A sequence filmed in ruined interiors of a neoclassic building is the starting point for a trans-medial conversation between the two artists: Go Eun Im and Igor Sevcuk. The dialogue has begun as an exploration of the architectural, technological and institutional transition of the Netherlands Filmmuseum into the current EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam. The relocation and reconstruction of the former film museum is a symbolic event in the history of cinema. Every film device has been digitalized while the new building reinforces this transition by departing from classical architecture to wear a new sci-fi look.

Im and Sevcuk reflect this change through a strictly cinematic approach. At times they press a pause in the stream of history; at others, they fast forward or slow reward it. In the course of four videos, the repeated variations of the excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut novel 'Timequake' considers the phenomenon of acculturation; the adoption of another culture, or new technology. Together with other thoughts on changing technologies, Serbo-Croatian and Korean voice-overs reconnect with the following:

- a 16 mm film workshop at the place called no.w.here
- two medialised events with the Dutch royal family in front of architectural settings
- a home movie version of Alain Resnais' film 'Last Year at Marienbad'
- the sequence blurring public and private images of the uprising in the streets of Kiev
- the archival collection from EYE, the film museum in Amsterdam.

Throughout four chapters of this experimental documentary, the montage of the shared materials had been each time renewed, retold, re-edited. The latest 2021 video (30:00) is a redux that merges all four episodes in one video.

 

drawings:

...................................................................................................trailer

..................................................................................................no.w.here

 

2013-2017 videos :

.................................................episode 1

.................................................episode 2

Nowhere Palace.......................episode 3

.................................................episode 4 (update is in progress)

 

 

Technological Takeovers draft text:

Once upon a time the most recent technological takeover seems to be fully accomplished – total dominance of software based technology appears to be a fact. In consequence we could sense that with this latest turn of the world, our ways of being and our inner rhythms are changing too. However, we could also observe that this digital takeover is not that total at all - everywhere there are still pockets of resistance and stubborn insistence of various analogue technologies. Or, could we observe that perhaps nothing much did change? We possessed nonlinear and other ways of structuring our thoughts already long before any advanced editing technology was invented. Our inner 'software' is indeed capable of very complex montages that are, for instance, so vividly screened in our dreams. This mental capability is quite delicate (bio)technology that extensively interconnect us with the changing world we inhabit. All additional / external recording and editing seem to be just its extentions.

In regard to extentions of our mind already Plato wrote about dangers of in his time still relatively new technology of writing. (1.a) In his Phaedrus dialogue writing was pictured as something 'unnatural' and inferior to live interpersonal dialectics. Furthermore, from this perspective writing could be seen as both fancy playfulness and handicapping activity. Alienated writers and readers of dividing rhetorics are occupying their minds with flows of external reminders: false recollections and abstractions. In short, for Plato writing was not remedy for memory, or something capable of 'true' relationship between our inner experience and outside world. Many centuries later similar concerns were voiced in regard to evolution and use of photographic - still and/or moving - image technologies. The most prominent thinkers did this in a variety of ways, among others: Barthes, Sontag, Derrida, Baudrillard and Debord.(2) For instance, Guy Debord in his 1961 essay-film Critique of Separation declares: "The function of cinema, whether dramatic or documentary, is to present a false and isolated coherence as a substitute for a communication and activity that are absent." (3) In the same time Debord's film script is based on his writing: "... a completely typical drunken monologue, with its incomprehensible allusions and tiresome delivery. With its vain phrases that do not await response..." 4) However, being well organised or more haphazard, writing is the invention that in comparison had far bigger impact on ways of human mind than later inventions of photography and film followed by nowadays digitally processed images.

because the outside world has changed... is a project that propose to test (and taste) solidarity between variety of old and new technologies influencing or creating our ways of relating with the world. For now we do confirm that both, the oldest analogue and the newest digital technologies do introduce 'division and alienation' - as Plato observed - 'but a higher unity as well'. Writing, just as other montage techniques, does 'intensify the sense of self and fosters more conscious interaction between persons'.(1.b) The latest excessive non-linearity and archival interconnectedness of the digital technology does certainly influence and change the way we think and communicate. Many of us are quite distracted when confronted with endless flows of chaotic links. In the same time we may be a bit closer to understand the ways of our inner narrative self - constant interlinking and reediting of our most personal and collective thoughts. because the outside world has changed... is an ancient work-in-progress (5), and now our experiment too, an experiment in rethinking and narrating our shared footage in transmedial and dialogic ways.

Igor Sevcuk, January 2014

 

1) Ong W.J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, New York: Routlege, 2002

a) chapter: Plato, Writing and Computers
b) chapter: The Inward Turn: Consciousness and the Text

2) McQuire, S., Visons of Modernity: Represantation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera, chapter: Amnesic Cultures, London: Sage, 1998

3) Guy Debord, Complete Cinematic Works: Scrpts, Stills, Documents, trans. and edit. Ken Knabb, Oakland: AK Press, 2003, p.29

4) Ibid., p.35.

5) "... we attend to the specificity of the human — its ways of being in the world, its ways of knowing, observing, and describing — by (paradoxically, for humanism) acknowledging that it is fundamentally a prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are radically “not-human” and yet have nevertheless made the human what it is."

from Cary Wolfe's What Is Posthumanism, Minneapolis: the University of Minnesota Press, 2010, p.xxv

 

 

Nowhere Palace, 2015, 17:00

 

 

Front side of Vondelparkpaviljoen in Amsterdam, 1963.
From 1972 to 2012 the building offered shelter to the Filmmuseum.

sevcuk.nl - works

because the outside world has changed...

 

a filmic dialogue by Go-Eun Im and Igor Sevcuk

2013-2021