Return to: ATA Film & Video Festival 2008: Program 2
Nocturnal Transmission
Carl Diehl, in person - 2007, 3', analog/digital video, Portland, OR
Questions with Carl Diehl
Elizabeth Wing: Can you tell us, in a nutshell, some of the philosophies about electronics and technology that inform your work?
Carl Diehl: I'm provoked by the premise of obsolescence, inspired by the concepts and implementation of adaptive re-use (literally/figuratively), generally interested in noise as a previously imperceptible signal. I'm fascinated by the curious gestures of malfunction and how those glitches can be re-activated in service of more or less intentional trajectories. This combined with editing, of course. Editing as the collision of worlds, like Dziga Vertov, the CERN particle collider, or certainly Craig Baldwin's collage-essays.
EW: How did you know how big that remote control should have been?
CD: Well, see, I didn't create that particular video sequence , that one was constructed and recorded by the mad technologist Jesse England (see below)
EW: In 2006 you successfully sold "memorable anecdotes" of secondhand/thrift shopping on Ebay. How much did they sell for, and what was the buyer like?
CD: In actuality those anecdotes didn't get sold, the transcription process was halted, the memories remain immaterial.
EW: Anything else you wish to tell us about your work?
CD: Nocturnal Transmission emerged from a live audio-visual mix that was created by a group I was in called The JiRCs. We created real-time 'edits,' or really more like conversations, carried out via analog video mixers, switchers and clips manipulated with digital software, cameras etc. In this context each "JiRC" contributed to the visual conversation by manipulating particular clips from their own archive. In one of the scenes mentioned previously, Jesse England offered the dinosaur-size remote control, another JiRC replied with Godzilla movie rejects. I was running the switcher, with additional feedback loops, coalescing and staggering curious kinetic collages. A fourth JiRC processing audio. All this activity was essentially improvisational.
Later, in the normal editing process, I extracted the 'godzilla/remote conversation' which seemed to me to suggest looming obsolescence, combined with a previous mix of electricity, phone calls, transmission motifs. Another instance of adaptive re-use, fine-tuned and corralled towards a vaguely narrative structure with the interspersed close-up of the groggy ghoul (this from my own archive of high school era productions)
Carl Diehl is artist and curator compelled by the vocabularies inherent in various A/V media. Particularly the curious gesture of malfunction. He is currently persuing blobsquatch in Portland, Oregon while retaining fond memories of his ATA roots.
Last updated 09/22/2008.
