kagablog

Sonic Elements
Director’s motivation

The Greek philosopher Plotinus’ aphorism “Soul is fire” informs my proposed investigation into the nature of the third generation digital sample. If the essence of the existing universe indeed be fire - then we immediately need to ask ourselves, yes, but what is it that is being burned? Plotinus never answers this question conclusively in his major work, the Ennead. My fascination for his philosophical system is not mere admiration, but highly pragmatic: I believe that through the process of digital technohybridization we are now in a position to add on to the theoretical concepts posited by Plotinus so long ago.
The neo-Plotinical digital research must therefore start out from Plotinus’ primary reference for the nature of all matter - Fire.

However, coming from a post-Greek, Christian background, it is impossible for me to ignore a Christian take on fire and therefore I choose to frame my digital experiment in strongly Judeo-Christian terms, utilising Edgar Allan Poe’s grisly story, The Masque Of The Red Death to reference the dominant use of fire in Christian metaphors, ie. HELL.

The synthesis of the Greek and Christian backgrounds to where the digital sample is today results in a very direct, albeit apocalyptic, statement - this world IS hell!!
In other words, the result of my digital research is to locate our contemporary understanding of the world via quantum physics in a paradigm that lends credence to Plotinus’ notion “Soul is fire” in a world that I perceive as utterly hell-bent on self-destruction.

Thus the formal, methodological approach to the space between the zero and the one in digital callibration gains a moral dimension. Ultimately, the kind of experiment that Frank Scheffer and myself are involved in in this period is a return to ethics, using advanced computer fragmentation of the image to reach a point where we ask ourselves the question, “how does the digital analysis of the image affect the way we experience space, time and deity?”

Re-mixing each other’s work is the interrogative, reflexive level of this questioning, the kind of essential work that experimental film making must return to these days if it is to mean anything to audiences outside of its narrowly defined “specialist” clique. These digital investigations are for all of humanity. We are involved, via the re-mix project, in a humanization of the digital potential, a harmonization of the digital dissonance, and ultimately, a unification (uni-fact-ion and uni-fiction) of the disparate digital elements.

Individuation is an illusion.
Only one universe is.
And the universe is One.

Aryan Kaganof
19/10/2005
Johannesburg