Catch Up
Created April 2023. This project was made possible thanks to the Movement Lab in the Milstein Center of Barnard College.
This short video, Catch Up, is an exploration of synchresis — the juxtaposition of multimedia elements — in an audio ethnography that calls upon soundscape, voice, body, and memory. Here, hazy dance is mixed with montaged snippets of audio collected in Paris, France, such as voice journals and other site-specific field-recordings from the urban environment.
The essay below brings this work into conversation with ideas outlined in the book Sound on Screen by Michel Chion, a French composer, film theorist, and scholar renowned for his pioneering work on the relationship between sound and image in cinema.
Chion’s ‘image of language,’ and the meaning of language as places where the brain first goes, point towards a great chasm between the effable and ineffable, as shaped by our perception of it. The relationships between dancing, music, technology, improvisation, and ethnography are of particular interest – how the spatial, temporal, and emotional relationships between these happenings change the nature of the art. It is a synchresis happening on and offscreen, between senses, timelines, and physical locations, in spatiotemporal reimaginations.
Dance is deeply ephemeral, and the kinesthetic empathy that intertwines performers and audiences is predominately somatic. Yet, the image of dance involves a translation of content’s meanings into choreographic form, in a similar way to language. I think dance has powerful potential as a language that is more fit for understanding ourselves and existence. The body can make spatial and visual occupations that are more fully engaging linguistic networks to live within, a physicality that can still ‘fill chambers’ like echoing words. Further, ‘the body’ itself is at once a gigantic eye, ear, and instrument, amongst other things, which allows ‘the body’ to uniquely swim in the aforementioned chasm separating language and the ineffable. These things come to mind as I think in conversation with Chion’s ideas of the ‘eye as more spatial, and ear as more temporal.’ The poetics of visual microrhythms, and the (irr)reversibility of image and sound, compels me to create at the intersections between technology and magic.
Perhaps it is compelling to creatively explore how Chion’s ‘synchresis’ manifests between nuanced modes of being: What happens when we “rediscover” gustatorial, proprioceptive, vestibular, etc. senses in connective ways? Here I am compelled towards technology’s ‘recordability’ to bring to life the ‘extrasensory perceptions’ of the magician, toward exploring how infinite immersions, both nurtured and innate, that are synchresistic. What underlying truths can be revealed from synchresis? Which combinations of sensory inputs are seemingly forged from nothingness/randomness, which are uncannily juxtaposed, and which feel even more innate (and satisfying) than the original sound-image relationship itself? This conceptual grounding both emerges from and extends the multiplicities of realities that interweave through our perception.
Technology can also supplant the original divide between mediums, instead of bringing them together supplementally. As Chion discusses regarding horror films — sometimes when sound and image give different information, the composite (reciprocity of added value) feeds a newness back onto itself. For example, when one records oneself dancing to music, it is most helpful to watch back the video silently, so that the flow of music doesn’t supplant itself onto, and thus obscure, the image of dance. I think of the predominance of silent dances and dance films in the postmodern era, so that sound doesn’t alter movement or perception, and ‘the body’s’ artistic merit can standalone. Thus, to emulate the organic workings of perception and technology, Catch Up is a deliberate stimulation of senses through synchresis: where kinesthetic empathy, ethnographic memory, and linguistic form emerge from the blend of ‘the dancing image’ and atmospheric sounds. The temporal poetics of memory are enacted through the forms of fragmentation, repetition, fading, blurring, and restructuring of visual and audio, set to evoke the auric buzz of Paris.
Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Translated by Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press, 1994.