Sing seeing, sing.

by Ryland Walker Knight

I visited Daniel in class yesterday and made some images; then I cut them up. Since my internet is so slow I uploaded a smaller file, which combs. And yet, again, I'm thrilled by the "failure" of this camera. It's another announcement, another event. I love how this version is different than the 700MB file I exported from iMovie, how both those are different than the raw file I uploaded onto my hard drive, how different all those are from when I was sitting there. Something I thought while sitting there, sweating in that plastic bucket next to the window: this adventure of perception continues to interrupt itself. Every blink is a cut, every step a zoom, every gesture made makes spaces different and the effects play like affects across the face. So what happens when you don't see Daniel's face here? Wait: we see his profile, his hands; his body to begin and end the clip. But it's dark. Where is the face? Behind Daniel, on the wall? That's not his face; it's his boy's face. His face is this pacing, this boiling gesticulation. As he would say, this style, this way of going. Style, of course, being a performance—of one's multitudes, of every angle brought to bear, of every memory made flesh. Things get tricky, then, when all he's doing is talking about seeing and all you want to do is look at the boy and his chocolate, not that flitting figure below.* But, of course, his figure forms the geometry of gazes, too. He even sneaks a peak at me twice, creating yet another announcement-event, and his language gets dizzy, too, there at the end, as he falls into-through that word: seeing. Seeing sounds like being, sure, but it sounds like sing, too. His waterfall of "seeings" sounds like an imperative to sing, sing seeing, sing. Live this seeing.

[If the veoh video above doesn't load for you, you can watch this on youtube: click here. The veoh looks better, and sounds better, but youtube is, well, damn reliable; what's weird is the youtube compression makes this feel more analog (warmer) than the veoh player, which still holds onto the cold of the digital comb.]

[Looks like veoh is just wrong, or too fussy. So I went ahead and embedded the youtube clip. If you want to try the veoh clip, and get irked, click here. Also, you can track Dsee's class via its dedicated blog, which is called -- you'd never have guessed it -- Seeing Seeing.]

*Try to note the lift before the first edit.