NOTES FOR MASON COOLEY'S FILM NIGHT AT THE MOUNTAIN BAR
THURSDAY DEC 8, 2005
American Primitive: Species of Spaces
By Mason Cooley
American Primate!: An exploration along lines of animal and human. The
animal being in a state of contraction, either cognitively or in the physical
surroundings themselves, with the human condensed into an array of Abe Lincoln
photographs. Ultimately, the connections are tenuous and can only be trusted
as making sense in the stratigraphic time between layers Ape and Abe.
Homers to Homers: Homing pigeons, radio transmitters and ham radio. The
literal connection if you will between pigeon movement and verbal renditions
of code plus the actual transmission of Morse code. All lines lead to a virtual
nest of wires as a radiobiology weaves in and around each pigeon either in flight
or on land. The medium in which they act and react is enveloped in a waveform
world of living noise. Who knows how human transmission of fax messages or voicemail
affect the homing pigeon’s navigation. The intensity each bird uses to
find the thresholds of navigation over land and sea is a kind of signature or
sense. A cartography of intensity par excellence!
Exit to Camel Barn: More of a survey of different places and spaces.
The landscape is abstract but only in the sense of real transitions between
figure and land. Camel and barn are connections only affirmed in this relational
sphere. It is as though all nodal points of information are immediately folded
back into the living whereby their completion from the outside is deferred for
an intrinsic dynamical process. Image folds back as a piling up of image and
earth.
Suburbia: Return of the Repressed: The landscape again but this time
much more intimately woven with the forces of human conversation and the living
animation on the ground itself. A texture more than anything else. The tactile
vision of suburbia as storytelling hub. A circuitous effort in taking a plan
and affecting it moment after moment with living material. A meshwork if you
will of vast spontaneous activities all slowly evolving round nodes of human
behaviour: from intimate radio transmission to ad hoc tree construction. A temporary
field of cohesion and dispersion. With the protest silenced a visual field emerges
different than if it hadn’t happened. The separation into vast cohesions
of sound lay across the porous video surface initiating visual explorations
seemingly stretched from different moments in time; steam locomotive to paper
envelope sorting machines! Are these sounds of moisture or machine?
Blood Oranges: A pathological video extended between airship and disembodied
voice.
Mythter: Music documentary across territories of animal and architecture.
Video C: A kind of direct cinema, meaning no dissolves or fades, simply
camera and landscape with the addition of monaural sound.
Untitled: A silent video with suburbia as surreal space. However no social
cues lead the viewer to an elevated awareness instead the unity of movement
keeps all attention around the presence of the faces and objects themselves.
A strict formographer’s vision of theatre and nature – a crystalline
amphitheatre of concrete and stucco.
Flying: The lone private pilot with only thoughts of flight check, weather
and air traffic control – music resonates like the instinct from an animal
on the verge of extinction.