Lost Wings
Production notes to accompany “Teich der tausend Tränen” (Pond of a Thousand Tears)
Translated from German by Isabel Adey
In autumn 2019, following our recent collaborations, Zeehyun Soh and I attended the VR Days fair in Amsterdam together. We were eager to gain an overview of the latest developments in media formats and digital technology in order to discuss our subsequent productions in this context. We also discovered some uses of VR that tied in with how we wanted to implement our ideas. But what surprised us most of all was the vast range of future applications of this technology — in everything from military and medicine to logistics, the job market and communications. We had only set out to familiarise ourselves with the new artistic means of expression, but we learned that almost all areas of life were about to be impacted by a colossal technological shift. It was mind-blowing to think what VR and AI would be able to achieve in the near future. It didn’t take a great deal of imagination to realise that our global society was about to be rocked to its very foundations.
On the drive back to Berlin, it occurred to us that not a single insect had flown into our windscreen. The sky was clear and the trees were completely still. No wind, not a bump in the road. The after-effects of the virtual worlds we had experienced in Amsterdam were still lingering, which only served to intensify the feeling that we were travelling through an eerily sterile scene. The difference between driving a real car and the simulated experience with VR goggles was barely discernible. We talked about insect decline and the sense of helplessness and sadness we felt in the face of the environmental disaster. While the possibilities of technology seem to be flowing thick and fast, life is slipping away from the planet. It was during this conversation that the idea of the wasp with one wing, the central image of Pond of a Thousand Tears, came to us.
In the wasp figure, our sense of helplessness and sadness is intensified. We feel as helpless, so to speak, as a wasp that has lost a wing. Somewhat irrationally, the image of a helpless insect stirred our emotions more than the concept of global warming, despite how insignificant the tiny, wounded creature may appear in the grand scheme of things.
When the pandemic struck a few months later and the new social distancing rules were introduced, it felt very freeing to be able to work without a large team — particularly thanks to the possibilities of computer animation, one of the core components of virtual reality. And with that, the theme for our next project was decided. In the context of storytelling in VR space, we would zero in on the wounded wasp.
Before painting a broad picture of our thoughts on the form of expression in the section entitled “The constellation” — which will then allow us to comment on the distinct levels of representation in the production, i.e. the images, texts and music — I would first like to introduce the two members of our core team.
The team
When looking for someone to translate my stories into images for my first professional film productions, I was delighted to come into contact with Zeehyun Soh, whose wood and stone sculptures I admired and whose paintings and drawings filled me with excitement. I was completely in awe as I watched her put pencil to paper during our first meeting, bringing the characters, scenes, ideas and feelings to life. It was a magical moment in my career; Zeehyun fully understood the intentions behind my words, and I could really feel my ideas becoming a reality.
Pond of a Thousand Tears is the product of an ongoing dialogue. Unlike my previous productions, the lines here are blurred: I can no longer pinpoint which ideas and stimuli originally came from Zeehyun and which were my own. Regardless, we continued to divide the work on the final media consistently: Zeehyun creates the figures, scenes, objects and final images, while I am responsible for the dramatic composition, texts and music.
The constellation
Every work of art has a primary exhibition place or a stage for which it is originally intended, although it may also be shown in other venues at a later point in time. Ideally, the platform and the content of the artwork will be a good fit for one another. A play is conceived to be performed in real time by real actors on a theatre stage, although it can be recorded on camera too. Though a film is made for the big screen, it can also be viewed on a smartphone. Contemporary music is often written with live performances in mind, whereas contemporary media art is created to be consumed in the gallery setting.
When I started to make films, I wanted to use the medium as a framework for complex, multi-layered narratives that combined images, words and sound to equal effect. I aimed to transcend forms and create interstices and interwoven layers, enabling viewers to access a form of inner perception beyond images, words and sounds. Rather than setting out to film material to background music, I was interested in approximating the idea of a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of the arts. It could also be said that I was aiming to create music by all means — in other words, music for all the senses.
All these aspirations applied to the wasp, too; but something inside of me was reluctant to simply dedicate a music film with a linear narrative to this character. Its “natural environment” is virtual space — precisely because the insect itself is completely and utterly virtual, due to its computer-animated nature. Since the virtual sphere is “embodied” by the internet, the means used to convey the wounded wasp would also have to be conceived with the internet in mind.
A network consists of many nodes and connections. A work of net art, which is also a formal expression of these thoughts, is a group of works from various digital media that are related to each other. The words, images and sounds do not have to be captured in a single form here; they may stand side by side in various formats with different focal points, shedding light on — and, in successful cases, enhancing — one another. With these considerations in mind, the final “intersections” or “nodes” of Pond of a Thousand Tears began to crystallise: a narrative 3D animated main film without beginning or end, but with its own musical language; a fictional essay loosely related to elements of the main film; and fourteen virtual sound objects, also without beginning or end, captured in short video loops.
Unlike theatre, galleries, cinemas and concert halls, the internet does not have a specific audience or typical target group. More so than other artforms, therefore, a work of net art is aimed both at everyone and at no one; probably the most comparable in traditional terms of form and genus would be sculptures or art installations in public spaces. However, since neither these nor any of the other standard terms we knew could fully encapsulate the form of representation we desired to achieve, we sought out a new, more fitting name for our project, ultimately deciding on constellation.
A constellation generally refers to a group or configuration of things, people or qualities and the situation that arises as a result. Etymologically speaking, the term is derived from the Latin “stellatus” (set with stars), which also explains why it is used to denote the planetary aspects and the supposed influence of the position of the planets on the fate of human beings. In our specific context, the term expresses both the unity of the group of works and the relationships between the individual media. Based on the concept of the art installation in a public space, the various media used for the wounded wasp on the internet form a constellation.
The images
The last centuries of human evolution were characterised by the desire to harness nature to its full potential; in other words, to study nature with a view to conquering and hollowing it out. While major discoveries and impressive technological advances have been made as a result, this activity has also damaged or even completely destroyed the habitats of people, animals and plants in its wake.
Technological progress often promises to save time when it comes to dealing with the challenges of daily life, but another significant side effect of all this progress is the growing time pressure that most people are constantly exposed to in industrialised countries. As contradictory as this situation may appear at first glance, it can actually be explained by the underlying principle at play here: human beings are part of nature, which means they are also part of the object to be subjugated and used up.
We used computer animation to create the visuals for Pond of a Thousand Tears — we believe it symbolises the discrepancies mentioned above. Hollow objects consist solely of their fascinating virtual surfaces. Empty shells without consciousness, in a suspended state of irresolvable ambiguity, allow almost infinite possibilities to be conveyed visually. Although the characters are identifiable and tangible in this respect, they remain abstract, hence we do not identify with them. Rather than characteristic individuals or objects in their own right, they are more strongly perceived as overarching principles or ideas. In the child figure, for example, we do not recognise a specific child but rather the idea of a child. The city backdrop refers not to a specific city but to the general idea of a city.
With all this in mind, we also wanted to let the characters speak with their actions rather than their words — and through their symbolically loaded arrangement and staging in virtual space. The surface of the Pond thus becomes a screen onto which the viewer can project their own associations, memories and experiences.
By shifting the focus away from acting and towards symbols and objects, away from the spoken word and towards sounds, light and shadows, a dream-like atmosphere is created. Thoughts are either dispersed into images and sounds or externalised to the text level within the constellation.
At plot level, the story of a wasp’s life and misfortunes is told against the backdrop of a modern city, where everything is designed for convenience and safety. The wasp appears as a fabled creature, symbolising the stressed, spiritually wounded modern human being, trapped in an endless routine, repeating the same actions. The wasp’s life story is told twice from two different perspectives, both with different moments of death. In one case, after an exhausting fight for survival, the wasp is swallowed by a crow and finally drowns after being excreted by the latter, while in the other, it dies of exhaustion. One gets the impression that it could have turned out this way, but it could also have been different.
Equally important as the framework plot, however, are the numerous subplots that are connected by a crying sculpture in the middle of the Pond of a Thousand Tears. A small child sits in the backseat of a car watching videos and news reports he cannot yet understand. The child’s mother sits in the driver’s seat, tense. Later we see her sitting in a pizzeria, bored, swiping at a wasp. Young people dance impassively to dull sounds. The numerous screens displayed in the city are all synchronised with each other.
Dramaturgically speaking, the main film is arranged as a theme with variations; the many screens, which also show variations of “real life,” create the impression of a mirror within the mirror at certain points. The sense of endlessness, therefore, is not only external; it also pervades the whole story.
The fourteen shorter video loops are self-contained situations or stations — time reliefs, so to speak. On the image plane, they consist of objects and motifs from the main film. A separate section dedicated to these video loops can be found at the end of these production notes.
I have found that a fitting portrait can help when it comes to overcoming or moving on from the subject portrayed. If I find echoes of my own problems in a novel, I am already half way to solving them. So in successful cases, the inner meaning of a sad portrait moves beyond the stage of grief. Furthermore, some of the situations presented on the image plane here are really quite absurd — for example, the disoriented wasp in the crow’s stomach, a scene oddly reminiscent of Jona in the belly of the whale. The subheading or motto of the constellation calls attention to this ambivalence: When everyone else is crying, it is good when one person laughs. When everyone else is apologising, is it good when one person cries.
The texts
Strictly speaking, the text level comprises the fictional essay Reflections of a Wasp, the name and the motto of the constellation, and the titles of the shorter video loops. In a broader sense, the textual components also include the script for the main film, the scores for the musical works, and these production notes. In an even broader sense, the vast amounts of code required in order to achieve the visible and audible results also form part of the textual layer. In this connection, we could also think of the whole virtual sphere as a collective literary work, of which Pond of a Thousand Tears is a chapter. Although I limit my musings in the following section to the textual level in the stricter sense, it is at least worth mentioning this more expansive concept of text, since it reminds us of one of the more distinctive features of virtual space, where material is sublated into commands.
Like other elements of the constellation, Reflections of a Wasp should both stand alone and be understood in the context of the media in its vicinity. It tells the story of a man who thinks he is turning into a wasp by sheer effort of his will. No longer able to take pleasure in his human life, he falls prey to a misguided notion of meditation. His flight is fanciful, of course, but in essence, it isn’t all that different to the completely normal human tendency to escape through drugs or modern consumer electronics. People live their lives in a bubble of their own imagination. The portrayal of the protagonist in the text comes before the metamorphosis, whereas the videos play out in the time following the transformation.
In the titles of the video loops, instead of conveying the contents of the narrative or making reference to the visual depictions, I aimed to open up other interstices and paths to the Pond — or away from it — by opting for associative fragments of speech. But at the same time, the titles are all interrelated, which adds a different dimension to the mix.
The music
I have long dreamed of writing a piece of music that consists primarily of tone colours, in other words, music that blurs the lines between sounds and pitches so that degrees of the scale can no longer be perceived and an open soundscape emerges instead. But I have always shied away from the challenge, for fear of failure. In the isolation of the pandemic, however, I had more time on my hands — which meant I no longer had an excuse.
If we make the spaces between the pitches so small that the ear can no longer distinguish any scale steps whatsoever, only “brightness” or “darkness,” and if we use the opportunities this affords not only to embellish the traditional scale structure but also to completely detach ourselves from the idea of degrees of the scale, we end up composing in an infinite continuum. The steps or jumps between tones have dissipated into a constant transition between nameless states, even though degrees of the scale are still written on the manuscript as one would expect. With this in mind, Pond of a Thousand Tears — also a constant transition between emotional states on a visual and textual level — provided a welcome opportunity to strike out in a new direction, both with storytelling and with music.
The open continuum of tone pitches cannot be explained by music theory and defies any attempt to do so. And it was precisely this overexertion of the analytical mind that initially made me shrink back from the challenge. To compose a piece of this kind, one must abandon oneself completely to the power of association, to the inner relationship of interval structures beyond analysis and construction. Nothing can be contrived here; things have to come to you organically.
Since traditional instruments are generally made for music with a semitonal structure, performing the piece means either building and learning to play a new instrument or tuning several identical instruments differently. The benefit of tuning the same instruments differently is that the piece can be played by trained musicians on instruments they already know how to play, which is why I chose to go down this route.
In the videos, I wanted to combine this composed “tone colour music” with atmospheric noises in a way that meant that the noises would also be perceived as part of the music. In turn, with the noises making reference to the visuals or directly adding sound to them, the aim was for the composition to merge with the image plane.
The time relief
To conclude, I would like to note down a few of our considerations regarding the unique form of the short video loops. Many of the virtual objects — like the crying sculpture, after which Pond of a Thousand Tears is named, or the variations of the wasp in the egg — are sculptural in essence. In a VR setting, you could walk around them and touch them.
Since we cannot create an experience of this kind online without major technological obstacles to overcome, we have captured a selection of virtual objects in short videos. These are now traded on the market as NFTs, as intangible one-off pieces. The videos are “infinite” loops; in other words, the images and sounds have been assembled so that they have no beginning or end. Hence, when composing the music, it was necessary to define the length of each video loop with full frame accuracy and to plan the dramatic composition very carefully. Not only did we need the beginning and the end to disappear on a technical level; we also wanted viewers to lose their sense of time and space — in the best possible sense — in the objects.
In our discussions, we started to use the term time relief to denote a bridge between sculpture as spatial art and music as art-in-time in this connection. Although from a technical perspective, these are short videos repeating on an endless loop, somewhat paradoxically, the opposite is happening in our perception. Because the spatial objects and sound objects exist without a beginning or an end — eternally, so to speak — there is no repetition and, ultimately, no linear time. In this sense, dematerialised digital art is once again in keeping with the contemplation of nature. Every morning, the sun comes up.
