Dialogue

Dialogue with Lucy Fernandes

LF: I looked at your work. I really enjoyed it. The big question for me is: would the viewer know anything about your working processes before looking at the work? Also, how long did it take you to do this? And what's your vision?

AM: This work explores what the combined process can reveal by questioning individual experiences of reality; reconstructed events alongside first hand experiences of them. The idea of a hidden reality of flux or flow and the passage from potentiality to actuality. The right sequence can be seen as the flow, and the left as manifest form. It aims to evoke neurological responses in the ‘viewer’, exploring vision and hearing, psychology and memory. I wanted to create an alternate reality, which has an existence on its own, a stage set, telling a multi-sensory story.

The water footage (right) was filmed and edited by Francesca and still photographs were also taken. I began by extracting the audio and collating the still footage, starting a process of exploring scientific visualisations of the audio (spectrograms) and the transformation of visual data into audio, and re-synthesising this data. Through experimentation, forms were constructed in 3D, and patterns ‘wrapped’ around the objects and put it back into the sequence. This process continued and I produced the scene on the left. The sequence is produced in 3D anaglyph, with the depth information from the left scene, superimposed on the water. The soundtrack is from samples taken from the visual imagery, binaural recordings, and found footage (the audio is spatially synced with the visuals).

LF: I notice you used the word 'neurological responses' in your explanation. How much have you researched the use of binaural beats by neurologists/psychiatrists/alternative medicine etc to 'heal', 'relax' and help people 'process' traumatic events etc etc? I don't know much but I'm pretty sure they can be used to induce an REM state, which not only manipulates the eye itself but could be considered to put the listener into a submerged place, just below the surface of conscious reality. This opens up a lot of possibilities for you if you are interested in experimenting more with sound and experience. For instance, if you could select specific beats used to induce certain known neurological responses in the brain, and translate them into 3D anaglyph, could you produce a visual equivalent of these kinds of healing experiences, and chill people out?

I like the way the 'texture' of the water is wrapped around the newly-born shapes, like reflection. There is a tension between repetition, and endless variety of experience.

There is the issue of manipulation in your work - how much is this active viewing, and how much is it allowing yourself to become a subject to experience? You could argue that participating in this work turns you into something strange, translated, unknowable. You lose a sense of familiarity as you immerse yourself in the work and the water, and as part of that process you forget who you are. If there is any 'nostalgia' in your work then it has to be specific to each individual - these images are hardly social currency - but for me, you just become an alien in a futuristic world. You don't even know why you feel a sense of nostalgia. You lose all sense of time, and place, and perhaps that is unsettling/disempowering?  

Again for me the work was about memory. The surface of the water was like the surface of your life - always moving, fragmented, sometimes familiar, sometimes surprising, fast, slow but (even though you see it in 3D) somehow always two-dimensional, black-and-white. The left hand side was what is beneath the surface, the stuff that goes on inside you while everyday-life flows along above. These are memories, experiences, things that are intangible and can't be grasped or known. Each shape comes into your vision without you knowing to expect it, and brings with it associations, memories that are unexplainable, and different for each person. It is interesting that most of the associations are from visual media, and not from my own memories. Maybe this is something to do with your medium.

Or maybe the power of film/animation/technology to stick in your mind's-eye more than real-life-moments. You saw them not felt them. Anyway, the way these free associations come and go and wash over your mind is like the water. Each water molecule touches the next and the next in ways that can't be predicted, and this endless mingling of molecules makes waves and the waves can't be predicted either. The water brings to the surface things that were floating in the murky depths of your mind, and yet you still can't predict which memory will push which memory, and how all the memory-molecules link together…Maybe I should use the word soul - it is more shapeless and flows like water - but your mind has neurons, which to me move memories like water molecules move waves - some turbulent, some calming.

I think the way you have to relax your eyes, and also relax your mind, is really important. It lets the images wash over you, bringing up to the surface things you could never have expected. The experience of the water and the experience of your own subconscious reflect each other because they are both chopped up, fragmented, and neither of them can be contained - if you try to hold them, or catch them, they slip between your fingers. In a way the water on the right has more shape, because it has a boundary to it - a definable surface - whereas your memories are boundless. But both the right side and the left are part of the past. The yellow sun would be a universal trigger. The fact that some shapes come from nowhere at all, i.e. the 'data' from the water, ensure that the work can't be scripted or analyzed fully, and those shapes represent things that can't be recalled in words or even conceived of - they are just feelings that never even made it into memories. The other thing about water-memories is they're not solid, and they're not quite reality. You can't really feel water, not properly anyway, and you can't feel memories properly either, even painful ones. So in that sense your work feels reassuring and safe. Weird as some of the shapes are, none of them are scary. Almost all of them are half-transparent. The theme of childhood is something that never grows old in your work and you mustn't let it go.

For me, the image of the buildings that turned upside down was particularly powerful - it made me relive/re-see the scene from the film Waltz with Bashir, the bit where one of the main characters goes out into the street in the middle of civil war and starts shooting round and round (the Waltz) and then falls to the ground and all the buildings must have turned upside down for him. One of the characters in the film says to another, 'you can draw, but don't film'. As if memory retrieved in animation was less immediate, more in-the-past, and so less painful for the world to watch. It's incredible.

There's a sense of loss in all your work for me. None of these feelings can be possessed. They're all fleeting, already gone. It's sad. 

The diptych format is one of the things that interests me most about this work. It reveals an important part of your practice/process - the way you have taken visual and audio information from the original photographs and footage, translated them into visualised data, and then used that to re-produce new visual/sonic material and shapes. This is satisfying considering the nature of the original material - water - which moves back and forth in tides and waves.

Also the vertical divide is a kind of refracted boundary of the surface of the water - there is both a left and a right, and an above and below. The viewer knows that rays of light and sound are passing through the middle line, just like they can through the surface of a pool or a lake, but they get distorted/diffracted in the process, and you can never quite know just where the object is, it's shape, or how the noises originally sounded. The complexity of your working process means that, although there is an underlying logic linking the two sides, as well as the sonic and visual components of your work, this is so abstracted that it is inaccessible/unknowable to the viewer, having been translated through so many different digital formats, computer programs, etc... a lot is 'lost in translation' and the viewer has to just give himself up to experience. Kind of like when you're listening to a language that's new to you. You can only enjoy the patterns, sounds, rhythms, and accept that you can't understand or deconstruct its meaning. 

I read about this recently ‘Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy. The basic mechanism is that the therapist moves their finger from side to side and the client asked to follow it with their eyes. Something within our neuropsychology means that we process traumatic memories through moving our eyes in this way. It is often used (don't quote me on this) in combination with binaural beats to condition a certain state of mind in which the technique is most effective: Like moving your eyes from side to side in your work? If you could use your work as a positive form of healing process it would give it a 'place' and purpose in today's world, open up possibilities for 'art therapy' etc. It is interesting what memories people bring to random visual images. Perhaps these link to personal, unresolved memories that need processing, and putting in the past.

Lastly, as a viewer I have to say that much of the selection of visual/sound samples seemed very gendered - they felt very much like they came from a boy. The sad truth is that our identities, our memories, and even our brains are gendered. If you could develop a collaborative process for selecting these images it might be more effective as an experience, which everyone, in their own way, could relate to?

One more thing - whenever I've needed to think (process), I've always got in the bath, immersed myself in water. Some people go out and watch the sea, watch and listen to the rhythm of the waves. Something deep in our primitive mind finds water a source of healing, letting pain pass away: Wave-particle analogy, quantum potential.

Funny how memories can help you forget.

Maybe one day you can make things like this based on one person's experiences. Work with individuals; ask them to select the components for the work. Being immersed in another person's subconscious could be the most powerful form of healing, even if you don't know the person, or why those memories are important. 

AM: For the ‘neurological’, in the animation there are several elements in their both from my own experience and from stuff I've read about (for example the bit when the whole scene goes upside down, people do experience this, a flip, I think its called Akinetopsia). As for the water element, it was Francesca's footage, and as you rightly say this has been a metaphor for calming the mind and soothing physically the body, but also as wave probabilities in physics. 3D glasses are handmade, based on two ‘characters’ in the ‘story’. The sense of loss and sadness you say in these works is actually something I feel a bit after the event of watching.

LF: I think the strongest idea amongst all of this is setting up individual workshops where people can select their own sounds and/or images and, with your help, integrate them into an interactive, 3D-sonic experience.

Following on from the idea of memory, experience, and the subconscious, you could encourage them to select samples instinctively, without thinking too much - just stuff they liked, or struck them/unsettled them. No need for explanation. Then you would use the skills you have developed to turn it into a piece of footage like the one you sent me. If possible they could be involved in this process too, but it depends how complex it is. At the end, they would have their own footage, personal to them, through which they could relive and recapture some of their distant feelings/memories/experiences, the ones that can't be described in words or in paint. They could also perhaps regain some of the things that time has lost.

This could be really valuable in the treatment of both PTSD and also memory-loss/amnesia after a head injury, and even early onset Alzheimer’s. It could also be valuable to anyone who has experienced some kind of traumatic/disruptive event (car accident, rape, military combat) and has somehow lost a sense of their own identity. It could help them feel like they reconnect with their past, and how they used to feel before that moment. The fact that you can play the tape over and over again could be comforting, and hopefully they would connect with the result of their own project (and the process), however abstract the outcome. You could integrate techniques like EMD, binaural beats, and Akinetopsia to aid the healing process.

Personally I would explore ways in which these techniques could help people on a therapeutic level - you could do ones only in sound, for people who have lost their sight, and vice versa, and also for people who have speech impairments and can't express themselves very well in words. Obviously there is probably limited funding for you to develop these workshops, but there is a lot of faith - and a lot of evidence - for the efficacy of 'art therapy' among the medical and clinical-psychologist communities (look this up - there is so much literature on it). Plenty of people would be very interested in new ways to 'update' art therapy and these therapeutic techniques, and once you are established a little you could get in touch with the psychology departments of some of the London universities - they have a fair bit of money to spend on research.

Your work could help so many people, especially those who are physically/sensorily disadvantaged in some way, and can't do the traditional 'painting how you feel' type thing. Another example would be people who are colour blind. Spreading colour on canvas wouldn't help them much, but being involved in a process where they could translate their own feelings/experiences into 'collages' of visual/audio samples to make a 3D experience, even in black and white, would be pretty cool. One place to investigate might be the NG education department, though they're not really interested in anything that doesn't tie into their collections. But they do this project 4-times-a-year working with inmates in youth institutions. I saw one where each participant selected 'objects' which they felt represented their identity and drew them in a collage on paper (Ambassadors-style). They seemed to really get into this one. I reckon some of the young offenders would respond to your processes pretty well due to the medium. I know the possibilities are endless for you but if you teach art to people in North London then I'm guessing you must already care about the role that creativity can play in people's lives, and maybe seen evidence for it as well.

Your next step now could be to make use of the techniques/technologies you've developed to bring this into the 21st century. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just personal. 

Your process may take a while (i.e. not cost-effective) but it is interactive, and only just getting started. Personally, having an animation that I had made of some of my feelings/memories, an inexpressible/intangible experience of the inside of my mind/soul/past, would be really precious to me.

The process of making it would be as much of a 'journey' as the animation itself. You would learn a lot about yourself that you didn't know before, through selecting things that comforted you, or frightened you, even if you didn't know why.

It would be a new way of keeping memories.

But at the same time: loss is also about letting go.

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