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 EAR EMAN#EMARE residency enters Phase II

The second phase of Graeme Cole’s EMAN/EMARE artist residency with Aleksandra Niemczyk at Bandits-Mages will begin today.

The duo arrived in Bourges two weeks ago to begin preparations for a new episode of UNIVERSAL EAR, an unfound time-travel adventure serial of the future. The new episode is titled The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum, and takes place in a future Bourges in which the concrete present overlaps with 3D, holographic and augmented reality meta-levels populated by looping historical monuments wandering impossible virtual heritage spaces. 

Today, the team will take to the studio at ENSA (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Art Bourges) to begin a period of intensive construction and experimentation ahead of the shoot, which is intended to take place during the final week of September. An artist’s book and supporting videos and digital materials will also be produced, with the work intended to be exhibited in 2018. 

The project can be followed on Mr Cole’s blog, Twitter, by joining the UNIVERSAL EAR Facebook Group, and on the official UNIVERSAL EAR website (Tumblr). 

Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Image credit: Elly Strigner

Recontres Bandits-Mages Program Notes

On Monday, our absurdist cop flick Epizoda ? had its international premiere at Recontres Bandits-Mage. The event's director Isabel Carlier asked me to select some films to play alongside our own, within the themes of this year's encounter. These are the program notes I composed for the event, including some thoughts on my 2017 residency at Bandits-Mages:

The three movies that form the program may not at first glance have much to do with each other. A meta-documentary on love and identity, a post-Tsukamoto monster romance, and a broken-down detective show. But each presents a vision of instability from their surface scaffolding, through their foundations, deep into whatever’s below. In each movie, the potential for transformation is hinted at, but it’s a transformation that is inseparable from destruction. The movies are maintained as much by the volatile portals that open up in the fissures as by the physical substance that weighs them down.

Kaori Oda’s Twitter biography used to read, “Am a camera”. Now it says, “filmmaker / log”. Her identification as a media cyborg does not preclude a profound and troubled humanhood. She watches and she records, but very quietly she also talks. ‘Thus a Noise Speaks’ is ostensibly about gender, sexual and family identity but the video’s mechanical exoskeleton is tangled in these vines. This is the digital human hybrid as a breathing video archive.

Ghazi Alqudcy has a morbid interest in the everyday and a healthy interest in the morbid. In ‘My Parents Are Animals’ we witness degradation, humiliation, excreta and noodles. A park, a kitchen, a doctor’s office become the showgrounds for subversion of the established social, physical and biological rules: yet love, as we know, remains a survival game requiring adaptation, submission, cruelty and affection.

Somehow the free-associating doctor of ‘My Parents’ is a cousin of Detective Inspector Colin Giffard, the English-named Bosnian detective of my own ‘Epizoda ?’. Giffard’s tragedy is that he is the privileged and inevitable outcome of a system to whose underlying code he has been refused access. As with ‘Thus A Noise Speaks’, the generic form and the wet content make for a pensive chimera; however, Kaori’s video nurtures an unpredictable potential for growth, while in ‘Epizoda ?’ we find only rot. Yet, both are processes that require the progress of time. When making ‘Epizoda ?’, I never asked myself if Giffard is searching for salvation: I only knew that this media dinosaur wanted to make it safely to the end.

Residency

When we virtualize our culture it becomes vulnerable to evaporating on a hot day or blowing away in the wind. Decay is history evolving. A stone monument remains alive even if blown apart. Its negative imprint stands sturdy in the memory dust. What do we mean when we talk about protecting our “way of life”? Can it be described as an endless reel of gestures and actions (with periods of snoozing)? Could we reduce it to a choreographic score, save it in scrolls and reanimate it? How different would the playback look if it was scored by Edvard Munch or Charles M. Schulz?

UNIVERSAL EAR is a lost adventure serial of the future, charting heroic ex-postman Harley Byrne’s ongoing mission: to capture and make available for download “all the world’s music, ever.”

Each episode sees Byrne travel to another time and place, where his efforts to find and record humanity’s rarest musics are hindered by his arch-enemy, Being, mysterious mistress of disguise.

It has become my own personal mission to (p)reconstruct these as yet unmade pocket adventures, one by one into infinity.

Inspired by recent developments in ‘virtual heritage’ – hologram Buddhas, hologram dead pop stars, 3D printed replicas of the still-smoking remains of Syrian monuments – I shall follow Harley Byrne to a future Bourges we don’t yet know: a future in which the concrete present overlaps with 3D, hologramatic and augmented reality meta-levels in a manner that is not so much ‘mixed-reality’ as ‘mixed-authenticity’.

What will the great-great-granddaughters of today’s heritage ministers consider important enough to preserve in ever-looping projections, town square battles and beheadings that recur in full digital fidelity each day with sharper regularity than the lighting of the street lamps? Which personal accomplishments and disasters will solipsistic curators make virtual space for in the alleys and byways of a city frozen in the past by the technologies of the future? What hymns to sing in the graveyards we’ll build for our virtual PA’s? What bitcrushed cries will echo through these temporal interstices with musical regularity?

Cf. alltheworldsmusicever.com

Epizoda ?

My Parents Are Animals

Thus A Noise Speaks

Split Log 8

Two artists doing very different but very good work here in Split are (Kino Klub tech person) Marin Tudor and Hrvoje Cokarić.

Tudor is inspiring for his irrepressible enthusiasm for everything. Introduced to me as an 'actor', all this really seems to mean is that he studied acting and now uses his body as tool, object and subject for a range of freely associative and rarely completed projects - inhabiting an abandoned display case outside Split's United Colours of Benetton, sitting Stylites-style half-way up a wall, creating suites of furniture from discarded plastic coffee spoons, tinkering with this or that to see what it could really do. In some ways he reminds me of Richard Widmark's existentially-stranded Harry Fabian in Night & The City, the description of whom as an 'artist without an art' I return to again and again; except that Tudor is an artist with too much art, a co-puppy frustrated by his inability to get things finished, because there's always something else to do, and never a good reason to apply the brakes. I toast you, Marin Tudor (Marin, tu dor!). He is also more than adept with a projector, creating living slides from chemicals and whatever else he finds; he will come on board as projectionist and smoketographer for my forthcoming video shoot.

Cokarić, he of the robotic Dalmation donkeys, is doing his bit for donkey preservation: meeting him on a tour of the mostly (thankfully) defunct local zoo, up in the Marjan hills, he explains that the particular lineage of asses in this part of Croatia has a noble history but faces its end having been out-evolved by the motor car. With a depth of artistic and ecological insight that is surely not lost on these wise creatures themselves (reader, you are encouraged to delve further hereabouts), Mr Cokarić is working on developing the surviving donkeys - and, hopefully, their manifold descendants - into a super-breed of mountain-climbing video edit suites, generating their own power in the unconnected wilderness, and carrying all a nomadic filmmaker requires to produce artist's moving image on the go (one of the donkeys is named “Marina Abramović”). The Chthulucene will be televised! It would be wonderful to establish an itinerant art residency on a donkey's back, it's only a shame I don't have the time - as my Kino Klub residency draws towards its end - to further explore the blurry lines between amateur, industrial and avant-garde in the context of these gloomy cyborg editing stations.

Hrvoje Cokarić: the carrot and the memory stick.

Kino Klub's Sunčica Fradelić horsing around with a 16mm Bolex.

Split Log 01

Arriving in Split as a self-appointed ‘failed-filmmaker-turned-guru’, I am to undertake a residency at the city’s historic Kino Klub, absorb the artistic and pedagogic technique of the ‘Split school’, and feed back into the loop with a series of workshops drawing on the Institute’s research and my recent studies at film.factory in Sarajevo (just 150 miles east from here). I will also mount some kind of film/video production inspired by or perhaps merely as a distraction from my quasi-academic work.

Secretly, it’s also a mission to make sense of a lot of fragments, scraps, vacuums and glitches that have accumulated in my already-ragged knowledge over the past couple of years and left me feeling more lost than ever. Combined with my pre-existing specialism in misplaced, damaged and impossible films, and a critical exoticism/guilty fetishism for the severity of socialist institutional nomenclature, the project has been christened as the Unfound Peoples Videotechnic.

Seduced by a stray quote from the Klub’s foremost historical figure, Ivan Martinac, I intend to spend the month on the (figurative) beach in a mood of “near insane contemplation”, knitting together some of those fragments into a workable comfort blanket with which to warm myself and those who would join me for breezy Split evenings and British winters to come. Perhaps I will remember to document my progress here.

I have also begun scribbling about some of the variously obscure/classic regional films I'm watching on Letterboxd. I'll try to pin them up here too.

Unfound Peoples Videotechnic at Kino Klub Split: Mr. Cole's new residency

This April, Institute co-founder Graeme Cole will hold an artist’s residency at Kino Klub Split in Croatia, supported by Arts Council England.

Mr. Cole will be introduced to local artists and institutions, and create new film and video works in the context of the rich culture of experimental film and video work of the former Yugoslavia region. He will also hold a series of free workshops for local film and video artists.

During the residency, Mr, Cole will research the structure and function of the Kino Klub model and use his findings to construct a program of workshops and resources to explore the language of artist’s moving image in the age of the ubiquitous lens. This aspect of the project will be developed into an itinerant absurdist filmmaking academy, hereby known as the Unfound Peoples Videotechnic.

Graeme Cole recently completed his MA in Filmmaking at Béla Tarr’s film.factory in Sarajevo, in neighbouring Bosnia & Herzegovina. He is an independent artist-filmmaker whose films have played at festivals all over the world. Working mainly with Super 8 and other consumer formats, Mr Cole’s films take the language of narrative-based genre movies and infect them with an absurdist sensibility. Meta-narratives and open-source laboratory work expand and re-categorize the parameters of his cardboard and fog universe.

Kino Klub Split was established in 1952 and its activity is recognized in public as one of the original entries in the history of Croatian non-professional, alternative, amateur cinematography. Kino Klub organizes weekly screenings and boasts a classical film school program covering audio-visual media, new media, copyright and amateur film and computer animation. The club cultivates an atmosphere conducive to creative growth, freedom of opinion and expression, and the conditions for free circulation and exchange of ideas and experiences.

Mr. Cole’s project is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

For more information on the April 2016 workshops and how to apply, please read on:

 

UNFOUND PEOPLES VIDEOTECHNIC presents

(Hrvatski)

UPV Videomaker’s Radical Deprogramming Program
“How to lose yourself, find yourself and lose yourself again.”

Artist-filmmaker Graeme Cole (UK) will hold a series of FREE interconnected filmmaking workshops during an artist’s residency at Kino Klub Split, April 2016.

The program is intended to reboot our assumptions and fetishize the tools and (im)possibilities of filmmaking in the context of the historic Kino Klub movement. Each workshop will consist of a lecture, creative exercises, discussion and screening.

Short filmmaking assignments in the form of audio-visual research will be set between workshops and reflected upon in class. The emphasis is on creating with the tools you have available (particularly camera phones and tablets), but Kino Klub will help facilitate filmmakers with other equipment where necessary. These assignments are intended to be completed as ‘homework’, but Mr Cole will be available for support where possible.

At the conclusion of the program, we will hold a presentation in which each participant will screen their work to an invited audience and we will preview Mr Cole’s residency project.

Local filmmakers and visual artists are invited to apply for the workshops, which may be most suitable for those who are just starting out or who have made a couple of films already. Please email a couple of lines explaining your experience and your interest in the program to graeme (at) zoomcitta dot co dot uk and include links to your work if possible. Alternatively, please contact Sunčica at Kino Klub on 0918965860 (Limited to 5 places).

Week 1 – Saturday 9th April
*Mythology of the Self *
There is no autobiography, only automythology.

This module looks at the personal voice of the filmmaker. Taking the genre of ‘essay film’ as a starting point, we will explore how the filmmaker relates to their surroundings and personal history, and how best to transform, disguise, exaggerate and lie about their feelings through art in order to reach more fundamental (and entertaining) truths.

Week 2 – Saturday 16th April
*Rotting the Image*
The odour of a film’s look.

All too often, lazy imagination, cinematography and post-production can result in a visual quality that posits dull or unmediated visuals as code for some kind of yawn-worthy ‘realism’. In this module, we will debate whether or not the moving image exists as an ‘object’ in the age of digital code, whether we should pretend it is anyway, and how it can be decomposed to evoke evocative new so-called realities.

Week 3 – Saturday 23rd April
*Something About Sound Design, Gardening & Mutants*
How to control sound, and how you can never control sound.

Admitting that sound is our enemy can be the first step towards learning to manipulate it against the audience. In this module, we will look at ways of artificially introducing sounds into the environment of our cowering images, and how to use alternative sound structures, associations and textures to infect the minds of unsuspecting ‘viewers’ through their ear-holes.

Week 4 – Sunday 1st May
*Setting Your Attitude In Stone*
Manifestoes, obstinacy & self-flagellation.

Every film needs a manifesto. You need a manifesto. Your wardrobe needs a manifesto. Your hairdresser requires precise instructions. This module will take a look at existing and implicit artistic manifestoes, and examine their power both as liberating tool and comforting straitjacket. Finally, we will categorize our own valuable faults and habits in the light of what we have discovered over previous weeks.

On weeks 1, 2 and 3 you are invited to join Mr Cole on Sundays to test our theories and collaborate on a new video work.