8 Ecstasies, 2014, 11:00, high definition digital animation, collaboration with composer Zig Gron.
About 8 Ecstasies
The film 8 Ecstasies, although completely digital, derives from a motif first explored in color pencil on isometric graph paper, later the basis for several large wall drawings. In 2007 I found a way to combine 2-D and 3-D techniques in order to animate the motif as if it were a smoothly transforming solid, while retaining the drawing’s linear clarity.
I set the drawing in motion according to rhythms of breathing, using a one-minute sound collage of internet pornography. All my films are concerned with an uncanny correspondence between sound and image; here my use of pornography had to do with humanizing and dramatizing abstraction, by pointing it toward a climax. I was also thinking about the Baroque ideal of spiritual-sexual-aesthetic ecstasy; for me, the undulating motif was a distillation of the Baroque.
In 2012 I sent the animation to Zig Gron, with whom I had first collaborated at CalArts in 1986. Gron is an experimental composer and video artist, now living in Italy; he is also proficient at instant scene setting, having worked for some years in Hollywood as a sound editor (including on all three Matrix films). I asked for a set of variations in which the rhythms and timing of the original sound source and animation, about two minutes long, would synchronize with each new variation, however radically different in texture and mood. I also asked Gron to consider some sort of overall transformation from the “profane” to the “sacred.”
Gron composed a sound score of eight variations, which begins with an interpretation of the original breathing and then takes the mood in many unexpected directions, ultimately to distant realms. I had intended simply to cycle the animation along with each variation in order to test my contention that in cinema, music does all the work. I was inspired by Gron’s expansive score, however, to add extended variations of my own in color, virtual camera movement, and other graphic complications. Nevertheless, the underlying animation itself repeats unchanged –– except in one climactic variation.
8 Ecstasies Exhibited at the Boiler
8 Ecstasies was an installation in Williamsburg, Brooklyn at Pierogi/The Boiler from May 16 through July 6, 2014. Zig Gron provided a 6-channel sound mix and an additional 5-minute interlude after the film’s ending. During the interlude, the darkened industrial space was the site of various sound and light events relating to the imagery of the film.. A second collaborative project with the poet and memoirist Nick Flynn, was available to be taken home as a newsprint publication.
The film 8 Ecstasies begins with a quotation from St. Teresa of Ãvila. The installation 8 Ecstasies was inspired, in turn, by Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Cornaro Chapel, his only fully realized fusion of architecture and sculpture. Bernini, the most sought after master of the Italian Baroque, created the chapel in the mid-1600s to function almost as a theater, with center stage
taken by his sculptural ensemble “The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.” The scene Bernini depicted comes from the Saint’s account, recorded a century or so before, of lacerating spiritual ecstasy, written in poetic language that was undeniably sexual –– a remarkable act of literary daring in the face of the Spanish Inquisition. Her political power as a Carmelite reformer, it seems, armored her words; perhaps no inquisitor was willing to risk seeming dirty-minded. Bernini’s astonishing visualization of Teresa’s spiritual-sexual-aesthetic ecstasy is arguably the definitive Baroque artwork, occasioning another shrewd lapse of Church censure.
For the installation, I hung long sheets of translucent bubble wrap from the Boiler’s ceiling, 40 feet high in places, to suggest a central aisle as in a cinema or chapel. The film was projected against the far wall. For seating I set out several industrial-size rolls of bubble wrap, 2 feet high and 4 feet in diameter. Speakers were placed on stands along the bubble wrap walls for the 6-channel sound mix, which resonated in the cavernous structure of brick and concrete.
At the end of the film the room went totally dark, but Gron’s extended score subtly continued. In the darkness isometric figures, made with glow-in-the-dark tape on bubble wrap sheets, slowly revealed themselves. (For the relation of bubble wrap to my drawings, and thus my films, please see my notes on the Wall Drawings.) Soon, the same motif, a primary module derived from the imagery of the film, was projected as a shadow into a remote corner of the ceiling. Next a hanging sculpture made of 500 foam rubber cubes was illuminated by spotlight and translucently lit from within. This sculpture, too, embodied the motif, but in three somewhat spongy dimensions.
Last, a black-and-white intervallic recording of the artist’s hand in the process of drawing was projected high on the brick wall above the bubble wrap curtains. Upside down and processed negative, the sped-up, silhouetted white hand seemed in a race against a menacing black banding that crawled continuously down the screen (a fortuitous side effect of using a photo lightbox, with its fluorescent flicker, as a drawing table). In response to certain sound events in Gron’s interlude score, the video inverted to positive midway, and ended when the drawing was complete. The lighting sequence of shadow projection and spotlit sculpture, also synchronized to musical events, was then reversed until only glow-in-the-dark drawings remained visible. Soon the bifurcating quotation from St. Teresa appeared again out of the darkness on the main screen as people settled into their bubble wrap chairs.
There was also a more intimate side to the installation. In the entry hallway, which was separated from the dark interior by a lightproof curtain, the drawing documented in the projection was framed and hung, along with 14 others of the same motif, each somewhat different, each with a video of its own creation on a wood-encased thumb drive mitered into the frame. Beneath the drawings was a shelf with stacks of a newsprint publication, available to take home. This was a collaboration with poet and memoirist Nick Flynn (Some Ether, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, The Reenactments). Flynn wrote the poem salvaged process notes for david brody’s 8 ecstasies by turning fragments of my working notes into an uncanny alchemical collage. Continuous blocks of the source notes, written over four years to keep track of technical matters, but also cinematic dreams, fill the 28 pages of the publication in small type, within which the distilled stanzas of the poem are set off in a sequence of windows, like titles in a silent film, interspersed with reproductions of each of the 15 drawings.
For a video guide of the installation 8 Ecstasies, please see my documentation below.
Video Documentation, 5:26