Wrestling with the demands of an ill-fitting technology has become such a common occurrence in this age of super slick edits and ‘Wow’ factor digital effects, that we now expect that immersion within a media artwork should be a wondrous experience akin to the ecstatic prelude to falling in love. Of course, the actual interface between human being and machine is highly problematic: compatibility problems are widespread, and if a person happens to have been reared on a Mac, well nigh the day that same person is subjected to a Windows interface. Refreshing then, is Sydney based remix outfit Soda_Jerk and their budding oeuvre of digvid flicks. By foregrounding in their films the faulty rhythms of bad transmission, coupled with unlikely and sadistic edits plundered from an infinite archive of Hollywood movies, their work not only faithfully renders the problems associated with the human being-machine interface, it aspires toward a simulation that is also a precise expression of a long forgotten Australian colloquialism. Orphaned and free of any easily identifiable pedigree, iconoclastic, idiosyncratic, and a catastrophic dissection of today’s on-line copyright predicament, Soda_Jerk’s latest work Pixel Pirate... is that penultimate expression of Australian frustration catapulted into the Postmodern age: a genuine mongrel bastard.
During a seminar at Swinburne University, convenor Darren Tofts quotes William Gibson by pointing out that “The street finds its own use for things”. And this is nowhere more apparent than in Soda_Jerk’s modus operandi. With backgrounds in visual arts and cinema studies, co-conspirators Dan & Dominque Angelora have formulated a bottom-up practice that is founded upon Hollywood film fandom, and a fierce desire for revenge against the oppressive copyright regime that haunts the media paradigm. While living in the same household, the Angeloras’ discovered that their mutual interest in watching videos could be mobilised by the use of rudimentary editing suites such as imovie, resulting in their first film, the contagious Dawn of Remix. A satirisation of the famous ape-evolution scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001... Remix is also a wry commentary upon the male dominated, testosterone pumped hip-hop scene, and a concise expression of digital video’s potential for visually representing kinetic street rhythms.
In ...Remix, Kubrick’s bone crushing primate is transformed into a drum thumping, cymbal crunching hip-hop thug by strategic edits, surgical scene selection, and the juxtaposition of previously disconnected material. Chimpanzees use parched fingers to scratch wished for turntables in the dust, while a chorus of orangutans, edited to resemble wiggers busting moves on a street corner in South Central L.A., hail the evolution of hip hop to a killer soundtrack. This digital manipulation not only immerses the viewer in a bastardised version of Kubrick’s film, it transforms the original material into a strange mongrel that is strikingly unfamiliar. Consequently, there is much unsettled laughter and a desire to ask provocative questions from those assembled in the auditorium.
Why this mongrel is so peculiar is mainly due to the Angeloras’ desire to subvert conventional understandings of chronological time. Like Burroughs, the Angeloras’ speak of time travel as if it were an actual possibility: that by watching a remix of Charlton Heston in The 10 Commandments, juxtaposed with an image of Elvis Presley transmogrifying into The Incredible Hulk, we the audience are actually travelling through time. When pressed upon this point, the Angeloras’ concede that this claim is an exaggeration. Yet because their work playfully refutes chronological time in all its sullen numbness, audience experience of a film such as Pixel Pirate is akin to the acquisition of an altered state of consciousness.
Chronologies in the actual world, or the passing of minutes and seconds within an imposed structure of 24 hours, is annihilated in Pixel Pirate in favour of a perception of time as it can be in the virtual world. Not only is material from the 20th and 21st centuries remixed to form disjunctive temporal oppositions within a single image, such as Elvis transmogrifying into The Incredible Hulk during a scene from The 10 Commandments, but the material itself is often a representation of a time long passed, and a time yet to be fixed. So when Moses skirts a mountain path carrying a tablet of stone, only to be confronted by characters out of Star Wars, the audience experiences a sardonic mesh of the fictional historic and the speculative, while simultaneously maintaining an awareness that The 10 Commandments and Star Wars were 20th century films created some 40 years apart. In the temporal space of Pixel Pirate’s virtual world chronological time as we know it mutates, becoming 1 distinctive temporal strain among many other possibilities. Rene Descartes would be turning in his grave.
Chronological time is an acquired, if not implanted temporal structure. Our lives are so organised around its linear and tedious momentum, that when a film like Pixel Pirate subverts this chronology, we find it most peculiar because it reminds us of the exciting ways in which we perceived time before mind numbing chronologies were implanted in our behavioral streams. (These chronologies are not only present in the ‘Working Day’ structures of primary school curriculums, they are also present and therefore sensed by children in their parents’ lives long before schooling begins). And even though the Angeloras’ claim that their films can initiate time travel in the actual world is an exaggeration, they are justified in claiming to have sparked time travel in the virtual world, and the minds of their audience. Little wonder then that Soda_Jerk express a specific desire not to be asked when they will start making “Real’ films: that is, conventional narratives with steady chronologies that reinforce the economic status quo within a society confined by the 24 hour day. And even though there was much enthusiasm toward Soda_Jerk from an audience comprised of 20-30 year olds, it was also interesting to hear the vaguely offended tone of 1 or 2, indirectly evoking the charge of a lack of originality. But the Angeloras’ were unperturbed. Both seemed quite capable of viewing their own practice within a rich historical aesthetics stretching back to Duchamp, his Readymades, and beyond. Anyway, offence toward an iconoclastic work such as Pixel Pirate is to be expected once audiences are reminded of the unreliable function of the human brain, or their very own mongrel bastard.
*images reproduced with permission
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