process of ageing but celebrated through music, dance and song.
We deny and at the same time confirm Chronos through memory - we resist it through making images - but these also fade, shatter and decay. The fear of loss and the desire to hold - make permanent, are latent in every image - every representation. In ecstasy, presence, sensual experience, colour, pitch, tone, Chronos seems to be ignored or at least forgotten but returns in the trace, representation and symbol.
I have just completed a TV production (Arts Council - Channel Four commission) titled 'Chronos Fragmented'. This is a one-hour programme intended for a normal 'linear' transmission. However, the programme is just one outcome from a much broader project which already has some alternative versions and is expected to remain 'open-ended' related to developing technologies like CD-ROM.
In the same way in which the project has no prospect of a completion, it is also impossible to define a clear origin to the work.
Of course, the most important issues remain the aesthetic, philosophical and theoretical questions which are raised by the work. These are difficult to approach directly, especially by the artist who has made the work. Choosing to start from questions of technology is partly because this offers a simpler approach to some of the artistic questions but also because the artistic choices and opportunities in this project are fundamentally tied-in with technological matters. I have always contended that form (or language), content and technology are not separable.
Two major technological shifts in my work are crucial to the development of the Chronos project.
One is the increasing involvement with computers applied at a variety of levels from the mere technical control of editing to the synthesis of image and sound and selection of sequences in the editing process. Though I made a computer generated film and some other computer art pieces in the late 1960's, the first serious work I did with this was incorporated as three of the sections in "Sketches for a Sensual Philosophy", all of which involved writing programmes to generate or manipulate picture and sound directly on the computer (an Atari ST) in 'real-time', subsequently recorded to video for the programme.
The second technological shift is the availability of acceptably high image resolution from light, portable video. In May 1988, I bought one of the first Video 8 cameras to become available.
Though as a film maker, I had shot most of my own film, I had never enjoyed the weight and wait involved in film production. What video 8 and later Hi8 promised and achieved for me was a less intrusive and more spontaneous basis of recording images. The tapes were cheap - lasted 90 minutes - could be re-used - the camera was small and light and recorded good quality sound as well as picture. In a soft bag I could slip it over my shoulder and carry it with me even if I had no particular purpose in mind. When I shot material, I was unobtrusive - like any home-video
maker - attracting no particular attention. Added to all these virtues, I also liked tte image on the screen. It was sharp - contrasty - strongly coloured and bright - even before Hi8, I had used some of the Video 8 material on the Channel Four production"Sketches for a Sensual Philosophy" without encountering any problems with the transmission engineers.
I found I did not hanker after the big screen, film look. On the contrary - video and the TV screen were providing me with the 'lower-key' less pressured context I needed. It satisfied the need I felt and continue to feel, to bring the making of work closer to the lived life. This was not a desire to make myself overtly the primary subject of the work - in a sense this is unavoidable in art however abstract or existentialist the starting point - but it was an attempt to close the gap between life experience and the subject of the work and in particular to re-enliven my investment in the shot image. I remain fully aware that the immediacy and convenience offered by video is no more 'natural' or neutrally un-mediated than working with film; the choice is symbolic as well as technical bringing with it its own established discourses and interpretative codes.
Though both video and computer technology created some new conditions for me, it did not involve a completely new approach from my own previous work in film, particularly in the area of image manipulation - replacing laborious photo-chemical processes with electronic and digital methods. The small, light video camera certainly represented a continuity with one major aspect of experimental film's history - that which stresses the artist's individual authorship through the act of 'writing' with the camera.
For my own practice and psyche, there is no doubt working withVideo-8 answered my needs at the level of recording or collecting - sequences - images - sounds, but it did not, in any direct way, answer other questions concerning the next level of selection, order, synthesis, symbol, metaphor - the structuring process making this into a work in a public discourse. I resist the diaristic interpretation which places the 'life' rather than the constructed-symbolic work at the centre of interpretation.
So - to clear it up a bit - for the Chronos project, there are at least two issues - one is the raw material, the video sequences on tape, their meanings and interpretation, the other is the structuring and transformation of this material through juxtaposition and re-working. The first issue spins theoretically around understanding how meanings enter and are inscribed in the recorded material, the second depends on what structures for connection or models for experience we can bring to bear on the ordering of the material.
The Material
The raw material - some sixty hours or so of video images, growing in both directions - forward as I shoot new material, and backwards as I incorporate earlier film images - is not a'diary'. It ranges from near 'home-movie' at one end to almost camera-edited short video poems at the other. In between is a range of sequences recorded on impulse or within some very tentative idea of a theme to which it might relate.
Almost all has been recorded with an attitude of 'low-key' intervention in the pro-filmic - a reluctance to intervene but also an awareness that what seemed 'charged' at the moment of shooting may not seem so in the subsequently screened image and vice-versa.
Though the material has been deliberately shot resisting any over-riding preconception it is none-the-less 'motivated' and within causal chains some of which derive from me and some which derive from other circumstances of which I am an 'agent'. This motivation or causality is inscribed in the material as latent meanings which may be more or less dominant. This inscription of meaning can be located in:
- the signification of the events themselves occurring before the camera;
- why I am where I find myself at the time of recording;
- the details of the act of recording as traced through the choices made, like framing, centring, camera movement or when to start and stop recording all as value signifiers;
- the technology and its in-built technological/language discourse (lens structures, colour-biases, auto-aperture, recording level limiters etc.).
In addition to the meanings inscribed in the individual shots, certain sets of sequences are themselves already determined within 'themes' or have other kinds of coherence - geographical - all shot within a short time - similar subjects shot intermittently over a period of time - psychological coherences and so on, even if these are not consciously pre-determined.
The Structure
There is an evident parallel between the problem of structure I face (faced) and that implicit in the concepts of Dziga Vertov. His "Kino Eye" theory similarly assumed a structuring process aimed at 'making-sense' of material which had been recorded beyond the confines of a narrative or documentary script. On montage Vertov said:
"'Kino Eye', flinging itself into the heart of the apparent disorder of life, strives to find in life itself the answers to the questions it asks; to find amongst a mass of possibilities the correct, the necessary fact to solve the theme."
then from the same piece:
"Montage - when I decide upon the order in which the filmed material will be presented (to choose from amongst the thousands of possible combinations the one that seems most appropriate bearing in mind the nature of the filmed material itself or the demands of the chosen theme)".
(Undated source translated by Christoph Giercke, published in 'After Image' no.1, April 1970).
However, for the Chronos project, there were some distinct differences to the assumptions made by Vertov. Coming from a background of formal/structural experiment I could no longer assume a singular form of resolution to thematic notions nor their full consistency with the 'nature' of the filmed material. This view emerged out of the anti- or non-narrative concepts which have accompanied my filmic exploration of repetition, improvised variations (on visual themes), the notions of 'verticality' proposed by Maya Deren and the awareness of programmable permutative or multiple solutions to structural problems. It also emerges from the actual possibility for exploring complex multi-conncetiveness or multiple variation implicit in use of computer technology.
For my project I sought (continue to seek) structural models which have a high degree of flexibility and correspond more adequately to the fluidity and uncertainty which seems to pertain in the way in which the mind deals-with, works-on and transforms its remembered or learned experience. I have thought of these structures in the context of a 'Memory Model' where, at the risk of over simplification, the shot sequences represent the perception and the structure and juxtaposition the act of memory.
This concept is apt in that the video recording does carry the documented trace of light and sound from its moment of recording directly to its moment of reconstruction-presentation. The image is carried form one-time to another.
It is clear that in memory, images from one source are linked with others in a continuing variety - used and re-used - constantly transformed in the process. In other words, meanings are not locked into the initial form of the memory but develop through re-juxtaposition. This is an active rather than nostalgic (or 'factual') notion of memory.
Non-linearity and Random Access Memory
The new computer technology applied to video makes an exploration of this process and analogy possible both in terms of developing structures for single 'linear' works or more radically for producing works which remain open in their form of presentation either through permutative options or interactive response with the user.
The most challenging concept relevant to cinematic structure emerging from computer technology is Random Access Memory (RAM). The 'random' in Random Access Memory has nothing to do with random number generation or 'chance' procedures. Conceptually, RAM represents a system of information storage where the sequence in which information is retrieved may be entirely different from the sequence in which it has been recorded with no additional cost in time or energy. In all print, film or tape systems, the retrieval sequence is linear - shot one must be passed to get to shot two - in a RAM based system, the location addresses of any item of data are equidistant - location 1 is as close to location 100 as it is to location 2. At its purest, RAM is a memory system best visualised as a multi-dimensional matrix where all addresses are equally proximate with communication between them taking place at the speed of light.
In fact, various constraints - the scale of information storage, inevitable interfaces with rotational (discs) or linear devices (tape) and possibly mathematical limits on constructing non- linear progression) create gaps between concept and technological realisation.
It therefore remains a matter of choice (and technological capacity) what is taken to constitute a unit of the data (a pixel, a frame, a sequence) and where the potentialities of Random Access is to be applied in the process of combination.
For the Chronos project these gaps between concept and technological reality are of no consequence. What is of importance is the concept of RAM as a model for memory and a structuring principle for the video source material together with sufficient technical opportunity to exercise this in an artistic work. The philosophical and artistic implications influencing the structure of the work are more important than the actual technology employed (which has to date been hybrid). The concept of Random Access Memory is taken as a reference point because it offers me a more appropriate basis for following my artistic intention than other available models.
Chronos The Work
It is in the interaction between the structuring process and the material that the work is being realised and in which I can define some specific artistic problems.
I was/am faced with a very large source of recorded material, in all of which I have a strong personal motivation. It is intrinsically confused and confusing (it would be of no interest if it were not). Whilst I am trying to make artistic (creative) sense of this material, I do not believe in the hyper-significance of the single artistic solution, but do seek levels of symbolic generality beyond the idiosyncratic and randomly made connection. I adopt the concept of Random Access Memory to explore flexible and multiple interconnections between the material, but RAM needs a programme (or programmes) on which to base connections. This has led me to concepts of clusters and themes where both clusters and themes may form up differently in different conditions.
In fact, the first stage in my approach was to catalogue all the video material as a data-base of shots where each shot had a verbal description line.
For example, here are the first three shots from Reel 33 section 1 showing the time code start and end and the description line including an image preference value:
CCC31_1 SHOT # 1 snow children 16:04:13:08 16:04:31:10
children play snow mountain cold grey winter windy pan
zoomin 2
CCC31_1 SHOT # 2 play snow 16:04:37:03 16:05:57:20
oliver sera play snow hill whirl gesture jiggle wind cold
children 4
CCC31_1 SHOT # 3 car 1 16:06:13:07 16:06:21:17
car snow hand wheel driving vcu 5
The description line was subjective rather than schematic, but did include abstract factors like colour and camera movement. It was not necessary to pre-define categories for description as a ´lexicon' of terms used was subsequently derived from the established data-base. This is a short section of the 'lexicon' derived from the same section:
snow children play mountain cold grey winter windy pan
zoomin oliver sera hill whirl gesture jiggle wind car hand
wheel driving vcu drive window landscape passes road lights
trees trackleft clouds sky blue white mist panright valley
tiltdown autumn waterfall splash noise power beehives
basket spiral craft zoomout still orchard cu leaves tree
sun branches trunk bark moss sway green trunks tractor
This made it possible to sort the material using the computer based on word combinations. These were either based on simple repetitions of words or on combinations with logical (computer logical 'and', 'or', 'not-and', 'and-or' etc.) and to compile
these directly as edited video sequences (the sorting programmes produce a standard format Edit Decision List - EDL which directly control assembly on a computer controlled video edit system - in this case 'Video Machine').
This process, which could be endless based on the number of new procedures which could be invented for selection, and could also be (not yet attempted) structured by Artificial Intelligence based programmes (so called 'expert systems').
Again it must be stressed, that as my concern remains entirely artistic and not technological, wherever I have felt it appropriate (which has been frequently), I have short-circuited the procedures in favour of building on them subjectively. They have, none-the-less, provided a number of connections and starting points which I would not have arrived at otherwise. Most importantly though, because the computer selections have been based on the subjective description lines and a preference value system for the shots, these selections have already reflected various potential coherences. Thus the clusters resulting from the process have had thematic tendencies. This would not have been the case if the initial categorisation system had been mechanistically determined without reference to particular material.
In this context themes have mostly been emergent not imposed, related to the connections which may be said to have been intrinsic to or latent in the material or in my response to it reflected in the subjective and unconscious description. I identify a number of different kinds of theme or cluster which have emerged from the process:
- themes which emerge from the strong and particular content of the material itself. This includes some of the material shot in China and Croatia for example, though material in this category finds itself in constructions which followed another theme;
- following through an idea where the material was shot 'as a piece', in some cases almost edited in camera. Examples
of this are - 'TV Song' (an interaction between video of watching TV and birds singing on the TV aerial) - 'Weir' (a water cascade transformed through shutter speeds and freeze superimposures) - 'Warsaw Window' (shots of events day and night below an old hotel window);
- sequences which lent themselves, through their image or sound qualities to computer or electronic manipulations - the interplay between representation and abstraction in a
way which relates to the material itself - the gestures and costumes of the Peking Opera material shot off Chinese TV is an example;
- themes working outwards from the evocative basis of the original image subjectively described in poetic terms;
- general, but open themes drawing on material across the whole sequence 'bank'. Examples are: Earth, Air, Fire and Water; Seasons; Child-hood, age and death; East and West.
Review
It is difficult and unwise for artists to be their own interpretative critic, therefore, some of the more interesting questions about the meaning of the work which I am doing and the completed aspect of it, "Chronos Fragmented", is out of the scope of this piece. I have tried to discuss the process in relationship to some general theoretical concerns about the meaning and structure.
It seems clear to me that one major part of my motivation in this work has been related to the problems of how general significance can be constructed from the very particular building-blocks of ones own daily, lived experience. In one sense these video recorded building-blocks are highly idiosyncratic.
The idiosyncratic is special, particular, arbitrary, and can only represents the general through inference, (for example, of economic causality) or through juxtaposition transforming the experience into constructed metaphor. However particular, the idiosyncratic is none-the-less the only way through which individuals can approach any understanding of their place in history or society or from which any reliable sympathy with the experience of others can be constructed. It is that which makes up the individual life - the direct place of our knowledge, experience and crucially felt reality.
It is also untidy. The intersections between the personal and the historical is unpredictable - when filming a sunrise in Corfu a refugee from strife-torn Albania, swimming on a tractor inner- tube, became a small speck traced in the magnetic fields of my video tape. I can control the camera, more-or-less but little of what takes place in the real world in front of it. All the material which makes up the Chronos project, in its raw state as recorded fragments, traces my momentary impulses and reactions to the events in the world encountered by my camera. These events have only been minimally structured as symbolic at the time of shooting. But, all carry latent meanings and potential links with other sequences which remain as 'layers' of interpretation provided the form does not close-off these 'responses to image' by over-determination.
An approach to the potential layers of meaning (and 'layering' is a concept not a 'reality') is through the treatment and reworking of the material. By editing, montage, juxtaposition, superimposition, matte (key) and visual image transformation, the idiosyncratic image eases its way towards communicative generality - becomes symbol, metaphor, allegory.
In this sense, one single sequence - the electromagnetic trace on video tape - may contribute to a range of themes. The meaning in the image is always LATENT -it becomes fixed temporarily as
it contributes to one or another theme - as, so it seems, does the transient particular human memory held in an electrochemical bond in the cells of brain and body.
The structural aim of the work lies in retaining a trace of the movement through the idiosyncratic towards the allegorical. This is to hold-on to the concept (reading) of the material as RAW and LATENT - available for new juxtaposition and new transformations - whilst forming broader significances in the themes - or perhaps remaining insignificant - trivial. Not all the themes opened up have matured and survived in the single version of the work, but I hope the form implies the possibility of other connections, explorations and variations.
In keeping with the concept of non-linearity, by implication, the sequences and themes of the TV version have been thought of as simultaneous rather than sequential. In other words, the form of editing and the episodic structure, seeks to imply that themes not currently available to view, might be continuing 'underneath' (continuing to develop underneath as in the unconscious memory) and could be made available by traversing through the current visible material. In a non-linear interactive form like CD ROM, this movement through layers of simultaneous development could be actual, preserving other versions and variations. ....The project continues.