RIA is two different things. One is the live cinema event (known as RIA LIVE), and secondly, it is a short film (known as RIA).
Short film=OUR EYE AYE (RIA= Resonant Interval Algorythmns)
http://youtu.be/g5XWFxnlYNk WARNING - STROBE EFFECTS -please play loud.
(2013, 5 minutes) - Will Erokan & Gerry Fialka's exploration combines film detritus and sonic sleep extensions to probe the phantasmagorical rebirth of "live cinema."
Gerry Fialka’s article I WANT MY RIA was published in CANYON CINEMAGAZINE Issue #2 NON/FICTIONS edited by Courtney Fellon
http://canyoncinema.com/2012/12/01/canyon-cinemazine-receives-alternative-exposure-grant/
.AVAILABLE AUG 31, 2013
40pgs, vellum cover featuring a lightbox collage by Mark Street. With contributions from:
Claire Bain / Elizabeth Block / James Cleeland / Chris Cogan / Alex Edgeworth / Linda Fenstermaker / Gerry Fialka / Mathew Galindo / Bryan Konefsky & Basement Films / Toney Merritt / Daniel Mitchell / Albert G. Nigrin / Abraham Ravett / Bernard Roddy / Ken Paul Rosenthal / Russell Sheaffer / Mark Street / Julieta Triangular / Steve Wetzel / Lili White & AXWFF / Roger Wilson / David R. Witzling / John Woods / Mi Young
THE COMPLETE VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE – I WANT MY RIA by Gerry Fialka - FOLLOWS…
Thank you,
Will Erokan williebenign@gmail.com, and
Gerry Fialka 310-306-7330 PFSuzy@aol.com
bio https://www.laughtears.com/bio.html
https://www.laughtears.com/ and www.venice wake.org
Stills at http://www.flickr.com/photos/59473002@N07/sets/72157632596865364
and https://laughtears.com/hi-res-pics.html
I WANT MY RIA by Gerry Fialka
Stan Brakhage would say, “Let the work speak for itself,” and then talk for 2 hours about it. Larry Gottheim explored this paradox in a recent interview. This essay expresses my struggle to deal with that dichotomy in probing the motives and consequences of RIA, a short film-video installation and a "live cinema" multi-media event. When David James invited me to screen my other films at his USC "Cinematheque 108" series, my co-creator, Bay Area filmmaker Will Erokan and I decided to make a preview trailer for RIA LIVE. In doing so, we came up with RIA: the short film as a trailer, a rare beast in the world of avant garde film.
RIA morphed into a promulgation. Or as James Joyce finneganeased "manifesto" into "mamafeasta," RIA is a "living organism" that mothers and feeds our art. "I want my Maypo" metamorphosed into "I want my MTV." I want our Resonant Interval Algorythmns to transform into "OUR EYE AYE." And hEARs how...
We are trying to get more control over our spontaneity in the making of RIA, which zooms close-up on the human eye, as seen in Bunuel & Dali's Un Chien Andalou, Vertov's Man With The Movie Camera, Frank Zappa's 200 Motels and more. We dwell on the Ludovico treatment from A Clockwork Orange, which originated in the novel by Anthony Burgess, who was directly influenced by James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
The Wake turns the eye into an ear via Finneganese (language about language): "Television kills telephony in Brothers’ broil. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen," and "what can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved fore."
James Joyce called himself a trickster: "Jameymock farceson...the cribibber like an ambitrickster...pseudojocax." Even faux faux-tribulator Craig Baldwin has quipped, "I think that RIA thang is a bit of a scam."
Peter Greenaway presaged the complex clairvoyance of Erokan's birth on September 30, 1983 by declaring "Cinema's death date was 31 September 1983, when the remote-control zapper was introduced to the living room, because now cinema has to be interactive, multi-media art." The retrocausality of this non-existent date renders an effect-precedes-cause half-truth... and as Marshall McLuhan said, "A half truth is still alot of a truth."
RIA explores and re-explores the sensory simultaneity of integral awareness (IA being the flip of AI - artificial intelligence) in passing through the vanishing point when seeing oneself both as oneself and as the other. It may be the death and rebirth of agraRIAn, antiquaRIAn, appropRIAtion, AquaRIAn, bacteRIA, Ave MaRIA, barbaRIAn, vaRIAnce, euphoRIA, extraterrestRIAl, grammaRIAn, phantasmagoRIA and AbdeRIAn laughter, the laughter of rustic simpletons who would scoff at anything or anyone they do not understand.
RIA: a drowned river valley that remains open to the sea. This evokes the many names of rivers in the Wake, streaming into Frank Zappa's "The ocean is the ultimate solution." Oceans of sensory over-load flood the remote viewing capabilities of the phantom spectator, who must either sink or swim in this Menippean Gesamtkunstwerk.
RIA's magnetic tape manipulations flow like the moving image art of Nam June Paik, whose studio was compared to a television repair shop three months behind schedule. The content and form deluge the bay area in its hidden ground: Silva Mind Control: 1-Beta (waking state), 2-Alpha (light sleep, intuition), 3-Theta (deeper sleep, meditation), and 4- Delta-(deep sleep, unconscious).
Robert Dobbs' Tiny Note Chart helped cloudburst the birth of RIA with his detailing the "Fourth World" as the "GAIA State" in "a chain letter of phase-shifts." We are walking on the waters of, or better yet, barefootin' "the hexad(vertisement)" by merging and clashing the "kinetic-cosmic-acoustic" figure with the "proprioceptive-visual" ground. Dobbs talks about the Android Meme: humans imitating the hidden psychic effects of our inventions.
This resonates in RIA when random film images communicate with conversation (phatic talk) - a new character arises. In McLuhan's first book The Mechanical Bride, he posits the ads and comics as characters in a new form of science fiction. Room 237 interviewee Juli Kearns says the window of the Overlook Hotel's office in Kubrick's The Shining is “a character in itself."
How the audiences use the art can also be a third character: "user as content" per McLuhan.
On the other hand, Phil Solomon, self-proclaimed "professional avant-garde filmmaker," says "The act of making art is not communication. As Suzanne Langer has told us, 'art is not discursive.' The act of creating art for me is originally and primarily between myself and the work at hand - an expression, a meditation of form, a mediation of ideas. What happens afterward is anybody's guess. The relationship between the work and the 'audience' (who are, indeed, everchanging and ever changing) is (hopefully) unpredictable and alive with each person's own psyche, physiology, and experience. How could I possibly speak for anybody else? So when I present the work to the public, at least in my case, I am no longer the artist, but the good host - my job as an artist was over when I signed off on the work and released it out into the world, a message in a bottle hoping to land ashore."
The character of RIA is quadrivial. In The Dictionary of Symbols, authors Chevalier & Gheerbrant articulate the importance of fourness (a major reoccurrence in RIA): "Almost from prehistoric times, the number four was employed to signify what was solid, what could be touched and felt. Its relationship to the cross (four points) made it an outstanding symbol of wholeness and universality, a symbol which drew all to itself." Four is the sacred number of the Zia, an indigenous New Mexico tribe. Cancer can be described as the body's inability to remove waste in four ways: poop, pee, perspiration and respiration. Phew!
More fourness in RIA:
Ritual, Art, Science and Technology.
Four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter.
Four Greek classical elements & alchemy: fire, air, water, earth.
Four cardinal directions: north, south, east, west.
Four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.
Aristotle's four causes in nature: the efficient cause, the matter, the end and the form.
Kabbalah: Pshat (the direct interpretation of meaning), 2-Remez (the allegoric meaning), 3- Derash (midrashic meaning, often with imaginative comparisons of similar words), 4- Sod- (the inner metaphysical meaning).
Exegesis, which is the act of interpreting or explaining in four levels: literal, allegorical, moral, and eschatological.
Michael Pollan's four types of food cooking: fire, water, air, earth.
Many symphonies are tonal works in four movements, which parallels T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.
Joyce structured Finnegans Wake with Giambattista Vico cycles: 1- divine age, 2-heroic age, 3- human age, 4- the end of the old cycle and the beginning of the new, recorso, coda, confusion.
Andrzej Duszenko wrote that Joyce "identified the four dimensions of timespace with The Four Old Men of Finnegans Wake: Matthew Gregory, Mark Lyons, Luke Tarpey and Johnny MacDougal, who at different times may appear as The Four Evangelists, the Irish historians of The Annals of the Four Masters , the four provinces of Ireland, and several other tetrads." Joyce wrote: "Our four avunculists....their fourdimmansions."
Vico is usually credited with being the first to identify metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony as the four basic tropes.
McLuhan described 4 epochs of history: 1- oral tribal culture, 2- manuscript culture, 3- Gutenberg galaxy, and 4- electronic age.
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity's Rainbow is divided into four parts: 1- Beyond the Zero, 2- Un Perm' au Casino du Hermann Goering, 3 - In the Zone (a transitional phantasmagoria, by its pure nature liminal, a maze of wind and reeds in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker and the early datamoshing in Chris Marker's Sans Soleil), and 4- The Counterforce.
Turning our stumbles into the RIA transcenDance, we get knee-deep in the swamp muck. Napoleon said that mud is the fifth element. Our mud (Multi-User Divergency) mambos musicality by correctly misspelling the word "algorithms" (the new tool that practically runs the world) as "algorythmns." Get on the good foot. Jump back and kiss your own resonating interval.
ALL-AT-ONCENESS -
Film Title Tetrad Quadrivium Finnegans Wake-Joseph Campbell Elements Aristotle Brothers-Sisters WasteRemoval
RIA enhancement arithmetic 1=book of forgotten past fire end Miranda-John respiration
RIA TWO obsolescence geometry 2=book of the present earth form Will-Nancy perspiration
RIA THREE retrieval astronomy 3=book of desired future water efficient cause Darcy-Gerry pee
RIA FOUR reversal music 4=book of the future air matter Laney-Janice poop
QUESTIONS -
"How about technologies as the collective unconscious and art as the collective unconsciousness?" - Marshall McLuhan
"To be is to interrogate the Labyrinth of a question that contains no answer." - Edmond Jabes
RIA connotes Amos Vogel’s 1974 book Film as a Subversive Art. Dennis Lim's 2-3-13 NY Times article sums it up: "A mind-expanding compendium of cinematic radicalism — from silent-era comedy to antiwar agitprop, avant-garde experiments to hard-core provocations — it is an idiosyncratic bid to create an anticanonical canon. Subversive cinema shows its viewers new worlds and new ways of seeing the world...'Art can never take the place of social action,' he wrote in Film as a Subversive Art, 'but its task remains forever the same: to change consciousness.' In the final paragraph he revealed what he took to be the book’s true subject: 'human freedom.'....Vogel’s taxonomy of transgression...Tacked to the wall of his home office is a quotation from the German writer Günther Eich: 'Be sand, not oil, in the machinery of the world.'...'It is in the nature of subversion that its perpetrators should be subverted in turn,' he wrote. Idealistic and humble enough to call a book that represented the culmination of his life’s work 'a rough draft,' Vogel, it’s safe to assume, would want Film as a Subversive Art remembered not just as an alternate history of cinema but also, and more important, as an expression of faith in its future."
Jay Rosenblatt told me that what most impressed him about Chris Marker was how he imaged Marker made San Soleil. We imagine how the RIA character will create live cinema. "I remember the images I filmed.... They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape. How has mankind managed to remember? I know: it wrote the Bible. The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed." - Sans Soleil by Chris Marker, who said:“I betrayed Gutenberg for McLuhan long ago.” Resonate that gap, homey.
In the spirit of "Expanding Cinema" (the name of Mary Ellen Bute's production company for her feature Passages From Finnegans Wake), and Gene Youngblood's seminal book Expanded Cinema, RIA's oscillating orchestration of time and space is a call to "expand cinema." Joyce dropped the apostrophe from the song Finnegan's Wake to title his novel Finnegans Wake. He was broadcasting: "Hey all you Finnegans...WAKE UP !" We are cheering for all the Canyon Cinema community to "EXPAND CINEMA !"
...fin...again...
Special thanks to Phil Solomon, Gene Youngblood, Larry Gottheim, Leighton Pierce and Bart Weiss for their recent interviews. They helped alot. Many available here- http://archive.org/search.php?query=fialka
Gerry Fialka is a genuine fake experimental filmmaker and conceptual artist. Join Fialka & Will Erokan for RIA in SF and Oakland, 2013 https://www.laughtears.com/
Oct 17, Thurs, 8pm - RIA LIVE with special guests V. Vale & Rock Ross) & Lake Shrine Lecture at New Nothing Cinema 16 Sherman St (off Folsom between 6th & 7th), San Fran CA 94103, phone 310-306-7330. FREE ADMISSION
Oct 18, Fri, 8pm - Winston Smith interview (and rare film clips) at Oddball Film 275 Capp St, San Fran CA 94110, 415-558-8112, rsvp info@oddballfilm.com, www.oddballfilms.blogspot.com $10
Oct 19, Sat, 8pm - RIA LIVE at Oakland’s Krowswork Gallery Will Erokan, Gerry Fialka & guests, 480 23rd Street (side entrance), Oakland CA 94612, 510-229-7035, FREE ADMISSION
More stills available http://www.flickr.com/photos/59473002@N07/sets/72157632596865364
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