Kaba kaday! Every raindrop tells a story, can you feel the river flow?
In this final story, new activities focus on attempts to evidence a feeling of relational immersion that has minimal human control. Without human directionality, weather or water is foregrounded as a powerful co-performer, the textural experience indicating potential as an indexical way to knowing durational change.
To sum up, with-and-through Jarramali’s tutoring, I now find myself constantly feeling through the intimacies of relationship with which to make significant knowledge of climate. Registers of intimacy, whether they be skin, heartbeat, gastronomy, breath, shit, blood, sweat, pain, magnetic attraction and love, family and collective togetherness are often ‘crushed by the determining influence of all other scales’. Yet to Holmes, knowledge gained at the intimate register are a dangerous and ‘unpredictable force, a space of gestation, and therefore a wellspring of gesture, the biological spring from which affect drinks’ (Holmes, 2008).
Bringing a camera to bear on all this, at first my approach was to record interviews, b-roll of country and moments of spoken human-centric encounter, a qualitative approach adhering to tried and tested notions of detached observational documentary practice. But as I live and grow, my attunement with-and-through Jarramali evolves, I feel more and more submersed within the push and pull of his country’s multiple forces, including their relational demands on my imagination to be expressed and incorporated.
I ask myself how non-human worlds which ‘already have their own stories‘ may cinematically perform? I am learning to sense madja-ji as an orchestration performing and expressing itself because ‘expression unleashes affect and affect is what touches’ (Holmes, 2008).
In his writings about the body of the filmmaker, MacDougall (2005) considers that an image perceived in the body of the viewer is affected as much by the body behind the apparatus as the body in front of it. Clearly when attuned to notice it, the tripod or the filmmaker’s body is hard-baked into the cinematic body, their ‘residue’ a co-presence of agency, undisclosed knowledge and interaction (MacDougall, 2005, p. 26). This residue performs by exposing and complicating the viewer’s perception of place with-and-through the textures of the medium holding the camera, in the case opposite, me. In this way, the cinematic body is ‘fundamentally acquisitive of incorporating the body of others’ (Kara & Thain, 2014).
The GoPro takes this in-corpor-ation one step further.
Self-tracking technologies like body cameras and the experiences they generate are considered by Pink, Sumartojo, Lupton, & Heyes LaBond, as processes ‘open and leaky, experienced in ways that are always relational to others’ (2017, p. 379). In practice, this means that the ‘digital is not separate from other forms of experience in the world’, its traces making evident, connecting to and corresponding imaginatively as ‘part of the ecology of place in which they are made, record[ing] a trace [with-and-]through it, rather than a view of it’ (Pink, 2015, p. 243).
I share my ideas with an amused but open Jarramali. I want to try relinquish my directorial control and restrictive thinking over the camera eye, letting non-human forces shape an alternative performance of an encounter, a performance that attunes audiences to the mundane, and seemingly sensory void. I consider Jean Rouch’s shared anthropology and his pioneering participatory film method in Moi, un Noir (1958), one of sharing the camera with participants to enable differing viewpoints and voices.
Jarramali and I agree to include actualités of un[hu]manned intimate encounter in the work, no matter how mundane or mediocre. To let country’s forces and agency creatively be expressed as entangled with-and-through Jarramali, me, the structuring of the apparatus and the viewer. By removing as much of my influence as possible, I relinquish aspects of directorial agency in order to elicit a non-human kind of viewing perspective and to evidence what textures and felt experiences the assembly might perform or what it doesn’t.
We make a buoyed GoPro housing and one afternoon after a swim, we throw it in the creek, waiting for it downstream.
That night after dinner, we watch the creek footage.
The movement tells a subtle story of country – the rains-atmosphere-rivercourse-inhabitants-rock-gravity vectors and so on coming together in place with-and-through the GoPro. The gaze is not from a locked off tripod letting the world external unfold in a static or slowly panning frame, it is immersed and its gaze subject to the surrounding push-and-pull forces of that film-world. Jarramali immediately comments on the transparency of the water, its speed, its colour, its temperature, the fish nearby and the slime on the rocks present. It’s late Buluriji water.
We work on a sequence to capture a feeling for Kambar (wet season).
This kind of performative filmmaking matters to climate change research because it provides new sensory cinematic perspectives with which to imagine and think about those coalescing dynamics.
Rather than a detached view from the river bank (or a satellite), the camera provides an intimate trace with-and-through the creek (and down to the ocean) that cinematically touches and emplaces. In relational technique, it works with-and-through the body and the part it plays within of the bigger ecological body, what and how it knows and actions, and remembers.
As an apparatus of time capable of repetitious return and adaptation, the cinematic body is learning to feel with-and-through the seemingly void of non-human, the mundane chaos and intimately attune to the haptic realm.
To bring my point to conclusion, as Prigogine & Stengers (2018) argue, immersed with the chaos of entropy (growing spontaneous disorder), certain circumstantial processes of energy-matter can produce order. From this, Deacon (2003) amongst others have argued that evolving from certain special circumstantial orders (of energy-matter) are living processes or a mental process. These emerging mental processes build embodied and representational concepts of how a world works that in application can have a huge impact on causality of the surface of the Earth.
Is this a perceptive tool of ecological performativity? In its timeliness, this perception becomes a self-referential performative act, a recognition of the consubstantive relations of lived body and world. In this way, the GoPro trace offers a method through which to imaginatively awaken a sense of immersion in the climate system and consubstantive relations to any durational affects. For the learning body, a moving image that structures a feeling of being inseparable from an open climate system, builds strategies towards the perceptual practice of emplaced climate sensitivity.
“… afraid to forget their own mind, fearing to fall through the void with nothing on to which they can cling. They do not know that the void is not really the void but the real realm of things”.
— Huang Po - d.850