M. Wooden’s experimental characteristic Commodity Buying and selling: Dies Irae screens on the Fall 2022 New Jersey Movie Pageant on Sunday, September 25. Right here is my interview with M. Woods:
Nigrin: Why did you make Commodity Buying and selling: Dies Irae?
Woods: Commodity Buying and selling‘s origin is an advanced story. Once I was 17 I started making what has turn into a cycle of artwork known as The Numb Spiral. That is centered round a film known as Melencolia, which is the subsequent characteristic movie within the sequence I will be releasing. Commodity Buying and selling in some ways is a stand-alone characteristic but additionally a continuation of the previous characteristic movies within the sequence: Dailies From Dumpland, Fractal Demise (which is definitely an immersive feature-length set up), and Physique Prop. In my debut characteristic movie, Dailies from Dumpland, I started utilizing Columbus Circle as a double for the 4th layer of Dante’s Inferno, a spot that totally represents the greed and hyperrealism of American society from the center of the island on which I used to be born – Manhattan. After all, the looming tower on this place is Trump’s cheesy, gaudy hell. As a toddler my mom, a single working Latina from Costa Rica, used to level out Trump’s properties and inform me they had been “cheesy.” The definition of cheesy forevermore was linked in my head with Donald Trump, now together with various different disturbing properties that signify Trumpism. As a New Yorker, Trump’s rise to the presidency and the autumn of America had been realized in sluggish movement throughout my life, however in a manner that felt prophetic. He was at all times a disturbing fixture of my actuality. The minute he began his presidential run he used the chance to label us Latinos as rapists and thieves. He negated us and all different non-whites for the sake of fanning the flames of racism and giving permission to carry up the hood as soon as once more on this nation. Commodity Buying and selling began as a listing of notes primarily based upon the thought of consumption. I considered various close-up pictures. The work has no screenplay. On the time I began capturing, my daughter was born and Trump had received the primary few debates of the GOP primaries by way of a sequence of horrific spectacles and inflammatory malignant nihilism. The work, The Numb Spiral, makes an attempt to get on the foundation of this nihilism – which is some extent through which one can select to abide by a philosophy that primarily destroys actuality. The work of Jean Baudrillard, Malcolm X, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, Man Debord, and Achille Mbembe all affect this understanding of nothingness because the symbolic negation of actuality; that is what Jean Baudrillard refers to as “hyperreality.” The Numb Spiral is communicated by way of its circulatory system, The Digital Illness, a phrase I take advantage of to imply your entire equipment and all the tentacles of mass media communication from the {hardware}, wires, satellites, invisible waves, to the firmware and software program that management and contour the switch of data that perpetually communicates much less and fewer. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness serves as a blueprint for the way in which through which human consciousness orients itself round nothingness with a view to allocate itself as being. Nonetheless, the malignant nihilism, that which Sartre refers to as Dangerous Religion, generates a supreme solipsism (primarily based primarily on the economic system of white supremacy) and ultimately provides approach to the whole negation of the actual. This devaluing of actuality is inherently tied to the formation of the triangular slave commerce, as Achille Mbembe astutely acknowledges in his work Necropolitics. On the College of Oxford, my alma mater and one of many oldest repeatedly working studying establishments on this planet, a number of figures had been concerned within the formation of the Royall African Firm, together with John Locke (mispelled as Lock within the Royall African Firm constitution), the determine whose three treatises on the idea of presidency drastically influenced one other disgusting narcissist and hypocrite, Thomas Jefferson. I lengthy contemplated how the writers of the USA Structure might worth a human at 3/5 of an individual. The concept of fractionalizing a human being appeared absurd, even for a racist and evil colonial state. Nonetheless, upon studying the notes of the Royall African Firm, housed within the Weston Library Particular Collections, I noticed first-hand the books and letters written within the late seventeenth century as correspondences between the Royall African Firm and its royal sponsors. The accounts written are foul and amongst them are the receipts and ledgers of the corporate, nonchalantly itemizing commodities that had been being traded (or sought.) They had been gold, silver, Africans (known as slaves), elephant enamel, hides, and so on… seemingly prioritized in a listing on this order. Among the many most atrocious of those receipts and ledgers is the commerce worth for a human being, “1/2 a slave” was value a barrel of Rum or a musket. The fractionalization of people, in addition to the negation on the coronary heart of this malignant nihilism, derives immediately from the start of world Capitalism which in flip is the start of the triangular slave commerce. This nothingness has birthed what Mbembe refers to as a “Bewitched” zone of hallucinatory realities ruled by a white supremacy that has purposefully launched a Neo-fascistic battle. As Trump continued to plunder American politics, possible for the advantage of Russia, I started to worry that he would win. I began filming consistently with my former brother-in-law Josh Grey (an actor, MC, producer, and the uncle to my daughter Annmarie. She is featured within the film alongside together with her mom Lauren. The film mirrors the dissolution of the nation by way of he dissolution of my household as we coped with dwelling within the trauma-filled, low-income neighborhood of Los Angeles we known as house, often known as the Jungles or Baldwin Hills.) Joshua and I set out on a number of shoots utilizing Los Angeles as a map to the opening of the Numb Spiral, and we collaborated on our journeys and the “script” which was born out of lengthy conversations between the Jungles, Skid Row, Beverly Hills, the native mall, and the websites of protest. On 11/9 2016, and all the days succeeding for 2 weeks, the “resistance” was born and we documented and took part as members of the resistance. Commodity Buying and selling continues off the map of actuality and into one other zone, that of the bewitched hallucinatory area, and prophetically realizes the Ukraine disaster.
Nigrin: Why do you utilize quite a lot of codecs in your movie?
Woods: The digital illness is available in quite a lot of varieties. Commodity Buying and selling is basically shot in 16mm movie as a result of 16mm as a fabric permits for the a number of publicity of area. Marshall McLuhan states that it’s inconceivable to have a perspective in a International Village, that which has by way of electrical media fashioned a false sense of connectedness by way of the instantaneous switch of data (that Baudrillard additional characterizes as metastasis within the abundance of damaged and damaging indicators.) McLuhan says with a view to have a point-of-view on this world, we have to be in all places without delay, on a regular basis, and “that isn’t a point-of view.” This a number of perspectival realization of area can be mentioned by Philip Okay Dick in his masterpiece, VALIS. VALIS stands for Huge Energetic Dwelling Intelligence System; within the ebook – a memoir of Dick’s personal Numb Spiral informed from the angle of his alter-ego “Horselover Fats” – Dick states that we live within the fall of the Roman Empire. Time has merely overlayed upon itself like a a number of publicity in a movie. He considered himself as a gnostic prophet in these end-times, and Gnosticism brings us as soon as once more again to Oxford, the positioning of the archives of the unique Gnostic bibles often known as the Bruce and Jung Codices. The Gnostics mixed many colleges of thought, together with Pre-Socratic philosophy, into a faith integrating Egyptian, Greco-Roman, and proto-existentialist philosophies/ mythologies. Their faith itself was a combined medium. In VALIS, Philip Okay Dick remembers an expertise through which a pink ray of pure info is transmitted into his head, and inside it lies the supply of plentiful and horrifying reality, that our world in its materials extra and decay is the supply of a profound void. This VALIS is Gnosis (information) within the type of a compression of data. Our world is oriented round primarily digital medias with nostalgia for an analog that’s not what it as soon as was. Media is a drug and its therapeutic massage, as is talked about repeatedly by Marshall McLuhan, communicates greater than its content material. An escapist film like a Star Wars franchise permits one to expertise a way of rebel with out ever rebelling. In that sense, media is tailor-made to the viewer’s unconscious drives in an try and create a false map, the results of the cancerous hyperreality.
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Nigrin: Lots of our judges discovered your movie to be fairly loopy in a great way and some others could not make heads or tails out of it. Have you ever acquired an identical type of response to your movie elsewhere?
Woods: It is a criticism usually leveled at my work. I take it as ableist nonetheless as my work additionally displays my very own neurodivergence, nonetheless I ask again, why is it that this work is seen as “loopy” versus the absurdity of this horrible existence through which we stay? What’s so totally different about this work than the propagation of nothingness that blankets over existence? What does it imply to be an American to have consolation and to require the cool escapism of a totally threaded collectively narrative when the world is mostly a metaphysical paradox within an infinite despair? Why am I displaying you these photos? Why are they juxtaposed collectively? What have you ever accomplished to hunt which means within the work? Is the act of spectating actually sure by the necessity for full readability? In that case, why is that not a requirement made upon the world as an entire? Or is movement image presupposed to be a cookie-cutter easy-to-swallow tablet for the aim of simplifying existence from the outside, showering it in fantasy, and giving linearity to that which is inherently non-linear? I’ve an issue with this critique in the identical manner that I’ve an issue when it’s leveled in direction of the work of David Lynch (at his finest) or the avant-garde as an entire. Maya Deren acquired the identical criticism. Spike Lee acquired the identical criticism. The avant-garde has repeatedly redefined the boundaries of cinema and artwork and has been known as loopy all through historical past and but with out it we’d be dwelling in probably the most conservative and strict fascistic frame of mind, which is what I’m desperately attacking. A film can not ever totally simulate actuality, however in Dangerous Religion it lies and poses as actuality. This generates nothing on this planet. This generates a false map, a false idea, a false actuality. The common film or murals makes an attempt to simulate a gross oversimplification and that turns into a simulacra of actuality. That’s the reason films are the primary conductor of hyperreality. As an alternative of demanding the film be “regular” or lack “craziness” one ought to study one’s personal relation to “craziness”. Do these similar notions forestall us from speaking to individuals which can be thought-about “loopy”? What’s loopy is that Roger Stone is free when he’s on the heart of a grand conspiracy to infiltrate the US authorities and produce again Jim Crow period white supremacy. What’s loopy is that half of the nation actually believes Donald Trump is President. What’s loopy is that the opposite half voted for one more horrible president who’s principally ineffective who eulogized Strom Thurmond. What of these neurodivergent that see the world from a perspective that the reductionists are incapable of viewing? I imagine this criticism, and even the view that my work is “loopy”, refuses to just accept the reality of the world. My work is perhaps “loopy” in a Starbucks actuality, the place the purpose of 1’s being is continuous to perpetuate the lies of Neo-liberal Capitalism with out taking into consideration that one’s personal consolation immediately hyperlinks to the dying of tens of millions. That, on the contrary, is just not a gross oversimplification. That could be a reality. We arrived from single celled organisms to some extent the place we watch celeb households argue on actuality tv, transmitted by way of electrical alerts, codified and cancerous, engorged by itself lack of which means. What’s loopy is that individuals go to Marvel films to tithe within the aspiritual hell in order that they nonetheless have a church, a Captain America/Thor white supremacist daddy, and a dogma to which they will adhere to for the precise cause that actuality is precarious; the uncanny, the unexplainable being, the endless puzzles are infinite and unknowable of their entirety. It’s a solipsistic tendency to imagine that one is owed full readability. As an alternative, the spectator has a accountability to ask why – to all the things – and to make use of their very own important thought as a way of exploring what an artist weaves collectively. The spectator has a accountability, in essence, to suppose self-reflexively about consciousness, the film, its function on this planet, and its relation in direction of itself – which is to say that the spectator has a accountability to cease being a spectator and to suppose. My film could also be structured in a manner that isn’t typical, however to name it loopy – even in a optimistic sense – is to profoundly misunderstand the work and even the world through which we stay. My film holds a mirror that condenses truths right into a type that’s anti-escapist, that forces one to broaden consciousness.
M. Wooden’s experimental characteristic Commodity Buying and selling screens on the Fall 2022 New Jersey Movie Pageant on Sunday, September 25. The movie shall be On-line for twenty-four Hours and In-Particular person at 7PM in Voorhees Corridor #105/Rutgers College, 71 Hamilton Road, New Brunswick, New Jersey. M. Woods shall be current on the In-Particular person screening to do a Q+A after the displaying.
To purchase tickets go right here: https://watch.eventive.org/newjerseyfilmfestivalfall2022/play/62bf734ef728970029ec0af9
For Normal Data on the Movie Pageant go right here: https://watch.eventive.org/newjerseyfilmfestivalfall2022
Albert Gabriel Nigrin is an award-winning experimental media artist whose work has been screened on all 5 continents. He’s additionally a Cinema Research Lecturer at Rutgers College, and the Govt Director/Curator of the Rutgers Movie Co-op/New Jersey Media Arts Heart, Inc.
