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Concrete Now!
Unovercryable is a short (3
minute) video by Richard Couzins, shot in Archway, North London.
Images of the street are cut so as to connect with a woman’s voice. The
images are overlaid, manipulated or effected to emphasise their various
relations to her commentary; sometimes clear and overt, sometimes more
subtle and tenuous, to the point where we may ask whether they were
intended or not, have we formed them ourselves? The narration highlights
and in itself reflects this questioning, discussing both the direct and
the more accidental or serendipitous connections, offering thoughts on the
nature of our understandings alongside observations of street life. The
effect of the accumulated images and commentary is a dislocation from our
usual recognition of the things on the screen, with thoughts provoked as
direct responses to statements made and more fluid musings on the perhaps
plastic and amorphous nature of what we generally perceive as solid and
certain. Unovercryable draws out the formal languages of shape and colour,
and connects these with the sounded shape and colour of words, slipping
from recognisable sense to more rhythmic and tonal phrases, suggestive of
music. We are placed in a synaesthetic state, an area (in our heads? in
the gallery?) where the senses overlap. Phrases such as “Look at the music
and do what it says.” or “These images are in my voice.” propose a more
fundamental ‘music’ shaping that which we generally perceive. Glimpses of
this music may be possible, but the realm in which it operates generally
seems |
(click for
larger image) |
| tantalisingly out of
reach, “The sign is saturated with something that will not come out.” If
the title refers to a concept of fundamental reason giving sense to other
more inexplicable phenomena, (Kant’s ‘voice of reason that will not be
silenced’) then perhaps the suggestion here is that reason might be found
to have less in common with science-fact and be more akin to music, that
is, it might not correspond to some internal structure, but rather may be
more a function of external organisation? |
