This evening I would like to speak about three installation works I've made over the last ten years, but this being a symposium on the subject of narration, I'd like to begin at the beginning with a work from 1986 called "Overture," which was a self-conscious beginning or opening to various concerns that would preoccupy me for the following decade. "Overture" is a film installation which incorporates two basic elements — the narrative voice-over that's derived from the opening pages or overture to Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and fragments taken of film footage shot by the Edison Film Company between 1889 and 1901 in the Rocky Mountains in Canada.
In his overture, Proust emblematically identifies voluntary memory, involuntary memory and habit, notions which are the conceptual engines that drive the huge novel. But as far as my overture is concerned they present the opposition between human time and mechanical time. Human time being mutable: people grow, become adults, they get old, they die. Whereas the function of machines, the very purpose of machines is to repeat, to be as self-identical as possible. For Proust, voluntary memory is the more mechanical or instrumental form of memory. It is the recollection of a past event that one can do wilfully for a particular purpose. Whereas involuntary memory has a direct relation to the unconscious when, for example, it intrudes on everyday routine and a memory is returned to one in a manner that is somehow beyond their control. This is the moment when habit, the third of the three Proustian categories, is disrupted. Habit being the mirror of custom which shields one from what Beckett called an "apprehension of the real," or radical different in the realisation of one's mortality or an apprehension of the world's indifference to human will.
As I had mentioned before, the film material was shot by the Edison Company at the turn of the century as part of a series of films called "Panoramic Views." This is a period before the system of narrative cinema was established, and all a film had to do to sustain an audience was to represent an exotic event, an extraordinary event or some exotic "elsewhere". In this case we're seeing scenes of the Canadian landscape in the Rocky Mountains. They had mounted a flatbed on a train going over canyons and through mountains. What you see in my film is the train coming out of a tunnel, traversing a section of track and entering another tunnel — and these moments of darkness is where I suture my loop – throughout which one witnesses one machine's view of another machine's trip through a landscape.
"Overture" combines a film from the prehistory of narrative cinema, before it was established as the primary means of industrial story-telling in this century, accompanied by a voice-over from a novel that recounts the decline of bourgeois Europe. So we're seeing and hearing scenes of virtually the same moment. There's a coincidence with this work as well in that all the images are from the Library of Congress's paper negative collection. Before there was a stable film base in order to copyright a film they had to photograph each frame of the film onto a sheet of paper. So the film actually composed a book with as many pages as Proust's novel, and in order to make the film they had to rephotograph each page of the book onto film once again to make the film you're about to see.
I'd like to run a clip of this film and there will be a simultaneous translation in the second half, but I'll make some remarks about it as it's playing in the background.

When "Overture" is installed in a gallery, the looping 16mm film is seen as a ten-foot high projection. It's composed of three different segments of film, repeated once and combined with six different fragments of the Proustian text. Just as there's a repetition in the film material, there are subtle repetitions in the text; certain combinations of words are used over again to giving the audience the impression that maybe they've perhaps seen the section before, and maybe they've been watching the loop for a lot longer than they think. This relates to the manifest subject of the text, which is a voice from which I've withdrawn the specifics of character and narrative, so that we just hear his uncertainties as to whether he's asleep or awake, dreaming or actually witnessing what he thinks he's witnessing. And this, of course, has a relation to viewing the work because the images are very large and very consuming, you're drawn into its linear single-point perspective which is constantly moving forward, however, when the screen goes black it's as if you return to yourself, your body.

1. When I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself: "I'm falling asleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and blow out the light. My body, too heavy with sleep to move, would endeavour to construe from the pattern of its tiredness the position of its various limbs, in order to deduce therefrom the direction of the wall, the location of the furniture, to piece together and give a name to the house in which it lay.

2. At the same time, my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness. Pleasant and restful enough for my eyes, but even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without cause. I would strike a match to look at my watch—nearly midnight—certainly I was now well awake, but my brain, lingering in cognition over when things had happened and what they had looked like, showed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller is hurrying toward a nearby station.

3. Nearly midnight. The hour when an invalid who has been obliged to set out on a journey and to sleep in a strange hotel, awakened by a sudden spasm, sees with glad relief a streak of day light showing under his door. Thank God it is morning! He can ring, and someone will come to look after him. The thought of being assuaged gives him strength to endure his pain. He is certain he heard footsteps: they come nearer, and then die away. The ray of light beneath his door is extinguished. It is midnight; someone has just turned down the gas.

4. When I awoke in the middle of the night, I could not even be sure at first who I was; for it always happened when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years. These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted more than a few seconds; it often happened that in my brief spell of uncertainty as to where I was, I did not distinguish the various suppositions of which it was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope.

5. I had lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep. This impression would persist for some moments after I awoke; it did not offend my reason, but lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented me from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. I lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils flaring, my heart beating; finally, the ignorance of a waking moment had, in a flash, if not presented me with a distinct picture, at least persuaded me of the possible presence of a room in the uncertain light.

6. I would fall asleep again and, thereafter, would reawaken for short snatches only: just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or to open my eyes to stare at the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness; to savour, in a momentary glimmer of consciousness, the sleep which lay heavy upon the furniture, the room, the whole of which I formed but an insignificant part and whose insensibility I should very soon return to share.


The next work I'd like to speak about is a work from 1993 called "Pursuit, Fear, Catastrophe: Ruskin, B.C.". This takes the form of a more traditional cinematic experience using a presentation strategy of screen practice from the early part of the 20th century, specifically, the silent cinema which combined film projection with some sort of musical accompaniment. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. I'd like to begin by discussing the subject of the work.
A lot of my projects begin with an investigation of a particular place and then I devise a story or response related to the situation in which I'm working. In this case, it was a small town outside of Vancouver, the city where I live, called Ruskin.
Could I have the first slide please?
Now, Ruskin used to be a town and now basically it's an in-between, when I asked a woman working at a gas station on the site of the old post office for a map of Ruskin, she replied, "A map of Ruskin? Ruskin is just not Mission and not Maple Ridge!" This district was, nevertheless, named Ruskin in the late 19th century, in 1896, when a group of people wanting to establish a utopian community based on the notions of the conservative British socialist John Ruskin bought a parcel of land on the Stave River where it meets the Fraser. John Ruskin is of course the author of "The Art of Modern Painters," the English art critic who was an early supporter of the English Romantics. But he also had peculiar notions about the organisation of societies within the sphere of his nation's Empire, for example, education would be the privilege of people living in urban centres, people living in rural areas would have limited access to education and technology.
In spite of his various prohibitions against technology, the Ruskinians in British Columbia wanted to finance their operation by running a lumber mill. This ran for exactly one and a half years until the Stave River dried up one particularly dry summer and, as they were unable to get lumber to mill, their factory was repossessed by their creditors, the EH Heaps Company. Five years later Heaps went bankrupt and their huge operation was parcelled off into small companies which tried to make a go off it at Ruskin. These lasted approximately another five years until they too went bankrupt. The area around Ruskin was vacant until around 1914 when a group of Japanese berry farmers — who were barred from having any kind of professional work or business in Vancouver-proper by legislation specifically excluding Asians —were able to move to Ruskin and cultivate profitable farms. These people flourished for the next number of years until Canada joined the Second World War and all Japanese were identified as "enemy aliens" and taken to prisoner of war camps in interior British Columbia and the neighbouring prairie provinces of Canada. At which point the descendants of the original Ruskinians were able to re-buy the land owned by the Japanese at a very low price.
In the meantime, from the turn of the century, the BC Electric Company was purchasing or otherwise acquiring large parcels of land in the area and developing a three-tiered hydroelectric power complex that would culminate with the Ruskin Plant. So this region was in many ways emblematic of the whole history of B.C., the history of people coming to establish utopian ventures in remote areas — often based on religious, political or ethical ideals (or flight from coincident persecutions) — that would exist for short periods of time and would be eventually compromised by the intrusion of heavy industry.
The structure of the work as well as its soundtrack comes out of sheer coincidence.
At the very moment this power plant was being built in this remote area of B.C., Arnold Schönberg was, in Berlin, composing a piece of music for an imaginary film, "Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene." Of course the year of this composition was 1929, exactly two years after the invention of sound film, so he was composing something that was instantaneously obsolete, a utopian gesture which in a way was parallel to the utopian system of music he was devising in the 12-tone compositional method. The 12-tone system of composition wanted to "liberate" dissonance in harmonic music, it wanted to make each note of the tempered scale of equivalent in value, so there would be no hierarchical centre or keynote in a piece of music.
Schönberg of course was Jewish, working in Germany, so in the 30s he was forced out of his position at the art academy in Berlin, eventually moved to Paris and then ultimately the United States. He could not get his savings out of Germany and had to eventually make his money teaching composition to hack composers who would write scores for Hollywood movies using atonal techniques to bluntly indicate fear or anxiety in horror films or science fiction films, for example.
The music is written in three thematic sections — Pursuit, Fear and Catastrophe — and these structure the central portion of the film installation that I made. There's a silent prologue where certain characters are established and it's determined that one of the characters has disappeared, somebody who works at the power plant in Ruskin. A lie is told by this man in a hospital bed and once the lie is told the music begins. He suggests that he was stabbed by a Japanese man in the woods who was trying to rob him and the police perform a perfunctory investigation of the incident, confronting the roommate of the absent one using his sole piece of evidence, a hat, determining that the man had died, by drowning. Ruskin is basically a detective story, centred around an absent character, accompanied by a computer-controlled piano that's appears to be controlled by an absent pianist. And here now is a clip from "Pursuit, Fear, Catastrophe: Ruskin B.C."

(the film's titles are read aloud, in Italian, to the audience)

So after this scene the police come and give their official account. Theodore does his own investigation. Once he finds out what really happened to his roommate the music ends and there's a silent epilogue as he sneaks into the police station at night by short-circuiting the security system you saw there and takes a piece of evidence, that would incriminate the constabulary, however, because of his social status, is unlikely that he would be able to do anything with it.

The last work I'd like to talk about tonight returns to the loop format, however, film loop in "Der Sandmann" from 1995 is more like a Mobius Strip. This work was conceived in the year that I spent living in Berlin and everything around it is set in this area of what used to be East Germany, specifically, in the city of Potsdam. Something I found quite fascinating, and quite peculiar, when I first arrived in Germany was the phenomenon of what popularly known as Schrebergärten. Their official name is Kleingärten which is the German name for allotment gardens. You can find "colonies" of these gardens throughout the country next to industrial sites, railway tracks, highways, abandoned army bases, etc. and the tiny garden plots of which they are composed can number anywhere between ten and five thousand. Typically they measure five metres by three metres and contain a small shack, or Laube, and a patch of soil in which people would plant flowers, plant vegetable gardens and sometimes little fantasy worlds.
But the garden system has a history going back to the early 19th century when people from rural areas were brought to the cities in order to staff industrialisation. The allotments began in Kiel, I believe, where workers were given small plots of land in which they were meant to grow vegetables to offset their food requirements. Similar gardens were used later in the 19th century as a form of social welfare, and of course they had a crucial function in the post-war period after the First and Second World Wars, feeding a war-ravished country.
What interested me was an event that took place in the middle of the 19th century when a peculiarly bourgeois form of these gardens appeared in Leipzig when a man named Ernst Hausschildt proposed that state land should also be used for children's recreation to offset the effects of industry. He proposed that children should be given a small green space where they could do exercises based on those devised by Moritz Schreber who was also working in Leipzig but had died two years previously. But only two years after the first Schreber association or Schreberverein had been established in Leipzig the children apparently had lost interest, and adults used the gardens for their own personal pleasure. Suddenly there were six more Schrebervereins in Leipzig and throughout northern Germany there were hundreds of these organisations, which was basically a way for the middle class to get access to state lands.
Now, Moritz Schreber would be an obscure figure if not for the colloquial usage of this name, but also for the writings of his son, Paul. Schreber the elder had certain notions of children's physical education which also included inventing devises such as the upright-holder that would pull at a child's neck and hair if they slouched at the dinner table or rubber pants would be worn at night-time so children couldn't masturbate — and all of his children had mild to sever psychological problems.
Paul Schreber's notorious work was called Memoirs of an Insane Man in which he laid out his theology based on Norse mythology; giving advice on how to erase the souls of people walking by you on the street; how to prevent tiny men from sucking out your spinal marrow while you slept; but his most complex fantasy was where he explained how God was slowly transforming him into a woman so that he could become pregnant and bear God's child.
Almost the entire edition of Schreber's book was confiscated by the Schreber family as soon as it was published, but one copy fell into the hands of Sigmund Freud who developed his theory of paranoia based on Schreber's writing, and the notion that one single kernel of untruth can develop a very elaborate system of paranoid fantasy. There's another Freud connection too in this work as much as the work takes its name from the romantic novel or short story by E.T.A. Hoffman called "Der Sandmann" which Freud used to introduce his short essay "The Uncanny" of 1914. The German title of this essay is "Das Unheimliche" which literally means "the unhomey" referring to things which have a quality of alienated familiarity to them. Freud makes an analogy between this effect and the process of repression, "the 'un' is the token of repression" he says.
E.T.A. Hoffman's "Der Sandmann" is in a way a story of doubles: every character, every event has a double somewhere in the tale. The Döppleganger, was of particular interest to me in relation to the structure I used to make the installation. The installation itself is based on this photo that I took of a Schrebergärten using the other features that you would find in the East German garden plots. It was very important that they kept these gardens, it was such an important cultural phenomenon that there were a few situations where family property was maintained in East Germany, but I was working with the various construction materials: plants, fences, and buildings that you see in these photos. Using that as a model and that painting I showed briefly by Adolf Menzel called "Hinterhaus und Hof," we constructed this fictitious Schrebergärten in a film studio.

This studio was built by Ufa in the early 1920s which of course was the same company that produced those famous gothic films such as "Caligari" and "Metropolis," but later it produced Nazi films in Nazi time and it was transformed into DEFA in the DDR period. One model for my work was a film produced by Ufa early in the century called "The Student From Prague" which was produced three times: in 1913, 1926 and 1936. Even though it has literary precedents in Hoffman and Poe, in way you could say that the story was inspired by a technical possibility, that of being able to make a double image on the screen. This is an effect I'm sure you've all seen, when they shoot a character on one half of the image, roll the film back and shoot the same character on the other half of the image so that you can have the character talking to himself. Now, if you roll the video I can describe to you how I made my own Döppleganger.
Everything was shot in film, a 360 degree pan of the studio made by a motion-control or a computer-controlled camera. It pans around the space and is able to move from left to right, move up and down exactly the same way every time for every take. The two sets were we built, depicting two different times, were shot with exactly the same camera motion. These two films were put end to end and put into film looping devices. So each film has the same spatial material twice but they're presented from two projectors one rotation of the space out of phase. One half of the image is cut off on one side, one half on the other side, and they match together in the middle of the screen. So what we have in effect is a temporal wipe instead of a wipe where a line comes across and makes one image become another image, it's a wipe in time where the line stays in one place and as it pans around the old gets wiped away by the new, and as it rotates the new gets wiped away by the old. So it's the same space occupied by two temporal realities. This has a relation to what happened to the character on screen, the only character you see aside from the narrator, Nathanael, is the Sandman, a demon from the Nathanael's childhood fantasy. In some cases the Sandman becomes a double of himself as he moves around his garden, and in opposing rotation, which you'll see in a moment he actually disappears from the scene. This uncanny effect underlines a story about an uncanny recollection by the character Nathanael who sees this man, the Sandmann, working in the garden, doesn't understand why it bothers him and discovers later on that there's been a system of repression working on him.

Nathanael
Dear Lothar,
It's been ages since I've written: You've got to be wondering what happened to me! And Klara, I'm sure, will think I'm up to no good. After months of travelling, I thought I should take a break — and that there would be no better place than the scene of our shared childhood. But maybe not. Something's wrong here. I'm not sure what it is, but places that once simply looked old now seem sinister. And even this attempt to describe my disorientation sounds pathetic as soon as I see it on the page in front of me.
I should get right to the point and tell you what happened. Although the mere thought of it makes me laugh — and if you were here to see my "nemesis," you'd think I was joking! Anyway, a few days ago I was walking beside the large Kolonie a few streets from where we used to live when I was seized by an overwhelming sense of dread. Its cause? This is the strange part. It was nothing more evil than an old man working in his Schrebergarten. To be sure, he was a weird-looking old man, but it was the whole scene that got to me, it was like I had seen it all before. He shifted and organised piles of sand, while brewing something strange in a large pot. I stood there staring, for I don't know how long, until he sent me on my way with a threatening look.
What is it, Lothar, about this character that I find so disturbing? That's the thing I just can't figure out. But I do know that my fear and my uneasiness has an origin somewhere in our childhood in Potsdam. This is why I am writing you: What is this strange old creature to me?

Lothar
Dear Nathanael,
What is he to you? How could you forget the "Sandman"? Nothing and no one scared us as much as Herr Coppelius! Don't you remember? We were obsessed by him because of the cruel tale my brother once told me. I asked my brother what kind of man the Sandman was. He looked at me sideways then scoffed, "Oh Lothar, don't you know that yet? He comes to children when they won't to go to bed and throws handfuls of sand into their eyes 'till they bleed and pop out of their heads! Then he throws the eyes into a huge sack and takes them to the dark side of the moon … where he feeds them to his own children … who sit in a nest … and have crooked beaks like owls!" I confided in you, but we were afraid to ask anyone else about this creature. We knew Coppelius was the Sandman.
Finally, we conspired to invade his garden and liberate the eyes we thought he kept hidden in his burlap sacks. We snuck out after bedtime one night and stole into the garden. Seconds after entering, you nudged me, "Hey, look! That bush over there looks like its coming toward us!" It was. And it was also coughing, and scraping, and talking to itself as it came: The dreaded Sandman had returned. Bearing his teeth, he bleated, "Little beasts!" Then ran us out of his yard hurling stones at us and curses at our families.
And this you have forgotten?

Klara
Dear Nathanael,
It's true you haven't written for a long time, but it seems I'm still on your mind — why else would you have addressed Lothar's letter to me? I must confess I realised your mistake as soon as I saw "Dear Lothar" — and I should have resealed the envelope then and there — but I read it anyway …
I gave your letter to Lothar in person, and you will be annoyed to hear that we talked about you all night! Our conversation brought back things that I hadn't thought about for years. Like, when we were young, there wasn't much that really frightened you, only two of the most unlikely things: This Sandman of yours and the sound of a water heater igniting. In a playful mood uncle Siggy once told us that the tiny blue flame was a devil trapped inside; and that that "whoosh" of the heater igniting was the sound of the devil trying to escape. I understood your wince when you heard that sound — but I had no idea who your Sandman was until Lothar explained him to me. Even when you refused to watch those puppets on TV, I thought you were just too "grown-up" for that childishness — but later in the evening when mother used to say, "Okay, off to bed! The Sandman's coming: I can already hear him!" You heard another's footsteps.
Lothar has already written to tell you that what you saw was nothing more evil than the old gardener Coppelius, who thought he could grow Spargel out of season by covering our sandy Brandenburg soil with boiled loam and heating it all with his crazy plumbing. Maybe the fear he inspired in you came from his dislike of people in general, and of children in particular. But I am surprised that you kept all of this so private for so long. I'm alarmed, too, that you could have forgotten its connection with the saddest moment of our childhood: You really don't remember do you? The same night you snuck out with Lothar, mother was called from home. She came back very late. We were asleep. She woke us up to tell us father had been killed. Now I understand why you cried so desperately: "Its my fault! Its my fault! It was the Sandman!"
Thank you, and if you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them.

A lot of this conference centred on memory. How does sound enter into our memory?
Sound has the same access to the whole process of involuntary memory as images do, however I think the one interesting thing about sound, and music in particular, in part is its relation to narration or narrative. Any kind of polyphonic music — music which represents the idea of there being more than one voice simultaneously — in a perceptual way sets up a relationship of a society or a culture, in a funny way. So the way in which the voices have a relationship to one another, the way they have conflicts and the way in which they do or don't resolve these conflicts are models of how people can conceive of it during time.

I'd like to ask Stan Douglas why in the works we've seen here it seems like there's an emphasis on the visual? — sound seems to function as a supplement, as secondary. My second question is: why Schönberg? — especially considering the light with which you explained him earlier, the curious fact that he initiated a type of intellectual music, music that was supposed to move your head instead of move you emotionally, but then in Hollywood he became almost purely romantic, emotional...
I'll answer your questions separately. There's a lot of bad perceptions of something as performative as music, especially when you're seeing it in a context like this which is a video production. The work is an installation, it's not video, it's film, and it's not recorded sound, there's a piano playing in the space. The structure of the installation has a relationship to the structure of the music and the whole presence of the piano in the space, a grand piano playing performing live with no pianist. This has the very, very important effect that has as much presence as the image, and in many ways I would have to admit I made the images to go with the music and not the other way around.
To answer the second question: I have to admit I'm not a musicologist so my understanding of Schönberg's music is quite limited, but as far as I understand I think that the 12-tone method was in many ways an attempt by Schönberg to just systematise the feel of his earlier atonal works, to find some way to write down and to make acceptable to the musical orthodoxy the way in which he perceived a new relation of the table scale could be established. The way he was doing it in his expressive way, in his expressive phase earlier on, because of course the later orthodoxy of the 12-tone system, that people would go through other people's compositions and correct them for disobeying the rules, of this method of composition does mean that there was a certain failure. As soon as it became institutionalised this music failed as a revolutionary possibility. In a way, this work, "Pursuit, Fear, Catastrophe", is all about a whole complex of different failures of these different communities that tried to establish themselves at Ruskin but disappeared, and the whole smell of decrepit British colonialism which is throughout the work in the images you see because of course the British Empire was losing its hold on Canada in the period depicted in this work.

We've seen how much attention you put into constructing a set. Is it then equally important to construct a space where these films will be projected?
There's always some kind of supplement to my work which comes in the form of photos. I do extensive photography of a site which I try to use as my way of seeing, focusing on or understanding what's there, but doing historical research. But most of the things I've described tonight are supplementary to the work itself, these elements may be recognised in the work by people who know them, who've seen the material, but I hope there's something in the work, a seductive quality in it's structure, that would make people want to go the extra distance.
Tonight I've only shown my works based on film media, but my video works also always have a very specific historical reference, both in the way they're shot and in the way they're situated geographically, and this is because even in spite of the globalizing tendencies of a lot of these media, the intentions of Hollywood, their representations of reality, their ideology. Even, say, a neighbourhood in New York City is known to everyone around the world as being a familiar landscape, in spite of this, in spite of all these media, it has a very specific local manifestation and so I'm interested in looking at these specific manifestations and making them clear to myself, to apprehend, but also to different audiences. It's a question of communication. If we don't understand different possibilities in communication our options of what we can say become very limited.
Sometimes a work works more or less depending on context. Often in New York, for example, people look less at the history and are more interested in the formal elements. In Germany "Der Sandmann" was successful because its references were transparent, but when I showed "Pursuit, Fear, Catastrophe" in Japan it was successful because the people there had forgotten about the Japanese who had left Japan.

Is it a conscious choice not to work on autobiographical material? I mean, you're not making work about yourself, which is what maybe most artists do.
How do you know I'm not?

Is there anything autobiographical in your work?
Yes.