THE OPEN FLOOR SERIES @marklipton 08|08|2020 SPRING 2020. OPENFLOOR is the latest in guru-led groups combining bio-mechanic movement, somatic connections and psychoanalysis. I was drawn to the model deep in the winter of 2019. The combination of movement, dance, trance and focused writing is a tool to break me into a more regular practice of writing. It worked. By the following spring, I was writing daily. Morning pages. Handwritten notes I would later be unable to read. Yet I persist. Because the PRACTICE of focusing my thinking; the habituation of my schedule; morning coffee; sun rising behind me; the room still; the neighbourhood silent. And I still heard music. A symphony of ambient waves activating my energy until, pen down, I need to move. Motion is lotion. March 2020. COVID-19 struck me down and everything froze. All work stopped. I made a short film about my inability to activate. I called it my ennui. The world would soon end, I thought. Ice death, I supposed, as spring hit and warmed the house and the Norway maple out-front slowly unfurled like a vast colourful spinnaker. I brought me joy. I could see small moments of incredible beauty; right in front of me, a tulip wilts and drops a petal. My visions of decay, rich metaphors like glasses to see the world, contrast the budding of spring. My rites of spring this year included an eschatological fantasy (fallacy) of total annihilation. No point in holding back.
“WE ARE MOST NEARLY OURSELVES WHEN WE ACHIEVE THE SERIOUSNESS OF THE CHILD AT PLAY.” — Heraclitus As the human brain evolved, an increasing number of specialized neural networks emerged to handle the vast amounts of information required for complex social interactions, abstract thinking and imagination. The increasing complexity allowed for the emergence of language, storytelling and narrative structures. Through language, individual brains gradually became able to use the minds of others through shared stories to aid in neural integration, emotional regulation and enhanced executive functioning. Understanding this interpersonal neurobiology taught me that necessary the physical isolation in this emergency situation left me unregulated and unintegrated. Scattered. Forgetful. Lucid yet dissociated. I have been here
OPEN FLOOR a project by @marklipton
before and knew what was needed. I found a very small group of movementfolks running a scheduled OpenFloor series and made the commitment. But more, in addition to the required psycho-auto-writing, I needed to experiment with telepresence. The experiment was to consider the interface of my remediated perceptions. The creation of digital-video-art was grounded in a creative practice intentionally and heavily abstract. Nothing conventional could come close to mirroring the sensations of touch. With unfiltered affective outpourings, the non-narrative, work seeks to abut the aesthetics of decay I was experiencing. The creative process offered a kind of alien agency, where I knew I was working on other writing and other cerebral tasks, and I continued. Suspended time. Made space for intimate movement. I had not really worked with my body and my Self as subject; othering, I became the object to manipulate digitally—approaching copresence. Well, telepresence, at least. There is a saying that neurons who fire together wire together. My aim toward telepresence worked like cognitive therapy bringing to the surface a series of texts to help me unpack my relations among habitual thought, language and behaviour. The simple act of putting feelings into words demonstrated a cascade of positive physical, behavioural and emotional effects; without medication I had lowered my heart rate, and very likely boosted my immune function. COVID be damned. My construction of short situations led to an echolalia of movement. As though the more I moved for a camera, the more I needed to keep moving; these modifications of behaviours were interferences afforded by the remediated technological and creative processes. My sense of space dislocated by the experience of watching digital versions of myself and my space as I manipulated and layered these representations. For me, the nonnarrative still tells a story. As I watch and re-watch myself dancing, I find a new neural integration synchronized by my sense of experimentation and my symbolic uses of play. What a great way to learn and grow! My moving, remediated bodies were a new platform, shared among my networks of self, display and community. This networked platform, itself, was disrupting my uses of digital technologies and my embodied constructions and reconstructions through language and symbolic play. I could now monitor this self-manipulated moving self. Watch and hearing one’s own body, as well, is troublemaking and unruly; questions emerged about my cultural values of sharing creativity and 2
OPEN FLOOR a project by @marklipton
creative output with social connections. Avoiding a turn to darkness I revented any insecurity into a personal inquiry. Agency, as made possible through the phantom platform of a digital my body Self, required a consenting ethic—my platformed ethos. This ethos was a kind of hacking and hacktivism, to engage my body and creativity in a practice that reflects a desire to move away from idealizing any Body/Self as individual and towards an examination of my movements as networks, without a clear leader, ideology or starting point. These movements are like a spontaneously rising chorus, integrating any single mode of working into this networked polyvocality. Here is where I recognize and re-vocalize how my appropriations and recirculations of remixed media point to the aesthetic decay of its original value. What is lost, for me, when two of my favourite films are copied and layered onto my moving body? Original value of the work of art collides and signifies the aesthetic potential of resourcing my own movement—attempts to foster or reinforce my queer sensibility were unnecessary. The work of art in the age of remix and digital manipulation did not distract from the agency that valorized its aesthetic value. Instead, these images and sounds, deeply tied to aesthetic desires and pleasures were constituted and reconstituted as extraordinary. In fact, the aesthetic value and memory – in tandem with my practice of creative manipulation led me to discover an inherent political action in these works. Sweet Charity and Auntie Mame contain queer political potential—without any loss of aesthetic pathos. This creative process enabled sets of instantaneous, deconstructive moves – my collection of staggered episodes—pursued (or at least produced) conflicting goals simultaneously. This is how platforms can restrict content or open up conditions for its possibilities; herein, this process provided strategies for keeping the tensions and spaces required for self-affective, dialectical intersections open. The tactile encounter, its leanings toward copresence and its teleology substitute the physical pleasure of touch, sensation and copresence, for specific instances of the cinematic codes of the close-up. Copresence is reinverted. There’s some echolalia in this pleasure. Yes. Yes. Yes. I take pleasure is the psychanalytic musings of Gilles Deleuze (1985), who likens individual shots or frames to the concept of the “affection-image” (Deleuze 87). And like my remediated face and body alongside Charity as “Dance Hall Hostess,” affection-images are also bipartite in its representation 3
OPEN FLOOR a project by @marklipton
of reflecting surface & intensive micro-movements –as Deleuze describes, oscillating between the two poles of admiration versus desire or between the stillness of a single frame without movement and its subsequent restlessness. Deleuze asserts the close-up transforms whatever it depicts “as a face [visage]. it has been envisaged; reified as face-ified [visageifiee], and in turn it stares at us [devisage], it looks at us, winks Deleuze, “even if it does not resemble a face” (88). With Deleuze on side, (and my confusions of reification) my auto-writing exercises reveal how my experiments into telepresence appropriated the accessibility and mobilities of these tools and languages of cinema for my own erotic ends. Cited Deleuze, Gilles. (1985). Cinema 2: The Time Image.
4
OPEN FLOOR a project by @marklipton
@marklipton OPENFLOOR A series of five short media works: OpenFloorOne. OpenFloorTwo. OpenFloorThree. OpenFloorFour. OpenFloorFive.
[03:16]. [02:12]. [01:34]. [03:03]. [02:39].
Stills available on subsequent pages:
5
OPEN FLOOR a project by @marklipton
.
6
OPEN FLOOR a project by @marklipton
7
OPEN FLOOR a project by @marklipton
8
OPEN FLOOR a project by @marklipton
9
OPEN FLOOR a project by @marklipton
@marklipton randomized post-production film still. 2020
10
