[above: the light at 9pm on Friday during Long Film For Ambient Light]

[The following is a short series of excerpts from an interview with Chris Fleming, recorded by Lucas, Friday 16th March 2007, 9pm. These quotes are cut from a longer conversation. You can also read a short note he wrote after the event, here.]

There’s something about the scale of it. When I first came in here I felt my eyes almost felt pulled on…because I’d been in my office all day… so it was really… I just kind of switched off…

LI: You’d said you were zoning oout?

CF: what does zoning out mean? Like a feeling that I didn’t know I was there but I knew I had been there. It’s really strange.

LI: how much time passed do you think in that period?

CF: five minutes? I don’t know.

Also this being framed by something that happened previously. It almost felt like an anchor. I found something vaguely comforting about the fact that something like that was being re-created.

The fact that it was done in the past lent it some weight?

CF – weight’s not the right word. Reassuring. It felt nice there was some continuity of tradition. Tradition’s not the right word, either, dignification. I really don’t know. My whole brain’s just switched off…

[continued, now outside the space]

It also felt a bit naughty coming in there…I was running out of the house. I’d been paralysed by wasting time, I could go in there and switch off without wasting time, there was a guiltless non-doing about it that I really enjoyed. The scale of it just shifts. The change in physicality. Like when you stand on somewhere really tall and you feel your stomach just move. That caused a shift in me that kicked something off, just the scale of it, it was big and enclosed, that was a defamiliarisation effect.

[The following is a short series of excerpts from an interview with Anne Walton, recorded by Lucas, Friday 16th March 2007, 2pm. These quotes are cut from a longer conversation. The full transcript will be more interesting!]

I felt a smoothness… like I was entering into something very smooth […] the light has something to do with it. And all the grey tones in this place. […] A slightly clinical feel. […] I couldn’t help noticing the curtains. Some kind of notion of theatre. Although I quickly realised they were just here, already a part of the space. I felt myself a part of the structure. […] As far as this being an event […] the physical structure and the structure that you… that this event is… it resonates with the notion of intervals and spaces.

When there isn’t much that’s been put here, I start to want to look at what’s been put here already… The little dotted recesses… in the concrete…

I quickly felt some kind of a longing – to be here, for much longer. … It’s a long film, and I’m only here for just a quick glimpse. So I feel…regretful.

[If I stayed longer] I imagine some of the initial romance and positive feelings would start to be challenged…

I started wondering whether lots of conversations will happen – is it a social space? A meditative space? Conversation can be great way to pass the time.

I feel as though if I stayed here longer… I’d do a lot of writing… from a state of relative emptiness… not useful writing, just a flowing writing…

The lightbulb … it is very electric… the thingness of it is very strong… it is a very sharp point in the centre of the space. It’s really crackling…

The time chart and the statement – made me feel supported in being here… they’re a kind of explanation. It helps to frame the experience for me… and give…not clues, but it reinforces…particularly the long scroll…somehow preparatory for my time here…

It’s quite zen …very zen … just attending to the present moment … I can imagine, having been I’m going to go away and take it with me…a consciousness of this slice of time in the space has been carved out, and it’s here, and I entered it for a brief moment, it’s almost like I dipped my toe into a stream and when I go away I know the stream’s there and others are going to come to the spot that’s been carved out for getting right into it … immersion…

Louise was struck by the austerity of this…I said yes, although for me austerity has a harshness about it, I don’t feel yet… There’s more of a sense of generosity in this space…

I’m glad to see it at this time, when it’s still pristine and unspoiled by human … habitation …

The Teaching & Learning Cinema invites you to “THIS TIME“, a film screening this Sunday, April 1st, 2007 6.30pm for a 7pm start at ‘Sydney’, Cleveland St (next to Fatima’s) (see http://officialsydney.com)
The screening follows along from a residency that Lucas Ihlein and Louise Curham have been doing in the majestic Track 12 at Performance Space’s new home at Carriageworks.

We’ll roll projector on some of the expanded cinema re-enactments we’ve been working on in the residency and some film prints we brought in for our research.

The prints come from the National Film & Video Lending Service in Canberra and from the Lux, the artist’s film archive in London ( why doesn’t Australia have one of these?). Performance Space are most generously lending a pair of beautiful Eiki 16mm projectors for the occasion.

From our recent work, marvel at the stamina of those who were there for the 24 hours for the ‘Long Film for Ambient Light’. As a kind of private experiment, we recreated the conditions for this 1975 work by Anthony McCall on March 16 and 17 down at the Performance Space. We’ll show a time lapse video (where one hour becomes one minute) and invite those who were there during the event to share their “mental residues”.

Also marvel at the stamina of the participants in our attempt to re-create William Raban’s 1974 film ‘Breath’. The film documents a walk up a hill by a group of walkers carrying whistles. Each shot matches the length of a whistle – a breath. Raban’s film was in the gentle English countryside. The Curham, Ihlein, Shaw version is North Era hill in the Royal National Park. We’ll show ‘Breath 2006′ and Raban’s original.

Enjoy our versions on 16mm film and miniDV of William Raban’s 1973 Expanded Cinema work 2’ 45”. In our reworkings (presented as ‘55 seconds’ (16mm film), and ‘6 minutes’ (mini DV)), we followed Raban’s recipe and projected an image of the projector screen, re-filmed it, projected that image, re-filmed it, projected, re-filmed and so on. The miniDV version has a velvety softness, and reaction between the iterations is a delight. Be part of Iteration 8 as we show you Iteration 7.

Of the films from the archives, we have William Raban’s ‘Angles of Incidence’ (1973). Raban describes this as an experiment in constructing three dimensional space on the two dimensional surface of the film.1 The film is exactly as it came out of the camera. It appears that Raban’s method was to fix a length of rope between a window and the camera and film all the possible views of the window that the rope would allow.

Lis Rhodes ‘Light Reading’ (1979): Those who attended the NowNow film screenings would have seen Lis Rhodes’ ‘Dresden Dynamo’, easily a stand out in visual dynamism with layer upon layer of re-printed lettraset stuck through the optical printer using all the printer lights. Light Reading has more of a polemic as a voice intones an essay on the role of the subject within the object of the film and the gaze of the camera, subverted by extended direct film animation and re-printing that is based on the light meter itself – the ‘eye’ of the camera if you like. This is a dense film but we found it very rewarding.

And the very cute John Smith 1976 film called ‘The Girl Chewing Gum’ – a wonderful spoof where the film director literally directs passing traffic. A subtly formal as it deals with the split between sound and image.

Okay so hope you can come and we’re looking forward to it immensely.

For a jpg flyer advertising the event visit this URL:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/152/435703456_c463d748bc_o.jpg

Cheers!
Lucas and Louise

A few folks who we invited to experience our private “screening” of Long Film for Ambient Light have begun to filter back with their thoughts after the event.

Mike and Deborah visited in its last half hour, late Saturday morning the 17th of March.

Mike sent us these thoughts:

So I thought I’d debrief a little……

I don’t remember seeing LFfAL before…… but might have done…… it is a subtle work in terms of image and duration and therefore recalled with difficulty. For those of us like myself who often make time to savour the light as it happens, in a range of settings and at different times, such subtleties are not for recall, but experiencing.

But this remote version, remote from the arbitrating influence of the conceptualist A.McA, created its own magic and its own mnemonic. The room was a people centre. At first like a refuge with figures huddled around bundles in a far corner, refugees from a cyclone, or some other natural disaster. Then the room was a laboratory with precision instruments lined along one wall recording from several perspectives and in many aspects the focus of attention. Which was, the four elegant windows along one wall, floor to ceiling, a barely discernible incandescen tlightbulb swinging from the high support, two metres off the ground. (I’ve attached the best of the pix I took
of this element of the place.)

Then the conversations in the room began and sometime later, as we were hoping, the sun came out for a moment and we all stopped talking
and turned towards the light(s).

For a moment I was reminded of what I have been told about Te Papa in Wellington. There are several galleries of photographs of Pacific Islanders, exposures made mostly in the 19th and early 20th centuries by anthropologists, for a variety of reasons from the altruistic to th curious, nonetheless variously imposing the technology of the colonial powers onto the peoples of the islands. What the colonialists hadn’t anticipated was that these images would become directly useful to the descendents of the subjects within the frame, for it is they on particular days who gather in extended family groups with the photographs hanging in the galleries – food is prepared and eaten with the ancestors.

The scene in the Track 12 room resembled these celebrations, the extended family of friends joined in this time and place by the bringing together of light as both concept, history, place and moment, in some ways like the ancient operators of the monolithic timepieces who also used light, place and moment to bring proportion to what could otherwise become an endless void.

A few folks who we invited to experience our private “screening” of Long Film for Ambient Light have begun to filter back with their thoughts after the event. First cab off the rank is Flemo.

Thanks for the invite to say something, although – at this stage – I’m unsure I have anything to say except thanks for the invite to say something. I was serious, by the way, about the idea of a “natural screensaver.” As much as applications have progressed, screensavers are still about the most interesting things computers do. Arriving late at night (-or late for me, a confirmed father and nerd), didn’t seem to bear out the screen-saver intuition. Perhaps this would have been different were I to have come during the day. So what of the film(ing), as I saw it? The experience of being in the space seemed to have an almost-sedating effect on me: there was something chruch-like – simply in the size of the space, the darkness I found quietening (and provided a kind of ‘cover’: a way of being non-selfconsciously alone with other people present); there was, I think, a kind of alteration of time and space that I can’t quite describe… or perhaps I don’t have the patience, now
mindful of having to leave my computer and get somewhere else soon.

What seems to be pushing itself into mind now is the difficulty of separating my experience of the filming from what else happened on that day. It has become blended with a slightly fraught day at work, the arrival of my in-laws and my buying two ice creams on the way home from the film, the first (ice-cream) of which tasted perhaps like the nicest thing I’ve ever eaten. (I’m not sure why; I’ve eaten lots of Mango Weiss Bars before.) It’s also bound up with sitting outside with you (L.), which now seems associated with things slowing down somehow. The banal point is, of course, that there’s no “pure phenomenology” in the way someone like Husserl would have wanted – that the frame blends into the artwork, blah blah blah blah. Perhaps a more interesting thing to think about it to reverse the priority here and ask why the ice creams and other things are now so vivid? Might it be because the experience of the work was strong enough “in itself” to frame the things that fell
around it, so that the “in itself” becomes hard to articulate, except insofar (and in the way) as it made my other “experiencings” on that day for me more vivid, more indelible. If so, why so? I don’t know.

Flemo.

PS. Two students just came into my office and grilled me about a graduate diploma that I don’t teach in and know nothing about. When I returned to this email I wondered why I hadn’t thought about that solitary globe in the film(ing) as representing perfect interrogation lighting?

Notes: Makes me remember the other events on that day.
Mafia light.

We’re in New York and Anthony McCall is putting on a new show, including Long Film for Ambient Light. I’m in the gallery as LFFAL is being set up, it’s completely different from our understanding of the work. This version involves a long piece of perspex set into the wall high up towards the ceiling. On the perspex are printed representations of empty film frames. Behind the perspex film panel an area of wall has been removed, and light filters in from here. I ask Anthony where the light comes from – “the outside of the museum via the air conditioning duct,” she says. Yes, Anthony is a woman. A youngish one, too (although at the start of the dream she was a man, still quite young, and with a full head of hair, far more resembling McCall’s photos from the early 70s, than what I imagine he looks like now, balder and more statesmanlike in appearance.)

I ask Anthony if this different version of the work still runs for 24 hours. “Oh yes, ” she says, and during that period I send someone out to do work for me.” What kind of work? “You know, photographing different places around the city that I haven’t been to before.”

I should mention that this female McCall has a lush brown goatee(!). She disapproves of the version of Long Film that we were working on recreating. (In the dream, we flip back and forth between being in our room at the Performance space, and her museum room in New York. It turns out that she’s very cross about the “misinformation” propagated via the book “The Solid Light Films and Related Work” – which we’ve been basing our work on. “They got it completely wrong,” she says.

Back at the P space, she’s very disapproving of the curtain in our room. “It’s too nice,” she says, ” I only ever worked with ordinary domestic curtains.” We flash back to her museum room in New York where she is having her curtains put up. They’re shabby black horrid things with patches all over them. They look like fires have burned on them, but then the frayed edges fo the burn-holes have been hemmed to stop further damage. Contrary to her idea of the domestic and ordinary, they look completely contrived.

I try to reason with her: “Look, we tried to get in touch with you before we went ahead,” I said, “but we didn’t hear back, and we followed the book as best we could, and Mike Leggett thought -” “Mike Leggett,” she said, cutting in, “is very contemptuous of what you’ve done.” I am shocked. “He thinks what you did is too correct.”

All of this is bewildering. I want to let her know that, whether it was “wrong” or not, the version of the work we tried to re-create was actually marvellous. I want her to be interested in the productive mistakes we’ve made. But she just wants to tell us about the time she came to Sydney in 1988 and stayed with her wife at the Rocks. “It was beautiful,” she says. Apparently, this visit is what has kept her looking so youthful.

noon (written at 1.30pm)

I pressed go on the timer. Set it to 23 hours 59 minutes. But we still were setting up, so didn’t really take the moment to just be here. Kat was still vacuuming. The space felt clean and neat, there was a “coming into clarity” about the whole thing. But we weren’t quite there yet. I was aware of being slightly stressed with regards to this. Would have been better if we were ready in advance, but I was also quite amused that the film starts whether you are ready or not. In some sense, the film is kind of indifferent to my responses. It doesn’t care if I “attend” to it or not. On the other hand, the film needs me – without me, it is nothing. Maybe.

1.36pm

Just rang Chris Fl. to invite him along. Its doubtful that he’ll make it which is a shame. He said “sounds like a natural screensaver” (somewhat faceciously). But I liked that idea a lot.

1.37pm

Anne W. has been in the space for about 25 minutes. She’s been pacing around with this “residue sheet” – not sure if the sheet really helped at all – perhaps not – I’m writing all over it myself (rather than filling it in properly). Can’t tell but my impression is that Anne feels unsure about whether she’s “doing the right thing” – this confusion could be a big part of peoples’ experiences here. (?)

Anne W says that Chris Fo. will call us on the mobile and come around 4am to see the dawn with us.

2.43pm

Just had a chat with Louise C., recorded it. Anne W. left 20 mins before that. The conversation with AW ranged from “the difficulty of separating feelings from sensations” (something I feel also) to interpretive leaps (finding meaning in things). She said – about the timeline drawing and the wall statement “notes in duration” – that they made her feel “supported”. I’m not sure if I understood her right, but I interpreted this a bit like: she felt that the drawing and statement helped give an idea of what McCall was trying to do – his own grappling, which led the staging of this work as a way of trying to come to terms with problems he’d been worrying about back in 1975. Perhaps this took the pressure off Anne in having to imagine what the work was supposed to “be about” – meaning she could relax a little into just being here and allow whatever happens to just happen. I think the form we gave her to fill in (thoughts sensations feelings) was slightly stressful for her, trying to slot things into boxes, but she seemed to move beyond that, and some useful observations emerged from her filling out the form. She noticed wanting/wishing she could stay longer. She said (aloud) that this was a “longing”. She also noted that she became more tuned to noticing things in the room, small details like the pencil marks on the wall.

Anne W notes transcribed:

arising/
a rising
suspension…
bridge

not long enough!
_this_ time frame
or mine?

some place
between

Is it a thought?
to notice things?
the pencil marks
the big rusted screws
some missing
ah! some missing
liek longing or
like not not knot
belonging,

wanting
to walk,
keep moving
slowly.
Noticing
things I
already said
that under
“thoughts”.

Wanting
wishing
to stay
to _be_ a
stay.

sad. can’t
be long.

an urge to make
an entry on the
time/interval scroll
on the wall. to make
“my” entry and exit.
to be recorded.
Is _this_ the fillem?

I could write in
here.
It’s some kind of
permission or
per mission, that this
space/time seams
to offer.

4.01pm

It’s hard to see our current dilemma as “interesting” and “part of the work” although it most certainly is. But how to? The left top window covering is starting to pull away, the gaffa hasn’t adhered to the fabric well enough. The trouble with this is that it isn’t easy to get access to the scissor lift, which is the only way to reach up into the corner and stick it back on again. This isn’t a bad time for it to be happening, since we’ve got no visitors and Vic’s around to help us out. Things could be worse. But I am a bit hungry and I was just on my way out to get something for us to eat when it happened. Then Vic brought us a small scissor lift but we had difficulty getting it to work, and besides, even when it finally kicked in, the reach of it is not wide enough to get into the corners. So I re-fixed the gaff in the middle, and we’re waiting for the big scissor lift to fix the outer bits. But hte big scissor is stuck in the theatre with some scaffold on top of it, and it can’t be removed until the builders return to disassemble the scaffold. Wow this sounds so boring.

Message from Anne W.:

Sent
16 March 2007
15:18:04
I want to keep
being probed by
it. it’s like being
offered a pulse
to take whilst
being a pulse
being taken. and
a pulse is
something to be
nourished by.
do i
read too much
into it? no but i
think its
profound what
you are doing by
not doing…
much. and now i
worry about the
intrusion of this
text. what can i
say? this is
residue. do i
have to …weight?
to let it
settle? moor?
but it’s so moorish!
sender
anne w

4.22pm

The sticking back I did of the fabric on the top left window seems to be holding. Just now having a visit from Katie D., Brian F., Peter V. Katie and Peter are sitting near me on the gym mats.

5.29pm
K, B and P have just left. They weren’t interested in being recorded per se., but they (esp P) wanted to ask _me_ a bunch of questions. The hardest one was about what _I_ had learned from doing this piece. That was a really difficult question to answer. I just talked about noticiing my own sensations and trying to come to grips with the idea that being in here, everything is valid and equivalent (at least within the scope of the film’s conceptual structure) – but how hard it was to accept problems like the fabric dislodging from the gaffa as equivalent and valid, and my irritation at that as important as the blissful feeling of watching the light change.

532pm
Brian talked about how the work made him conscious of the outside – or – conscious _on_ the outside, when he was outside the space. (He didn’t spent much time in here – he went off looking for milk to put in the tea we gave him, and didn’t return for quite a while – but he said the consciousness of space and time created by the work affected him even on his quest for milk.) Peter said “some people would find it really difficult to just be in here”.

546pm
Just tried to get the builder’s scissor lift to work, to fix the fabric. No go. Will have to wait till the theatre one becomes available after seven.

548pm
(Thinking about our provision of all the extra information via the zine and the reading folders). The work is “didactic” which is what I told K, P and B. In a way it says -

“hey, how do you normally use time and space? Instrumentally, right? You use them as tools to get things done, they are your friend or enemy depending on how much of them you have available (the more the better, right?). But why don’t you “use” them a bit differently? Why don’t you let them be their own things, in fact, not really “use” them at all?”

The didactic nature of the work – maybe its a bit like how mindfulness class or yoga is didactic – it’s about putting certain ideas in your head so that you can think differently about the way you do ordinary things. And with this piece – it’s the same. So providing extra info to our visitors (increasing the didactic material) might not hurt so much. The kind of experience one might have would change with the extra information provided, but that’s no loss. Surely (?) a more aware/attentive experience is the result? That’s a good thing, right?

5:54pm
Thinking about time. How much time has passed. Almost a quarter of the available time. It seems to have “flown” – I have no sense of boredom or of dragging or tedium. There has been too much to do, and I have had to snatch moments of quiet from in between the visits and the fixing of the fabric on the window. I wonder if time will drag differently during the night. Almost certainly it will.

Louise is with Russell E from Performance Studies at U Syd, who has just come to visit.
(to be continued)

Anxieties that arise – bathroom, who is feeding Reuben [cat]? (Luciana Lucas tells me). I hear: the video camera taking single frames. Previously I heard music. There have been voices.

I see: the fluctuation in the light. The bulb is non-frosted tungsten [100 W]. Should probably be pearled daylight balanced. Did discuss this. Lucas suggested Powersaver (fluoro daylight balance bulb). This would have been better because of the daylight balance. However at the time of transition (daylight to dark et al), tungsten bulb likely to come into its own or tungsten balance closer to sunrise/sunset light [answers: no proximity to light balance on cusps, daylight balance would have been better).

Comment from Walty: feedback forms NG for her. Removes linear narrative of her experience down to boxes, doesn't like this separation of sensation, emotion, thought.

Curham comment: not sure about value of reflexivity. I like to be very present tense. So I prefer the actual doing [unless the reflexivity/documenting is the doing eg commentary paintings]. In a sense we undercut the meaning of McCall in documenting. The work is all about relationships made through documenting [? Did I mean our interpretation of the work? I don't understand this statement.] Not sure about all the ‘I’ voice here.

NO WRITING FROM CURHAM IN SITU UNTIL 5.30AM 17 MARCH

[source: A3 project notebook]
[Notes made sitting] outside 5:30. Sky is a pressure, light is a pressure so I start to get more reverberations in McCall in is own work with his partical cones, Breath etc with this piece where light in sky is pressure. [Pressure of light change not visible in the room until c. 6.30 but visible outside at 5:03]

Body sensation: feels very flattened, feels very hammered flat. The light bulb emanates heat and it feels very aggressive, it is not lost in this room, it floods it.

5:10 air con in XPT Service Centre on other side of railway yards started up – enormous impact on surrounding environment. Incredibly loud.

My resistance to the work came in as the socially awkward moments increased.

Room became an entrapment. Intensity too great. No follow through, no resonance in a flection of it as cinema. The harshness of it not rewarding to me. I am left with myself in this mechanism and I don’t like it. My social relations are intensified. [Another thought, McCall not there to ease it, set its tone - this role falls on Lucas and I which is very demanding as artists because we have to interpret and speak for the ideas of another. Artist as translator effectively.]

In this state, some lateral tensions is felt in the body, left right. When tense, emotions occur. This shows me how much of all this room is missed [? I don't understand this now. i think I meant that in focusing on one's self, one missing a great deal].

Very pronounced intrusion from the light.

Very simple. Nothing to escape into. So reflection on the failure of cinema. Escape simply creates a gap with the here now. Some uber thoughts thhat any thoughts I may have are scattered and not profound. There is no real depth here, no necessity.

Outdoors this is definitely coming now. The colour of this page is very different. Whiteness to clouds not there before. Now I can identify that the sky was blue and not black earlier [5:03 ooutdoors].

[indoors source: A3 project notebook]
I am actually seized in here with all the intensity of this room. It means I have fewer thoughts than outside.

So now I think of Dulboot and Badjelly because the sun comes up

Has nothing whatever to do with cinema, no relation at all. There is no reflection back to the world. It is a completely nihilistic piece. Instead of nurturing a human through an escape, through a pressure release, it throws all the focus of the human on self same human. But somehow its hand is very harsh.

I do not think the mechanical shutter in this room can be withstood. Cameras are an intrusion [stills, moving - Bolex, my 35mm, Peter's panorama, medium format].

To me the presentness is very undermined by the capture tools. I do not want the capture tools.

From the re-enactment flows this whole thing to do with having access to pieces I never otherwise would.

Torpor of sleep comes. It is oddly in waves. The changing over of the light is magnificent [is it].

[source: feedback notes sheet 2]
Curham goes outside of the building, eastern side. Interesting how light is something of a pressure.

Sense periphery of sensation is like the light bulb. Sensations. I already dislike mapping this to the stimuli of this piece. Why at human height? [Light bulb]. Why this constructed aggressive intervention? Has the effect of making me uncomfortable etc. Light in eyes, a sense of shouting in the darkness of this room.

For me the site of the piece is the duration. So I have no problem with the light turned on [general room lighting for repairs to falling down cloth on top left window]. Because the duration continues. In a way we did not ‘lead’ the benefits of the space so we did not lead people to stillness and quietness. Some came with that expectation and that’s what they got. So does this become an artwork because of its publicness? This tells me possibly yes. So if myself alone said 24 hour silence in a room unless I somehow deposit this in a conversation, is has no reverberation. So there is a Curham theme. If I make work with if you like, no ideal reader, how can it possibly [reverberate].

Why the isolation? Because I am unexpectedly and unpredictably affected by sources and actions around me.

6:23 am 17/3/07 grey in frosting [on windows], in a sense the show starts.
6:26 Show time.

Really don’t like the documentation. Really think this and indeed the writing [Notes in Duration and time schema] undercuts the idea of the piece which is perceptual limitations.

6:35 I see the shadow growing on the arches.

We cannot really assess equilibrium because of the difference in colour balance [bulb to daylight - equilibrium of brightnesses, influence in room]. Frosted windows achieve better back projection, cloth windows achieve better projection as screens.

6:41 probably quite close to equal [bulb daylight]. Suppose the shadows show this. An aspect of learning to this piece, connoisseurship, if you did the piece several times over …

6:43 quality of dawn very grey. Those who want or enjoy inner reflection feel good, morality, judgement in ability to be reflective. Those who are best able to reflect are some how in greater control.

6:53 Tristesse. Maybe the very light greyness out there or sense of new day [but I felt tristesse].

[Notes: Curham in space from c. 12.30. Sense of pitching self against the distance of 24 hours. Sense of anticipation, delectation about watching the light.Note that it was a very hot night - 30 degrees at 9pm outside so Fiona said. Some notes about space - CarriageWorks is brand new arts centre conversion of old railway manufacturing sheds - huge Victorian metal works. It is about 5 km from Circular Quay and is right next to major railway lines. The room we have is huge, c. 18m x 40 m x30 m, an enormous cube with exposed ceiling and concrete formwork walls and one wall of windows, grey concrete walls, black boarded floor, orange feature doors, huge black hanging drapes in one corner. Furnishings almost nil, we have 2 tables, AV equip, computer and our junk which we have tried to keep to absolute minimum. For LFAL, room almost empty.]

The Long Film was a very intense experience – my head did very strange things. It was unrelentingly social which I found very, very difficult. The intensity of such focus on a single space over such a time span was intense in the
extreme. Interesting that the 24 hours McCall framed was darkness book ended by light.

My best discovery was a very clear mental image of the sun in the sky acting like a bellows creating these fluctuations in the room [so in the end for me, this is a landscape film, how curious!]

I found the light bulb almost intolerable, it came to invade the room, a ‘tense object’ as one visitor described it even in daylight. At night, it felt like an attack. There was a sense at about 1am of being in solitary confinement without the benefit of being alone. I sat outside the room for many hours there – still in the building but just outside, trying to keep myself calm and as present as possible.

The effect of the work for me was ultimately a kind of concrete poem – by having this vast slice of space set aside for nothing other than the passage of time within it, there’s something incredibly seductive about this right at this moment in time. I think we all had a sense that we would like this kind of space to be activated at all times.

We chose to make media documents (16mm time lapse film, 35mm slide, 30 second video time lapse) and this proves to be the undoing of the piece really because it in effect entirely undermines what McCall was attempting to do. This is a juicy part of the experience for me as it seems the most problematic choice we made yet reflects something very real about the ‘productivity’ age we’re in where we’re programmed to find outcomes and outputs. My problem here is this wasn’t really an active decision on our part, we just ‘did it’ without really mulling over the implications, yet we mulled over many other details very attentively. We were very clear about our aim to access people’s ‘mental residue’ but this pictorial documentation is another issue.

Another key problem was attentiveness. At times the room disintegrated into chat and gossip and human business. Nothing wrong with that. The experience would have been richer however had we had someone in the room being utterly ‘present’ with the work. This happened in the early evening and again in the morning.
Another discovery was that the experience of sleep is not dissimilar to the drop off of the light from the light bulb – a kind of fuzzing out, haziness on the edges.

Reflections on Saturday night (night after)
Discoveries in general
Increasingly irritated by the didactic matter in the room – the bulb and the papers. Denis uses the word ‘tense’ to describe the bulb – it is a tense object. Seems very true.

Ambivalence about resonance of this piece. Does it need 24 hours concentration 32 years after the fact? Doesn’t need it but is it worth it? Probably. But I don’t like it. Why? Because I don’t like how I behave within it. I don’t know if this is because I have to see myself so sharply in 24 hour span.

I can’t see that its resonance to film is really rich enough for me as a film maker. It is frighteningly simply. All it does is to make the subject/content of the film the events/actions/interactions in the room. This is throwing humans mightily on to themselves and I seem to be lacking in resilience. 24 hours in a room full of interacting people – just thinking about it stresses me (yet I looked forward to it as I had thought everyone would have the activity of experiencing the room to take care of and direct their social relations. To an extent this happened but I found myself constantly being a ‘talking head’ which made me want to withdraw from the room.)

So by making the subject of the work the room which is what happens in the dark and this is the focus of the cycle, book ended as it is by two slices of day.

A detail in the McCall notes we have overlooked is the importance of Warhol’s solid time films for him. Those are kind of like generated/filmed found objects. In a sense this is a super important precedent for these non-indexical films and these are non-indexical. Yet oddly this one might be the most indexical. It is like … church, monastic [but this is because of the vaulted room].

The performance aspect was inadequately attended to as George K so rightly identified. Needed some one to be 100 per cent committed to the work from start to finish to set the tone, show others how to be in the space.
So making the subject of the ‘film’ the room but titling it so that we think it will be light, this does something. I did not/was not able to think through how the piece would actually ‘edit’ before hand. In film making, previsualisation is usually very detailed and thorough and even with my ludicrously abstract work, I still previsualise in my head and usually in drawings. I did not do this. I had no real idea of what it would be. In part because these live pieces do not have this enframing that allows me to previsualise as I would with other film work.

I suppose I am in a sense in awe of the complexity this ridiculously simple set of conditions creates. By about midnight I was feeling that the resonance from the conditions was too poor. This was from repeating several times the way the piece interrogates cinema – the day/night function of the window – pellicula in day (rear projection), screen at night (front projection).

We impacted/changed conditions from the original in several crucial ways:

- vaulted space made it an experience of transcendent space [must re-read Gans on this. Matching frames – dumb muteness which bans irony and returns to the pre-language ‘uh’ that actually means something in itself – it does not stand for something else. Link here to non-indexical language, non-indexical film, if you like ‘core’, ‘foundation’ experiences, experiential states, FACTS]. This room is a totally different experience from the Ideas Warehouse.

- presence of image capture tools especially Bolex totally against McCall idea of attention in the present, no reference to other space, time [oddly, by masking other space, we think about that a lot eg windows]. Denis B for instance thought the ‘film’ was in the film camera, a totally logical and fair assumption and one we just really did not give thought to. Issue for Curham, had an internal reservation about this that I did not take further.

- Because so few elements in the space, have to think very very very carefully about what these are because they are all read very strongly as the work [a function of Broodthaer’s ‘figs’ is to locate the work from within a plethora of ‘stuff’]

- Some people really did not get it that it was a re-enactment or what that means. They needed really clear interpretive panels or information and needed the things that the work consisted of made really obvious to them. Our information booklet and table was still too obscure for people who really did not know about this whole concept.

- Bulb: brightness and colour temperature. Would be different experience with these changes. The bulb we had was not generously functional (eg couldn’t read wall material by it nor read in sleeping area) or human enabling, was very very harsh. [Method note for Lucas and Louise, try out elements individually before hand. If you like ‘shot list’ the film/work so that we actually make decisions about these aspects rather than just doing as an action with them.]

- Curatorial notes: some aspects have to be mimesis, emulation without real comprehension although comprehension feels like one has more agency to present the work because the understanding is thorough. So with this piece, I have spent 3 years thinking about the experience of that time block and of the light but I did not put 2 and 2 together about its actual focus which is on unchanging darkness. Works like this where the score is very open or requires interpretation, I don’t see how they can be mounted in any other way than as an art practice in itself as the decisions are not those within museum studies they are expressive and thus creative/generative decisions ie it could be this way or this way and these decisions impact integrally on the experience of the work eg vaulted space makes the piece entirely new.

- Importance of sound in space eg Sherre DL, her first comment was about the ‘sound track’ of the fan and its base frequencies generating an unnecessary eeriness in the dark (c. 9pm) yet earlier in daylight Russell E (c. 6.30pm) commented that the fan gave a cladding that allowed conversation to take place. Reinforces that all sensory aspects are integral to the experience because there are so few aspects.

Query the whole real time capture: writing, documentation et al.

Peter S (taking photographs) and Lizzie M (recording interviews) okay because not inside the structure of the piece but actions by Lucas and Louise are inside (for me). In a way to record ‘mental residue’ so quickly is NG.
Curham note: I did not really grab hold of the intention to really mount this piece for the purpose of capturing people’s experience. I can see that for LI this was really an integral action. Although we discussed it and we laid the ground work to do this together, it did not really penetrate for me. My observation was that the interviews worked really really well because they cemented for people the experience they had/were having and the motivated conviviality of that exchange made people feel their participation was crucial and highly valued (which it was). The extreme gift of this exchange leaves me overwhelmed in some sense. So in this way, the event was a catalyst for reflection and the interview was a tool for capture of that reflection. I have a question around this sense of achievement or satisfaction in this ‘productivity’ however. I think this is a very current experience – a need to somehow measure/record our experience or it will slip into that zone between the light bulb’s pool on the floor and the wall, so to speak.

I am afraid to think too deeply about the attack on the analogue aspect of film, its indexical, representational aspect. Question for Bec D, is there a related piece in photography? Or is this non-indexical ‘primary colour’, fact too banal in photography? What would it look like?

So we are talking about claims to forms that detach the elements so far that they no longer have that physical form.
Relational aesthetics link in Expanded Cinema is the ‘score’ of cinema re-worked with emphasis on relationships between the elements.
I found last night (Fri 16th during Long Film) that attempts at deep thought went nowhere and I was left simply with the room and the people in it. I could not get at the significance of there being no pictorial representation. But in a sense there is because there is the time schema and the light bulb which has this ability to be symbolic, irritatingly so.

- I found the frosting and paper on the windows had no [real] symbolism for me – or none came to mind.
- In the dark, it came to feel like solitary confinement without the benefit of being solitary

Interesting sense to go outside at 5.03am and sense the relief of a vast big space beyond that room. The room came to have the same kind of enscribed intensity as that in 55 Seconds where the space between the wall and the machines feels very intense/intensified.

Physical Discoveries

1. That the pulse of the light from the ‘bellows’ of light in the sky when my eyes are closed is not dissimilar to sleep. An awareness of impact of external environmental conditions not controlled by man ie nature on my body. So I was very energised as the light started to fade (Fri c. 6pm). I was out of the liminal sleep zone with a snap at c. 7am (although awake from 5am), 25 mins after sunrise. The border of sleep is very much like the ill-defined border of the light bulb in the room. That light is a serious attack on my sleepfulness, it stimulates me a great deal.

2. Despite decision to cultivate stillness, generally this was an emulation and my front brain was continuously suggesting activity which I did not discipline myself to resist. At times I did eg thought that I should turn camera over. Decision not to. But then a logic chain to the role of me contributing actively to the work and role of me ‘honouring’ my artwork by doing it as well as it demands rather than allowing it to reflect the other emphases of my life. So logic would lift my arm and turn the camera over.

3. Desperation. More an emotional state than physical. But discovered generation of tears is tension around sinus band in face and then heat on planes of upper cheeks below eyes and then on planes of nose near bridge and then welling which is felt in sternum. Cannot be talked down from this point. Sensation of tears on cheeks very unpleasant, quite slow. Strong sense of track of tears.

4. Fatigue. Experience of fatigue very curious. I have no active emotion other than a kind of claustrophobic desperation. I experience a visualisation of whitening. Like my limbs are becoming transparent. I start to have a visualisation of my body being hammered flat, like I am more 2D than 3D, a ‘Flat Daddy’ (life size cutouts for families of US soldiers on service). I hear my voice very flat. In this flatness, I have flashes of white irritation like sparks in a sense. If I am really honest I can feel the aches in my body at this point and there are lots of them.
Considering a Long Film study group day, collate comment, findings, arrive at some analysis. So much material generated, good to attend to it soon.

“The apprehension of any artwork, static or moving, is a fleeting moment, as are all experiences. It is their mental residue that is important”.

And yet, in all the criticism and papers that have been written about McCall, (and a few of them refer to long film) nobody actually discusses their own personal experience – and the mental residue that remains as a result, of being there in person. It’s discussed as an art world “move” – an avant garde or conceptual response to the conditions of film and sculpture, the reductive approach in the tradition of minimalism, the found object tradition of dada (turning something non-art into art) etc etc, but never from a phenomenological, experiential perspective. Perhaps that’s what we can bring by setting it up again.

If we (and a few of our punters) are going to stay for the full 24 hours, there are a few things need ironing out. I don’t think we can have the space completely empty and clear. It would seem intolerable without something to eat, drink, and sit on. Or am I wrong? For me, the work isn’t “about” discomfort, and it’s not really about setting up a space to be a crisp minimal installation either. Although McCall wants to reduce external stimuli as much as possible (having no set “events” to stimulate us and make us unaware of the passing of time) does this extend to having absolutely nothing in the space at all? Where does the human body go, what does it do? Do we sit or lie on the hard floor, or can we use a cushion? Can we go outside for a breath of fresh air or a smoke? Can we sleep on the floor in the space? What different kinds of experiences will we have, depending on how we choose to “accomodate” ourselves? For really, a work of such duration begins to be a kind of work we “reside” in, something that becomes a living space, as the duration approaches the order of magnitude of life rather than of art. How much can we push the trappings of life away from this special time and space? Do we restrict mobile phone use in the room (this would not have been a problem in the 1970s). So many questions.

Today we did another iteration of “six minutes” and of “55 seconds”. They’re both getting more interesting, particularly the video one. What’s happening is that the voice of the “now-me” competes with the voice of the “video me” and also the voice of the “video video me” and so on. The “now me” tends to make a decision to not speak over the top of the “video me”, but to do it before or after. Thus the recession of time which is evident in the visual component of the work has its analogue in the recession of time in the audio component. The sequence tends to go NOW / YESTERDAY / DAY BEFORE /DAY BEFORE THAT etc, a literal recession. But what we discovered was that this means that our “six minutes” will eventually be full of these announcements of the present time. Two things result. First, there will be no “quiet time” left – the reflective or meditative time of just sitting in the moment. Instead, we will constantly be stimulated by these announcements of past dates, like a spoken index or autistic oral history which only announces its title duration date and place. Second, it means that although our timer is only set to six minutes each occasion, the ending of the work is pushed back and back, so the work is a little longer each time (it currently stands at seven minutes).

These things lead us to hypothesise that Raban didn’t use recorded sound in his 2′45″. So was his microphone stand there just to project his voice to the auditorium for now? Or are we really barking up the wrong tree? [*NB, more discoveries re sound in coming days -turns out he did use sound!]

We had a few technical problems with the 16mm film version of 55 seconds too. It seems there might be an issue with our camera, which is jittering and periodically out of focus (based on yesterday’s iteration, which was otherwise well framed and well exposed). And today’s film strip seems too light, underexposed? Although we’re yet to run it through the projector, so tomorrow will shed light on that one.

one final observation: we’ve bitten off more than we can chew. any one of the four pieces we want to work on would nicely fill our available time. some readjustment of expectations may be in order!
over and out
luca