About Redacted Films: CoreCore & Other Prompts
As part of the Dialogues on corecore & the contemporary avant-garde, Dana Dawud (@dansdansrev) sat down with Redacted Cut (@redactedcut) to talk about Rng, the found-footage film project whose original trailer premiered at the corecore symposium and whose progress went on to tour as part of the Open Secret (@_opensecrett_) screening program.
Dana Dawud: What does corecore mean to you?
Redacted Cut: Corecore rings like a signal, a reversal of proposition. It sounds like a breaking with, or bouncing back, like adding oneself back to what one had subtracted from, a double negation where it is left to us to determine which logic we have to act upon or interpret as objects in themselves: the choice of doubling down or doubling up. It’s core movement is of dialectical nature, like the story of the soft shell of appearances and the hard truth of the kernel, although marked by a secondary unit, a kernel of the kernel.
Like most of us who have been contingently tied to the term, I was drawn to recollection and multiplicity in a hope to yield interesting research towards the refinement of some editing techniques within the immanently rich gap opened up by the formal device, while reflecting on an inherently musical driving mimetic force (playlists, samples, remixes, leitmotifs).
Dana Dawud: How did you come about making it?
Redacted Cut: I had some ideas regarding a found-footage only project and did not encounter the term nor the work that was trending at the time when I started experimenting around the same ideas. I was, like many others, indiscriminately collecting media and wrapping it around more intimate content. Personally, I wanted to see the rigidity of what was already there be counter-acted upon into my own diegesis, and expand it to longer, more compact forms. The process-based device finds a compelling framework in assemblage theory, yet the problems lie not in the theory, but in the fictions which seemingly fill in the void. There is no film without you, nothing without first the absolute decision of a post. So from the point of view of the timeline, it already is the merging or splitting of edits rather than one endless automated scroll. Another contemporary axiom I wanted to explore was the obsolescence of the classical position of the director, everything shrinking or expanding enough for agents to be their own channels, their own infinitely revisable final cuts. Internet is a place (and eventually, a place for placements, as in, product placements) where art is taken by force, so this might be a way to subtract or force art out of it’s own placement, to un-frame it rather than claiming any of its edges.
Dana Dawud: Why did you choose the RNG acronym for title and what does it mean to you?
Redacted Cut: First it is a reference to Random Number Generators, which broadly speaking are processes that generate sequences of numbers or symbols which can’t be reasonably predicted other than by pure chance. From this perspective, Rng is dedicated to a mallarmean eternity of chance at the heart of a restless struggle between metricity and free verse. It is improvisation, hazardous conglomerates randomly plucked out of disarticulated data pools in order to construct new composites. After the choice of flowers and pearls comes the bouquets and necklaces, where each flower is this or that bouquet. Sometimes it feels more like a game, like magnet letters or words on a fridge that have to make up sentences which, comedically, will somehow fit together sonically, between sensational spelling and cryptic language. I also like the idea that algorithms ‘work in mysterious ways’, where a particular activity seems chaotic and irrational but slowly draws with each new minimal hindsight a precise and thought-through radical order. Now, this overall strategy for modeling a projective and productive brute force might at first seem trivial, but I believe the faster you run into contradiction where problems in your system arise, the better you will be at patching through and finding what your own inventivity relies on.
There is another acronym which the title refers to, Relative Neighborhood Graph, a graph formed by the connection of a set of points, where two denoted points are linked by an edge. I use it to illustrate both this idea of contingent neighboring and the fact that in such a ‘flat’ view of the world, anything can be considered on an equal ontological footing, as equally accessible in a sort of all-you-can-feel. This can be quite misleading and can even predicate the very order of appearance preventing the modalities of antagonism to amount to something other than the decay and dissolution of negativity, of choices, etc. Indeed, the endurance of cultural virality (transported=transformed) and market seriality (connected=disconnected) makes up a logic of general equivalence where the democracy of objects outweighs and impeaches the rights of the infinite.
Dana Dawud: What is the aim of the page as a whole besides this film in the making?
Redacted Cut: I’m interested in working under the primacy of the editor in order to reorient and repurpose what’s too often considered lower forms of cinema, VJing, vlogs, wedding films, corporate ads… or of an even more radically different epistemic nature, playthroughs, the news, tutorials, montage parodies... everything which finally can be called grey cinema. This is deliberate widening forms a space of latency, a sandbox open-world hosting the claims to experiment various practices of montage, whether it be of metaphysical, phenomenological or historical usage. How to clip ideas and techniques, recollect them under local sections, blow them up into bigger ones and study how to glue these different scales together is the present imperative of Redacted Cut as a whole, towards editing as a creative endeavor beyond objects as such and objects for others: objects as fibers of cinematographical processes.
Rng is thus the beginning of an experimental playground, a laboratory of unrestricted abstractions within a fine-tuning langage model to generate constructive and repeatable iterations of expressive and material inferences I can use in my own filmmaking. It is a place to train rather than perform. Because ultimately, there is a need for such a place subtracted from the performance which brought us to it, if only for a second. And this may not be determined so much by the size of the screen rather than the degree to which one is being sat down. In fact, I do not believe in a lost excellence, nor do I believe in natural talent: right now, my focus is the elegance of some proofs stringed together by hand.