Documentation of Double Blind (Love) by Curt Cloninger.
Some thoughts on attempting to archiving a counfounded time:
Text wriiten by Curt Cloninger on the NetBehaviour list.
“My video documentation winds up being higher fidelity and more
intentionally synchronized than the original performance. There are
all sorts of very strange questions that arise in terms of the
synchronization. If I synch up Annie’s audio track from France with
the background arrival of her audio in the US, is that a “correct”
synchronization, or am I re-ordering the flow of time after the fact?
As I have been trying to synch everything up, sometimes the “arrival”
of Annie’s sound in my US audio will come before the “launch” of her
sound in the France audio — a kind of impossible, prophetic
re-rendering of time.
Another question arises — at certain points both our faces laugh —
a visual projection that is instantaneously recognizable to a viewer.
During the performance, Annie is hearing something in her headphones
that makes her laugh, and I am hearing something in my headphones
that makes me laugh, but it is doubtful that either of us are hearing
the exact same thing (at the exact same time) that the other is
hearing, and it is even more doubtful that either of us are hearing
what the viewers of this post-produced video documentation will be
hearing at that exact time. Yet it seems like we are all laughing at
the same thing.
The more I work with this (and I should have given up on it long
ago), the more it seems that the event itself was orchestrated in
such a way that it makes “accurate” post-event documentation
impossible. Brian Massumi says there are certain factors that elude
technical science. It’s not because scientists currently lack data.
It’s because there are certain affective “virtual” forces that will
always elude sceintific understanding — the parameters of science
are not set up to recognize these forces. It seems similar to this
video documentation. It’s not that I lack the software skills to
synch this stuff up. The problem is more complicated. It’s that there
is no single “standard” real world event with which to synch the
documentation.
Which is very cool. Most performances are more or less documentable
on video. But here we have constructed an event that eludes linear
video documentation. Not because we did the event in the dark, or
because we only used sound. We actually used streaming video as one
of our media. Our performance problematizes video documentation at a
more fundamental level — the level of the network and time.”
Filed under: Articles / Texts, Performance, Curt Cloninger, documentation, Double Blind
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