Noiseology: intensity, perception and noisy audiovisual poetics

• Grant number: 22/06605-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: September 01, 2022
• End date: July 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Cinema
• Principal Investigator: Cristian da Silva Borges
• Grantee: Rodrigo Faustini dos Santos
• Supervisor: Erika Balsom
• Host Institution: Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: King's College London, England
• Associated to the scholarship: 19/05083-8 - Ruidology: intensity, perception and noisy audiovisual poetics, BP.DR

Abstract

Certain films, approaching an aesthetics of visual excess, gesture towards the intense incorporation of technical defects throughout the creation of the work (thus going against the regulatory and normative models of the standard cinematographic form and its narrative- representational images), building complex audiovisual systems of chaotic and disorderly appearance. Thus, they seek to arouse sensorial intensities in the spectator, who, bewildered of his banal ways of apprehending an audiovisual work, is led to deterritorialize his distinctions between information and noise, form and chaos, constituting what I intend to call a "noise effect" in cinema. Identifying and investigating such "noise effect" as an aesthetic and informational problem, this research project finds it elaborated in experimental cinema since its beginnings, whether in works that bet on complex and chaotic structures for their construction (from Man Ray to the so-called Structural Cinema) or works by filmmakers such as Paolo Gioli, Stan Brakhage, Carl Brown and Patrick Bokanowski, who propose anomalous visualities, often approaching the formless or convoluted, altering the "filters" of the device, incorporating noise and distortions, consequently aiming at a multiplicity of the visual and the cinematic manifestation of forms. Finally, a more extreme way of searching for the audiovisual intensities brought by noise is to be investigated in the works of Paul Sharits, the couple Wilhelm and Birgit Hein and contemporary (experimental) filmmakers, instigated by aesthetic discussions by Cecile Malaspina, Michel Serres and Laura Marks about noise as a positive instance to expression, perception and cognition rather than a spurious artifact, the inarticulate. (AU)