From: Sophie

8 March 2008

Hi, Daria,

I experience pain and sensation in response to seeing or thinking about another individual getting hit or touched on part of their body. I get it in the same place on the opposite side if I am facing them, or on the same side if we are facing the same direction, and also get a shooting sensation up and down the middle of my torso when it happens.

It used to happen a lot more vividly when I was a child, and when I was 7, my mother took me to the doctor, who said my experiences were not uncommon and that they were called ‘Sympathetic Symptoms’. He taught me how to manage the pains by filling my head with other thoughts as quickly as possible when I saw someone else getting hurt, which happened a lot because little girls have a habit of playing with skipping ropes and chasing each other and nearly every day someone would fall or sprain their ankle. A cognitive distraction could manage the pain, to the point where, if I looked away and thought of other things quickly enough, I could almost prevent myself from experiencing it at all. It did, however, make me feel like an awfully unsympathetic person whenever one of my friends fell over!

Wishing you all the best,

Sophie

From: Daria

9 March 2008

Hello, Sophie,

Thank you for your intriguing account of your mirror-touch-synaesthesia.

I am curious about this form of synaesthesia specifically because it seems to differ from other forms in one important way: unlike ‘coloured hearing’, say, (in which the synaesthete experiences colours in their mind’s eye that others don’t perceive), mirror-touch synaesthesia is concerned with what others do experience. Rather than being inward-turning, does mirror-touch enable social connection?

But your story implies a movement in the opposite direction: despite being highly empathic, funnily enough, you described feeling more callous than others when you had to look away from your hurt friends. Do you think that mirror-touch (that might have evolved to increase protectiveness towards others) could, because of its extremity and your need to protect yourself from vicarious pain, ironically cut down

on your ability to act caringly?

As an artist (though not a synaesthete), I am attracted to synaesthesia as a complicated model to open up approaches to learning, perceiving, and communicating – approaches which might be latent but suppressed by our culture. What could the experiences of mirror-touch synaesthetes contribute socially or artistically to a matrix attuned to other thresholds of sensitivity?

How does your mirror-touch syn affect you on a daily basis?

Best,

Daria

From: Cara

10 March 2008

For Daria, Sophie and All:

My mirror-touch isn’t exactly feeling what other people experience, but instead I can feel things if they’re pointing at me. For example, a pen sitting on my desk pointing in my direction results in a very uncomfortable sensation of a pressure point. If a fork on the dinner table is pointed at me, I can feel the tines leaving a row of sharp pressure on my body where the fork is pointing. The intensity of the pressure varies depending on the object – book corners are dull sensations, while pens and fingers are sharper and ‘deeper’. However, it seems that I have to see the object, even just out of the corner of my eye, to ‘feel’ it.

Also, if something is moving across my line of vision, I can ‘feel’ its pull. It’s as if I have a kind of ‘magnetic field’ around my body, and an object moving across my line of sight ‘disturbs’ the field, creating a pulling sensation. The feeling corresponds to the part of my body that the moving object is level with.

Another sensation I’m beginning to wonder if it may be mirror-touch is that sometimes, when looking at an object, especially if it’s spindly or sharp, I can feel it in my mouth. It’s really unpleasant, especially since I ‘feel’ insects and spiders on my tongue!

All the best,

Cara

From: Amelia

12 March 2008

My son, Akim, has mirror-touch synaesthesia. He says what

he feels is dependent on previous experiences. If it is something he has experienced before, then he will feel nearly the same thing. If he has not had that particular experience, then he will feel a milder form of a related experience. This goes for pain as well as other sensory perceptions.

Some examples of how this works: (1) If he watches someone’s throat being slit on TV or in the movies, he feels the kind of cut he’s gotten from penknives; (2) If he sees someone being stabbed in the stomach, he feels it like a punch to the stomach. He’s never been stabbed, but he has been punched; (3) When he was younger, he didn’t feel much when he saw a man being kicked in the groin on TV or in the movies, although he never understood why people found it funny. He was kicked in the groin once when he was 12, and now he finds it very painful when he sees it on screen; (4) When he sees kissing on screen or in real life, he feels like he’s kissing. He didn’t feel this until after his first experience. Before that time, he felt a light touch on the cheek – which was the usual kissing he got as a child. When he sees couples kissing in the hallway at school, it annoys him because he doesn’t like feeling like he’s kissing on the way to class; (5) Once, when holding a cat of ours that was just coming out of anaesthesia after surgery, his hands felt numb and continued to feel numb for at least five or ten minutes afterward. He’s had anaesthesia and knows what it feels like. He was surprised I couldn’t feel it.

He can feel the sensation either as victim or attacker –

but it depends on the genre. He doesn’t like horror shows.

He feels what the victim feels. But, when he watches

action movies and karate movies, he feels like he’s the

one hitting, kicking, shooting. He relates this to the fun he had as a child pretending to be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle or a Power Ranger, and happy sessions with his dad learning karate techniques, or the hours of fun playing with toy guns or swords – all of which almost never ended

up with painful contact.

One last thing: when he touches someone, he can feel their emotions, like most people feel hot and cold. He just senses it; it doesn’t become his own emotion.

From: Daria

13 March 2008

To Amelia

Akim’s synaesthesia sounds like it is part-gift and part-burden for him. The sensations you describe him experiencing are strong ones (whether pleasant or painful). Does he experience mirror-touch synaesthesia also for mild kinds of touch, like a soft caress or the touch of a distinctive fabric? For extreme temperature experiences? Or for taste, smell, for proprioceptive sensations (i.e., does he feel a sensation in his belly when he watches someone somersault)?

I wonder, Syn List, whether people with other kinds of synaesthesia experience excess empathy as Akim does?

Daria

From: Rachel

14 March 2008

Knowledge of empathy in the human condition is hardly

a recent trend.

Empathy as part of moral development is as old as religion and included in Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning. What people in the media and corporations are beginning to realise is that it’s not enough to be intelligent. It’s also important to be able to deal with other people successfully and collaboratively. Myers-Briggs tests notwithstanding, a brilliant boss with terrible empathy is a terrible boss.

Having good social skills doesn’t necessarily mean empathy.

Psychopaths are usually ‘charming’, which refers to flattery and social graces. These are rules that can be followed; drop compliments, open doors, make pleasantries and you’re charming. Empathy is the ability to internalise what someone else is feeling as if you were feeling it. Psychopaths most definitely have no regard for the feelings of other people.

People suppress personal or other people’s pain all the time: soldiers, snipers, or even just pedestrians walking past the homeless and suffering. There is surely a spectrum of pain experience and empathy as part of that, just as there is an unsurprising spectrum of every other part of human development.

From: Anne

15 March 2008

Hi Sophie, Daria, Amelia and everyone

I think that too much empathy can be just as much of a problem as too little.

On a personal note, I find it very difficult to detach from both the physical and emotional pain of others, even though there are clearly times when it would be ideal to do so. For example, I have always had big problems with seeing kids with loose teeth wobbling them around (it is like I can strongly feel the remembered pain of my own experience, although I would not call it anything like mirror-touch synaesthesia in my own case).

Where it becomes problematic is with the kids. My daughter stepped on glass and made it back from the park (about 300 yards away) with a shoe full of blood sloshing around and a deep gash on her foot. She put the shoe back on and managed to hobble home (it had fallen off at just the wrong moment and she put her foot down on the glass). Not every adult is good in a situation like this, but I had extra problems detaching enough to see the wound and clean it, in a situation where (for a lot of practical and evolutionary biological reasons) it would have been a lot better for my daughter if I could have detached, cleaned the cut and sorted it out with a minimum of emotion and physical malaise at the sight of the blood. This is one reason I was never

a candidate for medical school. Only some people can detach enough to dissect cadavers.

Similarly, my daughter’s teachers came up to us and said that she is the only one in the class who visibly trembles and shakes and starts to cry when another child is being strongly disciplined. They have said that, even though she is not the one being disciplined, ‘it is like she feels the thing personally’. She is the only one in the class who has to keep being sent to the girls’ bathroom to wash her face and try to compose herself after such events.

Best wishes

Anne

From: Fumiko

15 March 2008

Dear Daria

I do not have mirror-touch syn, but emotion-colour and music-colour syn. I found it interesting you asked whether empathy was increased with all synaesthetes. I never really associated my empathy with my syn, but it is definitely higher than almost anybody I have known. I cannot watch certain movies, and have a very low tolerance to watching people inflict pain and suffering on others intentionally. I cannot comprehend it, literally. It has nothing to do with squeamishness; I have worked in the medical field for almost 25 years, with almost 20 in level-one traumas, and do just fine. I cry right alongside my pregnant patients when they learn they have miscarried, and at times when watching TV, it’s almost like

I do experience mirror-emotion. I got agitated when I saw a clip of the Virginia Tech shooter video released to the public. I couldn’t watch more than a short couple of minutes. It wasn’t like I felt hate. I felt his hate, and a certain pain at the world. It’s always been this way.

Personally, I would love to associate this with my syn, because my boyfriend believes I’m a complete ‘sissy-la-la’.

Fumiko

From: Shaun

15 March 2008

My most significant types of synaesthesia are emotion-colour and physical sensation-colour. I am possibly oversensitive to how people feel to me, but I have always thought that this was tied to having grown up in an abusive household and church … my safety and my ability to keep my little sisters safe was tied to knowing who was dangerous or when people were likely to hurt me or my siblings.

I have had experiences of physically sensing what I perceived others were physically sensing (for instance, when watching the Chinese acrobats earlier this week, I got dizzy and queasy in response to the act where they roll around and spin inside the big rings). I also have had what I think

of as physical memories (there was a week or two I couldn’t open one of my hands when I remembered how it got burned when I was a child). I never thought of either of these as having anything to do with synaesthesia. Couldn’t it be that we all, and not just synaesthetes, carry physical memories that can be evoked on a cellular level just as memories are evoked on a cognitive, linguistic, visual or aural level?

I know of some other women who were abused as children who also experience what I call physical memory and find it difficult to watch violence because it evokes such strong empathetic experiences.

Shaun

From: Olivia

15 March 2008

All, and anyone discussing mirror-touch synaesthesia

I don’t have a very strong sense of mirror-touch, and I’m not sure I would like it too terribly much! However, I have noticed ONE sensation I get, in response to media, when

a character is somehow knocked unconscious. It could be drowning, head-blow, drugging, suffocation – it doesn’t really matter, just the fact that the character becomes,

by outside forces, unconscious.

It does NOT occur when someone just passes out (say, a mother fainting because she just got the news her son died). Until reading this discussion, I was under the distinct impression everyone experienced this, but I get a very physical sinking feeling everywhere between my ribs and hips. Pretty much just the abdominal area; nothing else. If the sensation is evoked for a long period of time, it moves to the legs to where they cannot support a standing position.

Is that the same thing?

Olivia

From: Alex

16 March 2008

Concerning feeling what others are feeling I would like

to suggest that at least some of this is probably a more universal phenomenon. Here is why.

In the U.S. a while back, there was a television commercial campaign against smoking. In it, a child is sitting in the back seat of a car. The mother is smoking a cigarette, and the cigarette smoke permeates the car. The camera shows the child being buckled into the seat. The camera shows the windows being rolled up. The camera shows the doors being locked. The camera shows the cigarette smoke.

The effect is one of suffocation.

If it were only synaesthetes who felt this, they probably never would have made the commercial.

Thank you

Alex

From: Daria

18 March 2008

Hello Syn List members

Regarding non-synaesthetes also experiencing ‘sympathetic symptoms’, a possible connection: some scientists have recently speculated that mirror-touch synaesthesia is an explicitly felt (as opposed to implicit, or unconscious)

form of ‘mirroring’ that we all experience (with the exception, perhaps, of a few – people with extreme autism, psychopaths, and others with very low empathy). Some

suggest that mirror-touch synaesthesia is a new term for old-fashioned ‘squeamishness’.

As you probably know, there has been much recent research into what scientists have identified as ‘mirror neurons’, and one theory about mirror-touch synaesthesia is that these synaesthetes’ mirror systems are on overdrive. Jamie Ward, a pioneer in this research, says: ‘We often flinch when we see someone knock their arm, and this may be a weaker version of what these synaesthetes experience.’

As Alex writes, many people cringe or look away while watching onscreen violence (I have always been very sensitive in this respect). Do films also appeal to and impact on our senses of touch, temperature, taste and smell, in part, through mirror neurons?

Daria

From: Gudrun

19 March 2008

In response, Daria, to your musing about the visceral effects of media, I think that at times it can have the opposite effect.

Some years ago when I was studying behaviour disorders and aggression, I remember reading a piece of research in which an audience was assembled ostensibly to hear a lecture. The auditorium had televisions mounted high at both sides of

the stage. Researchers watched the audience from a hidden location above the stage. During the lecture, a man came up on the stage and engaged in an altercation with the speaker. When the man began to physically assault the speaker, the majority of the audience shifted from watching the lecturer to watching the altercation on the television sets, even

as it unfolded in front of them. They did not intervene to defend the lecturer. The whole thing was staged, of course, to test the theory that people are comfortable watching violence on TV – that is, they are able to distance themselves from violence.

Gudrun

From: Lili

19 March 2008

I believe ‘empathy’ is a number of different attitudes, experiences or skills. I see danger in assuming that (for example) a person with mirror-touch synaesthesia cannot

be a con man, or assuming that a crime suspect is more likely to be the serial killer if he is autistic. I also think conforming to gender roles has some influence on the behaviours that are thought to involve empathy.

I have a male family member who has, for as long as I have known, shown great distress when watching scenes of real bodily harm and surgical scenes in movies and TV. This same person has a history of neglecting to notice when people around him are seriously ill or injured, requiring medical attention. I suspect that he’s pretty hopeless at reading the emotions of others. Noticing that someone has a great bleeding gash in their flesh does not require any type

of skill at reading emotions, social situations or facial expressions, but noticing that someone is in severe pain from a closed-injury broken bone requires rudimentary social or medical skills.

I do not know whether he has mirror-touch synaesthesia. I do not have it, but I do have many other forms of synaesthesia. I do not enjoy watching footage of real bodily injury in news broadcasts or surgical scenes, but movies don’t bother me as I know it is all fakery. Does knowledge of genuineness or fakery affect mirror-touch synaesthesia?

Lili

From: Laura

21 March 2008

Hi, all

I’m new to the list. I’m 25 years old and am pretty close to being totally blind, due to an inherited condition. For most of my life, I thought I could see only light, and only when the contrast is high. But recently, I’ve discovered that I seem to have some kind of visual tactile synaesthesia that helps me make sense of the tiny bit of visual information I’m getting. Here are a couple of my experiences.

I was looking at a computer screen that was set to high contrast, and I was able to describe some shapes that were on the screen. My mind supplied me with a picture that

felt like the raised line drawings I had seen in my maths textbooks. This is a common element of my experience: I’ll see something, and then instantly feel like my fingertips are exploring a picture of whatever it is I’m seeing. It seems as though colours and different kinds of light have different textures. Some light feels plasticky, others feel heavy, others feel thin, or thick, or metallic. I tend to feel these colour textures on my cheek. Also, sometimes moving different parts of my body helps me to understand what I’m seeing.

Another time, I was at a movie theatre and, when I looked at the movie screen, a picture popped into my head of a bathtub draining, or something melting. My mom told me that this is probably when the images on the screen are changing. At another time, I looked at the screen and saw something that felt like a wide open field, or an echoey building, and my mom said that’s when I’m seeing a landscape with not a lot else happening on the screen.

Thanks

Laura

In conversation: Daria Martin and Etel Adnan

14 February 2013

Daria Martin was born in the San Francisco Bay Area around the same time that Etel Adnan, esteemed Lebanese poet and painter, settled there. As a child, Martin knew Adnan as a family friend. The two met again in Adnan’s Paris home and spoke about Martin’s new film and some shared histories within.

Etel Adnan: Film has a haunting power. It shows people and images as if they were in front of us, while they are in fact utterly absent. In your recent film, One of the Things that Makes Me Doubt, people, texts and artworks appear, disappear and return, links within a wider world.

Daria Martin: One of the reasons I work with film is its capacity to elide time and space. It makes images continuous — images that, in the ‘real’ world, inhabit very different contexts. It can also create ruptures and dissonances. Before films, I made abstract paintings, very formal and strict, but they didn’t allow me to explore this kind of agency.

EA: Many generations appear in the film, including Anna Halprin, founder of postmodern dance. She surges onto the screen, her triangular face like an arrow, an element that ties things together and pushes them forward.

DM: Anna is a powerful force! And another woman artist, like you, making work inspired by Mount Tamalpais, in Marin County, California.

EA: But the central past figure in the new film is that of your grandmother, Susi Martin, who I have had the privilege to know and befriend. We don’t see Susi’s image but rather her paintings and diaries, surfacing fragmented or whole, like the soul of a person on which everything else is grounded. We witness a continuum of past and present, which is a transmission.

DM: Susi’s paintings and diaries are the ‘ground’ of the piece, and I layered on top of her relatively private bodies of work my relatively public body of film work. As the film progresses, Susi’s centrality is diffused, spinning off into parallel conversations with actresses who have appeared in my films. These women perhaps become stand-ins for Susi, or her part-personas, the recurring personalities she tracked in her dreams — an internal community.

As you know, in ‘real life’ Susi was part of a tight-knit community of painters called Sight and Insight, a Bay Area group influenced by abstract expressionism and Zen Buddhism. You were also painting there in the 70s. How did you discover the group and Ann O’Hanlon, its founder?

EA: Ann was very important for me because she made me paint. In the 70s, while I was teaching philosophy of art at Dominican College, Ann was teaching art there. When I met her for the first time she asked me provocatively if I painted. I said, ‘No’. She said, ‘Why?’ And I heard myself say, ‘Because my mother said I’m clumsy’. She said, ‘And you believed her?’ And you know, that answer freed me. There are moments in life when certain words change your life.

DM: From then on, you painted with a palette knife, a confident and definite technique!

EA: Later Ann started weekly seminars at her own place. She didn’t want an academic setup. By word of mouth, in a few years, she had many people, as many as 60. It was a beautiful place, two or three acres in Mill Valley, in the foothills of Mount Tamalpais. That’s where I met your grandmother, Susi.

DM: Sight and Insight was a place where Susi could experience reverie.

EA: Well, the Bay Area is paradise — the mountain, the sea…

I want to be in the open — I want it, and it’s becoming more acute. Perhaps it’s to do with ageing. Nature frees me; it leaves me free. Nature isn’t territorial. Yosemite belongs to itself.

Ann based her teaching on not teaching, on letting a student find their way. She didn’t teach to draw or paint. She was philosophically like her contemporary John Cage, embracing chance and play. Let people find what you cannot teach.

At the same time, Ann had her hang-ups. She hated women who decorated themselves, who wore earrings. She couldn’t stand high heels. It was something very deep. Her own sexuality was non-existent.

DM: So her advocacy of free expression met its limits in decorative, feminine expression. Yet it was mostly women in the group.

EA: Very few men; occasionally a husband would come. There were many foreign women: Austrian, German, English from Rhodesia — people homesick for Europe or elsewhere. Susi was not American herself, was she?

DM: No, she was a Czech Jew whose family fled during the Second World War. When she was 13 she was sent to boarding school in England because, luckily, her parents understood what was happening. She was separated from her parents for a few years, while she read in the papers about Germany’s advance towards her childhood home.

Decades later, in her 50s, she fell into a deep depression and began to paint. She tried to tackle her crisis simultaneously with painting and with Jungian analysis. They functioned in two very different ways to process her experience of exile. While her analysis was probing and penetrative, a way to dig into neuroses, painting freed her from it. I think that painting was a way for her to find some internal home or balance.

EA: It’s maybe the same for me, I don’t know. Sometimes people ask me where I live, and I say ‘I live in my books’. I am where I am.

DM: Thinking again about Ann and what you said about her denial of sexuality, I wonder about the role of the Zen attitude in all of this. Zen Buddhism is very attractive in its openness, its lack of hierarchy. But my experience of Zen is that some Westerners use the philosophy as a tool for denial, perhaps distorting the concept of ‘detachment’ or ‘emptiness’ to detach from emotions, passions, the conflict of life.

EA: You’re opening up an interesting question. Not the Buddhists of Japan or China but American Buddhists, Cage included, they escape the conflict of the world. That might even be the purpose of Zen: to solve problems by escaping them. Perhaps it’s about protection. But there is something cold about it — more of a denial than a solution. There is more than lack of pain in a solution.

DM: Do you think that denial itself can be a sort of solution?

EA: Well, Susi was the only person who helped me, once, over a very strong phobia. I can’t stand snakes. If I come across one in a book, I cut the page and burn it. It’s not fear for of my life. It’s incredible, uncontrollable horror.

One day Susi and I were at Sight and Insight. We were going from one building to another along the hillside and there was a little garden snake, not moving. I said, ‘No, I can’t go, there is a snake!’ She said, ‘So what!’ I was terrified, I couldn’t move. But she said ‘Nonsense!’ She took me by the arm and I went on. It didn’t cure me but I was happy I could do it.

DM: Susi had quite a stoic side. She was a rigorous mountain climber.

EA: She had both sides: she was a dreamer and a determined, strong person.

DM: –A natural introvert, but toughened from the trauma of what she went through during the war. She wasn’t directly involved in the conflict but —

EA: She absorbed it.

DM: She really absorbed it, and one of the striking things about her dream diaries is the continuous mention of Nazis until the end of her life. They kept arising in her dreams. Her diaries are dense with arguing voices and characters, while her paintings were dreamy, floating and beautiful.

EA: Well, I’m a writer and a painter. My paintings are the dream, the beauty of the world. My writings are full of conflict.

DM: Is writing a way to give voice to the crises you see in the world? You’ve written in response to wars in Algeria, Vietnam and Lebanon, your home country.

EA: Yes, writing is totally opposite to painting — same as with Susi. But it’s personal. If I weren’t a writer maybe my painting would be different. You can say political things in paintings, like Picasso and Goya did. Goya painted about war. I wrote about it.

All the arts have an inner balance to achieve. Rhythm is part of any art form. But also, each one has its own mystery. A painting you see. A short poem also has immediacy. But a film you have to memorise — you never see it whole. A book is the same.

DM: Each medium carries images differently. In the new film, I wanted to create a frame in which different media and subjects can speak, different images can arise, a bit like Scheherazade’s One Thousand and One Nights mentioned by Susi in her diaries.

EA: Do you have the diaries?

DM: Yes, I brought some pages to show you.

EA: This is an invaluable document! I see that she meticulously dated the entries; that’s good. She took great care. (Reading.) And she writes well.

DM: The diaries were only intended for an audience of two — her and her analyst — but they are very orderly. There are white pages documenting the dreams and yellow pages recording her account of the analysis. She also tracks the archetypes that recur in her dreams, and their evolution through the years, as if these characters were living.

It’s addictive reading. Every night she records two or three dreams, in detail. She did this for over 30 years. It’s like literature.

EA: What is literature? Once it gets published, it’s literature!

It’s writing.

Four Women Conversations

These four interviews, made originally in 2007 for a project on feminism, describe, loosely, four generations of performers.  Actor Nina Fog, composer/ musician Zeena Parkins, artist Carolee Schneemann, and choreographer/ dancer Anna Halprin speak about their relationship to improvisation, imagination, craft, voice, the body, and more.

These can be reached through the following:

The One and the Many

An essay by Catherine Wood, 2005

I first saw Daria Martin’s film Birds (2001) projected in the crumbling loft space of the temporary Bart Wells Institute in Hackney, in an exhibition curated by the artist David Thorpe. We climbed up a stepladder onto the damp and dark topmost space before the 16mm film flickered into view. The moving image conjured by the projector feeding its strip of 16mm film through a beam of light was intensified by the rudimentariness of the surrounding situation which it suddenly illuminated: the simply constructed wood and perspex screens around which the performers move and the coloured poles which they manipulate into lattice-like patterns were unexpectedly echoed by the physical structure of the roof’s beams above the make-shift viewing platform; the film’s title was given a certain animality by the pigeons resident in its shadowy, woodwormed corners. Because of this, the primariness of the materials used in the film – sheets of coloured acetate, cloth, wood, paint – not only framed the bodies of the performers who touch, move and are enclosed by them, but they also felt all the more tangible.  Despite the marked difference between the ultra-clean, white studio of the film and the deteriorating Victorian roof space, my relationship to the piece was not purely one of physically suspended immersion in the image but of increased haptic investment. At a level removed from the rest of the exhibition this space also perfectly suited the nature of Martin’s work, as a kind of elevated and private ‘hideaway’.

The world in which we live in the early twenty-first century takes for granted a high level of social connectedness mediated by technology, a situation which is often popularly lamented as being at the expense of primary contact between people. A great number of contemporary artists have made work attempting to counter technology’s refraction of experience and its complicity with the capitalist ideology of ‘spectacle’ culture. Working against high Modernist painting’s prioritisation of optical engagement with an artwork, the Minimalist artists of the 1960s such as Robert Morris made a feature of the viewers phenomenological engagement with his ‘blank-form’ sculpture placed directly on the floor. In the 1990s, the generation that have been characterised by Nicholas Bourriaud in terms of ‘relational aesthetics’ – Rikrit Tiravanija, Liam Gillick, Mauricio Cattelan et al – made work which encouraged literal participation in a collective situation, addressing the ‘realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.’ Daria Martin’s films all depict the staging of relations between people as choreographies mediated by objects or formal rules.  But what is striking in her work, as distinct from the viewer’s physical constitution of installation environments in the 60s or the 90s, is that its invitation to participate in its world is opened only through the imagination. Despite the fact that they represent relationships between people, the films conjure an atmosphere of intense solitude, inviting an intimate form of communion between artist and viewer mediated via the film’s fantasy world of suspended disbelief. At the same time, a sense of haptic identification with the sculptural matter with which Martin builds her costumes and sets rubs against the immateriality of the projected image, complicating the idea that it marks the boundary to a separate sphere into which the viewer has no physical access.

The twilit and isolationist titles of In the Palace (2000) (after Giacommetti’s surrealist sculpture The Palace at 4am (date)), Birds (2001) and Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon (2004-2005) hint at the private space in which they are conceived to exist, and at the work’s essentially romantic basis. Martin’s work investigates the individual imagination as it inhabits or draws upon the real fabric of the outside world, in this sense treating the film medium traditionally, as a ‘window’.  And yet the artist stages a direct level of sensory communion with the viewer which seems to temporarily suspend for the viewing subject the fact that they exist on the worldly plane. This is part of the fantasy of becoming immersed in the work, at least.

Her films, derived firstas textual scripts, have something in common with Maurice Blanchot’s characterisation of writing as an ‘affirmation of solitude’. Blanchot writes of transferring thought to written text and of the extent to which this transfer, unlike speaking out loud, severs the subject from acting and inter-acting in the world at large; “to write is to break the bond that unites the world with myself. It is to destroy the relation, which, determining that I speak toward ‘you’ gives me room to speak within the understanding which my word receives from you… To write is to withdraw language from the world” (p. 26, Blanchot). In choosing the film medium, Martin is able to depict a world of acting subjects, who relate to each other physically. They are, in Blanchot’s terms, separated by their outwardly communicative gestures from their own interior being. At the same time, her films open up a space which invites a direct channel of communion between artist and viewer that sidesteps usual modes of communication in the form of bodily gestures or verbal exchange.

The evocation of solitary fantasy is most evident, and related to Blanchot’s observation, in the profoundly silent nature of the films: the dancers and actors never speak, their interaction is gestural and mimed, always set to a musical soundtrack, setting them in a sphere which is at one remove from us. In the earlier films, Martin frequently uses material scrims and blank studio spaces which give the space inside the film a sense of being ‘screened off’.  The performers are often posed still here too, which, in combination with her use of props and objects, lends the work the appearance of sculpture. Karmen Mackendrick has written of stillness in dance as an equivalent for silence in the use of language, describing Bataille’s claim that language ‘cheats’ in concealing the violence that silence implies (p. 145). Martin’s work is daring in its embrace of that quietness and stillness that goes against the grain of the film medium and its very ability to capture movement. These early works test the boundaries of her separateness from the world, oscillating between abstracted distance and voyeurism. In a climate excessively concerned with connectedness, Martin stakes out territory which appears not to be afraid of solitude.

Given that Martin’s films are all, in a sense, edited sequences from recordings of elaborately staged performances, it is revealing that she consistently chooses to repress live presence into the immateriality of film. Rather than choosing to situate such performance in the theatrical context that requires a live audience to constitute it, Martin creates films that can be conjured into the present in the darkened space of a gallery installation, for just one. Although the technology Martin uses is not new (preferring the quality of 16mm film) she registers that very contemporary form of isolated contact with which I began, tapping into the intimacy and fantasies offered by communication technology’s capacity for virtuality. Making film recordings instead of live pieces enables their looping and repetition. The action is preserved and can be repeated in a way that connects with Blanchots conception of writing’s reiteration, a form of stasis that connects with the core of ‘being’. In this, Martin reinterprets the classic eighteenth century Romantic artist’s struggle to distinguish between internal subjectivity and external object, or the world at large, via the mediation of the image. In making films that combine abstract aesthetic form with performed action, Martin’s actors become in a sense ‘puppets’ and their presence registers a split between her own private subjectivity and Blanchot’s ‘worldly plane’ in which internal subjectivity is necessarily repressed. Moreover, the films stage and dramatize the split between the imagination and the world outside. Like the presence of the male figure looking out onto the sublime, Romantic landscape in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, Martin often focuses on a central female figure within the film who serves both as a kind of stand-in for the artist’s own subjectivity, and as a ‘threshold’ marking the boundary of this other world.

Essential in this discussion of solitude, though, is the fact that the making of Martin’s work is unavoidably collective. It is a generative process, not an entirely controlled one, relying on the participants ‘playing her game.’  Martin first writes a script and treatment for her films which includes details of the film’s aesthetic, its atmosphere, the filming style and the movements and attitudes of the characters, as well as technical instruction for the camera.  Extracts from her treatment for Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon read, “the camera tilts back up to the first floor gridded window where the headmistress stands; the camera slowly zooms towards her.” Or, “she is a woman of unplaceable age and enduring sexual charisma; her face silently speaks of a life well lived”. This script, a fantasy dreamed up by the artist in private, is then realised through the participation of a large team of people – from the individual performers who carry out the artist’s instructions, attempting to inhabit her vision, to the choreographer who invents the movement patterns, the designer of costumes and the production and camera crews and post production editing. The degree of mediation at stake in making the primary conception of the script and the artist’s formal composition – with its abstract basis – manifest is something that Martin deliberately embraces. The linearity of the script-text and the compositional visual patterns are literally fleshed out. The encounter with real people as the substance and subjects of her medium creates the essential texture to Martin’s imagined vision. Not only is this visible through the individual characteristics of the actors, but also in specific areas of the films, such as her use of ‘found’ locations and narrative situations which provide real-time frameworks for playing out the artist’s ideas.

One of Martin’s earliest films, In the Palace (2000), shows a group of performers posed still inside a scaffold which might equally be the stage of a pole-dancing club, a commonly found venue in LA (where the film was made) or nearby Las Vegas.  The male and female performers are dressed in hand-made looking aluminium foil and fabric costumes which resemble those seen in early modern dance performance by Martha Graham but their skin and bodily contours are nevertheless revealed.  Despite the static petrification of this ‘performance’ in which the dancers remain for the most part still whilst the camera rotates mesmerisingly around them, the piece has erotic overtones. Occasionally we catch a glimpse of an embrace between them – silvery made-up skin touching skin under the cold blue light. In common with the mood of Giacommetti’s piece, Martin’s film appears to turn the suggestion of erotic spectacle and its drive towards revelation and display into a deathly space of memory and latent, rather than explicit, charge. She pulls back from the potential offered by the live situation, as though wanting to crystallise the moment as sculpture.  The piece contains a kind of petrified ecstasy, both sexual and fantastical, corrupting remembered fragments of theatre, art and of dance history with the factuality of the real context in which they are revived, as though the artist wants to inhabit them and preserve them at once. The static atmosphere is intensified by the soundtrack which includes thunder and rain rumbling in the distance, like an approaching tropical storm which never comes. Throughout the film’s 7 minute duration, the figures remain together yet isolated in this art historical cage.

Birds (2001) conversely, sets the performers free in a white photographic ‘infinity’ style studio space which is mapped out by the relative positions of moving bodies and moving structures. As though the space is too wide, too far-reaching, the figures position themselves in relation to screens, sticks and hoops, making lattice-like grids against which their own shape is set.  They are in turn playful and serious, but seem to be stranded in this borderless place with its conflation of history and curious futurism. As with In the Palace, though, wind blows through the set and its suggestion of ‘naturalism’ charges the pure artificiality of the scene, as though it is connected with the elements despite being an indoor space, and yet we know that this too is a deliberate and artificial filmic construct, ‘breathing life’ into the scene. In Closeup Gallery (2003), the last film in the trilogy, a focus on a magician’s hands dexterously shuffling, spreading and picking up cards sprayed as Malevich-like red, blue, black and green rectangles on occasions viewed sandwiched between the layers of the revolving, 3-tier glass table – proposes them as equivalents for the performers in Birds who move between fabric scrims, wearing coloured squares of acetate and painted paper costumes. In the Palace, Birds and Closeup Gallery present elements of idealism represented as early twentieth century modernist abstraction transferred to situations referencing the secular rituals of the strip club, the magazine fashion shoot and the Las Vegas style magic show.

What is at stake in the work, then, is the degree of ‘directedness’ or artistic control versus the input of the individuals, and real objects and places, that Martin works with, whether she literally invites improvisation or not. The films reveal the extent to which real, performed action and the specificity of a built or customised set always exceed the formal principles through which it has been set out. Martin has said, “In general I am drawn to ideals: primary colours, cohesive communities, ordered cosmologies and beautiful bodies” but at the same time, she ways, she wants the work to embrace awkwardness: “I intentionally include in the edit moments in which the performer drops their guard, stops acting, allows themselves to relax, reveals exhaustion”. Indeed, in both In the Palace and Birds Martin captures the performers breaking at the end of the shot or smiling.

In Soft Materials Martin complicated the relationship between ‘actor’ and director, working with an artificial intelligence lab and two dancers trained in contact improvisation to effect a complex collision of man and machine. The dancers’ naked bodies are shown as vulnerable and real against the metal antennae of the artificially intelligent ‘being’ in the opening shot whose rods resemble the barrel of a gun, and Martin shoots flesh as it is seen through the grid of steel wires or juxtaposed with the metal teeth of turning cogs. But rather than containing this relationship within the early twentieth century narrative framework of the mechanisation of man of the anthropomorphism of the machine, or in surreally humanising it after Rebecca Horn, Martin blurs the boundaries with the setting together of two kinds of randomly generated rules which respond to, learn from and appear to become intimate with each other, despite one being human and one robot. The film creates an impression of tenderness in the sequence in which the female performer allows the fine plastic antennae of the intelligent machine to ‘flutter’ against her face, feeling the soft skin of her cheek, lending the robotan anthropomorphic quality. But at the same time, we are explicitly aware of the robot’s hand-built, provisional construction from pieces of electrical and computer equipment. In Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon, the formal idea of the sculptural object is substituted with a succession of ‘readymades’ which come with the readymade form Martin has chosen to structure her piece: the ritualised sport of the modern pentathlon and its accompanying kit, rifles, horse-jumps and fencing masks and swords. Martin weaves her own aesthetic threads through the found form of the sport using coloured ropes and ribbons pulled across the screen to make linear patterns;  the actors carry the white poles for the equestrian event back and forth across the screen in measured lines; in the shooting section the rifles are raised and lowered by a line of marksmen and women in choreographic succession. Martin’s film treatment describes a desire for the film to “emphasize repetition and movement en mass”, continuing that, “they do not depict military precision as much as a rippling, delirious excess found in baroque architecture, a stylisation of nature that abstracts yet intensifies its effect.” However, the formal abstraction of Martin’s composition and choreography and the rules of the sport are cut through by the suggestion of emotional narrative: a love triangle between the ‘headmistress’ and a female pupil, who is attached to one of her male peers. Martin conflates the rigour of sport-derived choreographic form with the emotive drive of the ‘movie’ narrative to explore the extent to which a real situation (signified by this twist in the ‘love story’) exceeds set patterns – whether they be the rules of a complex sport, or filmic convention.

Both Soft Materials and Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon draw upon forms of choreography, the former free-form, the latter highly regulated. Martin admits a fascination with simultaneously designed movement. She acknowledges Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia as a point of reference, but her work complicates the frequent association of mass bodily movement with the subjugation of individuality in military or sporting displays deriving from Fascist politics. Slavoj Zizek rejects this generally drawn association in any case, arguing against the idea of “the allegedly proto-Fascist character of the mass choreography displaying disciplined movements of thousands of bodies.” He writes, “the ‘bad’ bodily discipline, if there is one, is not collective training, but, rather, jogging and body building as part of the New Age myth of realisation of the Self’s inner potentials.” This boundary line – between performing oneself as part of a community and as an individual – is a distinction that Martin’s work problematises: to what extent do shared codes or rules enable participation and to what extent to they oppress? Do or can these idealised and self-enclosed communities she represents thrive in reality if, according to Blanchot, the outward gesture of codified communication between people is produced at the expense of ‘being’ a solitary subject in an inward sense?

A sequence in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3 shows one of the ‘air stewardess’ characters in the futuristic, sealed-off room of the living space idly playing with a bowl of red and green grapes, placing them in different patterns. These patterns are, surreally, played out to spectacular scale in a grand arena below by hundreds of dancing showgirls in matching costumes. Barney here stages the split between a daydream and its fully fleshed out realisation. But where Barney’s vision is made in the airtight and glossy manner of a high production value Hollywood film, Martin specifically aims for a more fragile aesthetic. Martin has said she wants to go beyond the “seamless quality of Hollywood films because they don’t allow breathing space for the viewer to enter or leave at will”. Her props have more in common with the provisional nature of Maya Deren or Jack Smith, she incorporates elements of spontaneity or mistakes which recall the recorded performances of Carolee Schneeman. Where Barney employs one hundred idealised female models, Martin deliberately seeks realness in the people she casts, whether they be actors, athletes, dancers and/or friends. She chooses individuals for their qualities of vulnerability and readability.

In her staged tableaux for film, Martin presents equivalences for the dream or fantasy space of the mind as it processes and recycles the material it consumes. Images from history and the present are equally available to her as references and resources, woven together to make a fabric of continuous present. A.W. Schlegel wrote that the mind has its own ‘ideal time’ linked to ideas of an eternal, a-chronological truth.  Henri Bergson developed this idea as psychological time: the world experienced as a continuous progression rather than as a succession of identical separate moments, similar to how we hear music. Woven throughout Martin’s films, always set to specially composed musical scores, are elements of formal composition drawn from her training as a painter, from art history: the constructivist painting of Popova, the stage and costume designs of Sonia Delaunay or Varvara Stepanova, the Triadic Ballet of Oskar Schlemmer or Fernand Leger’s film Ballet Mecanique. Martin draws from these sources a set of patterns and archetypes quite specific to art history: lattices of wooden poles or ribbons, choreographies, sculptural costumes and props are woven together to create complex formal arrangements synthesising the arts into a magically conjured immaterial space.

Despite the seductive visuality of Martin’s films and the work’s temptation towards complicity with its fantasy, there is always a degree to which the work itself prevents this, pushes one back to an awareness of its construction, its fakery and its surface. Martin’s choice of the film medium seems to be specifically – and politically – aware of its own power. Unlike the utopian aims of some of the work that Martin references – the way in which constructivist theatre quite literally set out a ‘world’ in which the performer was depicted in harmony with objects, the gesamtkunstwerke – Martin’s work registers a different kind of utopian agenda, an attempt to reclaim some mental or imaginative space, some potential for collective understanding beyond what we are fed by marketing and branding strategists. Where Stepanova had faith in the possibility of abstract art’s potential functionality in the everyday world – as costume design, furniture, political poster design – Martin’s utopia is concerned especially with the artist and viewer’s relationship as it is mediated via the fantasy space offered by her medium. The artist is fascinated by Jungian ideas on the unconscious and its archetypes or ‘primordial images’ which might act as essential points of connection between people across cultures and across time.

In contemporary, late-capitalist culture, short moving-image advertisements on television represent a world which we are invited to be a part of as consumers only. A pop cultural anti-equivalent of Martin’s work might be seen in the advertisements for ‘Gap’ shown on UK TV in 2001, for example, showed a group of young, beautiful people wearing Gap clothing dancing in choreographed unison against a white background. Writing on dance, Randy Martin has made a negative comparison between the cathartic, collective identification with the protagonist of Greek Tragedy and the pop cultural spectacle of ‘marketised consumption’ in which “one watches anonymously but constantly for that image which might finally give place to identity. This process of watching life go by outside oneself means that the virtual life of the spectacle looks back, casting judgement on the onlooker as a negative reference to what he or she lacks.” Martin’s work addresses the extent to which advertising co-opts our relationship to images and fantasy, attempting to substitute for those deeply buried collective archetypes relations to a commercial brand. Martin seeks to locate her work in a recognisable world; to graft the aesthetic realm with the vernacular of everyday activity with her use of real people and situations, employing a povera frankness of her materials.  In so doing, Martin digs into that ephemeral, two-dimensional image space with deeper perspective.

Martin borrows from the familiar pop-cultural image-world as much as from other areas of art, theatre and dance history, but she refuses to be satisfied with its interiorlessness, substituting fallibility, sensuality, awkwardness and humour for its hard flawlessness. In the worlds of her films, Martin stages relations between acting subjects that fall in and out of conventional gender roles, predictable movements or positions, rubbing the two-dimensionality of text or abstract pattern against the flesh of the world. The work is political in the sense that Jacques Ranciere describes the ‘distribution of the sensible’ in the wider social sphere; “The artist only ever lends to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible” (Ranciere, p.19) Martin’s work tests out the fantasy that the solipsistic space of the individual imagination might incorporate forms of collective history and memory. The work stages, on the one hand, a fantasy of how social or communal experience might be played out according to aesthetic codes and patterns – recalling, for example, the feminist project of Californian artist Suzanne Lacey titled The Crystal Quilt(1987) in which a large group of older women arranged at differently coloured tables moved in unison to make ‘patchwork’ patterns– and at the same time the work problematises the necessarily directorial relationship between the root of that aesthetic impulse and its material realisation. This contradictory longing is mediated for the viewer via the otherworldliness of a film projection set to music so that the artist is able to both offer her world and pull it back, to expose the bulkiness of the real materials or bodies she works with and to flatten them as dream-like visions. The seductive qualities of Martin’s work makes it mischievously double-edged in its appeal: the films have the power to colonise and propel the viewer’s appetite to devour images at the same time as interrupting and prizing loose compulsive, learned habits of viewing.

Daria Martin in Conversation with Yilmaz Dziewior and Beatrix Ruf

2005

Yilmaz Dziewior (YD) and Beatrix Ruf (BR): We have collaborated already on three exhibitions, but one thing we find especially intriguing about our current working together on your book, Daria, is that it seems that the whole project (your exhibitions in Zurich and Hamburg as well as the catalogue) seems to follow an intrinsic logic. In Zurich you showed your trilogy consisting of In the Palace (2000), Birds (2001) and Closeup Gallery(2003) and in a single screening the newly finished film Soft Materials (2004), which you then showed in Hamburg with Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon (2004-2005). As we three all know that the sequence of the shows was not planned from the beginning, we just wonder if the same can be said about your trilogy? Watching the films one after the other it seems as if you would have known already before starting the series how each part would look in the end. It starts in a dark space and with a somber atmosphere (In the Palace) then the space is light and the action a bit funnier (Birds) and in Closeup Gallery the narration gets more elaborate and it seems that you increased the formalistic approach of the first two films to an even higher degree.

Daria Martin (DM): It may look as if the films have been designed methodically to unfold in sequence, but in fact they’ve evolved in an unplanned way, guided by strong interests and semiconscious desires. I think it was Marguerite Duras who spoke about writing as a process of groping in the darkness toward a distant light. Writing for film is like that for me—an instinctive impulse—so it is only in looking back on the films’ progression that the logic is spelled out. I called my first three films a trilogy because, in retrospect, they seemed to provoke and then resolve a dialogue: In the Palace poses questions (blackness, voyeurism, holding poses); Birds provides counter-questions (whiteness, participation, frequent breaking of poses), and Closeup Gallery perhaps begins to resolve or at least to distill those questions. For example, the trilogy’s engagement with hand-made magic is made literal and concrete as well as symbolic in Closeup Gallery.

The role of the films’ performers has evolved from the assumption of static poses to enacting increasing degrees of movement, and, looking back, this gradual “awakening” is parallel to a slow move from my former painting practice into the full possibilities of the film medium. Also, the direct references to particular art movements or pieces in the earliest films have with time become more imbedded within my growing visual language, and sometimes within a loose narrative structure.

One way that the more recent films depart from the trilogy is that they have moved away from my self-enclosed studio and out into the world, away from manufactured, possible worlds to engagement with actual ones. Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon and Soft Materials both work with existing phenomena that tie into the work’s conceptual strands. Soft Materials takes off from intriguing research on embodied artificial intelligence and Loneliness weaves a fiction around an anachronistic Olympic event. They use occurrences in our culture as traction to broaden the work’s sensibilities.

YD: I think it is quite significant that Beatrix, having been involved in modern dance earlier, and I, who recently did an exhibition about formalism and the impact of modernity on younger artists, invited you for an exhibition. These themes seem deeply rooted in your work.

DM: It’s the first time I heard that Beatrix used to be involved in dance but somehow I’m not surprised! The connections you’ve mentioned are significant indeed because you’ve touched on two poles of the work: abstraction as against figuration, or more specifically, the use of sculptural form and painterly colour as against the performing body. The trilogy of films beginning with In the Palace arose from the context of my graduate school training in Los Angeles in the late 1990s, when my peers were turning to Greenbergian modernism as a touchstone for a new sense of agency, a way out of over-theorised postmodern academia, or a guiltless indulgence in beauty. I was also attracted to the sense of freedom that this return to “Modernism” seemed to promise, but I worried that what many artists were doing willfully shut out the whole arena of the body and its vulnerability. So in searching for a place to begin, I turned instead for inspiration to the some of the stumbling first moments of 21st-century modern culture, when the modernist project hadn’t yet worked out its parameters (if it ever really did) and was open to the contamination of humour, exaggeration, pathos, play, and awkwardness. For example, I was intrigued by Oskar Schlemmer’s direction of the Bauhaus theatre program: he combined instruction in the arts of vaudeville with an application of his own rigorous painting practice; he created a continuum, not always seamless, between the dress-up games of the Bauhaus’ gala costumed balls and his own self-serious, pseudo-scientific study of abstraction. I’m very attracted to awkward clashes like Schlemmer’s: areas where Apollonian control and Dionysian release come into conflict.

BR: My past involvement in dance did not have any influence at all on having invited you for the show in Zurich, but of course this “reference” did reactivate knowledge in perceiving your films. I was very intrigued by the formalist understanding of what early modern dance created in relation to crossovers to visual art practice (as you mentioned with Schlemmer) and especially to the interaction of sculptural forms and three-dimensional movement. I understand that for In the Palace your reference is Alberto Giacometti’s The Palace at 4 am (1932), which is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Can you talk more about the spatial and sculptural concepts that interested you? Thinking of Giacometti’s sculpture that creates a kind of spatial box in which activities can/might happen—it also reminds me of another artist you seem to refer to a lot in your work, Joseph Cornell.

DM: The relationship between film and sculpture is an interesting paradox. On the one hand, film is extremely articulate in describing form, space, and volume. Unlike video, it doesn’t flatten its subject through a grid of pixels; unlike photography, it can actively move around its subject. But on the other hand of course, it’s impossible to fully capture the bulk and volume of sculpture on the ephemeral medium of film; it’s a relationship that doesn’t quite work. That not-quite-working can generate an emotional tension, a little bit like the uncertain desire created by a psychological projection, or by the experience of romantic love directed towards someone who might or might not care.

Giacometti created The Palace at 4am before he began making his famous existential figures. Whereas Giacometti explained those attenuated sculptures as being a result of directly observing people in the distance of a cityscape, compressed by the atmosphere around them, the pieces made around the time of The Palace at 4amseem to be compressed in the mind, by another kind of atmosphere. These sculptures, quite small, resembled game boards or maquettes; many looked like models for something that could exist on a much larger scale.

The Palace at 4am, as practically anyone who’s seen it will agree, has a particularly evocative feeling, as if the figures within it have each been caught within their own dreams, simultaneously sleepwalking through the same house. When I used to visit it at the old MOMA in New York, it seemed vast and diminutive at the same time—its scale shifted in the imagination. The idea that sparked In the Palace was a desire to literally realise my own fantasy to inhabit this small sculpture, to blow it up to human dimensions and to populate it with performers.

After measuring the sculpture in MOMA’s archives for the accurate proportions, it was quite a shock, months later, to finally stand inside the 25-foot high version that I built with my art-school friends. It wasn’t until the thing was lit, within a darkened sports arena, that you felt a hint of the isolated atmosphere of the original sculpture. In the process of making all my films, I hit this odd point of shock and recognition, where a mental fantasy suddenly meets the reality of a collective physical effort to realize that fantasy.

This is an aspect of filmmaking that really fascinates me: the voyage of the work’s existence from its beginnings as a daydream to its translation into a real-world event when it is filmed, and finally to its return to an ephemeral presence when it is projected. In a way, the film projection, the light streaming from the projector, is like a maquette or model: physical space and action has been compressed, but the on-screen images hold the potential, in the imagination, to expand into an entire world, to spring to life.

Joseph Cornell, who filled hundreds of boxes with delicate selections from his collections of objects and images, is an artist who has fascinated me for many years. His boxes seem to compress emotional experience; sometimes, like Giacometti’s early sculptures, they take the form of a game or a maquette that seemed to invite, yet exclude, participation. These boxes seduce you into complicity, yet they also shut you out of their self-contained worlds. Like The Palace at 4am, they suggest a whole world growing from a lap-sized space.

YD: I would like to get back to Schlemmer because, especially concerning his ballet, there are more striking similarities we haven’t yet mentioned. Just the title Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet) already indicates the structure of the three components it was built of. I read that just like Daria’s trilogy: it starts with a funny, burlesque scene, here all in yellow, then the Schlemmer stage becomes pink and in the end turns—again comparable with the trilogy—into black. Besides these formal analogies, it is most of all Schlemmer’s fascination with what he called “artificial figures,” which also seems evident in a different way in Soft Materials. But whereas Schlemmer’s fascination with progress and the machine age was not tainted by any doubts, the figures in Soft Materials seem to be both using and being used by the machines.

DM: Schlemmer created a kind of science of the body that was oddly irrational—an awkward fusion of art and mechanics. The performers usually appeared in baggy body suits padded in the hips and shoulders, almost exaggerating both their masculine and feminine attributes. Perhaps they were meant to represent androgynous “everyman” and “everywoman” but instead they looked like awkward aliens making mischief.

There was plenty of humour in the Bauhaus performances—mime acts and moustachioed masks and lots of staccato trotting around the stage. Schlemmer built his theatre around what he called the “play instinct.” The ridiculousness of his performances is difficult to reconcile with the seriousness of his diagrams, drawings, and paintings; there seems to have been a “split” there; he apparently felt that his performances were inferior to his paintings. You say that his optimism was untainted, but I think that there might have been a kind of secret, lingering doubt there; a doubt about how the presence of the real human body might corrupt the kind of unblinking faith he felt for his painting practice.

My first films set the performing body in relation to sculptural objects. At times the constructed environment around the performers—sets and props—almost appears as important as the human presence. And yet the sense of bodily frailty and fallibility is always hinted at. These films set up a parity between the delights of artifice—form, colour, sculptural space—and the complex nature/culture entity that is the human body.

Soft Materials was an experiment in introducing the vulnerability and tenderness of human flesh and feelings to animated yet man-made objects: robots. Working with scientists in the field of artificial intelligence seemed like a natural extension of my involvement with the notion of artifice.

BR: I find it quiet interesting that the robots you worked with for Soft Materials have a really old-fashioned aesthetic; they appear to refuse recent high-tech knowledge, and yet they also seem to work against the suspicion we have of post-mechanic machines/technologies. These robots also seem to refer again to a modernist, specifically a handmade, look and to early utopian concepts of the relationship between humans and machines, with an underlying dream of a functioning and an interaction between the two, which keeps humans “in power,” pre-sci-fi kind of. And these robots again remind me of early modernist dance props.

How did you find the AI (Artificial Intelligence) Lab at the University of Zurich, where you shot the film? What exactly where you looking for? (Funnily this all happened before our plan to do the show at Kunsthalle Zürich.) Can you also speak about the scientists’ ideas behind using these “old fashioned” models?

DM: AI is an emotionally loaded area in the popular imagination, and I wanted to remove the sense of fear of these objects, to move away from paranoid fantasies of machines taking over humankind and toward a far more open area of poetic and metaphoric possibility. I also wanted to keep this experiment somehow “grounded.” The robots at the AI lab at the University of Zurich appealed to me in part because they look, as you say, quite “low tech,” their parts held together with gaffer tape, plastic cogs, and wheels. In appearance, they reminded me a bit of the “new sculpture” coming out of Los Angeles recently—formal work made with DIY materials. The scientists at the lab work like artists; their desks are completely covered with raw material, a big mess. The lab is also very open to outsiders, making a policy of inviting professionals from other disciplines to visit the lab and this is how I found them.

What is fascinating about these creations is that, despite their rather rudimentary appearance, they actually represent the forefront of artificial intelligence research today. They are products of research into “embodied artificial intelligence,” a cutting edge field of AI that seeks to create robots that “learn” from their environment. Rather than being programmed in a purely pre-meditated, rational way, instead they evolve behaviours based on trial and error interactions with the real, physical world; they “feel” the world around them. Many of these robots are designed using animal morphology, and some develop the fluid, lively movements of animals. Others are less recognisable; for example, “Eyebot,” the robot in the film with multiple rod-like sensors, mimics the multifaceted perception of an insect eye.

Watching these robots in action, it is difficult not to anthropomorphise them, to imagine that they are experiencing a fundamental state of wonder, like a human infant. They caress, toddle, probe, bump into things. Their exploration of the world around them reminded me, oddly, of performance experiments of the 1960s—for example Carolee Schneemann’s works in which performers approached their environment in a state of unmediated directness. In Soft Materials I wanted to create a fiction in which the performers and the robots are each discovering, in an intimate and frank way, the existence of the other. So I asked two performers—one a dancer, the other an actress—to form a tender relationship with the robots, to enact scenes that were simple, even basic, in the manner of toddlers relating to their toys. In actual fact, the robots in the film are not physically responding to the performers; this is an illusion created by the two performances.

I suppose the film celebrates a kind of animism: the possibility of objects having life. The potential for robots to develop “real life” or “souls” is a huge object of fear in our culture, and the subject of countless post apocalyptic sci-fi movies. It is certainly within that cultural context that Soft Materials was made, but this is not a film about nightmares. Perhaps the film’s fictional world has something in common with the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s experiments with sculptural objects in the 1960s. In a complete perversion of ethics of both art and science, Clark used hand-made props to psycho-dynamically “treat” the viewer, who became her patient.

I don’t think that Soft Materials reiterates modernist ideals of a functional relationship between man and machine wherein “man” safely dominates. What seems the dominant element to me in the film is the performers’ receptivity and vulnerability. Of course, those characteristics are quintessentially human, and by fictionally endowing the robots with those qualities also, “humanity” does win out. One could say that the foregrounding of those qualities is part of a humanist, or perhaps feminist, sensibility.

YD: For me there is a certain tension when you present your films in the most precise way, using 16mm film rather than video to create a very high image quality and at the same time revealing, for example, the hand-made nature of the costumes, or in contrast to the high mannerist movements and looks of the actors showing a natural shy smile or direct glance into the camera. In this way you seem to reveal “the making of the film” a bit, and by doing so, using similar techniques Bertolt Brecht employed in his “epic theater” to stimulate a deeper intellectual involvement of the spectator. I mention this also because of Brecht’s strong belief in the social and political function of theater. Obviously there are themes like the social interaction of people or our relation to progress and the continuous development of technology, but in general you seem to avoid direct political issues, don’t you?

DM: The politics of the films lie in the way that they work with imagination and fantasy. I’ve always been woefully introverted and, frankly, like a lot of my generation, disconnected from active politics. But I am also very sensitive to the culture around me and painfully aware of how it impacts on my feeling of what is possible, of how the world can or might be perceived and received. It seems to me that we, in the accelerated high capitalist world, live in very fragmented times, and this fracturing has called up, as compensation, all sorts of commercialised visions of “authenticity” (the Apple ads, for example). Contemporary art can of course, in its shallower forms, just fill up, in a superficial way, that craving for authenticity: a collector buys a hand-made oil painting because it reminds him of a wholesome devotion to craft, for example. But of course, art also has the power to shift our perceptions of the world in subtle but intimate ways …

I hope that my work creates that shift by moving the viewer through fictions that are conceived and crafted in a way that is somehow distinct—distinct, at least, from mainstream images of fantasy. So much of the imagery we consume through TV, movies, video games, magazines, is ingeniously computer generated, and has that slick, impermeable, and ungrounded surface quality. In my work I want to bring dreams into the physical world, to embody projection. These “dreams” may be esoteric at times, but explicit flaws like shadows on the backdrop allow viewers both an entry point into and an escape route from that obscurity. The seams, holes, and outtakes that are woven through the process and into the product of filmmaking are roads into and out of the work; they allow the viewer the option of participating or leaving. There is something in common there with Brecht, of course, but mine is a much gentler kind of consciousness-prodding.

In the newest works, those overt references to the physical making of the films—the provisional costumes, the actors dropping poses—have mostly melted away and have been replaced by moments of vulnerability or self-referentiality that are more smoothly integrated into the works’ fictions. Actors, in a rather traditional way, often provide the point of entry, through revealing an emotion within the film’s fiction, or, even more literally, revealing their flesh. Performers also “act out” rituals or activities, which, in their discipline and creativity are not so different from the process of making art: athletes train or weave on looms, dancers perform a scientific experiment. In a sense, all of the films record scenarios that could be said to stand in for the art-making or film-making process. I would say that performing that process alone in this day and age is potentially political.

BR: Maybe we should go back for a moment to dance and film and the reactivating of the utopian aspiration to bring together the different art fields. This has not only been a theme in early modernism, but has also been an ongoing discourse since then, especially between film, dance, and sculpture. I’m thinking of Martha Graham and Isamu Noguchi, Merce Cunningham and John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg (especially his long lasting relationship with Charles Atlas to translate dance into film), Trisha Brown, Donald Judd, and so on. More recently Michael Clarke and Sarah Lucas are other examples among many others —but your work also brings to mind video clips for music, for example some of the dance related films of Chris Cunningham or his music clip for Björk which uses robot imagery. Do you think about any of these? How do you see the influence or development of this cross over  between media? And can you talk about utopianism, as you understand it?

DM: There’s a longstanding romance between art forms at least through the 20th century—writers looking at art, artists listening to musicians, fashion and art in mutual fascination. There’s always something about another medium, which seduces, the things it can do, which one’s own cannot. At the moment I’m amazed by the freedom and discipline of musicians improvising together onstage. That camaraderie, communication, and intense interdependence is virtually nonexistent amongst visual artists today, unfortunately.

My generation has come of age in a time that’s increasingly interdependent and hybrid on the one hand and increasingly fragmented and isolating on the other. It’s a paradox: so much information is at our fingertips, yet collective direction seems unclear. The hybrid art form—the “total artwork” or Gesamtkunstwerk that the Bauhaus celebrated—is all around us in commercial form: video clips, television, and especially films. Of course, even the most commercial Hollywood films integrate image, text, sound, and usually music; they are the legacy of Wagner’s opera. For my generation, coming of age in a time beyond postmodernism, a cross breeding between genres is completely taken for granted.

In my work I try to fold that interdisciplinary approach back into a more intimate and private realm, one where a kind of internal “utopia” can unravel. And so fantasising about past moments where this cross breeding has happened in a less commercialised way—Graham, Noguchi, Rauschenberg—is a way of finding some traction, of escaping from our contemporary culture’s slick version of Gesamtkunstwerk. My work seeks to reassemble this romance between the art forms, to backtrack in time and perhaps suggest a different method for those paths to be forged.

YD: Tell me about your personal background. I know that you were born in California 1973 and did your Master of Fine Arts at University of California in Los Angeles before moving to London in 2002 because of a studio grant at the Delfina Studios. Your first degree was a BA in Humanities. What were your subjects?

DM: Humanities was a major at Yale that attempted to survey the Western Canon, and its prime virtue was that it was completely cross disciplinary—we were encouraged to make connections between literature and philosophy, art history and music. I wrote my senior thesis about Joseph Cornell, the artist I mentioned earlier, and Emily Dickinson, who was one of his muses. Both Cornell’s boxes and Dickinson’s poems were like tinderboxes — incredibly compact and intense and loaded with obscure passions. Cornell dreamt about Dickinson and I dreamt about him. It was a lineage of repressed identification. I became more and more involved in researching the details of Cornell’s life — visiting his old friends, and so on — until I reached the end of that string and realised that actually I wanted to be an artist myself. Of course that realisation was liberating. With time I’m also becoming more interested in looking back towards the legacy of growing up in Northern California in the 1970s.

YD: You started with painting and only later turned to film. What were your reasons for changing media?

DM: Probably because I didn’t have the tools to create entire worlds within paintings, whereas there seemed to be endless possibility within the medium of film. Film as a medium is like a Cornell box: an empty container waiting to be filled with whatever one desires. I kept hitting the wall of opacity with paint on canvas, whereas there were layers of transparency in film, a medium perfect for moving with desire.