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Thoughts from a mind !

13/05/2024 - Malibu Jackiechan

In malibu / belmont girl’s “ocean eyes” the city sways before u --- heat smudged --- squinting. The ambient-cover-mashup-throwaway from is the mythos on the channel, always accompanied by video clips stretched to powerpoint stutter, shot from an iphone: blues, oranges, squinting astigmatisms. Super-slow isn't new at all and while I can't think of a deliberate early use of timestretched video, these shimmer into view, mirage-like, as a long lost grandchild of warped UK hardcore vocals and Stan Brakhage's Wonder Ring (the data thief sends his regards). Spatially deliberate and pondering, using video and sound / lack of sound to pinpoint an ordinarily fleeting emotion.

The light gleaming through a window, the stars which appear before you when your eyes are half closed, the dust filtering through a doorway shadow momentarily visible between two endless nonbeings. The artform of timestretch now is strewn across end of year degree shows and hexadecimally named MK-fodder, particularly poignant somehow for a generation so used to everything fucking disappearing instantaneously like you're scrolling an endless carousel of really loud neighbours trying to stick their nails into your eardrums.

So now I'm writing this .... I haven't seena anyone pick up on the timestretch as a device. Is it just because arts / music / etc journalism is mostly dead, or that it's derived almost entirely from easily taggable and sortable identity brackets? Or maybe I just didn't do much research. Or, .... ,,,, .... ,,, maybe both!

My first thought is that this is something that's prevalent because it's so stupid easy. SO easy in fact that it even feels like a way for me, arch procrastinator 7th rank, to feel some semblance of creative fulfilment squishing and stretching fragments I've collected. But then we live in a hateable world and I don't want to succumb. Criticism is vital but it has to be thoghtful or at least try to be. So whilst yes every braindead goldsmiths gimpster can set their handicam video to 0.2x and wack a 7038634357 song over the top of it, I still believe there's value here. Shout out to Hito Steyerl for the endlessly useful grammar of the poor image, but what timestretching does is apply some #Oliveros deep listening magic to the flotsam of a digital spiral - a Shepherd Tone of less-than-nothing content flashing before our eyes and guzzling power bills in Norway and Kazakhstan.

Far from being lazy I think the timestretch is a deliberate act of concentration, honing in on the briefest of fluttering ash in the dumpster fire, burning too quick... And, in fact, in being easy to create and reproduce it's an artform that lends itself to the vital repetitions, mistakes, and rounds of criticism and thought that actually produce good art. Artforms that can hit 10,000 reps before one dolt has even finished developing his 16mm film and plugging in his modular synth are necessarily going to be able to a) withstand criticism better: "if it's bad I'll just make another", and b) stick to a cutting edge of cranial maximosity aka when you see a new type of shitpost and it's a static image or a funny sound and it tickles your brain in exactly the right way where billions of neurons cascade down in a waterfall of understanding and you laugh or send goosebumps up your back in a way that four gallery assistants can't explain no matter how hard they try.

But beyond just a boring paean for the poor image I love the timestretch particularly as a hyperdigital response to slow cinema. I love James Benning. (It's hilarious that to do a digital detox every few months I watch a static shot of something mechanical like a giant vat of ore being poured or something beautiful like 10 Skies or something else slow and meandering as a sort of stress test for my moth eaten attention span.) But instead of needing realtime footage timestretch audio/video expands tiny moments that you'd otherwise miss. IN the same way that Jackie Chan would choreograph his fight scenes so that the punch hits twice, strengthening the impact on the viewer, extending a glance or a smirk into a 5 minute montage zooms in and expounds the tiniest of fragments of emotion. Malibu'scamera shaking reminds us of her humanity, the gaze behind the lens, the thoughts and dreams of the person staring out of the window at that same moment.

you r puny brain gets all the time and oxygen it needs to soak up that ultimately very singular moment and drink it in, bathe in it’s melancholy.

The music’s kinda nice too.

Thanks

 

-=[ more squirrels ]=-  1/97

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