Read the transcript here

Read the bibliography here

This episode is a performance reading by Esperanza Collado and Marta Azparren. Esperanza is an artist-researcher specializing in expanded cinema and paracinema and Marta is a visual non-visual artist working between expanded cinema and live performance. In this episode, Esperanza and Marta respond to Victoria's invitation through the creation of a collaborative text which guides the listener through an auditory cinematic experience. This includes extracts from Esperanza's performance text titled Things Said Once. You will also hear sounds from Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967) courtesy of Michael Snow Studio.

Find out more about Esperanza and Marta on our People page.

To the Glossary Esperanza donates Paracinema Cinema that exists beyond its material apparatus. Not the absence of cinema, but cinema revealed in its most fundamental mechanisms by other means. and Marta donates Blind Cinema Refers to the inner projection of images that emerges when external images are interrupted, paused, reduced to monochrome, or suspended in the interval between frames..

This episode, is part of a series of a sharp prickled growth on flower stems, found on roses. thorns a sharp prickled growth on flower stems, found on roses. called Dreaming Communities. It is curated by Victoria Pérez Royo and hosts invited artists who work with ‘dreaming substance.’ Here the adjective “dreaming” does not refer solely to nighttime sleep, but serves as an umbrella term for a whole series of images that have been conceived in a fragmentary and scattered way in various disciplines and practices: memories, anticipations, daydreams and night dreams, ghosts and specters, visions, and hallucinations, among others.

Here you can read a full text about the series, written by Victoria.

This series is produced and edited by Hester Cant. The series is curated by Victoria Pérez Royo with additional concept and direction by Martin Hargreaves and Izzy Galbraith.

Transcript:

MARTIN:

Hello and welcome to Thorns, a podcast where we bring you conversations in relation to concepts of the choreographic the choreographic can refer to choreography, and to the writing of dancing bodies, but it can also refer to modes of generating and circumscribing movement that do not register as dance, or as art works.. Thorns is produced as part of the Rose Choreographic School Gathering places for teaching and learning. Also, a school of thought is an idiom that suggests the sharing of traditions of philosophical and intellectual practices. at Sadlers Wells. I'm Martin Hargreaves, Head of the Choreographic School and we are compiling a glossary of words donated by people that collaborate with us. You can find this glossary on our website. I've invited performing arts researcher Victoria Pérez Royo, to curate a miniseries of the podcast, and this is how Victoria frames the ideas behind her curation.

VICTORIA:

This miniseries called Dreaming Communities; we are a group of people having conversations around what we call the dreaming substance, meaning all the work developed around images that do not appear on a material surface outside of the body.

MARTIN:

This episode is a response to Victoria's invitation from artist and researcher, Esperanza Collado and visual non-visual artist, Marta Azparren. There is a full transcript available for this episode on our website together with any relevant links to the resources mentioned throughout.

ESPERANZA:

Please turn out the lights.

We are in the dark theatre, comfortably seated, surrounded by strangers and people we know. We are about to remove our bodies, just as the projector is turned on and throws its rectangle of light above our heads.

Suspended in this null space, with the habit of our affections as our only luggage, we surrender ourselves to an inter-subjective time – the psychological time of a community, a communitarian exercise of attention and concentration.

This is the only place where that which is worthy of being called cinema, a unique experience of perception [of at least two of our senses] and memory, can take place.

It is here where the intermittent light of the rectangle responds more palpably to the unison of our vital breathing.

The rectangle of light lives literally in our mind and bathes our absent bodies intermittently.

It is our rectangle.

Perhaps its sheer presence has as much to tell us as any particular thing we might find inside it.

MARTA:

At this point, even if it feels unnecessary, we could ask the audience to close their eyes.

Close your eyes. Cierra los ojos.

Going even further: we could ask the audience to gently cover their eyes with their hands, to block-out any extra light.

What the audience would see then is Eigengrau.
In German: Eigen — “own”, and grau — “gray”.

This “intrinsic gray” isn’t technically a color because there’s no external stimulus causing it. It’s a false color generated by the brain — something like an internal screensaver — that appears when there is no visual input coming in.

It’s the very first color we ever see. And it will also be the last.

If the audience paid close attention — or pressed their palms a little more firmly against their eyelids — they’d notice that, along with the gray, there are tiny flickering specks of light drifting around. Maybe it looks a bit like a strip of black film, with dust and scratches shimmering across the celluloid. That’s what keeps a moving image moving, even when there’s no image.

But those sparkles on our Eigengrau, are the remaining electrical signals from our neurons, the ones that build our visual field — what we experience as seeing.

An activity that never stops. Not even in total darkness.

Not even with our eyes closed can we stop seeing images.

ESPERANZA:

Contemplate my word which speaks about cinema and you will see my film.

Cinema is an idea, an abstract power, a “cosa mentale”. Photo-chemical film is a material, a physical thing full of gaps, like life.

Cinema is immaterial, it can be conceptualized, and it’s free of any form of technology.

Cinema is montage, formation of light and duration. Cinema is projected with or without machines.

Cinema is an intelligible matter that invokes mobile thought – «the One which becomes two and gives it a new unity». Our culture obsessively requested a body for it.

A cultural dream:

The invention of the camera obscura. Our skull. Plato’s Cave. Res somnians. The software of the Earth. Cathedrals and their stained glasses. The electrical synapses of thought. Renaissance painting. The invention of perspective. The theory of relativity. The seventh art. Stonehenge. The convergence of an obsession: the myth of total cinema.

Cinematography is the art of writing cinema:

Anonymous: Comment va la peinture?

Cézanne: Imbécile, je ne fais pas de la peinture, je fais un tableau.

Perhaps the invention of the cinematographic apparatus is no more than a historical contingency.

MARTA:

Philosopher Jacques Derrida says that attending a film in a cinema is both an intimate and a communal act.

He explains that receiving a film in the darkness of a screening room is deeply personal, and yet, at the same time, it’s also a collective experience.
It’s a kind of paradox — a “community of vision” where the spectator is, inevitably, alone.

It might feel as though we are sitting still (here in the dark theater)— perhaps adjusting a little here or there to get comfortable — but in reality, there’s a part of our body that’s moving at a frantic pace.
The fastest-moving part of the human body.
It reaches speeds of 60 movements per second, with rotations of up to 900 degrees per second.

The eyes.

Now, we’d like you to become aware of that movement. Imagine — we’re, what, 25–30 people here?
That’s 50 or 60 eyeballs; and if you could somehow remove the rest of the body, you’d see 60 ping-pong balls dancing frenetically, silently, endlessly, in the stillness of the body around them.
Jumping from the neck of the person in front, to your own shoes, to the tiny green light of the emergency exit…

All our eyeballs move at this pace. Even those of blind members of the audience. Even if someone has already fallen asleep — (though maybe it’s a bit early for that.)
In fact, it’s when we’re asleep that the eyes dance the fastest.

Scientists suggests that during REM sleep — Rapid Eye Movement — our eye movements mirror the movements our bodies would make if our dreams were real.
Even asleep, the brain continues to direct a body through an imagined space.

As Paul B. Preciado writes: “Closed and asleep, the eyes see.” Cerrados y dormidos los ojos ven
Well, closed and asleep, the eyes also dance.

ESPERANZA:

The “apparatus”:

The medium or support for film being neither the celluloid strip of the images, nor the

camera that filmed them, not the projector that brings them to life in motion, nor the

beam of light that relays them to the screen, nor that screen itself, but all of these taken

together, including the audience’s position caught between the source of the light

behind it and the image projected before its eyes.

You know, when you’re really expanding it, you’ve almost constricted it again!

MARTA: 

A Russian scientist, Yarbus, was a pioneer in observing eye movement.
He discovered that when different people look at the same complex object, their eye-movement patterns are similar — but not identical.

So looking together at anything right now — even this empty space — is both an intimate and a collective act.
If we had a tiny laser pointer on each pupil, we’d draw together a forest of dots.
They’d coincide in certain areas of interest, but the paths themselves would never be exactly the same.
The final drawing of those paths would be, at once, intimate and collective.

Our eyes perform all these movements because we don’t see in high resolution across the whole field.
We only see the centre of our focus in detail.
That’s why the eye moves: to successively bring into focus whatever catches our attention.

By the way, the rods are the cells that detect movement.
Every time we watch something move — like a dancing body, for instance — our rods are activated.

Even when we try to fix our gaze, the eye is in constant vibration. Tiny micro-movements, imperceptible.
We need to constantly update the image we perceive, because those rods respond only to movement.
If our gaze became completely still, the rods would stop informing the brain — and we would stop seeing.

We need constant movement in order to perceive movement.
Only through continuous motion can we perceive motion.
Only from movement can we think movement.

So those 50 eyeballs, when they fix their gaze on the same complex object, are actually dancing constantly — a dance as frantic as it is imperceptible.
A dance as collective as it is deeply individual.

But today, we haven’t come to speak so much about the eyes in our faces.
We’ve come, above all, to speak about all that moves but is not seen.
And also about the eyes of the body.
We’ll get there.

Is it possible to fix the gaze?
Can we look with a still eye at a moving body?

ESPERANZA:

Behold the enigma of material dialectics in the (film) apparatus:

The eye. The hand.

Light. Darkness.

Camera. Projector.

Before. Now.

Darkroom. Theatre.

Negative. Reversal.

Projector. Screen.

Projection booth. Auditorium.

Tekné. Fabula.

Local space. Any point of the universe.

Projectionist. Spectatorship.

Front. Back.

Body. Mind.

Absence. Presence.

Interval. Frame.

Movement. Stillness.

Discrete. Continuous.

Rotation. Propulsion.

Supply reel. Take-up reel.

Mechanics. Choreography.

Spectacle. Geometry.

Time structure. Space structure.

Rectangle. Cone.

Volume. Surface.

The zoom. The room.

Trajectory. Horizon.

Visual magnification. Spatial narrowing.

Suspension of disbelief. Present situation.

Ontology. Phenomenology.

24 frames. 1 second.

Illusion. Material.

Rhythm. Flux.

Flicker. Epilepsy.

Solid state. Gaseous state.

Mathematics. Architecture.

Objecthood. Theatricality.

History of Art. History of Film.

Cut

In the running of film, you’re actually watching an illusion of only half of what took place. The camera´s shutter was closed the other half of the time. So that there is another cinema of equal length that could have been made precisely at the same time.

MARTA: 

We see two films. One of light — where the brain responds to visual stimuli. And one of darkness — in the intervals between images — where the brain acts on its own.

It is in this blind half of the film — in our unconscious film — that the spectator can respond. It is in these pauses, without images, that fantasy is freed.
It is here that complex associations are activated.

In Black Sun, Gary Tarn’s film, the protagonist, a filmmaker — Hugues de Montalembert — lost his sight after injuries from an assault.
He describes the first days of blindness as a continuous projection of internal images. As if, in the most extreme monochrome, the brain needs its images. It simply cannot do without them. His brain, used to a constant flow of visual stimuli, generated its own images. Many of them erotic. Clear as sequences of a film. On the blank screen of his blindness, new images emerged — disturbing, intense, vivid.

There’s a term for this: Prisoner’s Cinema. It describes the hallucinations of people locked away, deprived of visual stimuli for long periods. The visions are often patterns, geometric shapes, vivid colors — appearing to project themselves before the eyes.

This happens too, sometimes, to truck drivers trapped in a snowstorm.
In absolute white.

The light in cinema, operates with additive synthesis.
It means that all colors together produce white light. All frames of a film together — if you could project them at once — would make a white screen. All frames of every film ever made, projected together, would be only one thing: an intense white glare. So intense, it would probably blind us.

During the shooting of Blind Kind, Van der Keuken noticed something remarkable. Blind children were learning the concept of “bird” through touch, manipulating a taxidermied specimen. It made him think: how does a filmmaker grasp phenomena that are always in transformation, always in motion? How to capture them without stopping them? Without depriving them of their essence?

A few days later, he took the blind children to the zoo. They were allowed to touch live birds. To feel a living being — breathing, moving, pulsing — without holding it too tightly.
Just enough to feel it without smothering it.
Letting go just before it takes flight, to understand the concept of flying.

For Van der Keuken, this became a lesson:
How to capture experience through movement.
The strategy of the sketch. The preliminary drawing.
To catch movement as a living process. A metamorphosis of what escapes immediately. To register the living lightly, through the trace and weight of the space it has just moved through.

From the blindness of these children, Van der Keuken learned a new strategy. A tactile image. One capable of capturing a moving event — without becoming taxidermied.

ESPERANZA:

Today I experienced a transcendental storm of chromatic visions while riding the bus to Madrid. We were passing through a long avenue of trees and I closed my eyes against the setting sun. Then, an irrepressible avalanche of vivid colors exploded behind my eyelids, like a multidimensional kaleidoscope spinning in space. It was like being in a world of infinite numbers. But the vision stopped abruptly as soon as we passed the trees. Was that a vision? What happened to me?

Brion Gysin wrote something similar in his diary in 1958. A few years later, he created with Ian Sommerville The Dream Machine, a rotating device capable of inducing eidetic states of consciousness. Its incredibly simple construction mimics the mechanism of the zoetrope: it consists of a cardboard cylinder with perforations that allow light from a bulb located inside to flash. The cylinder is placed on a rotating surface (such as a record player) and activated at 78 rpm. The 'user', sitting in front of The Dream Machine with closed eyes, experiences the warm flickering light, facilitated by the intervals, coming from within.

The experience with the trees, which surely we have all lived on more than one occasion, reminds me of hypnagogic visions, those perceptual experiences that occur in the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep. These visions can include visual images (geometric patterns, kaleidoscopic forms...) and even bodily sensations, like the typical sensation of falling. What is fascinating is that these perceptions have a very particular quality: they are involuntary and often have a vividness and strangeness that distinguishes them both from the dream images of deep sleep and from conscious imagination. Some describe an almost cinematic quality associated with them.

I remember when I first saw The Flicker, Tony Conrad's film, in 16mm. I remember it very well because in fact I projected it myself and was able to contemplate the situation of the audience in the theatre from that privileged position. What was happening was something similar: alternation of white and black frames at changing rhythms, which stimulates the perception of colours and forms, and can even produce alterations in the nervous system. These are not images represented on the screen, but produced by the flicker, by the frequency, by our bodies ultimately. It is, like what was described before, the interval materialized as corporeal experience. I then verified that it was possible to see the film perfectly with closed eyes. An apparently subjective phenomenon—the images generated by the flicker—became a collective experience in the dark room. It was a literal dreaming community.

Allowing the intermittence activates our mind, just like that other film that took place when the camera’s shutter was closed. In all three cases the perceptual experience arises from the interval, from the threshold, from what is "between"—between wakefulness and sleep, between frames, between light and darkness. And in all cases, there is something that resists representation to become direct, corporeal experience. The cut as a generator of potency rather than narration.

MARTA: 

Continuous shapes, uninterrupted surfaces — these are the favorites of the blind children in Blind Kind, and of blind people in general.

Why? For perceptual economy.

When the object we perceive has gaps, perception is interrupted, and the receiver has to fill in the blanks.
The discomfort a blind person feels when perceiving an incomplete surface is the same as what a spectator feels facing an interval on screen.

Intervals — the editing of the black film within each film — work like the gaps in surfaces perceived from blindness.

But they also correspond to the way consciousness probes the different layers of reality.

In the other film, the one in black, that flickering is also a direct entry into our mode of perception.

Fragmentation, intermittence, the cut between images — this is not only how we see cinema.

It’s also how we perceive reality, how we build thought, how consciousness works.

Interrupting the chain of literal reasoning in the image — with a cut, or a pause of no-image — activates connections that are closer to our nocturnal consciousness, to how we use images in dreams and in poetry.

Cinema mirrors the way we think — fragmented.

And the way we look — intermittent.
We think in intervals.
We see in intervals.
Like the moving image itself.

Blinking is our natural way of facing the visual.

Intermittence is what characterizes vision.

We perceive reality sprinkled with dark gaps.

Seen this way, a physical connection emerges between how we perceive cinema and how we look in general.

We see ourselves reflected in the rhythm of our blinking, as we watch the screen.

Again, we learn from blindness to leave space for the spectator’s thought.

To bring them into the present.

Because a film that is too smooth — without gaps, without intervals — as Dorsky said, “profane our experience.

ESPERANZA:

At this moment, it might seem that the film is ending. And if it were, it would be through a long fade to white. It's time to come "unglued" from the mirror. Some figures could disappear into the distance; the image of a snowy landscape could become flatter and flatter as a final fade to white merges with "our rectangle." The elemental rectangle of light from the projector would then reveal the two-dimensionality of the screen's surface.

Something persists in the post-filmic experience.

Smooth or wrinkled; white or colorful; stretched or extended, today's screen need not be yesterday's, but what it urgently needs is for us to be conscious of it.

MARTA:

Later, the audience could be asked to choose one image they remember from today.

Any image — any single image from today.

To look closely at the qualities of this memory — its color, or lack of color, its texture, its sharpness…

Then, the audience will be invited to imagine a desire.

The image of something they wish had happened, but didn’t.

They should take their time — and their pleasure — in carefully imagining the details of that unrealized desire.

The framing, the definition, the colors, the brightness, the glow.

Once this desire has been imagined, the audience will be asked to compare it with the memory they chose from today.

To notice the qualities of both inner images — color, sharpness, resolution…

And then, gradually, to adjust the imagined desire until it takes on the same texture, format, definition, color, and grain as the memory.

As if both had been captured with the same camera.

When both images appear to have the same qualities, the audience should store the desired image in their memory as a memory.

If even a single person in the audience manages to fix the image of a desire in their memory as a memory, this session will have fulfilled its purpose.

Later, the audience could be asked to think of one last image.

The last image before they stop seeing, for whatever reason — that is not important.

To choose what they would like that final image to be.

The very last thing they would like to see.

Then, the audience could be asked to raise their hand if that last image includes a human figure.

The rustle of clothing, or the lift of arms, would become an emotional sound.

Finally, the audience will be asked to open their eyes again — but only, only, and only when they genuinely feel the desire to look.

It is likely that a small number of spectators will open their eyes immediately — distressed by the absence of images, or perhaps out of boredom.

A very small number may decide not to open their eyes again.

Most spectators will probably open their eyes at the moment they consider appropriate within the “performative” time — reopening without any real desire to look.

Blind spectators will open their eyes, noticing the difference only in proportion to their visual impairment.

It is very likely that some spectators will not open their eyes, simply because they have fallen asleep.

It is highly unlikely — though not entirely impossible — that a spectator opens their eyes and never sees anything again.

No ver nunca nada más.

ESPERANZA:

I have read fragments and performed gestures from the written piece and performance Things Said Once. I am Esperanza Collado, artist and researcher. You have heard a brief excerpt from Wavelength by Michael Snow.

MARTA:

I have read excerpts from Cine Ciego (Blind Cinema), and from the performative lecture

Cerrados y dormidos los ojos bailan (Closed and Asleep the Eyes Dance). The sound fragments are by the sound artist Haize Lizarazu. I am Marta Azparren, a visual non-visual artist.

MARTIN:

Thank you Esperanza and Marta for this wonderful listening experience. For the transcript of this episode and resources mentioned, go to rosechoreographicschool.com. The link for this page will also be in the podcast episode description, wherever you're listening right now.

This podcast series is a Rose Choreographic School production. The series is produced and edited by Hester Cant, curated by Victoria Perez Royo, with concept and direction by Martin Hargreaves and Izzy Galbraith. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.

Bibliography:

Things Said Once, Esperanza Collado - Performance

Things Said Once, Esperanza Collado - Text (in English)

Things Said Once, Esperanza Collado - Comic

Sounds:

Michael Snow - Wavelength (1967)
16mm film, 45 minutes, colour, sound
Courtesy of Michael Snow Studio

This sound file is used between 00:16:05 - 00:18:50