It is traditional when running a weblog to have a post called “reviving this after X period of time” so heh. With that out of the way I am going to just use this place to talk about some concepts I'm thinking about. I'm not trying to make any hard-and-fast assertions, and I don't really want you to do more than read and think about them and maybe talk to me about them. I sure don't want to see links to these things, or rebuttals, etc – they're on my hidden little commonplace book for me to practice writing and developing thoughts, is all!
So. Smoke. Been thinking about using smoke for a few years now, how it works in video-images in particular. My piece TRANSIT features this, smoke dissipating in one way and uncannily backwards-coalescing into the sculpture when seen the other way around.
Smoke's process goes from a finite volume to an infinite one; from contained to immanent. It's a way, over time, to point to barely-perceivable metamorphoses but not from one form to another (which feels intentional, didactic, analogic) but instead from one form to its absence, its no-form. Smoke's particular animation, the quality of motion of its diffusion, tells observers a great deal about the environment – prevailing winds, the oppressiveness of the air and the closeness of the room, the thickness and heft of the smoke itself (revealing the ardor of the often-unseen burn fueling it). I have a video-sketch that seems always to be in the works, I hope to make it someday soon just to scratch the itch, but here it is: it's a high aspect-ratio shot, vertical, lush resolution and pencil-thin. The shot frames a delicate, unperturbed wisp of cigarette/incense smoke (that thin, pale blue of a cigarette-sized ember, never fully opaque). The smoke moves straight up and we know from this the room is absolutely still. Maybe we hear a monologue, or a person on one side of a phone call (once I was honored with some acting award and got to choose what to perform – it was the final phone call from Franny and Zooey (but LOL, an admin told me, after I'd rehearsed for weeks, right before I went onstage, to cut every instance of the word “goddamn”)). No person or motion is ever shown onscreen – just the imperturbable smoke. The sketch concludes with a door (offscreen) opening and closing, obliterating the tendril.
The progression of smoke in a video-image intersects with something common to most of my video-performance ideas: the idea that the video is not cut, edited, or sequenced in a way that deceives. The video of the performance may be highly contrived, and apparatuses, wires, actors, etc may be staged out of frame, but the video itself is more forensic than illustrative, more a (deranged, maybe) documentation than visual composition on its own. The composition is the scene-in-the-world, and the video image is just one residue of the actions taking place in that scene.
Smoke is useful, then, as a temporal watermark – a way to entangle an unfalsifiable physical process (itself symbolically rich and never unrelated to the action taking place) with the events playing out onscreen. In TRANSIT, the action of the smoke is one of the very few elements in the shot that is absolutely detectable as backwards-in-time. This highlights, for me, how much of the rest of the frame is basically temporally symmetrical – wind in the leaves, the sound of wind and branches, the motion of sun and shadow – all these elements do not read to a viewer, especially an ambient viewer (as is the intention with most of my landscape-painting-type videos), as backwards or out of sorts. That uncanny coalescence of smoke-into-form is an enormously powerful but subtle crux of the piece. An immanent order coalescing out of the wild, only to shatter in an instant back into the eternal.
In the Danse Macabre piece, I'm working with the idea of, in at least one vignette/sequence, smoke eventually filling the frame and totally obscuring the dancer and jumping-jack. Here, the smoke is again a temporal watermark but also an hourglass, a ticking-clock, illustrative of a process that, however gradual and continuous, eventually reaches a point of catastrophic, overbearing interference. In wider shots, when I was making test footage summer 2023, I liked the action of colored smoke exuding from the terrain, seemingly started synchronously (and by a remote-initiation system I spent awhile designing, only to find that the smoke effects themselves are only like 50% viable in terms of wicks catching from an e-match). This conjured a four-horsemen, hellfire-of-war atmosphere, a jungle LZ or charnel pits. But thematically not quite cohesive, unless maybe this can work specifically in reference to the gradual-suffocation shot described above. The shot above, by the way, is a portrait-orientation shot in which the dancer appears on a large 4k screen as 1:1 life-sized – like the Danse Macabre motif, it is a picture with the viewer staring out of the frame, trying to warn/communicate even though, for the dancer trapped in the frame, it is too late to be saved. Maybe the juice, then, is that the whole field becomes smoke – a hundred synchronous smoke effects, all filling the open-air field with startling and inexorable efficacy? And the color, something deeply unnatural like red-orange, can be what ties them even more together?
Smoke's nonvisual aspect, for example as incense in a censer, is also pretty interesting to deploy – an unseen scent is ominous, threatening – something deeply intimate gets inside your body without anything you can do about it – once you perceive it is too late, it is already inside you. A censer swing on a slow walk through a space, on the other hand, stakes ownership to this intimacy, performs its deployment, makes it clear that scent is an element in play at the moment. It is intentional, and it is both ephemeral (in time) and infinite (in space) – but with the consequence that as it suffuses into infinite space, its power/impact are diminished to the point of imperceptibility.
The day she got laid off, she told me she encountered a perfume that was to smell of an electronics shop in Bombay – it smelled, she said, of sandalwood and something acrid. Weeks later she performed in a dance for the first time in years, and I was on another coast. Over there I had a dubious expert page me through an exhausting fusillade of perfumes he hoped would answer my challenge: find me the smell, I asked, of theater lights warming up in an empty performance space, the smell of hot dust and vague electrics as the venue opens a few hours before curtains. Not quite smoke – the moments before it; not quite fire but a sequence of embers flinting out into the space, detectable only in those intimate moments before the audience arrives.