[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.

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.