The “uncanny” feeling in David Claerbout’s Unseen Sound
When attending a photography exhibition, one might expect a show of neatly positioned photographs on display, attended by some degree of luminosity and a defiantly small print on the side of each, revealing its name or explaining the artists’ intention. Not on this day, however. Today, the exhibition space on the first floor of the Garage Museum looks both premeditatively claustrophobic and spacious. When I slip through the grey curtain into what seems like a medium-sized room, I am immediately greeted by the suspended flickering screens, which look consciously larger than the space would have otherwise allowed, making one feel small and irrelevant in comparison. Moreover, the screens are placed, perhaps strategically, in such an angular way that when I enter, I feel confined between the two. Although the room allows for a bit of roaming, when I walk around the middle projection, I enter the space of “in-between” again.
Whenever I attend a gallery, I look up an artist but don’t venture further in my research — I want to compare my initial impressions with what the artist tries to convey. Admittedly, such an attitude might indicate my amateurish status in approaching art. To put it in the words of author Zadie Smith, who referred to herself self-effacingly as a “laywoman,” a “non-expert” when she was writing about art in Feel Free, I am but “a casual appreciator,” who — instead of “frantically consult[ing] the catalogue before daring to look up” — just looks up. So, before I entered the space, I only knew that David Claerbout, whose works were displayed, manipulated images to challenge our perception of lens-based media. I must acknowledge that I had certain expectations about Claerbout’s work: I thought I’d see images distinctly distorted in the manner of a collage, where one can easily spot the manipulation. Instead, I saw something entirely different.
As I walk in, I see the screen that projects a series of photographs depicting people irregularly dispersed throughout the beach (Fig. 1). There’s slightly discernable ambient music playing in the background (which I later learn was intended only for the third screen, but due to the limitations of space could also be heard upon entering). The slideshow captures one moment as seen by different people. Men, women, kids look at something that has caught their attention, but it’s impossible to say what because that “illusory” something is never shown. I cannot tell whether people are happy, sad, or surprised because their facial expressions don’t give way to the ultimate secrecy of the mirage. The faces appear to be staring blankly at the unknown phantom in the distance. Some faces I don’t see at all, because they are not in focus, or people are captured from behind. Sometimes all I see are people’s feet. At what appears to be the end of the slideshow is a boy, splashing the water. So maybe that is it — the phantom in the distance might have been the boy after all. Then I notice that no one seems to look at the boy except two kids nearby. So what is it?
Fig. 1. Claerbout, David. The Quiet Shore. 2011. Single-channel video projection, black & white, silent, 32 min 32 sec. www.davidclaerbout.com. Accessed 17 May 2021.
I turn around to look at the second screen and immediately become a voyeur to another moment — a loud celebration (Fig. 2). I see couples laughing, embracing, and lifting their hands to capture colorful confetti ribbons. The “confetti” piece is the only featured work that is not black and white: amid the sobering pale colors, the screen seems alight with vivid and purposefully saturated splashes of pink and blue. The camera has yet again recorded a single moment from multiple angles and distances, thus giving the viewer a perspective of everything that happens in a room where the celebration takes place. In the midst of it all, however, I see a boy. This time, the boy is screaming, as if frightened by the bursting of confetti. So is it a happy moment after all?
Fig. 2. Claerbout, David. the “confetti’’ piece. 2015–2018. Double-channel video projection, color, silent, 18 min. 25 sec. www.davidclaerbout.com. Accessed 17 May 2021.
I walk around to look at the last screen with two slideshows that follow each other in what feels like an endless loop. The ambient music becomes palpably louder. The first slideshow depicts an Asian family playing a game of ball in front of the residential complex (Fig. 3). A camera has captured the ball in the air with people lifting their heads to look at it. I notice other people in the background but they don’t appear to be participants in the action and are either shot from behind or not in focus to allow for a more detailed appraisal. Finally, I notice something uncanny about the photographs: if the family has been captured at different discrete angles, why don’t I see other cameras in the background all aiming to capture the same moment?
Fig. 3. Claerbout, David. Sections of a Happy Moment. 2007. Single-channel video projection, black & white, stereo audio, 25 min 57 sec. www.davidclaerbout.com. Accessed 17 May 2021.
The last series of photographs on the same screen portray both elders and teenagers on a makeshift soccer field on a rooftop somewhere in the Middle East (Fig. 4). They have been playing soccer when one of the boys stops to feed a seagull that hovers in the air above the players. If other slideshows have so far seemed divested of plot, this last one feels like it has a narrative with a clear protagonist in its center, who, by simply feeding a seagull, triggers a phantasmagorical chain of cause and effect. For the first time, I can see that some participants of the game are not happy with the intermission: they look bewildered, annoyed, or curious. The camera itself seems like an invisible participant in the action since it patiently documents all conceivable angles in an attempt to atomize the environment. The scene looks both real and surreal because deep down I understand that such atomization of a single moment from multiple discrete angles is impossible. Some sort of calibration must have taken place.
Fig. 4. Claerbout, David. The Algiers’ Sections of a Happy Moment. 2008. Single-channel video projection, black & white, stereo audio, 37 min. www.davidclaerbout.com. Accessed 17 May 2021.
I return to the dashboard, which I saw before I entered the space, to read up on something I might have missed, and I am stunned to see images from the artist’s studio (Fig. 5) where he meticulously works on each shot in a graphic editor. None of what I’ve seen is real or ever happened.
Fig. 5. Vorontsova, Marina. “The making of images.” 2021. Unseen Sound. Garage, Moscow. JPEG file.
On the way back home, I can’t stop thinking about what I have experienced: I feel a compelling need to place my emotions into some sort of a labeled box and give them an explicit definition. Upon returning to my apartment, I read further in hopes of deconstructing the bizarre experience of viewing the artwork and disposing of the emotional burden that I seemed to have gained from coming in contact with Claerbout’s definition of “uncanny.”
In the short description that accompanies David Claeurbout’s manifesto on the Garage Museum website, curators define the artist’s work as a hybrid of media at the confluence of photography, video, film, and 3D. Claerbout, in turn, is described as interested in how images affect viewers’ “metabolism” — how their “physical and sensory reflexes change in response to stimuli in an increasingly digital environment.” The artist’s primary intention, or as curators succinctly put it, his “thesis,” is to argue, or prove rather, that the switch from analogue or lens-based media to digital undermines our trust in a photographic image because the analogue is no longer “unalterable” but a product of different technologies, including big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI). A brief foray into the artist’s background reveals his many years of apprenticeship in lithography, printmaking, painting, and later interests in cinematography, animation, and neuroscience. Even though he doesn’t seem to openly acknowledge it, Claerbout’s interest in neuropsychology is quite obvious upon reading his manifesto and essays.
The exhibition at Garage, which is ambivalently called Unseen Sound, features Claerbout’s four works, spanning ten years. Although each slideshow captures one moment, deliberately stretched out in time and space, they are the result of processing and complication of more than 50,000 digitally generated images. Before Claerbout starts working on any particular project, he visualizes the story and its participants on paper by carefully crafting and drawing it scene by scene. What follows is just one example (Fig. 6) of the artist’s meticulous sketching of the “splashing” scene in The Quiet Shore, the first work I described. What I find rather amusing is the artist’s peculiar remark in blue where he leaves a note either to himself or others working in his studio to “pay attention to cheap bathing trousers with flowers.” In many of his interviews, the artist, indeed, confirms that he works with a team of apprentices (in what might resemble a 19th century painting studio), who, perspiring over easels, are simultaneously painters, photographers, and filmmakers, albeit with a degree in computer science.
Fig. 6. Claerbout, David. “The Quiet Shore (trousers with flowers).” 2012. www.davidclaerbout.com. Accessed 17 May 2021.
Despite the artist’s insistence on an image as fabrication, Claerbout doesn’t entirely dispose of the analogue and the “material.” According to Erika Balsom, a senior lecturer in liberal arts at King’s College London, besides sketching, Claerbout photographs each subject individually “against a chromakey backdrop — a screen that enables foreground/background compositing — and then assembles figure and ground into a single image” (90) using graphic editors. To make images three-dimensional and reconstruct the surrounding environment, either from memory or from supplementary materials, Claerbout uses pictorial 3-D, which, as he explains in his essay “The Silence of the Lens,” published in 2016 at e-flux, produces images out of geometric shapes that are subsequently textured and lit by virtual light sources. Like a painting, the resulting image is synthetic, the product of a human hand, albeit in this case, through a computer proxy.
Several essayists have attempted to put a label to such a meticulous calibration of images, to define and explain its underlying mechanics and its effect on human consciousness. Thus, Saskia Korsten, a media artist and lecturer at the ArtEZ University in the Netherlands, boldly frames Claeurbout’s artwork into an aesthetic strategy she calls “reversed remediation” (2) which, through displaying incongruities in the workings of media, serves to wake up viewers from the narcotic state they enter under the media influence. In her essay on the subject, she goes on to explain that at the heart of “reversed remediation” lies the concept of “hypermediacy” (2) or the multiplication of technologies, which Claerbout propitiously employs, that either helps the viewer enter the hypnotic state (remediation) or drop out of it (reversed remediation). Upon reading Korsten’s essay, I’ve realized why I expected to see something similar to collage art when I first heard about Claerbout’s media manipulations. According to Korsten, collage is one of the perfect examples of reversed remediation: in a collage, the incongruities between the employed media are strikingly evident, enabling the viewer “to contemplate how one perceives and makes sense of multiple layers of media’’ (3). However, Claerbout’s approach to fostering critical awareness, regarding our media consumption, seems more subtle. Instead of employing distorted imaginary subjects, he photographs real people and places them in what appears to be trivial circumstances in typical surroundings. Yet, by scrutinizing only one moment in extreme detail, the artist subverts our trust in the image and prompts us to question our visual perception of the portrayed reality. And so, Korsten continues that because of such atomization of the moment in time and space, what must have become familiar for the viewer (through time in front of a reproductive image), gradually becomes unfamiliar instead (3).
If Korsten argues that Claerbout uses time as “a meta-critique on the workings of media” (7) other art critics are more interested in the artist’s use of time in the context of photographic theory. The thing is, in his artwork, Claerbout challenges the fifty-year-old, yet still highly influential concept of a “decisive moment,” a sacred cow of any photography theorist. The concept was first introduced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who, as Professor of Psychology at Rider University John Suler put it, argued that everything has its decisive moment that occurs when both psychological and physical elements in a scene meet in perfect unison to reflect the essence of the situation. However, taking a seemingly indivisible moment in time, Claerbout explodes it into multiple smaller moments as seen from different perspectives. Each subject in a photograph seems to have their own decisive moments, which, according to the Garage’s description of the artist’s work, makes “the complete picture … unattainable: the number of additional frames may be unlimited and the scene can expand ad infinitum.”
By undermining the viewer’s desire for immediacy (through stretching a single imaginary moment over slideshows of half an hour each) and subverting an idea of a “decisive moment” (by impregnating each subject with their own “moment”), Claerbout seems to question our perception of time and space and their relationship to each other. In his manifesto, which accompanies the Garage’s description of the Unseen Sound exhibition, Claerbout philosophically speculates on our perception of time as a commodity, which, he argues, offers nothing but a flat explanation of “something biologically complex.” It feels as though through his punctilious work in image-making, Claerbout has arrived at the conclusion that time is “ungraspable,” no matter how hard one tries; however, because of time’s “incredibly transformative power,” it has an extraordinary effect on the human consciousness.
Although the etiquette of gallery attendance doesn’t call for the full engagement with each specific artwork and implies a certain autonomy on the part of the viewer in determining the length of time they spend in front of an image, Claerbout, being aware of such a lucid viewer-artist arrangement, seems to employ its limitations to his advantage. I’ve arrived at the conclusion that the artworks that inhabit the Garage space activate a spatio-temporal experience in such a way that it makes one aware of time and space not only within the image but around oneself as well. Perusing several essays on the subject, I found that I was not the only one who had left the space with mixed feelings. Lynne Cooke, the Senior Curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, in her epistolary conversations with Claerbout, published in the exhibition catalogue for Kunstverein Hannover 2002, often refers to the feelings of “nostalgia, loss, melancholy” (2) that his artworks evoke. I reckon that such anti-cathartic feelings arise out of frustration, a sudden realization of impossibility to fulfill our inherent human desire to stop and look at a moment in time through a microscopic prism, which Claerbout accomplishes with such an envious precision, albeit digitally and virtually.
Yet there’s something else that contributes to this uncanny feeling. The works in the series also question our perception of sound — by either depicting something that is supposed to have sound but is, in fact, silent or by accompanying the visuals with sound that feels almost random. As I’ve mentioned above, only two works (Sections of a Happy Moment and Algier’s Sections of a Happy Moment) are meant to have a sound accompaniment, the ambient music that neither adds to nor takes anything from the photographic narrative. Neither does the music seem to meet the images — instead of providing pseudo-continuity, it exists independently, as an agent serving to break the media-induced anesthesia and steer our attention to the incongruities between “real” and “imaginary.” The Quiet Shore and the “confetti’’ piece, on the contrary, are both mute; however, the splashing of water, bursting of confetti, and screaming, all imply familiar sounds, which are absent, or, as the title suggests, “unseen.” In his manifesto, Claerbout writes that in these two pieces, he aims “to produce a quasi-tactile volume out of muteness, turning … the absence of sound into a presence of silence.” I interpret the muteness of the digital simulacra here as another culprit responsible for the feeling of frustration at the unfulfilled desire to hear the implied sounds.
I’ve noticed a few references to tactile experiences in Claerbout’s essays, some of them were in quite unexpected contexts, such as while talking about sound, as exemplified above. In his correspondence with Lynne Cooke for Kunstverein Hannover, Claerbout confirms that while producing the artwork and arranging it in an installation, he is targeting multiple fronts of human perception. Thus, he explains that in the dark, viewers negotiate the space based on their bodily knowledge to “compensate for the … limitations” in their vision, which, in turn, creates “kinaesthetic awareness” that, coupled with the hearing, “engages optical responses far more than is the case when perceiving under normal conditions of adequate luminosity” (8). In the case of a mute image, the hearing is physically grounded, “partly because he [the viewer] has to move his body through rooms with projections which themselves remain quiet” (3).
Such a deliberate yet subtle “attack” (I dare say) on the human consciousness by means of engaging five senses is the artist’s attempt to instill an uneasy feeling when viewing the artwork and question what one really sees. By producing this artwork, Claerbout confirms his thesis that photography is no longer a credible medium because it can be manipulated using graphics and video editors. The future of photography, according to Claerbout, lies in its past with the return of an omnipotent master (manipulator of an image) and the end of abstraction as we know it. In his essay, “The Silence of the Lens,” Claerbout recalls that, when he first started to work in pictorial 3-D animation, he was astonished “by the intense overlap between Western historical painting and cinematic techniques” and “the radical conservatism of 3-D.” Just like painters before the 1850s, image manipulators nowadays try to produce images as close to reality as possible: every minute detail is pre-corporated and pre-determined, having a specified “dead” address that disallows any possibility for contingency. Perhaps, the sudden realization that such a degree of materiality is possible out of immaterial is a major factor that contributes to cognitive dissonance on part of the viewer, which is responsible for the “uncanny” feeling that I’ve experienced.
When I mentally bring myself back to the exhibition space in Garage and to Claerbout’s imaginary moments, I can still feel the presence of the lingering pitch blackness, irregularly disturbed by splashes of neon pink, and hear the subtle yet irrelevant musical accompaniment. I can almost touch the “digital” but I cannot yet smell or taste it. I wonder if it’s something Claerbout would work on next — infuse his artworks with the tangibles of smell, so that there’s no basic human sense left through which the viewer can escape.
Works Cited
Balsom, Erika. “David Claerbout’s Indecisive Moments.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, vol. 32, 2013, pp. 82–93. Crossref, doi:10.1086/670184.
Claerbout, David. “Conversation (Interview with Lynne Cooke for A Prior and Kunstverein Hannover 2002) (ENGL).” David Claerbout, www.dropbox.com/sh/jvq7cq2bzzw8s0i/AACZ2UmARn-XxSyGZymjp4Sna?preview=conversation+with+Lynne+Cooke+Hannover+2002.pdf#. Accessed 17 May 2021.
Claerbout, David. “The Algiers’ Sections of a Happy Moment, 2008 — David Claerbout.” David Claerbout, davidclaerbout.com/The-Algiers-Sections-of-a-Happy-Moment-2008. Accessed 17 May 2021.
Claerbout, David. “The artist’s manifesto. David Claerbout. Unseen Sound.” Garage, garagemca.org/en/exhibition/david-claerbout-i-unseen-sound-i/materials/david-klarbaut-manifest-david-claerbout-manifesto. Accessed 17 May 2021.
Claerbout, David. “the ‘confetti’ piece — David Claerbout.” David Claerbout, davidclaerbout.com/the-confetti-piece. Accessed 17 May 2021.
Claerbout, David. “Sections of a Happy Moment, 2007 — David Claerbout.” David Claerbout, davidclaerbout.com/Sections-of-a-Happy-Moment-2007. Accessed 17 May 2021.
Claerbout, David. “The Silence of the Lens.” E-Flux #73, May 2016, www.e-flux.com/journal/73/60460/the-silence-of-the-lens. Accessed 17 May 2021.
Claerbout, David. “The Quiet Shore, 2011 — David Claerbout.” David Claerbout, davidclaerbout.com/The-Quiet-Shore-2011. Accessed 17 May 2021.
“David Claerbout. Unseen Sound.” Garage, garagemca.org/en/exhibition/david-claerbout-i-unseen-sound-i. Accessed 17 May 2021.
Korsten, Saskia Isabella Maria. “Reversed Remediation: David Claerbout‟s Sections of a Happy Moment.” Nictoglobe, Friction Research, no. 4, 2011, www.researchgate.net/publication/321671498_Reversed_Remediation_David_Claerbouts_Sections_of_a_Happy_Moment/ Accessed 17 May 2021.
Suler, John. “Photographic Psychology: The Decisive Moment.” Photographic
Psychology: Image and Psyche, True Center Publishing, 2013, truecenterpublishing.com/photopsy/decisive_moment.htm. Accessed 17 May 2021.
