Michael Filimowicz: Interworld

The flux of experience is typically characterized by artists and thinkers as an undifferentiated continuum of sensuous particulars, haphazard, unorganized, a “raw stuff” to be ordered and structured by our sense organs and the cognitive structures of the mind.

Filimowicz’ video is named after Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the ‘interworld’ and seeks to counter the traditional notion of flux. It is based on a phenomenological investigation in which flux is explored not as a random sequence of unstructured percepts, but rather as a concatenation of rhythms.

Even at the level of raw sensory perception there is a high degree of repetition at work, and these repetitions overlap. Not only are there the repetitions of the body- breathing, blinking, heart beats, walking, chewing, and the perception of wavelengths of light and sound (regularly repeating and thus identifiable) but the environment is also ordered in layers of repeating vectors- dawn and dusk, seasonal changes, waves crashing into a beach, the repeated calls of animals and insects.

Interworld is composed of very brief fragments of overlapping visual pulses- each pulse being a momentary articulation of the body. This work engages in something of a temporal polemic with the approach to time and change found in Brakhage’s work, which so often ignores the minute repetitions to be discovered in even the most fleeting of perceptual experiences.

Bio:

Michael Filimowicz is an interdisciplinary artist working in the areas of sound, experimental video, creative writing, internet art, public art and digital photography. He is the convener of the Cinesonika conference and festival, and is on the faculty in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University.