Reflecting on the state of contemporary culture, the philosopher Bernard Stiegler expands Gilles Deleuze’s idea of ‘control societies’, and points out that aesthetics has become a powerful weapon in economic warfare. Today’s audio-visual technologies, like an instrument of capitalist marketing, control and shape the choices made by society. The philosopher highlights the intense production of temporal industrial objects (like a song or a film that continues in the time of its flow, and coincides with the time of our consciousness), which draw many people under its control, simultaneously listening to the same tune or watching the same film. These are unified experiences, in which a certain ‘symbolic misery’ comes through: our choices and our individual desires are reduced.
‘The most important musical event of the twentieth century was the recorded song,’ Bernard Stiegler points out. In our technologised culture, song recordings have become widespread, and by being constantly repeated, they have become part of our memory. Agnès Jaoui, the screenwriter of Alain Resnais’ film ‘On Connait les Chansons’ (1997), once said that by gathering popular songs for film, she used fragments of songs like proverbs. According to her, the commonplaces rooted in the words of popular songs summarise feelings, and at the same time they impoverish them. By using a reduced form of song, whistling or humming, and by supplementing tunes with moving images, these problems of ‘impoverished’ experiences come into focus in the project ‘The Fragment as a Proverb’.
Here, while Mariko Takagi is whistling American tunes and the Liepaitės choir are humming the popular tunes they like for randomly selected listeners, some moments in the daily life of Fukushima and Ibaraki Prefectures and some images of Vilnius streets are represented in video projections. Several details from the films ‘The Sun’ (Сóлнце, 2005, directed by Aleksandr Sokurov) and ‘Repulsion’ (1965, directed by Roman Polanski) are embedded in these videos. Some semantic layers are interlaced here in order to show that the impact of the past and the present, and of reality and fiction, is able to provoke critical thought and waken the consciousness, which is lulled by music and images.
Sound mastering: Alius Bareckas
Light design: Norvydas Birulis
Organisers: Kristinos Inčiūraitės studija, and the Contemporary Art Centre
The Fragment as a Proverb video documentation from the performance at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (04 11 2014), cameraman Povilas Baltinas:
Photographs by Evgenia Levin
