Launch of a temporally-limited edition book: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum

The Institute is proud to announce the launch of our first book.

UNIVERSAL EAR: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum was created by Graeme Cole with Aleksandra Niemczyk, in response to Mr Cole's EMAP/EMARE residency at Bandits-Mages in Bourges. It is available for just 21 days during this year's Rencontres Bandits-Mages, where this UNIVERSAL EAR episode will also appear in movie form as part of an installation until 2nd December.

Here's the science:

UNIVERSAL EAR: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum by Harley Byrne

229pp, paperback, 12/11-02/12/2018

Reconstructed by Graeme Cole (text) and Aleksandra Niemczyk (illustrations) from the unfound memoirs of Harley Byrne.

Available to buy in a temporally-limited edition during Rencontres Bandits-Mages 2018, 12th November-2nd December.

BUY NOW £8 +£5 postage and packaging (UK & international)

Harley Byrne’s ongoing mission is to capture and make available for download “all the world’s music, ever.” This novella-length extract from his memoirs tells the full story of Byrne’s adventures in Bourges, France, 2187AD.

While working on his escape from slavery in the reverb mines of 32nd-century Detroit, Byrne is tipped off to the existence of a form of ‘rogue sim electroacoustic pop’ created by a pair of sentient statues in 22nd-century Bourges.

But when he arrives in the historical city, he discovers it to be an ontologically dubious virtual heritage site, overrun with corrupt holograms, cyborg saints, and the occasional native telling fisherman’s tales from deep VR.

What’s more, one of the musicians is missing: the lab-cultured, organic statue of Saint Ursinus, recreated from ancient DNA but barely more than an adolescent.

In order to track him down, Byrne must navigate the ever re-loading maze of the city, outwit the crazed busts of Bourges’ most celebrated sons and daughters, and keep hold of his senses under the effects of the curse of the phantom tympanum.

Available for 21 days only, the first UNIVERSAL EAR book was created as part of an EMAP/EMARE artist residency at Bandits-Mages, Bourges, further supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. The book also contains a photographic project - A New Ontology of Hallucination - and Mr Cole’s studio log from the residency. A film adaptation of the adventure will loop as part of a Curse of the Phantom Tympanum exhibition at Le Haïdouc – Antre Peaux in Bourges from 16th November-2nd December 2018.

* Please note this is a small-scale, non-profit art project. We will endeavour to dispatch your book anywhere in the world within 5 days but please bear with us. Queries before and after purchase can be directed to graeme[at]zoomcitta dot co dot uk.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 34

Worship the sun, and invoke the wrath of the rain. Well, that might be utter rubbish, but the project is certainly suffering from a severe case of hubris after yesterday's glowing successes, as today the crew arrives drenched by an 8.57am downpour. More seriously, this morning's guest actor slips on the way to the studio and, after a cup of sweet tea and the reassuring gazes of half-a-dozen medically incompetent filmmakers, returns home to rest it off: she will return tomorrow only if she's feeling much better.

But after that, the rain seems to have quenched its thirst for misery and misfortune, and instead becomes a pleasant background to our day's work, cocooning us in the studio and make the team feel a bit better about a day with the shutters mostly down.

Lockwood even begins to hibernate, after our first shot of the day - in which Harley Byrne is trapped in a tomb in the foetal position and believes himself on the brink of death - runs without a hitch. He's in a difficult place at the moment (emotionally rather than geographically - he's quite charmed by Bourges) and this moment seems important to him; we leave it as long as we can before removing him from his tomb so we can strike the set and set up the 'Bourges streets' scene. A respectful nod, for that first shot, should also be directed at intern Arthur Leray: on every shoot, there seems to be one person who gets roped into playing 'unidentifiable body parts' - yesterday he was a shoulder in a Manchester postal workers social club, and for today's opening shot a holographic saint's hand.

The 'Bourges street' shot takes up a serious wedge of the day which, as we reflect, could be considered somewhat daft, seeing as how the street itself is just around the corner but instead we've flown two artists and two actors across Europe to shoot it in shoddy cardboard replica in a studio five minute's walk away. But that's sort of the point, somehow. And Niemczyk's art and draughtspersonship, and ex-intern Yuan's legacy Palais Jacques Coeur replica, conjure a certain kind of magic in the studio when the whole wonky perspective shot is put into place.

Leray and soundie Queissner (who is stranded on set amidst mainly silent scenes today) team up to set-wrangle a simple close-up that just begged for a little complication. We add a row of houses, a moon, a reflector and some authentic Berry fog to the scene, and I only regret we didn't add any foliage. 

The city that Niemczyk built.

After that, it's back to trying to create a floor made of liquid hologram - or quicklight. It's an athletic feat, since working with a projector, a Super 8 camera with no monitor, and a hand-held vase-as-wonky-lens actually involves building up a sweat on this chilly Bourges afternoon. Lockwood, too, is pushed to his limits as he must replicate fighting for his life while sinking through a cross between quicksand, liquid light, and malevolent, dissolving floor tiles, no doubt dreaming of a warm, comfortable tomb in which to sleep once this trial is over.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 28

The day begins with a confusion of keys which results in me walking to the studio by myself in the rain, a delay that I try to exploit as thinking time in which to resolve both the problems at the studio and a broader existential malaise; it is my birthday, after all. Well, I only have thirty minutes to walk, so I don't get very far with either pursuit. Mostly I wonder whether it might be good human management to make fun mandatory in the studio on my birthday.

Yesterday, however, Leray and I managed to hurtle our way through creating an entire shot list and storyboard, meaning today we each face the challenge of tedium: it's time for me to attempt to start scheduling, leaving Leray in the hands of the Tangibles - and our art team unfortunately have to delegate the less inventive jobs to their temporary ensigns (in this case, stencilling wallpaper).

The shot list seems to be quite completable in the eight days we have assigned to shoot it. Unfortunately, the matter is complicated by the varying availability of our enormous cast and our studio space - questions that I hope will be resolved over the next 24 hours, since the illusion of feasibility that comes with a draft schedule is like a warm hug in these nervous pre-tournage days.

Preliminary sub-hugs come in the form of our first actors-on-set: Felipe, who will play a security guard (and quite possibly the only biologically authentic human in 2187 Bourges) and Josephine, who will play the late Brieanne Morelle - the disgraced former heritage minister responsible for the state in which hero Harley Byrne finds the city. With their presence comes, if not the illusion of feasibility, at least the reassurance of some sort of inevitability.

They are both game, and we drape them in some preliminary costumes before attempting the canning of emotions - the back-up technique used by all major contemporary serials to ensure they can always complete the show if one of their actors should wander off or become otherwise unpresentable. It is a technique we first tried with enormous success with Stewart Lockwood/Harley Byrne himself.

This is actually a very challenging way to act, starting from a discrete emotion (hungry; outraged; numb) with no dramatic context or scenery. But it's a splendid way to get to know each other and to start figuring out the talent's metaphysical topography. 

It's also a great way to ensure the actors don't get too carried away with the ol' "method", and engage instead with preconceptions and stock characters. This tends to make Lockwood/Byrne look rather absurd as the only person who's trying to really get inside his character and create a nuanced, sensitive and sympathetic portrayal. He would never 'play' a villain, for example, because nobody believes they are a villain - just a person with certain wants, needs, and insecurities. Josephine, on the other hand, jumps right into being an awful Tory teen, and I find myself measuring her attempts at her given emotions against those of Theresa May (who is actually a great study figure for the 'I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way' type).

Midway through the day, before Felipe's arrival, our daily screening of Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers is interrupted as the Bandits-Mages team invade the studio with cake, sparklers, pink booze and other surely contraband materials. Somebody clicks play on iTunes and by coincidence, Lockwood's singing voice rings out as the track happens to be cued up to his guest vocal on Duett's Running Scared. Niemczyk is noted to have made herself quite at home in the studio, since she is wandering about in her socks (in fact a result of the rain/wet shoes). She hunts out the giant pink monster-feet slippers that Chaillou has found for her, and wears them around the impromptu party, apparently being all about the mandatory fun. Getting nervous, I draw the fun to a stop before Felipe walks in on us: there is already too much to explain.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 25

Today Niemczyk and I made a pilgrimage to the Rue Patrick Dewaere, named for my (obsessively) favourite actor, although he seems to have no actual connection with the area. Indeed, the nomenclature around the peculiar puzzle-shaped new build community to which the street belongs is all cinema-based. The eerie quietness and absurd, almost autoparodic architecture stirs the need to come back and make a new film in Bourges, outside of the studio; likewise the Lego buildings and artificial lake ('Bourges beach') that we ride around in its entirety as part of the route to Patrick Dewaere. Sorry for the awful photos - click'em for more details. And oh, those clouds!

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 16

Damien Chaillou hooks us up with the appropriate adaptor so we can begin the day by connecting our hefty early-noughties digital camera to a far more contemporary projector, enabling us to get started on our experiments with holographics.

We already have a Yuan-shaped cardboard cut-out, so we channel her image from one camera, through the projector, and on to her 2D avatar; it works quite nicely, but the cardboard is somehow a bit too clunky (if that's possible) so we proceed to work with various alternative materials and lighting set-ups to get the interactive, hand-waving (and peace-sign wielding) Yuan that we know and admire appropriately videoported from one corner of the studio to another. Veering dangerously close to the uncanny valley, we pause for lunch (and for me to go and get my five locally-crafted stitches removed by a friendly nurse) and concentrate, after lunch, on building tangible scenery and props. On the topic of obsolescent hardware and connector conspiracy, our coffee machine gives up the ghost mid-afternoon, the water failing to connect with the coffee grinds.

Monkey with cable issues.

Chaillou and I have spent some hours, over the past couple of days, trying to capture mini-DV footage via a succession of programs and computers. Each time, a couple of dropped frames bring the whole process to a halt. The computers want everything or they want nothing - a single missing frame is cause enough for a melodramatic refusal to continue. We sense our absurd quest for total documentation reflected in the process and product of outdated equipments in ways that aren't so immediately obvious in newer tech that has not yet ripened. Slowing down to follow the signal and lovingly press buttons with functions that today you'd just gesture at is a rewarding way to keep focussed on our aims. At least it is so long as the footage, cursed like our characters to be trapped in obscurity, is pretty much second-rate and no big loss.

There's nothing for it but to get back to real space and air, so we take a field trip to the sturdy Palais Jacques Coeur, a key location of The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum, to take sketches and photographs for its virtual reconstruction (in cardboard). Like the cathedral, the house that Jacques built (but barely lived in before he was nabbed by the gendarmerie) is thick with sculptural reliefs (if we couldn't find any that were quite as pervy as the cathedral boasts), and as you might guess from the title of the forthcoming UNIVERSAL EAR episode, they play an important part in the tale.

It's a beautiful, winding house, but it feels a shame to be ushered through such a direct route when it promises a warren of secret passages, alternative escape-routes and time-proof hidey nooks. All the same, we identify some find shapes and colours to steal, and I'm impressed to catch young interns Decerle and Delevacq defacing the visitor book with UNIVERSAL EAR imagery before we leave. You can't go wrong with paper and pen.

Studying the tympanae(?)

Jacques Coeur and his emblematic heart. It's a HEART.

Yuan having a moment by a key Curse location.

More bloody hearts.

Inspiration for hats...

...and for interns.

Back at the studio, the unreal thing.