Melody Woodnutt

An extraordinarily unified and durational gaze toward the Messier 87 galaxy revealed the haunting images of the event horizon and the shadow of the M87 black hole. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) network drew from eight ground-based radio telescopes positioned in challenging high-altitude sites worldwide to create one Earth sized telescope with over 200 researchers and multiple calibration and imaging methods. This paper traces a constellation between the event horizon, love, the threshold, sonic mysteries, NASA's acousmatic sounds, and Rebeca Elson's stars as plucked from space,  drawn inward to heart or belly “all inside me”, becoming a quasi-exogeology (exo-lux/exo-sonic) fabric that embeds its symbology into my microcosm of heady love and the 16mm film of such,  titled Galaxies [a love letter].

There has long been a relationship between artistic work and the influence of the world, though it is taking a new turn in trends of conceptual relationality and an ‘expandedness’ is prevalent in contemporary art. In this essay I think through categories and the meanings of expanded cinema to argue that a relation exists for contemporary artists to use ‘the world’ as source material in their creative reiterations. As most theory on expanded cinema focuses on an historic position I argue for the relevance of ‘expanded cinema’ in a contemporary art context. I consider the ecological approaches by artists in fields of expanded cinema, sound and relational listening, 16mm film, and expanded thinking through worlding and framing. I consider work by Lawrence English, Amy Hanley, myself and briefly, Stan VanDerBeek, and Philip Samartzis. The essay considers ideas that exist in processes and conceptual peripheries of my collaborative 16mm film work with Amy Hanley’s sound work, which was commissioned for Speak Percussion as part of their Social Distancing (SD) Series over April to June 2020. Amy spent time at Bogong Centre for Sound Culture as a sound artist in residence and I spent time with The Weight of Mountains film residency in Dawson City, Canada working with 16mm film1 of which the SD Series work evolved from. Our collaboration is contextualised by ideas existing in contemporary sound and arts, including artist’s craft or t​ echnē that uses the world as source material for creating expanded objects or recorded and re-framed ‘worlds’.

Keywords: expanded cinema, relational listening, field recording, 16mm film, sound, hauntology, worlding, frame, and/or re-framing, contemporary art.

Using the example of an unusually unfrozen Yukon River in the subarctic region of Canada it becomes a catalyst to witnessing the tensions between philosophical concepts of World, Universe, and Earth.

"Suddenly we notice a sovereign Earth that is somewhere else. The veil of the occult is thin – that is to say the hidden, the spatiotemporal traces, and the folds of the atmospheric are privy to humans via the performance of place that creates noticeable signifiers of ‘somewhere else’ – an eco-occult."

"Artists are peculiar beasts and spirits... No longer are metropolises their Mecca; artists are now descending upon the periphery hosted by members of small communities to create new life and opportunity in their towns via artist residencies, where both artists and hosts orchestrate a durational slow change within the heart of remote Icelandic villages, often rekindling the economies of dwindling hope. In the words of Derrida: " ​ ...we rediscover the mythopoetical virtue (power) of bricolage. In effect, what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new status of the discourse is the stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute arché. " Within bricolage, the origin of perception is recaptured; the centre is disseminated. Authority and hierarchies are subject to distant, contorted imaginations as a previous reality twists into new artistic accounts and documentations conceived from deep in the field. The rebellious act of withdrawal and an international 'elsewhere' ethic contributes to a decentralisation of power within the institutional art world and gives flight to new peripheral centres of infamous activity; with a royal finger to the establishment, the periphery almost feels punk."

The Weight of Mountains (TWoM) is a filmmakers residency program that takes 6-10 filmmakers into differing remote and regional areas of the world every two years (i.e remote northern Iceland/ Moroccan Sahara) for months at a time creating an immersive construct that engages with localised environments yet filmmakers are often outsiders to local culture. Importantly, the artistic direction of the biennial arts residency and outcomes (film/festival/symposia etc) focus on the intersection between humanity and environment (purpose of artistic/film field work) and Foucault's heterotopia 2 (the philosophical construct of the residency itself). As an ongoing biennial dislocation of selves, immersing 10 filmmakers into a place hatches two reactions: the experiential (human) being within the world and the reflective consequences for structures of being (law, art) or the challenge of such containment. It is with the following text-and for the actual practical and biennial embarkment upon The Weight of Mountains film residency-that we begin at base camp and proceed from (figurative) point to point, uncertain of destination. It must also be considered the following is the default hierarchical perspective of the anthropocentric; of which the human is at the centre of psycho-geography, mythology, art and law. These structures of place and human navigation of it may entwine with ideas of the sensory as an equal informer or signifier of place, particularly when considering immersion into new environments. For the soundscape presented alongside this paper, the field recordings come from 11 filmmakers involved in the program and Hamish Clift and Melody Woodnutt. This collage is a summation of the sensings, the experiences, the noticings, and the recorded atmospheres within and beyond TWoM-the field recordings were manipulated through the artistic aesthetic choices within the arrangement done by Melody Woodnutt as a way to illustrate bricolage from global immersion and the unique and differing perspectives of what that means to the individual through their own bias, but which can be experienced collectively. What is TWoM?

**1 By its nature, this paper is a work in progress; it is a riff on many and varied conversations between us about our art and professional work, the ontologies of those ephemeral notions, and some common threads that seem inseparable from what it is we think we do.

I am an artist belonging to an artist run film lab (Artist Film Workshop, Melbourne). I use 16mm analogue moving image film as a creative medium, firstly because it carries alchemical processes that feel magically collaborative in the darkroom and secondly because film has an archival quality, better mobility, and can encompass a series of ideas that my ephemeral installations (or theatre sets) can’t match. Mostly, 16mm or analogue film feels like a soulmate medium with its own voice and a collaborative tension like that of a romantic relationship - it requires a giving (and consideration) of time. When a medium evokes this kind of romanticism I believe it transcends all other explanations and laws of attraction for an artist. Likewise, observations and feelings toward 16mm or analogue film exist in the viewer - particularly the evocation or perception of nostalgia. In this paper, I want to address the problem of nostalgia for analogue film and the division between observational nostalgia and feeling nostalgic. Using the tool of comparison between works by Bill Morrison and Tacita Dean, I’m driven to ask what the phenomenon of nostalgia means for my artistic medium of 16mm celluloid and more broadly all formats of analogue film or ‘cinema’. Potentially, this might assist us to move on from a common interpretation of analogue film as nostalgic and recognise what that label really means in ‘contemporaneity’, seeing it as one that carries its own complex shadows.