The Heavens Rained Stones
video, 4:16 minutes, 2020
From PRINCE SHIMA's album 'Fantasy Themes Vol. 1' (2020).
A collaboration between moving image (Alexis Grey Hildreth) and sound (Bradley Kurushima), The Heavens Rained Stones is an audiovisual conversation between early German Expressionist film and early experiments in analog video. The macrotemporal forces (human histories, traditions, and narratives) at play in Wegener's Der Golem (1920), are spliced into the microtemporal events (machine processes, flows, and signals) at work in Steina & Woody Vasulka's Noisefields (1974). This conversation is ruptured by a bit-based communion with interior light (sought through a keyhole) beneath the tympanum at St. John of Jerusalem Church, Hackney, United Kingdom (2016).
In the Der Golem story, matter is animated without spirit; brought to life by invoking the hidden name of god (Shem HaMephorash), the auspicious alignment of celestial bodies, and the electrostatic discharge those bodies bring forth. In Noisefields, an image is conjured without the use of a camera; birthed solely from the electronic signal. The Heavens Rained Stones follows these electrical forces, these lines of televisual communication, these luminance patterns, as they transfer back-and-forth, from one image to another: from Der Golem to Noisefields, from Noisefields to Der Golem, and eventually to their release through/entrapment within the keyhole in the main doorway at St. John of Jerusalem Church.
Through Noisefields, the Vasulkas expose the viewer to patterns, pulsations, and processes operating behind what is typically perceived as stable sights and sounds; to (what media phenomenologist Mark B.N. Hansen describes as) "minute shifts in affective tonality well beyond what is visible to natural perception". The hyper-montage and sound-image reciprocity of The Heavens Rained Stones is designed to sharpen the analytical attention of the viewer; to prime the eye to receive echos of the non-human temporalities (the microtemporal events) contained within Noisefields chaotic video signal.
The Heavens Rained Stones holds a curiosity with media archaeology, signal migration, data immersion, occult(ed) knowledge, (anti)social memory, the (de)generation of the archive, and the (re)mediation of temporality.
The Heavens Rained Stones is a product of art's transformation and empowerment through televisual speed; a vestige of art's liberation from the monument.
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Source material:
-Paul Wegener's Der Golem (1920)
-footage of Steina & Woody Vasulka's Noisefields (1974); captured during the Machine Vision exhibition at Raven Row, London, United Kingdom (2016)
-footage from the main doorway at St. John of Jerusalem Church; captured in Hackney, United Kingdom (2016)
-quote from Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), chap. 71 2.35-68
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