Poetry

I consider both readings to be poems. In fact, collaging cut-outs from another source is a method I have used for writing. It made sense to use it for this particular work because I felt it translated very well the contemporary practice of forming political truths and opinions by selectively manipulating the sources. I therefore went back to DADA to try and re-apply its practice of the reactionary production of “nonsense”. Dicta II explores the same idea, but goes a step further dismembering any trace of language from the poem and leaving only clusters of “nonsense” words in a seemingly random order.

Sound design

Sound design is an important feature in almost all of my works. In Dicta I and Dicta II, this aspect has been reduced to a single sound texture. I tried to leave as much room as possible for understanding the text, but the inclusion of a “particular” extra sound in each film was a conceptual response to the overall idea.
In Dicta I, this sound is a prolonged ‘S’ sound which sounds like a snake hissing. It connects to the reading of the text by attaching itself to the words that begin or end with a phonetic S. For example, it begins with NICE and ends with FORCE. I played with this a bit to add an extra layer to the work and edited it to sound like a snake. Dicta II has a background sound of two men sparring, but also the clutter of balls mimicking the sounds of sparring which, rather like a percussive instrument, accentuate the rhythm of the reading.

The Eye

Looking is another important concept that creates a bridge between the two works.
In Dicta I, the narrator is depicted bluntly staring out of the screen with grotesque fake eyes painted on his face. Here the idea was to further deconstruct authority. In Dicta II, one of the main intentions was to make it more difficult for the camera to get a clear picture. I tried several ways of obscuring its view, but finally decided not to go with anything mechanical, gimmicky or theatrical. Instead I simply switched lenses trying several and mainly using a zoom lens, which from so close prevented the camera from seeing clearly.

Contact

Dicta I and Dicta II both build upon several micro-concepts, one of which is manipulating the idea of contact by either exaggerating or missing the mark in the timeline.
Synchronization is an obvious form of contact between the body and the voice and it is often either slightly or markedly displaced throughout both films. This tool is one of the main driving forces used in Dicta. It has allowed me to create the feeling that Dicta I has been ‘ventriloquized’ to such a degree that its DADA poetry gains meaning.
In Dicta II, the obvious synchronization contact was the fighters’ bodies as well as, throughout the scene, the balls. The following scene was also used to play around with out of the sync moments when, in some parts, safewords referring to colours are precisely attached to the colours of the balls passing across the screen, while at other times they are out of sync.

Nightingale

There is a saying by Plutarch (233a) which I found in Mladen Dolar’s book “A Voice and Nothing More”. Plutarch tells the story of a man who caught a nightingale hoping for a delicious meal. After plucking it he discovered there was hardly anything to eat at all and so he said to the dead bird: ‘You are just a voice and nothing else’.

In the spirit of Dada poetry, I used to embed Safewords in Dicta 2. Here are meaningful words relevant to the project, keywords if you like, detached from the structure of language in the new unconditional space of reinventing the meaning, free of control: