Through time-lapse and pixilated animation, recorded on the run through Serbia, Europe, international air travel through Australasia, and including recordings at the 2013 Christmas Markets in Dusseldorf, this short roaming personal narrative contemplates our current pre-occupation with mobile technologies and the concomitant reshaping of everyday life and public space. It features one extreme response to technological and political change: Alex Jones’ Infowars radio program. The film suggests surveillance, metamorphosed from avant-garde and minimalist cinema, as the ‘new norm’, and witnesses the new stasis that hypermobility institutes globally and the florid thinking it elicits.
Alternative title
Found Found FoundJournal
NECSUS : European Journal of Media StudiesVolume
6Season
Autumn 2014Pagination
1-1Location
Amsterdam , NetherlandsISSN
2213-0217Language
EngNotes
In this inaugural audiovisual essay section we have curated two very different works that give a sense of the possibilities currently sparking to life across the two ends of the spectrum we have sketched out. Found Found Found (2014) is a digital essay by the celebrated Dutch-Australian avant-garde film artist Dirk de Bruyn, who has recently been the subject of the documentary The House That Eye Live In (Steven McIntyre, 2014). Found Found Found might be seen to be taking as its point of departure the type of ‘personal travel diary’ which is a hallowed tradition in avant-garde cinema – especially as associated with Jonas Mekas who, increasingly today, approaches his own very intimately shot footage as a vast archive to revisit and re-edit. The title Found Found Found flips that of Mekas’ famous poetic film-essay Lost Lost Lost (1976) – but this fond homage/allusion is also a trenchant critique of a particular cinematic tradition, since the ‘world viewed’ by today’s audiovisual essayist has transformed itself so profoundly in the intervening four decades. Irony looms: what or who is exactly ‘found’ in de Bruyn’s piece?
Mixing, as he has done for some 35 years, an immersion in media theory (Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord, and particularly Vilém Flusser) with the free-play of abstract, structural, and poetic forms, de Bruyn produces a meditation on the type of ceaseless loss (of a sense of self, of geo-physical co-ordinates, and of social values) produced by a neo-capitalist world premised on international travel, social mobility, and all-pervasive communications networks. Its ‘argument’ is channelled all at once through a montage of visual and sonic fragments (many recorded by his digital camera) and through the sensations produced by light, colour, and rhythm. As ever, de Bruyn’s audiovisual art challenges us to think dynamically in frames, pixels, and micro-seconds, relentlessly tumbling one upon the next – to be a part of the sensorial, media-saturated world as it is experienced, on the move, but also to somehow get outside of it and view the logic of its ideological power structures.
Introduction to the audiovisual essay: A child of two mothers
by Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian MartinPublication classification
J2 Minor original creative workCopyright notice
2014, Amsterdam University PressPublisher
Amsterdam University Press
