Sirens, Stylus, Silence

Sirens, Stylus, Silence is a three part essay film based on the manifesto. It is divided into three chapters. The first, Sirens, describes the inevitable and yet evasive overlap of a self with an other. The second chapter, Stylus, describes the historical inadequacy of expression and action as imperfect strategies. The final chapter is a proposal and call to enact silence.

The visual language of the film is one of sensory overstimulation. The video, assembled from a huge variety of found clips, stock footage, social media content, archival footage, and other sources, mirrors the organized chaos in the textual tagging of content on the internet. I adapt a literalist approach in trying to find image to “match” the narrator’s script. The slippage between word and image created when literalism fails is where meaning is generated. The clips are inflected with notions of sensory, particularly haptic experiences, self help, militaristic technologies of optics and surveillance, automation, instruments, timekeeping and the breadth of collected human knowledge. Using short edits, I attempt to hold attention captive between aesthetic and linguistic registers, never fully settling on either. The final installation over nine screens serves to underscore this flitting nature of attention again, and creates associative meanings with further randomization of clips against each other. However akin to the search for knowledge, the images coalesce into a single whole at some definitive moments which promises certainty and comprehension before scattering into fragments again.