Out of the darkness a sound emerges. It echoes and drones. Terrified people take to the streets in search of its source. They get their cameras out and document the sky, searching for an author. We watch on, sitting in darkness, our muscles contract and our pupils dilate.“I hope the camera picks this up.” Sitting in Darkness explores the circulation, spectatorship and undeclared politics of contemporary images.

Leo Goldsmith: My first question was going to be a banal one: to ask you about all of the different types of images you've included here and their provenance. But instead, perhaps something slightly more abstract/pretentious: can you say something about found footage as a material/medium, as a cinematic practice (with roots in collage, montage, etc.), and as a horror genre?

Graeme Arnfield: I’ve always had an interest in mediation, the event, the representation and the repercussions of that representation’s creation. Found footage is the ideal form to deal with those ideas, it’s an unavoidable part in their use. On top of this I think it’s important to better our understanding of the images we currently have, rather than allow their logics to flourish without notice. We should reconfigure these artefacts of the past in order to create better conditions for a more ethical future. Not alter them, but to throw light on their undisclosed politics. This is especially important for images like those that populate my film, whose capital has been based off their sensational value, and relationship to fear mongering apocalyptic visions. Which is to be expected, as you mention horror cinema and cinematic genres haunt these images. It’s hard to watch them and not think of the rush of handheld faux evidence horror films that still kick around cinemas. Even the scientific reason for this sound’s appearance suggests the return of the repressed, one of horror’s favourite themes. On a personal level, as someone who finds filming in public or organising actors an incredibly panic inducing experience, the safety of re-use is sometimes the only way I can face making a film. With other people’s footage that crushing spell of disappointment that often accompanies the creation of images isn’t there. I can accept the images as they are and think about what they are doing, not what they could have been.

LG: You use a lot of compositing here: pictures within pictures, almost like having many windows open on one's desktop. What is this strategy’s relationship to other (maybe more modernist?) ones like montage or collage? Do you see this aesthetic strategy as particularly useful in approaching the contemporary and/or the Internet?

GA: The experience of browsing the Internet, the logic of hyperlinks and the algorithmic curation of YouTube in particular were definitely some things I was considering when working out the composition. In YouTube’s network, images are brought into attention by the viewing of previous work, often filmed by different people, at different times, in different places which are nevertheless grouped together by shared tagging and spit out as a form of continuity. In this sense the past dictates what is watched in the present, leaving a trace of this past on the screen, allowing it to literally frame the current film seemed like a way of aesthetically highlighting this experience. The thing with YouTube is that it demands that all images become insatiable; they ask for suggested sequels and spiritual successors. So if the videos of people filming the sky have a capture all logic, then my film has a case of rabid auto-play, coupled with a nasty case of multiple browser tabs, which start to colour readings of the videos. This auto-play extends to the point where these various mobile phone videos were actually dictated by YouTube’s algorithms, the order in which they appear is the order that the videos appeared to me, one after each other, feeding off the search term “strange noises in the sky”. Of course I had the say on when to start and end this survey, but I think it still shows a good cartography of the network. But this networked programme is one thing; there are always more browser tabs. There is continuity, and there is distraction and temporal reduction. These days I am never less than five tabs open at once, emails from dead friends rub against soundcloud techno mixes which rub against clips of the latest catastrophe; it is everything all the time. This nature of distracted vision was something that I tried to embed in the film through the text passages and the other images.

LG: In working with images taken from others, both individual video-uploaders and corporations (like Google or YouTube), how do you characterize your collaboration? Do you consider yourself as having certain responsibilities? Rights? On a more practical level, do you contact the the makers of the videos you use?

GA: Responsibility is always a tricky one and depends on what you are using, how you are using it and for what purpose. At least for this work I felt I had a responsibility to these individual filmmakers not to take their work wholly out of context, one as their context is what I’m really interested in, and two to allow people to speak for themselves. I wanted to find room for both our voices in the same image. I don’t know if I’ve fully done that, but I tried. The important thing is that I have to disrupt, renew and critique these images but I also have to be able see myself on the street at their creation, equally confused as the filmmakers were. I have the privilege of distance; they had the panic of the event. It would be wrong to speak down to them. With this responsibility I tried to make myself complicit in my own myth making. In this sense of complicity I mean to say this is a speculative document, its science is shaky, its history is tear stained. Especially in the latter sections, where the language drops its guard and I start to fill in gaps of understanding with my own emotional investment and interpretations. But I hope even with these speculations the videos still stand for themselves and the original filmmakers don’t feel misrepresented. Curiously though some of these videos are re-edits or re-uploads by others. The original accounts are gone; so all is left are the copies of their circulation. Reposting and appropriating is a major factor in the success of films on YouTube. The philosophy of ripping a video, writing a more algorithmically appealing title and uploading it for some quick views saved some of these films from oblivion. In a way the identities of the people who shot some of these videos are now as shaky as the origin of the sound they were trying to document.

LG: You use images of a sort of sci-fi gaming environment a 3D-simulation, of an alien landscape, which in some moments seems complete, at others partially constructed. My first thought was that these images suggest the extraordinary expansion of the ways in which images are generated and circulated now and that they are an index of image circulation of which this is just one example. But my second thought was sort of the opposite: that in fact this was an example of one sort of worldbuilding, and that your assemblage of various images, textures, and orders of reality was another. Briefly: do you consider your video as a kind of worldbuilding, like that of these simulated CG environments?

GA: Worldbuilding is a great term for it. Along with the flow of hyperlinked mobile phone images, I wanted to include side plots, things that on the surface seem disconnected. But on closer inspection all come together, just in a discursive way. Connoting multiple browser tabs if I’m keeping up with my own clumsy metaphors. The images from the video game and Apple Maps are an example of this. They are both attempts to make a world, but one whose stitches and cracks are showing. In the game world through turning the tools of development inwards, in this case using the developer console inside the game the player can enter “god-mode” and float through the complex maths, surveying the hollow mountains that float in grey nothingness. While video games are actionable, the engines they are built on allow for non-proscribed forms of action as well. I believe there are new worlds to be built out of these hidden images. I certainly am interested in this worldbuilding in my own work, the credits sequence at the end which list all the filmmakers almost sets a challenge for people to de-make my film, float through it’s surfaces and expose it’s hollow mountains. It is a world filled with my ideologies and politics, no different than any other construct; one like any other world that should be challenged.

LG: Since this video is partly composed of videos found online and will be viewed online, could you say something about the exhibition of this work? Do you have any preference among the varying potential contexts for viewing this work, e.g. cinema, gallery, laptop, phone?

GA: I think the ideal way to view it is in bed, on a laptop, 3am, unable to sleep, falling into one more link, letting your pupils dilate and your anxiety keep your muscles from settling. Or at least these were conditions of its production. If possible I would love people to stumble upon the film, have it come up in their own searches for “strange noises in the sky”. To have it embedded in the culture it is about would be fantastic. After all there are a myriad of videos compiling these type of videos, mine isn’t so different, it just has a more critical eye. Ultimately it is adaptable work though, I can’t afford to be specific, and so wherever people want it I will curiously see if it works. I have no real preference for where it is to be seen. I am just happy for it to be seen.

LG: While watching your video, I was at first seduced by the variety and texture of the images, but given the subject matter of the videos you draw from the mysterious drone I became increasingly aware of your sound design, making use of as many sonic layers as you do visual ones. I also started to think about this idea of a strange sound coming from nowhere/everywhere, one that links disparate locations around the globe, and also, more generally, the concepts of recorded sound, of synthesized sound, of disembodied sound. I wonder if (any of) these ideas of sound were a guiding principle in your treatment of the images, or vice versa?

GA: I tried to treat sound as its own thing, tying it to the images, as much as the images are tied to the sound, neither of them being privileged over the other. The films I’m archiving do take a stand on this though; they are often incredible non-visual in some sense. These people were filming sound; this was one of the aspects of the videos that initially seduced me. Here were people enacting ritualistic gestures, point cameras into the sky, something not unlike the films Peter Gidal made, anti-illusionary in their own way. It makes perfect sense, this is the age of high-definition smart phones so why just record the sound when you can produce an image as well. This is increasingly our first response, at the first glimpse of interest our phones come out; they are an extension of our nervous system. Along with the sounds of the event I want to complicate things further though scoring the film, blurring the line where the event and the representation meet. It was important to me to use an instrument that was tied into the themes of the film; as such I started experimenting with synthesizer samples. The sounds of synthesizers are tied to distant planets and far off futures. Yet if anyone has had to lug one around they know they are very much of this present material world.

Credits

A video by Graeme Arnfield

Sounds and images documented by: firelensman, Apple Maps, Miguel de Cervantes, Yoshio Ojima, TestTube BabySpy, beautyintheuniverse, The Chinese Room, Spreeder, garry and alice bray, coopers204, bezocan, Craig Sauve, Kevin Rockett, dawsynblue, Super0731, rhysmon, grassiew, Chelsea Noelie Cecilia, The MozzShows, ZootedJohny, Logan Jewkes, Sizzorfite, Sbm3412, Airplanes and Airlines, MyLifeInUR PassiveAggressiveWorld, Graeme Arnfield

Thanks to: Sasha Litvintseva