UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 24

Aside from the loss of Yuan's talent and personality from the production team as she leaves us for the bright lights and shimmering pavements of the Sorbonne just before lunch, it means that our Intangibles unit - the team researching light and sound for the forthcoming shoot - is mostly male. We have Queissner, of course, but she's currently hunting ambiences off-site, leaving just Leray and myself to spend the day trying to improve our hologram set-up. 

The main issue is that the ideas that go into our shambolic form of mediation should be - however shambolic - not just derived from a couple of blokes; our vision of a future virtual reality interface and environment requires greater diversity of thought, feeling and representation (cf). However, Yuan lives on in the project through the ideas she provided in our early experiments (when it was just her and me), and through the cardboard cut-out we made at the time and are using as our stand-in dummy for holographic projection tests today. Indeed, she now exists twice on set, simultaneously as cardboard and as light. Perhaps big businesses that are trying to increase workplace diversity could take a leaf out of our book: with carefully placed mirrors and projections it's possible to multiply the female presence in the office.

Still, Aleksandra Niemczyk makes not infrequent visits to ours, the altar end of the Chapel, to variously provide better ideas/improve our existing ideas/articulate our developing ideas more quickly and succinctly than we boys are able. We spend some time trying to reconstruct the set-up we had the other day, which was around 60% as effective as what we're looking for, but even that proves difficult. 

Matters are complicated by the peculiar light politics of the studio, a combination of electro-shuttered windows, analogue barn doors, an enormous multiple automated light rig overhead that functions via a haunted control panel, and some traditional floor-bound fresnels and what-have-you; not to mention the projector and various laptop displays, iPhone screens and the occasional flash of a camera. Delphine Robin-Tyrek, project assistant by name (but we need to find a job title that more fully represents her enormous and varied contribution), whispers with the haunted control panel and with the Tangibles (the team building our sets and scenery, who thus also need light), and eventually we have a functioning democracy of light in which we are able to reliably create our hologram effect.

Top: cloudy tissues. Bottom: Mondial Tissus. Later: We all fall down.

The problem now is finding the right fabric to use as a screen, so as not to draw too much attention to the machinery of the hologram (although a little clunkiness is desirable) but to make it clear enough to show up on Super 8 next to the real (meaty) actors. We have a few scraps and shapes to try, including a mosquito net that acts like a kind of column of tulle. It seems to have the best level of transparency, but while it's great for human figures it's a bit too specific for the scene in which two holographic saints stand alongside a holographic tombstone. We decide instead to try to make a screen of the material, which means a trip to 'Mondial Tissus' with our resident fabrics expert Decerle, to invest almost as much in soft netting as we spent on the entire production of A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear. Still, as I assure the team, if we can get this effect right then we will probably be head-hunted as a unit to create Star Wars X.

Pride before fall.

Back to the Chapel, and I hang the curtains with Leray. We fire the whole thing up, and it looks kind of good, but too faint, somehow. Have I blown a Flea Orchestra sized wad of Euros (around twenty-five of them) on the wrong material? The size we got is also too awkward to start tripling it up (it's already folded over double) if we want it to fill the whole screen in a wide-shot. But anyway, frustrated, I walk over to give it a try. My foot gets tangled in the low-hanging cable of the projector and the stupid thing falls off its perch, instantly breaking.

Tripped by the light, my pride hurt, the clock ticking, we decide it's best to spend the last few minutes of the day 'clearing up'. What's most frustrating is that today was the day when I'd resolved to start being a bit neater about our experiments - to slow down and consider and also to be tidy and elegant. But I considered not the low-hanging cable.

In the evening, back at the house where Leray now rooms with us, the cable of another guest's computer is strung across from the kitchen counter to the work table. Leaving the kitchen, I manage to catch my foot on it and stumble, if no damage is done to the machine (thanks, for the millionth and first time, to Apple for their quick-release magnetic power sockets). I apologize to Leray, assuming it's his computer; he tells me it's not, and he had tripped on it himself only minutes previously. Filled with pride, I repair to my room: we may not have solved the hologram issue today, I may face hundreds of Euros worth of repair bills, but it is heartening to see our young apprentice learning from my clumsy example.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 23

The day begins with a human resources shuffle, Arthur Leray joining our 'Intangibles' just as Shengwen Yuan announces she must leave us, quite suddenly, for the Sorbonne. Well, of course Niemczyk and I can't take full credit for getting Yuan into the Sorbonne after just eight days on the UNIVERSAL EAR set, but as her roomie/adopted parents we can't help but feel proud - if we'll miss the young artist's bevelled perspective on life and art, and regret we won't get to know her further just yet!

Leray steps up to the projector with courage, and is kind enough to tolerate a whole morning of me trying to explain our ever disintegrating shot-list. His suggestions as to technical solutions for the 'quicklight' floor scene - in which the movie's hero, Harley Byrne, encounters a quicksand-like historical floor fabricated from goopy holographic light - lead us back to works of Karel Zeman, and we watch a 'wonder of Zeman'-type documentary over lunch with the Tangibles. It's an odd documentary, made creepy by the video transfer's melting music and laboured shots of the genius Zeman drawing for the children who make it all worthwhile. It seems like a propaganda movie, but for what, we don't know; it's inspiring all the same (as the best propaganda movies are) and we resolve to create our quicklight tiling with a bendy lens and a fancy duvet.

We have Yuan with us for one more afternoon, so we start to test some tricky shots together; a forced perspective street scene in which the cardboard architecture is supposed to appear with a lag, like the latency of VR or video game graphics. Even with our temporarily expanded team, we are short of hands, and while we are admirably equipped with tripods and stands none of them seem to match - nor to interface directly with cardboard. On Niemczyk's return from the shops, we arm ourselves with three different types of tape and just about figure out where the buildings should stand, and what materials we'll need to fill in the gaps.

The view through our Super 8 camera (Doris's successor - she still needs a name)

Further experiments abound: torture in 2D, more hologram stuff, and piecing together the modular background for Tympanum's Godotesque opening scene. The secret subtext of today's work is never far from the surface: we are preparing Yuan to enter the Sorbonne as a sort of mole and spreader of insidious propaganda for the L'Institute Zoom way.

Yuan adding finishing touches to her signature piece of scenery...

...and visiting it in an early video test.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 21

We lived the movie twice today. This morning, following a ‘show-and-tell’ of our respective photo tours of last week’s visit to the Palais Jacques Coeur - each photo set being almost identical since we walked the same route and were essentially on the look out for tympanums, cheeky sculptures and fancy colours - Yuan and I sat down with our new sound recordist Nina Quiessner in order to create a foley list by combing the script for sonic potential. Items such as ‘howling landscape of despair’, ‘awkward silence’ (“we should at least consider it”) and various thrums and thuds prove it a rich hunting ground.

In the afternoon, Niemczyk’s Tangibles squad take a break from rebuilding the city out of cardboard in order to step into the limelight, 'volunteering' to take starring roles as we video an entire script-reading of the movie. One of the key aims of this exercise is to physicalise the dead leaves of the screenplay to get its rather wordy thematic and visual potential out in the air (particularly important since the words are tough enough for a native English speaker to get their head around, let alone our Polish-French-Chinese-German crew).

The 'Curse' plot in a nutshell.

The women (for everyone in the studio except for me is one) have fresh-toasted printouts of the screenplay, while I work from the latest shotlist; the inconsistencies between the two soon lead us into chaos. We also run out of readers, or become confused as to whether we have enough people around to see the show through, since the story contains multiple cross-identities and layers of disguise and even physical properties (some characters are made of light, or metal, or flesh, or glass; at least one is history disguised as flesh disguised as stone).

The endeavour becomes not so much about carefully staging the shots so that I can cheat by pre-editing the finished movie, as about just getting through the dummy-shoot: we rush on to the end without even stopping the DV camera between shots; a cruel parody of next week’s proper shoot when we’ll likewise allow just one take per shot but will urgently stop the camera as soon as or even before each character finishes speaking, such is the premium on the Super 8 film stock through which we’ll be burning.

Afterwards, thankfully, the crew claim to have a better understanding of the potential movie. There’s nothing like a shared perilous experience to tune folks in to the precise frequency of their situation.

At our digs, where Niemczyk and I are currently holed up with Yuan and Bandits-Mages associates David Legrand and Julien Record and an artist called Pierre, a partial electrical outage has caused us to huddle together in the kitchen around a warm circle of Wi-Fi, when otherwise we might have kept to our rooms. With only wine and eco-detergent and brief flickers of Facebook to sustain this awkward pack of strays, who knows what frequencies we might tune into or into which layered personae we might lapse. If I don’t tweet by tomorrow noon, please send somebody to shoot this damned movie for us, since we will be lost.

The 'Curse' plot in a different nutshell.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 18

Another day of auditions, so it is mostly to be described with the talent's show and tell items (below). Sadly one chap dropped out because he saw A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear and didn't like it. It makes me wonder how many potential auditionees we're losing out to the forthcoming Star Wars production. A second chap arrived to read the English-language script, but left before we got to meet as he had thought it would later be translated into French. No way, André! 

Well, it turns out our lost actor is part of the society that protects the French language from the insidious Franglish of villains like us. Of course, cultural imperialism is the sinewy meat of UNIVERSAL EAR's thematic soup, and even when Harley Byrne travels two million years back in time to converse with the homo habilis, everyone speaks 2012-era Mancunian (more or less) without the question ever being raised.

Later in the afternoon, we got to meet Nina Queissner - who will hopefully be our sound recordist - for the first time, over a beer and a discussion about the immateriality (or otherwise) of sound and music and how to pirate a sound sculpture that exists only within a unique architectural space. Santé!

Here are today's show-and-tell items in full:

• A case of colouring pencils
• A flopsy-wopsy bunny rabbit toy
• A vintage pharmaceutical pestle and mortar
• An enchanted notebook of sketches, ideas and poems
• An Iain Banks novel
• A Nintendo Switch controller
• A lifelong-held copy of Le Grand Meaulnes
• A copy of the Hitchcock/Truffaut interviews (brought by a 13yo who reads the relevant interview before seeing each movie!)
• A security yo-yo.

 

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.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 15

The cameras rolled today on the production of audiovideo material supplementary to the primary project: the documentation of the Stuff. 

If we're not getting as much time as I'd like to thoroughly examine the medium of virtual reality, the prevalence of which is a pervading thematic motif of the forthcoming UNIVERSAL EAR episode, we at least know enough to recognize that it makes sense to thoroughly document the image and sound of each material and tool with which the episode is going to made so that, should the film not reach completion, or should it become lost or cursed, we can insert the archived material-and-tool objects into a virtual environment and remake the whole thing in an imaginary studio made of View-Master-sized electronic light slabs. 

Meanwhile, our 'Tangibles' unit creates torture instruments and tombstones out of cardboard. As Decerle remarks, on trying out a cardboard tomb for size (though it'll have to fit Lockwood, beard and all, in a couple of weeks time) -- "it's cool to be dead". It's been a tiring day.

This chain tells a story. And that story is called The Chair Wars.

A Yuan-shaped torture innovation.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 14

For the first time since we held rehearsals for It’s Nick’s Birthday in a disused Christian Scientist building on Daisy Bank Road in Rusholme, I’m regularly going to church: the preparations, and hopefully the production, of The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum are continuing in the chapel of the 16th century converted convent (we don’t know if the nuns were saved or damned by the conversion process) inhabited by the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Art de Bourges. The studio is, indeed, known as the Chapel, and occasional cherub-like characters watch us as we work, perhaps - like us - trying to work out just what the hell we’re doing.

Spot the cherub.

We have loosely split into teams: the Tangibles, being Niemczyk accompanied by interns Charlène Delevacq and Gallane Decerle, are painting, building, and otherwise fabricating our props, sets and costumes; while the Intangibles, myself and Shengwen Yuan, are trying to fix together some antiquated video and TV cameras in order to undertake a period of experimentation and the raising of holograms.

But it’s us Intangibles who wind up covered in dust and furiously wrestling with the very physical incompatibilities of frigid vintage cables and a VHS recorder that refuses to hold on to its tapes. No less than four classic cameras are written off as unusable (for now) in this way, before we reluctantly accept that we may just have to go digital for this one (it is a digital media residency after all, just that we’re trying keep the digital aspect purely thematic). Damien Chaillou, video technician and studio guru, eases us through the process. Given the morning’s issues and my ongoing lack of a pocket camera, it’s a small triumph when we finally see a (delightfully hauntographic) image on the sturdy old problem-free analogue monitor.

That Edison moment.

The change of format requires a change of aesthetic, so Yuan and I decide to take the ghosts out of the recording format and put them into the image. This will require some work with the lights tomorrow, though thankfully not the heavenly ones that loom above us just yet; rather, a profane standing lamp to create some profane silhouettes of our sisters, the Tangibles.

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