Lacuna

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‘LACUNA’ GUS CUMMINS | SEPTEMBER 2010

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AIM TITLE - ‘LACUNA’ DEVELOPMENT SCREEN CHOREOGRAPHY LANGUAGE & NARRATIVE LEVY FLIGHT v BROWNIAN MOTION STRUCTURE OF LACUNA OVERLAYING SEIZURE MAPS PRODUCTION POST PRODUCTION SOUNDTRACK CRITICAL EVALUATION CONCLUSION REFERENCES

AIM I intended to produce a video that explored the automatic behaviour of complex partial temporal lobe epileptic seizures, and related this behaviour to the borders of consciousness.

A complex partial seizure is a focal seizure that causes impairment or loss of consciousness, a typical example is a temporal lobe seizure that results in an ictal phase of unconsciousness and automatic movement, followed by a postictal phase of partial consciousness and impaired cognition in the form of temporary dysphasia and amnesia.

TITLE - ‘LACUNA’ Regarding the title; I found the word ‘lacuna’ while researching forms of amnesia, and it became the working title of the project. It comes from the Latin for pool or gap, and is strongly appropriate for this piece. It means: • Blank space or missing par • A small cavity, pit, or discontinuity in an anatomical structure I consider it as referring to the gap in the consciousness continuum.

DEVELOPMENT I developed the piece in a series of sessions with performance artist Nat Wyatt: • We observed medical videos of my seizures and discussed interpretation • I directed her movement using ‘seizure maps’ • I filmed her to study her movement

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Seizure maps are plans of my movement during seizures, created by a manual motion capture technique consisting of extracting a sequence of jpegs from a hospital video, and plotting movement of my head and limbs using a vector graphics programme.

Nat Wyatt

After these sessions I was able to make notes from the videos of Nat to improve her movement. We would watch videos of previous sessions together and I would tell her what movement I liked and what movement I didn’t like. We established movement cycles (which in themselves were not unlike analogies for ictal movement, which is rather cyclic.) Then I mediated, commenting on good and bad parts of cycles, eliminating the bad parts and encouraging the good parts. When the cycles were filmed, the good cycles were extracted.

I also made movement maps of Nat’s performance in development as tools to work from, which also became progressively cyclic.

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SCREEN CHOREOGRAPHY Prior to shooting the video I attended a program of screen Dance/Video/Improvisation at Bristol film company ‘Picture This’, curated by Kyra Norman (Light Fantastic) and Beth Alden on 25/6/10, and an artist’s talk from Katrina MacPherson on 26/6/10. I began to see the work I was developing as a form of screen choreography; I hadn’t regarded it in this way before.

As a result, a new area of research was unlocked and a new context established.

LANGUAGE & NARRATIVE Mimetic language and nonverbal cognition fit easily into the picture of a seizure, the mimetic language both communicates the presence of a seizure and represents nonverbal thought. I experimented with the Dub framework in my previous ‘Invisible Architecture’ project, attempting to strip narrative away in a short film – ‘Pin Lane’. I had limited success; verbal narrative was replaced with semiotics, still arranged in the form of linear narrative. Now I replaced it with gesture and movement, and reduced the narrative structure to close to zero. This represents an earlier stage in human evolution, before the pressure of society required verbal language, when mimetic and prosodic vocalization sufficed. (Logan 2010) The vestigial remains of this are released during a seizure through automatic movement and guttural sounds.

The Dub framework refers to the use of the dub consciousness model. In reggae an initial version of a song includes bass, drums, vocals and melody. A Dub version strips away vocals and melody leaving the bass and drums. I use this as a model for the loss of consciousness during a seizure, during which verbal thought and language cease, leaving the body’s life sustaining functions, and fragments of nonverbal thought. The bass and drums represent the life sustaining functions and the vocals and melody represent verbal thought and language.

I drew on the mimetic language of the ictal phase, and the bidirectional (i.e., Boca’s and Wernicke’s) dysphasia of the postictal. This provides hand movements, and vocalization, expressed and heard, without meaning.

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Developing & applying the dub model

LEVY FLIGHT v BROWNIAN MOTION I represented the movement of the epileptic seizure with movements of the hand. Nat and I had worked from the seizure maps, which in development I had smoothed out, averaging points. In so doing I had produced a lot of movement resembling fluid Brownian motion, and further encouraged this while directing Nat. Brownian motion is a simple stochastic process.

When a scientist visiting my studio came across a painting I had produced from a seizure map with no simplification applied, he identified the motion he saw as closely resembling Levy flight: “This method of simulation stems heavily from the mathematics related to chaos theory and is useful in stochastic measurement and simulations for random or pseudo-random

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natural phenomena. Examples include earthquake data analysis, financial mathematics, cryptography, signals analysis as well as many applications in astronomy, biology, and physics.”

(Wikipedia 2010) It remains for me to research Levy Flight further, but I am attracted to the idea that seizure movement should bear resemblance to the motion of a hungry shark stalking prey rather than the Brownian motion of swirling gas molecules (Wikipedia 2010). I shall correct future work to reflect this; unfortunately ‘Lacuna’ was complete when this was brought to my attention.

The mathematical algorithms for generating Levy flight are simple, and I intend to build Pd patches utilizing them during the next stage of this direction of the project. I am already working with some Pd patches that generate graphics from some recent (April 2010) intracranial EEG data. I am enthusiastic to compare EEG driven graphics, Levy flight graphics and seizure video and identify visual parallels and contrasts.

STRUCTURE OF LACUNA ‘Lacuna’ is presented on two screens adjacent to each other (or two panels on a single screen.) All of the references so far have been to the right hand screen, which was the intellectual part of the production. The left hand screen was produced in a more intuitive way. However, both panels developed rather organically in the post production stage, with no pre planned structure.

‘Lacuna’ was made as a development of the earlier ‘Pin Lane’ film. I strove to identify the strengths of the earlier production process. Inevitably ‘Lacuna’ developed its own very distinct style. The linear narrative was reduced to a minimum. The left hand panel had originally been a scene following temporally the main body of the film. The decision to juxtapose it spatially changed the film dramatically. Various dualistic readings are possible.

Importantly, the film was rendered more watchable in the absence of a linear narrative by the presence of two parallel activities.

The left hand screen has a low level of activity. It shows a gated garden. The working title of this screen was ‘Timeless Garden’.

Pink shoes and blossoms pick each other out in the blurred frame. A figure dressed in white enters and leaves the gated area at low speed, leaving a visual reverberation in her wake. There is a captivating quality to the scene. I want to say that this is the Japanese quality of wabi-sabi, transitory beauty, but I am not qualified to judge. The figure in white is transitory, with no fixed pixels, while the garden appears constant. Precisely halfway through the film the garden blinks

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for a moment, and runs again from start to finish; this is a long loop. The film is divided in space and time. The raw footage of this scene was of Nat walking in and out of a brightly lit rose garden. The dreaminess was bestowed by software. In the same way, my walk along a familiar street can turn into waking up in an unfamiliar and threatening place if an aura or a seizure strikes.

If the left hand panel represents a thing, it may be slipping in an out of consciousness as though it were a timeless garden.

OVERLAYING SEIZURE MAPS The right hand panel film includes a short introductory section before it enters the periictal phase. The introductory phase treats the screen as an illusory window, through which we see the protagonist’s face. Then the motion of arms represents the slipping into seizure.

After around a minute the arms are overlaid with white lines – the slowly animated seizure maps. These break the illusion of the window we are looking through, they are marks on the surface of the window. This is intended as a comment on the effect of a seizure on perception. When I have a seizure I become aware of the nature of my perception more than what I perceive.

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PRODUCTION My initial plan had been to be cameraman and director working with Nat, I realised that I would need another person on the team because: • I would be using a large and unfamiliar camera • I would be seeking to direct and film at the same time I hired Tony as cameraman and driver. He has experience as a stills cameraman and I assumed he would adapt to video. We have worked together previously.

The footage was shot over 2 days with an HD camera hired from Picture This. The location was Ashton Court estate. I worked from a list of desired shots. An immediate problem was that Nat and I had established working protocol, but on these days we worked outside that protocol with Tony on camera. He rapidly picked up the technical complexities of the camera and time based work, but didn’t frame shots the way I wanted. I finally shot around 10% of the footage. At the editing stage around 75% of footage included in the piece was what I had shot.

Lessons that I learned: • I liked my own camera work • I required a driver and a technician • Communication was not clear enough If I do hire a cameraman again I will • Communicate my requirements very clearly • Check every shot as we proceed • Seek a more experienced person and check their previous work to see if they are appropriate I would prefer to do my own camera work, while hiring a driver/technician. I will always need to hire a driver because I cannot drive with epilepsy. The person in this role would also be useful to help carry equipment and act as a technician. I am considering whether it is possible

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to brief this person thoroughly enough for them to take on a directorial role. I am interested to know how other artists allocate roles in teams and look forward to discussion groups etc..

EXTRA NOTE After writing this I fed it back to Tony. He made the point that this had been our first time working together with moving image, and that as well as the solutions I propose he expressed enthusiasm simply to work more in this way until we established better results. His enthusiasm is impressive.

POST PRODUCTION A lot of the work on Lacuna is at the postproduction stage, by which I mean the editing, the application of effects and the merging of animated seizure maps with the video footage.

Due to my initial frustration with the footage, the editing stage was prolonged. However, I believe the struggle was productive.

I had to compare the output to developmental work which was much rawer in nature – using lower quality video combined with self produced drum’n’bass soundtracks, this work was strong, but focused on the traumatising aspect of epileptic seizures.

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I stayed with my intention of extracting elements of seizures that are very moving in a different way – they have often been described as quasi-spiritual or sublime experiences.

They can certainly be creatively fuelling. In the process of outputting 5 minutes 41 seconds of edited material a great deal of other material was shelved, notes made for future projects and new skills learned.

SOUNDTRACK I applied a number of different soundtracks to the visual work when it was near completion, and unsurprisingly the impact of the work varied greatly. I finally composed a musical piece using a combination of methods.

The background sound is choral, and this is computer generated using an application called Reason, with my composition. I was able to closely examine a preset sound in Reason, and simplify it to a sine wave with a few filters applied. Further modification took place in Ableton Live, the mixing and equalising software.

I added distorted speech from a recorded Basho haiku run through a Pd patch to represent the dysphasia that accompanies a seizure. The haiku was recorded during the experimental stage of setting up the patch and recording system in my studio. I called in a fellow artist from a neighbouring studio, and she read the words from a book that was in my bag. I haven’t managed a better or more appropriate recording since.

An intermittent ‘bleep’ sound generated from EEG recordings during a seizure was also added. This was EEG run through a simple patch, using velocity to generate frequency. This is not recognisable sa EEG related, but I like the minor connection.

All tracks were balanced using Ableton Live to make the sound suitable for small laptop speakers or large sound system speakers.

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Pd is a Graphic User Interface that allows the processing of all forms of digital signal, it was originally a shareware variation on MAX/MSP designed by Puckette.

CRITICAL EVALUATION I sent the Vimeo address of Lacuna to many people to try and get independent opinions. The percentage of replies was low, they included: ‘This is a beautiful and evocative piece of work’ - Zoe Shearman ‘A very interesting film’ - Julie Penfold ‘This is the medium you must work in’ - Danny Start ‘The best work you have made about epilepsy yet’ - Lorna Giezot Friends give positive replies, so maybe I can’t call these opinions independent, with the exception of Zoe Shearman who I have only met once, and is an esteemed voice on the Bristol art scene.

MARCALO In recent years there have not been many art works focussing on epilepsy. One exception was Rita Marcalo in December 2009. This Doctor of choreography stopped taking anti epilepsy medication some weeks before a performance involving sleep deprivation and strobe lights, intending to induce a seizure on stage. She failed. Her attempt received acclaim from many reviewers, including those in the Disability Arts movement, but was badly received by many people with epilepsy. This may be because they have very regular seizures despite medication, and a failed attempt to induce one did not seem laudable.

Baxendale (2009) regarded the piece as reinforcing negative stereotypes, and the failure to induce a seizure as informing on the unpredictability of epilepsy.

Sutherland (who has epilepsy) gave Marcalo a positive review (Sutherland 2009), declaring: “She speaks for us all.”

After a mixed bag of comments, including many from people with epilepsy pointing out how their lives were scarred by the condition, he was forced to partially withdraw the statement, writing: “I don’t claim to speak for everyone affected by epilepsy, and not (sic) I’m sure would Ms Marcalo.” (Sutherland 2009, italic text added by me)

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TRIBE Another work relating to epilepsy was ‘Dead Star Light’ by Kerry Tribe which showed at Bristol Arnolfini from July - September 2010. This was largely film and video work investigating memory. Within this exhibition was ‘H.M.’, an experimental film installation.

‘H.M.’ consisted of two adjoining screens, each showing the same film, 20 seconds out of phase with each other. The content of the film was footage of an epileptic patient called ‘H.M’, who had been the subject of a temporal lobectomy operation in 1953. This was the first year the operation was performed, and in this case had resulted in permanent amnesia for ‘H.M.’, leaving him with a 20 second memory until he died in 2008.

Film Installation: ‘H.M.’ by Kerry Tribe. Arnolfini, Bristol, 2010.

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I found ‘H.M.’ intellectually and emotionally engaging, not least because this patient had an early version of the operation I am currently waiting for and because the format of the film was almost identical to ‘Lacuna’, which I had just completed when I saw ‘H.M.’.

Even disregarding these very personal resonances, I felt that the ability of the film medium to engage the viewer was demonstrated. The film largely consisted of interviews interspersed with symbolic sections, and the 20 seconds offset was fascinating. It would be difficult to achieve this level of engagement with performance for an audience accustomed to screen.

LACUNA Lacuna could be said to contain elements of Marcalo and Tribe - it is choreography presented on two screens. What is absent from Lacuna is the realism that spills out of the other artists’ work. An attempt to have a seizure on stage, or an interview with an ageing man who has lived most of his life with crucial parts of his brain tissue removed, have a huge presence.

The word ‘shocking’ occurred repeatedly in reviews of Marcalo’s intention. Tribe’s work was emotionally moving. In their presence, ‘Lacuna’ may seem small and insignificant.

But ‘Lacuna’ is presenting the subjective (non) experience of a seizure. Depending on the context in which a seizure occurs it can be small and insignificant. Or, in the words of Zoe Shearman, it can be ‘beautiful and evocative’. I added a choral soundtrack to ‘Lacuna’ because a seizure can also be a sublime and quasi spiritual experience. It is thought that in history many religious visionaries may have had epileptic seizures and interpreted them as visitations from god.

‘Lacuna’ was intended to be shown via projectors on large screens. So far it has only been seen on monitors, so the impact has been reduced. While the personal seizure experience may be insignificant to others, the first party is immersed in it. The intention is that this should also be the case for the viewer, the screen should be large enough to fill one’s field of vision. Parts of ‘Lacuna’ are dark and hard to distinguish, which is appropriate for the

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shadowy perception and memory of seizures. There are moments where higher lighting levels emerge from the shadows, and others where slow motion accelerates to real time.

I like the transparency of these moments, they don’t try and smooth the edges of applied effects.

The left/right screen division is unclear in its intention. Various meanings may be grafted onto it, including left/right hemisphere lateralization of focal origin seizures, but this needs to be clarified in the content. Or concept/percept with verbal/mimetic correlates, but again, this needs accentuation.

Considering that the visual aspect of the film is the product of two elements - seizure generated linear graphics, and choreographed body movement developed from these graphics, the simplification or smoothing of the graphics was a mistake that leaves a flaw throughout. The film would be improved by replacing the Brownian motion with Levy flight.

However, that aside, the fluidity of the movement in the film can be entrancing. The linear seizure maps don’t interact particularly with the body movements, but that doesn’t seem to be a serious visual flaw.

Altogether ‘Lacuna’ works fairly well. It would be stronger if its context were broadened by lengthening the introduction and conclusion This is ironic since the piece was developed from ‘Pin Lane’ and one intention was to reduce unsatisfactory ways in and out of the seizure scene.

CONCLUSION This was the first time I have worked with a hired camera, or a paid team. The development stage was successful, the shoot was problematic (but these problems are solvable) and the post-production stage was also successful.

My stated primary aim was to explore the relation between epilepsy, consciousness and automatic movement; I think this has been achieved. I am aware that their is potential to improve the film, especially by providing a clearer context for a seizure to occur in and introducing extra elements to a seizure. Also the nature of movement in a seizure requires more careful treatment. These are achievable aims for a follow on production.

Discussion of the film with other people has raised other new issues to consider; parallels between seizures, and ego loss induced by meditation, hypnotic dancing and other physical behaviour. Parallels between expressive dysphasia and automatic movement, and glossolalia.

Reflection on epilepsy and shamanism in some cultures. This provides a lot of rich new material.

Analysis of glossolallia (speaking in tongues) shows that it retains characteristics of the speaker’s native language in terms of rhythmic patterns and range of consonants. It would be interesting to construct a Pd patch that loads a set of sounds and patterns, and see if it can generate speech patterns resembling glossolallia or dysphasia.

NOTE Lacuna was shown at Shape in Camden from Sept - Dec 2010.

Exeter Phoenix have expressed an interest in showing it in their digital media section for a few days in 2011.

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REFERENCES Barnett, D. 2008. Movement as Meaning in Experimental Film. Rodopi.

Baxendale, S. 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8413404.stm accessed 6th December 2010 Logan, R. K. 2010, Mind and Language Architecture, The Open Neuroimaging Journal, 2010, 4, 81-92 Sutherland, A. 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/nov/20/epilepsy-liveart-rita-marcalo accessed 6th December 2010 Wikipedia 2009, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9vy_flight accessed 3rd December 2010

SOFWARE USED

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Adobe CS5 Premiere Pro AfterEffects Photoshop Extended Illustrator

Pd-extended Reason Ableton Live VLC QuickTime Player 7

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