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.

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