print this PROPOSITION FOR
A STORYLINE
[First draft. Jan 2002]
The situation proposed is constructed around a woman, but it could just as well be a man.
A woman is working in a big room where she is editing files of sounds and images. She is surrounded by recording equipment and several smaler monitors are displaying what she is working on. A laptop and a bigger screen brings in images and sounds from the outside, The public gets the impression that the machinery is connected to some kind of network. But what you see is very intimate or just shades of color and texture. Now and then a clearing in the image and a person approaches the camera, speaking directly out of the screen and into the situation. What we see and hear appears to be realtime, but it can just as well be a construction. The persons on the screen have the quality of angels.
We get the impression that the woman is looking for someone. That she is submerged in a feeling of loss and amputation. As the situation progresses we understand she is structuring a work around the recordings of a classical piece of music by Gustav Mahler: The devastating song cycle of The Kindertoten Lieder. What we witness as a public is a rehearsal situation, the moment where the work is being constructed, when the recordings are made and the transposition of the other story, slowly unravelling, unto that.
Through a big glass window in the back wall the public can look into a recording studio. Its possible to see the musicians as they are playing and mooving around behind the glasswall. The frontroom can be very quite, as if everything happens outside of the room, like in the studio or elsewhere in other rooms, what is revealed on the screen.
Emotions can only be experienced through a filter. The woman is working to break through the filter. She might not know how, but she is trying. She enter parts of recorded material onto the screens and starts manipulating and distorting the images as if she is trying to extract some other information,as if she is trying to discover layers underneath the appearent - reavealing hidden or lost information.
On the right side of the glasswindow is a door.. Now and then, the musicians who are recording in the studio behind the wall, will enter the front room to practice or just to wait for their turn. It is through the door and the big glasswindow, that the 2 parrallel situations eventually will brake down. The 2 rooms become reverted. and people who were untill now just present through the videoprojections on the screen will enter the situation and be physical and real. The music will be heard, in its naked beauty, without any filter.