AFFECTIVE CONTAMINATION - The Birth of MOONEGGSUN

M O O N E G G S U N

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Getting ready.

MOONEGGSUN production stills

M OONOVOSO L · O V O · S O L · M O O N · O VO · S OL OVO M OO N · N O V O · N O V O M OO N · S O LNOVO MOO · N O V O S O L M O O · N OVO SO · E G G SUN M OO N · M O O N E GG · S U N E GG · E S UN · SU N M OO N · S U N E GGM O O N · SUNSO O VO · SOL · MOO N · O V O S O L · O V O MO O N · NOVO · N OVOM O O N · N O V O S O L · NO V N O VOSOL MOO · N O V O S O L O V O · N O VO M O · M O ONEGG · S U N E GG · E GG · S U N · E GGM S UN EG G M OO N · S U N S O L · E GGO V O · E GG · O VOSOL · O V OM O O N · M O O N S O L · SO L M OON · NOVOSO L · N O V O V O · S O L O VO M N O VOSOL OVO · NO V O M O O N O V O · M O O N S UN EG G · EG G · S U N · E GGM O O N · E GGS M OON · S U N SO L · E GGO V O · E GGS OL · M S O L · OVOM OO N · M O O N S O L · S O L M O O N · N O VOSO L · N OV O V O · S O L O V O M OO N · S O LOVO · N OVOM O O N O V O · M O O N E GGSU · E GG · SU N · E G G M O O N · E GGS U N · M O O N S O L · EGG OVO · E GGS O L · M O O N O VO SO L M OON · M OO N S OL · S O L M O O N · S OL O VO · NOVOVO · S OLO V O M O O N · S O L N OVO M O V OMOON O V O · M O O N E GGS U N · E GGSUNM E G G MOON · E G G S U N · M O O N S U N · S UNM O · E GGSOL · MOO N O V O S O L · O V O · S O L · M · SOL MOO N · S OLO V O M O O N · N O V O · NO V OMOON · SO LN O V O M O O · N O V O S O L M O M OONEGG SU N · E GGS U N M O O N · MO O NE

O S O L · OV OM OO N · M O O N S O L · S O L MO O N N O VOSO L · N OV O V O · S O L O V O M O O N · O L O V O · NOVOM OO N O V O · M O O N E GGSUN E G G · SUN · EG G MO O N · E GGS U N · MO O N O L · EGGO V O · EGGS O L · M O O N O V O SO L · N · M OONS OL · S OL M O O N · S O L O V O M O O N V O VO · S OLOVOM O O N · S O L N O V O M O O · O O NOVO · MOO N E GGS U N · E GGS U N M O O N M O ON · EG G S U N · M O O N S U N · S U N M O O N · G S OL · MO ON O V OS O L · O V O · S O L · MO O N L M O ON · S OLOVOM O O N · N O V O · NO VO M O O N · S OLN OVO M O O · N O V O S O L M O O · N E G GSUN · EG G S U N M O O N · M O O N E GG · S U N · MO O N S U N · S U N M O O N · S U NE GG O O NOVO SO L · O V O · S O L · M O O N · O VO N · S OLO V OM OO N · N O V O · N O V O M O O N S O LN OVOM OO · N O V O S O L M O O · NO VO U N · EG G S U N MOO N · M O O N E GG · S U NE GG N SUN · SU N MOO N · S U N E GGM O O N · SUN L · O VO · SO L · M O O N · O V O S O L · O VO O M O ON · N OVO · NO V O M O O N · N O V O SO L O O · N OVO SO LM OO · N O V O S O L O V O · NO M O ON · MOO N E G G · S U N E GG · E GG · SUN · O ON · SUN EG G MOO N · S U N S O L · E GGO VO M OON · O VOSO L · O V O M O O N · M O ONSO L O V OMOON · N O V O S O L · N O V O V O · SO L O O O N · NOVOSO LO V O · N O V O M O O N O VO · E G G · SUN EG G · E GG · S U N · E GGM O O N ·

Frame from MOONEGGSUN IV: Oo0ø•º•∞ =<

Affective and Perceptive Rapture: the birth of MOONEGGSUN

Roderick Peter Steel 2014

The project MOONEGGSUN ... (or MOONOVOSOL, in Portuguese) was produced during a two week videoresidency at Galeria Mamute, in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. The residency presented an opportunity to assemble and explore a set of robes I had wanted to make as far back as 1999, during initial contact with African-Brazilian ancestor spirits, Egungun, in the city of São Paulo1.

The residency also set into motion another long held desire, articulated with Adriana Tabalipa2 and Andreia Vigo3, to bring filmmakers and performance artists together to produce colaborative work4. This article, written impulsively the week after the project was produced and edited, strains to process MOONEGGSUN5 as a video-performance6 while brushing up against Deleuze’s formulation of affective contamination. Deleuze wishes for art that “moves in the direction of the ill-formed or the incomplete.” By casting individual agendas aside and tapping our collective energies into the materials7 at hand, we sought to enshroud ourselves with the possibility of becoming “molecule, to the point of becoming-imperceptible” (DELEUZE, 1997, p. 225).

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Molecular robes Can a series of cotton robes, cloaked in reflective Deleuzian molecules, divested of individuality and rendered pervious to the environment, induce us up the murky path to affect? If so, how does a performer take this challenge up in successive takings? Or to take the cue from Gilbert Simondon, how can a group of perform-

1 The relationships between the complex, multi-layered, full-body mirrored robes and the ancestral spirits they were designed for - and who inhabited the robes through the bodies of their mediums - had long been a source of wonder and enchantment. These fully-body clothes are generically called ‘masquerades’ by anthropologists such as Margaret Drewall who have carried out extensive research on masked or costumed ancestor spirits in Yoruba culture, in south western Nigeria. The decade I spent observing rituals, dance and performance in the Ilê Egungun Obá Nilê Temple in São Paulo generated the feature documentary The Balance.

2 More on Adriana Tabalipa: 3 I am extremely grateful to Andreia Vigo for generously extending the invitation made to her by Galeria Mamute to Adriana and to me.

4 Though I am both a performer and filmmaker, Adriana is a performer with an interest in film, and Andreia a filmmaker with an interest in performance.

5 To watch all six videos click on the links provided and enter the password “abre”. vimeo.com/91799774, vimeo. com/91551839, vimeo.com/91794131, vimeo.com/91603096 vimeo.com/90971484, vimeo.com/90339559 6 The term video performance is generally used to describe the exploration of the relationship between live and time-based artwork and the way it is performed and conceived for video. Video and performance art arose together and influence one another from the late 1960s onwards. Five of the six performances for MOONEGGSUN took place in remote locations, inaccessible to a general audience. In much of our performance work we are as interested in the ephemeral qualities of a live performance as we are in its re-mediation, its transduction into another, video body. In this case, a 3-screen body, or “video-triptych”.

7 Not uncommonly, artists refer to the specific materials they use as their ‘arsenal’.

Mobile Rituals. Sequential frames from MOONEGGSUN IV: —°‰—

A passing through. Triptych frames from MOONEGGSUN IV: —°‰—

ers propagate, transindividually, a seemingly endless cycle of open-ended experimentation in an attempt to transduce nothing other than potential energy. (SIMONDON, L’individuation psychique et collective, 2007) Through the arbitrary introduction of dozens of mirrors, the performers (all organs, except for the hands and face) are subjected to an autopoietic possession, a receptive and transmissive immanence. Together, they become liminal, inexplicable entities pierced by varying focal perspectives of the world: reflecting and absorbing free zones of becoming that zero in on and zoom out of serial lenses. These droves of molecular eggs “defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds,… energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement,” return these bodies to a state of creation “before the formation of strata”. (DELEUZE, 1988, p. 153)

The long sleeves worn by the performers extend outwards as far as the finger tips of gloved hands, to relinquish ‘prehensile and motor functions’ and activate ‘pure touching’. (DELEUZE, 1989, pg. 12 ). Furthermore, the robes unleash a will to ritualize, altering the performers’ awareness of time and stretching out the affective interval between an action and its meaning. This trance-like immanence thwarts viewer expectation8 of a linear narrative, while impregnating intensive movements with revelatory potential.

Deleuze reminds us that in the time-image the body slows down and, “becomes rather the developer [révélateur] of time, it shows time through its tiredness and waitings’ as much as by what it consciously brings into being. (DELEUZE, 1989, p.XI) As such, the cell-emblazoned performers become models for all becomings, as they turn the sites they encounter into experiential zones. Their deliberations slowly unveil potentially transformative rites, ‘embodied, enacted, spatially rooted and temporally bound’ to acute sensory faculties and a heightened awareness.

ÓÔÒO °·O0· = ·0O·° ÓÔÒO

Rebounding Mirrors “In place of the reflexive transcendence of mirror and scene, there is a non-reflecting surface, an immanent surface where operations unfold – the smooth operational surface of communication.”

(Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, p.126)

8 The ‘viewer’ in this case is imagined. Viewership as it relates to performance documentation will be discussed later.

Prehensile strata. Triptych frames from MOONEGGSUN V: •Ó···<=Ø=<···Ô•

Convex mediation. Triptych frames from MOONEGGSUN II: Ø0º>=<0غ

Ad infinitum. Triptych frames from MOONEGGSUN II: Ø0º>=<0غ

For Jean Baudrillard the projective, imaginary and symbolic qualities of the object as mirror of the subject have been replaced by ‘screen and network’. He alludes to the mirror in his essay ‘The ecstasy of Communication’ as a metaphor for the Lacanian process in which people project themselves ‘into their object, with their affects and representations, their fantasies of possession, loss, mourning.’ (BAUDRILLARD, 1987, p.127) Affect is taken for a projected mirror image. He laments that what was previously projected – or mirrored – and lived out on earth is now projected into a dimension lacking this intense mirroring: namely, into the hyperreal interface-space of multiple screens. In other words, once upon a time, the mirror metaphor mediated the intense psychological dimension in which a subject’s ‘dramatic interiority’ and the objects and images that made sense of that psychic interiority were set on affective stage. Now, however, the mirror merely stands by idly as the subject becomes a ‘terminal of multiple networks’. If anything, the subject is reduced to a non-reflective screen that receives and distributes these virtual networks, endowing psychic life with the telematic power to regulate everything from a distance.

Brian Massumi assures us that mirror-vision is also a relative ongoing reciprocal determination of I-me/Iyou, but in the same breath introduces motion into the equation, as a sort of antonym to the mirror. For him, movement-vision is absolute and self-distancing: “Movement-vision is not only discontinuous with mirrorvision. It is discontinuous with itself. To see oneself standing as others see is not the same as seeing oneself walking as others see one.” (MASSUMI, 2002, p.50). What to make, then, of mirror/movement-vision? Will the fusion of Lacan’s mirror with speed amplify this metaphysical distance, or create an expressive event with its own unique “charge of lived abstraction” capable of affective contamination? (MASSUMI, 2011, p.155).

The convex hand-held mirror chosen for the performance has a visible aluminum ring that circles it, much like the ring formed during annular eclipses when the edge of the sun remains visible as a bright ring around the moon. In ‘Crystals of time” Deleuze acknowledges the process by which mirror-images vie for virtual and actual supremacy, the one winning out over the other based on the preeminence of a particular field of vision.

Whereas Deleuze’s time-image moves vertically, and the movement-image horizontally, the convex mirror as mobile image-object passes through an infinite number of both vertical and horizontal planes and circuits.

Thus the mirror’s convex surface reflects the actual world as a seemingly distorted other, providing vistas into a polycentric universe bereft of a vanishing point. This dysmorphic effect registers the real object neither as transcendent other nor as its displaced double: there is no coalescence between the two, but rather a dynamic metamorphosis between the real object of an actual state and the physical trajectory of its reflection into another temporal state. In its double movement of revelation and erasure these successive planes and independent circuits stretch and shrink the quantitative spatial configuration around the mirror. As such, it becomes a mobile selection of time, an organic temporal mold in perpetual exchange between inner and outer screens.

The movement/mirror vision sets into motion the coming together of intensities of experience, while jilting connections between them. Those who wield the mirror soon find it evades a push towards pure expression.

On its liquid surface, immanent forces spiral into a warped center of centrifugal dispersion within a relational field incapable of containment. (MASSUMI, 2002, p.155)

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Mortal Coil. Production Still from MOONEGGSUN VI: °·O0·—Ø—·0O·°

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At times it seems to act as a brain, reducing the world to a series of thought-images, at others like a grain, germinating seed-images. One recalls a short description from the Futurist manifesto on the collaboration between vision and movement.

In some ways the mirror belongs to the paradox of the absurd, impossible objects. Included in Deleuze’s definition of the impossible object are circles and the so-called perpetuum mobile (his italics), which he describes as “objects “without a home” outside of being” that have nevertheless “a precise and distinct position within this outside: they are “extra being”…” (DELEUZE, 1990, p.35) Perhaps the mirror’s partial hold on us comes form its special affinity to this perpetually moving impossible object. At the same time, when wielded, the convex mirror teases us with a potential metaphor for art itself when it presents us with an aesthetic ‘counteractualization’ of the world through its interpolation of an interpretation of what can be effectively seen occurring. (Deleuze, 1990, p.35)

When performed, this counter-actualization is neither mimicked nor revealed in the mirror’s drop, but identified with a downward, inward distance that cracks one open to a new becoming. Like a cosmic egg, the convex mirror is as laden with the capacity to distribute intensities as with the potential for experience and experimentation.

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Seeking situations The initial impetus to develop a performance for video in animate, bustling locations could not be realized within a two-day location scout9. It became clear that the inner workings of each site would have to be unveiled, teased into being by the investigative mirror, the probing flashlight, the explorative robes in situ, and in front of the camera during the video-performances. We were constrained by a paradox: for how long can the process of discovery and creative use of the materials, the mediation between them and the world and ourselves remain emergent? The last two performances provide a release from these contraints, by folding all of the materials together, in a surge of activity between circuits.

9 A cinematic progression (the closest the series comes to narrativity) was charted in which it was agreed that a single set of materials would be used in each one of the first four locations, reducing these performances to compact circuits of contracted possibilities. Constraint and limitations are vital to the creation of a field of action.

Cracked open. Triptych frames from MOONEGGSUN VI: °·O0·—Ø—·0O·°

Opening sequence. Triptych frames from MOONEGGSUN I: ÓÔÒO

Initial concerns over the role of the video-performance within the performance itself - never more visible than when the videographer’s ominous reflection played out in the convex mirror - prompted us to connect Andreia Vigo to the performances during the first day of production10. Metallic capes, covered in small oval mirrors, were used by the performers and by Andreia herself, the performance’s official videographer, to ‘activate’ her own autonomous performative gaze11. She wore her cape through all six performances and was captured ‘performing-documenting’ in the last three performances when a second, immobile camera was positioned from the outside in. And so the first sequence in MOONEGGSUN marked the moment these sentient platinum agents were presented. Thought their identities were concealed from the viewer, they gradually resurfaced - through Andreia - in the guise of a series of reflective, anonymous metallic manifestations in the ensuing performance documentation.

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The Botanical Garden session Once donned, the robes turned the performers into sentient beings, and roused them into destabilizing the process of organizing, identifying, and interpreting sensory information and into “sensing-feeling” nature’s nervous system and stimulating its bio-chemical sense organs, its seed-sources. Their experiential drive placed them on the fringes of form, of sensory modes of sight, sound and colour. If their mirror is topological, then the sentient performers are its mathematicians. a The illusions created by the watchful mirror and ambiguous readings issued by the flashlight’s illuminated gaze turn nature into a brain’s stage for processing different kinds of sensory information found in the perceiver’s mind. With these instruments, the performers attempt to purvey the world’s “general activity” through illuminated and reflective spots of “special activity” (WHITEHEAD, 1967a, p.176). They inhabit a cyclical “inaugural moment of indecision between the already-going-on-around and the taking-in-to-new-effect, before the culmination of this occurrence has sorted out just what occasion it will have been.” (MASSUMI, 2011, p.2) They are immersed in a cyclical “ ‘primary phase’ of the occasion of experience”, a ceaseless “middling moment of bare activity”. Their acute investment in the pursuit of the generation of affective forces voids them of intentionality, of rest, of a call to adjust perception or order representation. Perhaps, more than

10 The performances followed a production method not unlike that of observational documentary filmmaking.

11 Whereas ‘Forces’ placed the camera inside the performance, coupling camera and performer diegetically, MOONEGGSUN

presented a work where the relationship between the camera (diegetic) and film-maker (partially diegetic) is as intense as in Forces but not so present within the action itself.

Virtual ecologies: Triptych frames from MOONEGGSUN IV: Oo0ø•º•∞ =<

Difference and Repetition: Triptych frames from MOONEGGSUN IV: Oo0ø•º•∞ =<

anything, it is their insistence in a search for meaning, without ever attaining it, that prizes apart an affective gap in the work.

For Bergson, perception quantifies but does not generate external stimuli. He affirms that images are neither in the mind nor projected from the mind, but are a selection within, and a contraction of duration. Are the performative sentient beings Bergsonian in their sensorial examination of rocks and plants within the site?

Though their selection accentuates duration, it is also affective, in as far as it engages auto-contemplation of intensive internal vibrations. For Guattari, “the creation and composition of mutant percepts and affects” creates an aesthetic paradigm for every possible form of liberation. As the sentient Beings explore their virtual ecologies, they offer the promise of begetting becomings and the “conditions for the creation and development of unprecedented formations of subjectivity that have never been seen and never felt,” (GUATTARI, 1995, p.91) They inhabit the amodal space between between “sense interaction and sensed relation” (MASSUMI, 2002, 169–171).

In the book’s chapter on Machinic orality and virtual ecology Guattari extolls the virtues of aesthetic decen-

tering of points of view capable of enunciating “new cleavages between other insides and other outsides”. As both black and white performative beings explore the paths of Porto Alegre’s Botanical Gardens12, refracting

and absorbing images they become the embodiment of pure optical sensation. Deleuze created the notion of ‘tactisigns’, triggered by a touch which is specific to the gaze. (DELEUZE, 1989, p.13) As the hands carefully direct the mirror onto the world around it in a dual motion of reflection and illumination, containment and release of the mirror’s parabolic power, they become the ‘mode of construction of a space which is adequate to the decisions of the spirit.’ (DELEUZE, 1989, p.12) The fusion of mirror and body – already embodied within the DNA of the robe itself – prompts tactisigns to blend with chronosigns (time-images), noosigns (thinking images) and lectosigns (readable images), in a state of immanent coalescence. Furthermore, this coming into being takes place through the bodily co-presence of the performers as they discover each other and tune into the world around them.

As mentioned, these layered interactions are witnessed by one or two video cameras. While one of these documents the mise-en-scène – or the “materiality of the performance which is brought forth according to the plans and intentions of the artists” - the other camera is coerced into its drive for “specialization” by Andreia Vigo, the performance’s active spectator as she generates a high degree of contingency in her oscillation between encountering and inscribing new meaning.

Guattari assures us that Performance art “delivers the instant to the vertigo of the emergence of Universes that are simultaneously strange and familiar. It has the advantage of drawing out the full implications of this extraction of intensive, a-temporal, a-spatial, a-signifiying dimensions from the semiotic net of quotidianity.” (page 90). Guattari, again: 12 A brief exploration of the lower part of the Botanical Gardens revealed an abandoned nursery that looked like an abandoned spaceship. The location for the day’s shoot was to concentrate on this building and the outlying bamboo tunnel. However, before shooting began, I spotted another nursery at the top end of the gardens. To access it we had to speak to Ary, the head Gardener, who then showed us a Garden that he designed and built himself.

“Strange contraptions, you will tell me, these machines of virtuality, these blocks of mutant percepts and affects, half-object, half-subject, already there in sensation and outside themselves on fields of the possible.” (Page 92) So what exactly are these affects? For Deleuze, they occur in a gap between the perception-image and the action-image; for Massumi in the gap between content and effect (2002, p.24). They occur in the space between perceiving the Botanical Garden’s garden and the performative act of sensing its field of perception, and doing so without filling it in or filling it up. The attentive mirror and flashlight release flows of feeling that hone in on object-images as they present themselves for the illuminated capture of the sun’s rays. As an eye-mirror, it operates on multiple planes simultaneously, describing, altering, illuminating, distorting: “It surges in the centre of indetermination…between a perception that is troubling… and a hesitant action.” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 65) Like the hand that hesitantly wields the eye-mirror, this indeterminate center creates a moment of hesitation, a short-circuit that channels all actions into seeing and conveying a constantly mutating thought-image. We observe the diegetic mirror in the botanical garden as it cross-examines stones and plants, enabling “relational dimensions” and rendering lines and features, “always provisional, always in question, displaced or replaced”.

(DELEUZE, 1989., p. 45) This is not a reflexive Lacanian mirror, but an active, autonomous mirror that changes the register of what it reveals.

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The Viaduct13 session Within this new setting, the performative mobile mirror pushes Deleuze’s main types of descriptive cinema image (the movement-image and the time-image) into a strobic spotlight. The series of actions presented in and around the viaduct activates a series of illuminated potentialities, none of which are that clear-cut, thus renovating previous actions within an oneiric continuum.

Indeed something else is happening in the viaduct. The dynamic interplay between the mirror, the flashlight, the sentient videographic gaze (as camera-consciousness) and the site’s own flow creates a constantly shifting trajectory between intensive and extensive movements, awakening a constant shift in perceptual planes.

The mirror’s trajectory as it glides between light and capture - the flashlight following the camera’s lens through the mirror as they run behind each other and refer back to each other around a point of indiscernibil13 The Otávio Rocha Viaduct was built in 1932 to suspend the bridge over which Duqye de Caxias road crosses over Borges

de Medeiros Avenue. The paths that lead to the bridge, suspended by the viaduct, are known as the “Four Seasons Walkways” (Passeio das Quatro Estações). Source: Wikipedia

Change of register. Triptych frames from MOONEGGSUN II: Ø0º>=<0غ

ity14 - is arrested and marked by multiple circuits. As it dances through the arches of the Viaduct it is targeted by the flashlight to provoke an optical confrontation between its convex surface, the camera’s own lenticular surface, and the rate at which the slanted mirror positioned between its shutter and lens generates frames.

Though we have by now become accustomed to the vicissitudes of the mirror-object, it nevertheless captivates us anew, as it glows, flares and flickers into radiance. Its flowing unpredictability, fickleness and fluctuation of its luminescent surface spawns an hypnotic effect.

These are startled by short bursts of light that cross the camera’s shutter, compromising its ability to capture the integrity of movement in its own internal mobile mirror. This short-circuiting of the camera’s mechanism causes fault-lines that open up another deeper circuit within the crystalline forces already active. The flashlight’s burst splits time as it opens the image up into another space, pushing the crystal to the limit as the entire diegetic image flares into white light, vanishing in the ‘limit between the immediate past which is already no longer and the immediate future which is not yet….” Intense white energy ensues.

This self-reflection by the performance of its own becoming generates a self-creative loop, which lends itself to a how-now feeling “of participating in itself. It is the feeling of its unfolding self-relation.” (MASSUMI, 2011, p.4) But it does so by perpetually unfolding back into its own unfolding, suspending its “taking-definite-shape” and refusing to relay its formative potential. Like an amorphous process within a portion of an ontogenetic cycle that goes back and forwards in on itself and never goes beyond a certain point. Therefore the performative playing out is a promise, a potential, a never fully realized search that refutes “final characterization of itself as its point of culmination”.

But within this set of limitations complex forms of mediation are indeed taking place. Ron Grimes reminds us that there is an inherent conflict between ‘media-driven-rituals’ and ‘ritually saturated media’ (GRIMES, 2011, p.4). Perhaps it is in this environment that one can sense the performance towing a tense line between mobile ritual event and ritualized media event. And this is where we find one of the primary conditions of the video-triptychs: to throw into relief the mirror – the convex mirror, the molecular mirrors, and the cameraeye-mirror – and the process by which they all, independently and quite differently, take possession of the gap, or affective interlude, between an image’s reception and its virtual transmission.

The differing levels of mobility and interaction of the mirrors contribute to an open-ended cycle of experimentation, by exploring the space between a “prior phase, anticipating a subsequent phase and relaying this momentum into an occurrence without fully perceiving the pertinence of each of these phases to one another, or even co-feeling how they belong to each other.” (MASSUMI, 2011, p.3) 14

Gilles Deleuze. 1989, p. 69 (in Chapter 4: The crystals of time)

Fault lines & flares: Triptych frames from MOONEGGSUN II: Ø0º>=<0غ

The Molecular Garden session The activation during magic hour of the entire arsenal of relational materials used in the performances unleashed contrasting regimes of becoming in the series’ final session. Whether in two makeshift huts, around a pond, next to a lit fire in a supermarket cart or beneath a dense overhead forest, the single

flashlight and the mirrors sprinkled around a friend’s rooftop garden allowed for an intense cinematic exploration of fragmented states15. On this occasion, the ever-sentient performers were liberated, freed into an optical environment which extended their bodies into a ‘movement of world’, where they remained ‘motionless at a great pace’. (DELEUZE, 1989, p. 59) This movement of world becomes verticalized through the expansion of the totality of space and the stretching of time through the multiple refractions of shadow and light-play in lattices and kaleidoscopes. This is exacerbated by the flow between the optical and spectral states of the camera’s own lens, its focal length and aperture, and its distance from the mirrors. These intersect to depict the “diffuse condition of a dust of actual sensations” similar to a sleeper’s perception of a virtual world momentarily inhabited. (Deleuze. 1989, p. 45).

Spectrums, refractions and deflections proliferate from a multiplicity of mirror-molecules that absorb the entirety of the characters and return them to their unconscious atomic parts, opening up new thresholds to alterity. As defended by Deleuze and Guattari:

“..under such conditions that the body without organs has replaced the organism and experimentation has replaced all interpretation, for which it no longer has any use. Flows of intensity, their fluids, their fibers, their continuums and conjunctions of affects, the wind, fine segmentation, microperceptions, have replaced the world of the subject. Becoming, becomings-animal, becomingsmolecular, have replaced history, individual or general.” (DELEUZE & GUATTARI, 1988, p. 162)

Meanwhile the mirrors on one robe reflect the other, and are reflected back into the reflection of the other and so on… The flashlight’s strobe further enhances the relationship between the black and white performers: the hypnotic flashing not only splinters the camera’s mechanical capture of the images, but it injects light into the brain, shattering the retina’s already limited ability to follow rapidly changing fluctuations and modify perception. Another vortex, or black-hole, is formed when the camera’s electrical circuit is sent for a loop when the flashlight’s beam traverses and ignites its virtual reflection in the convex mirror.

15 Though the performances were conceived for video, special effects were avoided during production and post-production.

If effects were achieved, they were done so with the careful use of the materials at hand.

Inside Light. Triptych frames from MOONEGGSUN V: •Ó···<=Ø=<···Ô•

Spectral zones. Triptych frames from MOONEGGSUN V: •Ó···<=Ø=<···Ô•

Abyssal zone. Triptych frames from MOONEGGSUN V: •Ó···<=Ø=<···Ô•

Machinic assemblage. Triptych frames from MOONEGGSUN V: •Ó···<=Ø=<···Ô•

Triptych frames from MOONEGGSUN V: •Ó···<=Ø=<···Ô•

The ensuing black blob creates feedback between external and internal mechanisms, generating an undulating electronic eye. As it expands and dilates, from spot to blotch, it recalls the previous moment when the sun’s rays refracted on the camera’s lens. Like an abyssal zone, it announces the intent to bore a hole through the fusion of white on white, generating a digital altered state. It is as if light itself has freed itself of the cinematic sensorium in order to engage in the exploration and expansion of its own time-images.

It is during these moments that the first close-ups are shown of the performers. Deleuze attributes an intense quality of affection-image to these ‘reflection-faces’. For him, mental reflection becomes especially intense when drawn into cinematic proximity. It is especially ‘affective’ as it “expresses a pure Quality, that is to say a ‘something’ common to several objects of different kinds.” The performers are imbued with mind-states that Deleuze attributes to such a quality: wonder, faceifying outline, immobile receptivity, reflecting unity and expression of a quality common to several things. (DELEUZE, 1986, p.90-1) These close-ups, both on faces and heads, interact intensively across the three screens, bringing together disparate views into a state of communion with a “scrap of vision with which the face is formed in power or quality.” (DELEUZE, 1986, p.104) The tight angles conceal performers throughout the sequences: one is blocked out by the other, shown in fragments from behind, or seen disappearing out of frame.

At times only the back of a head is seen as a performer looks off-frame, facilitating the projective processes by which the viewer identifies with the characters, ‘entering into a machinic assemblage with the camera-eye’.

(Anna Powell, 2012, p. 137) While one turns away on the left screen, the other looks upwards in the center screen towards another time-span: yet both seem to be finally captured within a constant turning away, in what Deleuze call tournament-détournement (turning towards-turning away )…‘like planets around a fixed star’ (Deleuze. 1986, p.104)

[Ó] · [Ô] · [Ò]

Performing across three screens Might the decision to turn six performances into video-triptychs thwart burgeoning affect, and frame the acts within the superficial hyperreal interface-space of multiple screens theorized by Baudrillard?

In order to preserve the experimental approach taken in all six of the performances for video, it was decided to use every single minute of shot footage. Furthermore, just as the performers had been free to wield and discover the properties of their mirrors in performance, Andreia’s process of discovering her own cinematic apparatus and its limits would also be preserved. 16 16

For the first 4 performances, Andreia had used the camera lens and apparatus freely to extend the capacities of her own eye, activating a gaze totally independent of the performers’ perspective of what the work was about She was free to interpret the performances as she saw fit. Indeed, Adriana and I only watched what she had filmed after production had ended. I interacted in the

During the editing process, it became evident that dissolves, superimpositions, deframings, special effects and other manipulations had all been achieved mechanically and optically, on location within the garden, and were best served by restrained clear-cut montage. We avoided dissolves, superimpositions in post-production and willfully engaged in non-continuity editing across the three screens. This expanded circuit allowed the images on each screen to comment on one another in a freeform pattern.

Deploying such a technique generated unforeseen relationships and junctures between images. The effect is not dissimilar to the surrealist exercise of collectively assembling images (cadaver exquis) in which a ‘finished’ sequence is joined with another to create a new living form. The resulting motion between screens eludes any attempt at measurement or control, unleashing a flow of time-ensembles. It makes Bergsons’ concept of duration and spatialised time extensive, instead of intensive. Furthermore different moments are laid out next to one another and are perceived simultaneously.

One of the surprising characteristics of the video-triptych was its diegetic deconstruction of the linear process of presenting and activating the balls of sheer fabric in the bridge session. The bridge as a unit of time and space is subdivided into three screen-units that confront each other in an endless cycle that inhibits linear perspectives. In this way the object (fabric as becoming) and the act (unrolling the fabric in space) become entangled in one another across the video’s own time and space.

The continuous act becomes sectioned into potentialities of past, present and future, the one rolling into the other. The act and the perception of the act are further sub-divided into three other simultaneous affective, temporal intervals. While one screen contains the balls of fabric, another shows the ball being unrolled and then rolled back, “like a strip of memory unrolling beneath the images of the film itself,” to form the underlayer of an implicit round. (Maya Deren. Cinematography, pp. 154-5.) Present states and former states gradually become indistinguishable form one another, like a ‘spiral open at both ends’ (DELEUZE, 1986, p.32) The ‘pluralist cosmology’ of the scene’s ‘repetition-variation’ sets time free, ‘reversing its subordination to movement.’ (DELEUZE, 1989, p.102)

Triptych frames from MOONEGGSUN IV: —°‰—

Open-ended spiral: Triptych frames from MOONEGGSUN IV: —°‰—

Triptych frames from MOONEGGSUN VI1: °·O0·—Ø—·0O·°

1 The Hotel Majestic’s abandoned Dome provided the ideal location for the end sequence of MOONEGGSUN. Englobed within a half-globe that spirals towards the sky like a time-portal (its topmost circular eye dissected in half) the performers navigate through circular dream-time. The central screen documents the activation of the scene’s gaze by the sentient camera-being, which emanates on the lateral screens.

Bibliography BAUDRILLARD, Jean. ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, in Hal Foster (ed) Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press, pp126-34. 1983.

DEREN, Maya. Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality. Daedalus, Winter, pp. 150-67.

DELEUZE, Gilles. Diferença e repetição. Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 2006.

DELEUZE, Gilles. 1986 (The Movement Image) University of Minnesota Press. 1986.

DELEUZE, Gilles. Cinema 2 (The Time Image). London: Athlone Press. 1989.

DELEUZE, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. London: Athlone Press. 1990.

DELEUZE, Gilles. Literature and Life, in Essays Critical and Clinical. London and New York: Verso. 1997 GUATARRI, Felix & DELEUZE, Gilles. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press. 1988.

GUATARRI, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico Aesthetic Paradigm. Sydney: Power Publications. 1995 GRIMES, Ronald L. Ritual, Media and Conflict. Oxford University Press. 2011.

MASSUMI, Brian. Parables for the Virtual. Duke University Press. 2002 MASSUMI, Brian. Semblance and Event. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2011 POWELL, Anna. Deleuze, Altered States and Film. Edinburgh University Press. 2012.

UMBERTO, Boccioni, CARRA, Carlo; RUSSOLO, Luigi, BALLA, Giacomo and SEVERINI, Gino. Manifesto of Futurist Painters in Poesia (Milan), February 11, 1910 SIMONDON, GILBERT. YOUNGBLOOD, Gene. Expanded Cinema. E.P. Dutton, 1970

Š MOONEGGSUN 2014 Adriana Tabalipa Andreia Vigo Roderick Steel