Video Descriptions #1: You Have Been Selected
As part of my practice based PhD research I made In Hell (2021), a video installation containing 118 code sequenced performance to camera videos, featuring performances by Tammy Reynolds, Daniel Oliver and me.
The way I’m thinking about the PhD is that I’m going to ‘write off’ the artwork, instead of ‘writing on’. I’ll work backwards, writing to find out things about the artwork that I didn’t know when I was making it, and at the same time, using the artwork as a launch pad to generate new thinking about topics that the artwork is about.
Supplement
Practice based research is always presented with a written document, with written texts as part of the thesis, or as a contextualising document that positions the practice based work in some way, allowing it to be ‘read’ by an examiner as research. In the second case, this contextualising document is additional to the artwork that ‘really’ constitutes the research, but it is also an essential, often mandated part of most practice based PhD theses and it is the presence of the written document that constitutes the project as research.
This seeming paradox of a text that both is and isn’t the research reminded me of the Derridean idea of the supplement in which signs stand in for things, but are also always additional to the things they are meant to stand in for. This sounds like a contradiction and it kind of is, but for Derrida that contradiction is the condition of possibility for the operation of language.
Video Descriptions as Supplements
In this ongoing set of texts, I’m going to describe each of the 188 videos that are in In Hell. In each text I will attend to the details of the performances and the post-production techniques of editing, video FX, sound design, captioning and animation that make up what we see on screen.
I’m thinking of these video descriptions as supplements - texts that try to stand in for the videos, but are necessarily additional. I’ll embed the video at the beginning and the end of each text, with the implication being that the viewer/reader might watch each video twice: before they read the text, and after.
You Have Been Selected, 1 minute 16 seconds.
Over a deep blue background, 3D animated text appears on screen saying ‘WELCOME’ in black, and ‘SELECTED ARTISTS’ in white over the top. An electronic music sting plays on the audio track.
The title is wiped away to the right by a green background and our two performers: Daniel on the left, a tall white man with a big bushy beard and long hair, wearing cycling shorts and Crocs; Tammy on the right, a white person with dwarfism wearing flesh coloured padded cycling shorts, a tank top, trainers, red glasses and gaffer tape on their head.
Tammy and Daniel start to rotate in 90 degree intervals, anti-clockwise. With each turn the colour of the background changes (now red, now blue, now orange, now purple, now yellow) and a percussive sound effect plays. The sound effect changes in pitch each time, creating a basic melody that repeats every four beats. On every beat, a word appears on screen in a mid sized serif font. If you watch closely you can see that the same video clips of Daniel and Tammy have been used to create the rotation effect in the edit. You can tell by the way Daniel’s hand waggles at the start of each cut.
The text begins, ‘YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED’ and continues in the manner of a template letter from an institution that has selected Tammy and Daniel for some kind of opportunity. We do not know whether Tammy and Daniel have applied for the opportunity or whether they have been approached by the institution. The text is excitable and complementary, ‘WE CAN’T WAIT TO MEET YOU’, but also generic and impersonal, ‘WE HAD MANY APPLICATIONS AND YOURS WAS ONE OF THE MOST COMPELLING’.
As the video plays, the rotations, colour changes, sound effects and on screen text all speed up, getting faster until the onscreen text hits a refrain,
YOU
HAVE
BEEN
SELECTED
YOU
HAVE
BEEN
SELECTED
YOU
HAVE
BEEN
SELECTED
It begins to change so fast that the colours are more like flickering lights and the melody blurs into an arpeggio and the text flashes up too quickly to read.
Daniel and Tammy spin jerkily around and around. They have been selected, clearly, but it doesn’t seem very comfortable. Then they stop, a black screen behind them, ‘SELECTED’, in front. A bell rings, the camera zooms in, and they stare straight ahead, waiting.
We cut to a mid-close up of Daniel. The camera zooms in towards his face. This zoom has been applied in post production and the image appears slightly pixelated. In the background a Mellotron choir sings a long ‘Ahhhhh’, and ‘WELCOME’ appears on top of the shot. Then we cut to a similar mid-close, zooming shot of Tammy; the ominous choir sings a new note, and ‘TO’ appears on screen.
We cut back to the wide shot of Tammy and Daniel. The choir sings a chord featuring a 6th, aka the devil’s interval, Timpani plays and a huge, flaming red animated ‘HELL’ appears over the top of the shot. In the only piece of actual ‘performance’ that they have done for the whole of the video, Daniel and Tammy throw their hands up in the air, wave them around and make faces that suggest wailing. At the same time, a piercing scream sound effect plays on the audio track. Tammy and Daniel drop out of shot, down towards hell, which we now realise is the ‘opportunity’ they've been ‘selected’ for. The screen fades to black as the scream dies away.