Simon Faithfull

Simon Faithfull- Escape Vehicle no.6

Simon Faithfull- 30 km (2004)

These two short film by Simon Faithfull show the the footage of the camera, attached to a weather balloon and set free to the edge of the space. In 'Vehicle no.6', the camera shows the journey of the domestic chair, while the second film, '30 km' is 'objectless', but framed in this circular frame. Both of the films are becoming very strange at the moment when the camera is reaching the space edge, the image is not clear, the sound becomes broken, and in the rare moments of clearness of the picture the viewer can see the outlines of the earth and the darkness of the space. the mixture of these 'ingredients' create a truly surreal experience for the viewer, when it is so easy to imagine yourself sitting on that chair and flying off to the atmosphere. There is certainly something very strange about such a simple object, a chair, to be seen in such an unusual environment. It almost breaks all the odds: a chair, something so stable, something that was built to celebrate the gravity, something meant for relaxation,  being so distressed and brought 'out of a comfort zone' into the exploration of the new.

very inspiring.

Simon Faithfull's website

Stan Brakhage, the interview.

Chodorov (Rail): Could you read these opening lines from your 1963 book,Metaphors on Vision, and expand on them and explain how these ideas influenced your filmmaking?

Stan Brakhage: Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective. What a way to take it. Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective. Our whole structure of visual thinking is based on manmade laws of perspective and so on! But imagine! I say in my youth, an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. In other words everything you see, you have to be having an immediate adventure with it. It’s not canned in any sense.How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of green? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? In other words, can we actually see the rainbow at all unless we’re squeezing the eye in that particular way that causes that diffraction? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? In other words, can you really see the quivering, the actual quivering little wavelets through which every little shaft of light is, you know, feathered onto your consciousness? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects, imagine it just alive with things we don’t know what they are, incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movements, everything moving. There’s not a moment of stillness anywhere and innumerable gradations of color. I mean, you start naming the different shades of, let’s say, these pants, blue-black? Are they gray-black? Are those socks then black-black? You have all these varieties…Here’s a blue…And you start naming: is this Prussian blue? Is this cobalt blue? Is this navy blue? And those are just blunt gradations, names that are given, and you can go on and on and on and you run out of words, finally. You’d end up with a dictionary full of words trying to delimit and otherwise describe a quality of blueness, very shortly, just along the line of these black pants and black shirt and black socks on this quilt which I will make no attempt whatsoever to try to describe. [laughs]

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Internship for Karmameju ApS

Design for leaflets/ postcards.

'No beauty without truth. Only natural ingredients'

T-Shirt design 'Leopard' (inspired by Amur Leopard, the rarest cat in the world)

Three Short Films: How it was made

Looking into the possibility of changing the perception of a site through filmmaking and editing process, allowing the site to dictate the process of editing. Throughout the process, the desired outcome would be to create a ’mental space’ (dream) within chosen sites.

Discovering the effects of different filming techniques and how the relationship between camera and filmed object interact once the aspect of randomness is allowed.

The creation of three short film has allowed me to unravel these possibilities. Thee films were filmed in three different spaces with completely different atmosphere. the only common thing that these spaces have is a strong directionality to them, either vertical or horizontal. 

here are some photographs i took during the process of the making.

space for film 1: White-ness

Space for film 2: Sunset-ness

Space for film 3: Float-less

Limits. Short film

The aim was to create a film that would embody the dream experience. According to Gilles Fauconnier in his book ‘Mental Spaces: aspects of meaning construction in natural language’, mental space is a space of imagination, the imaginary space that the speaker refers to. So anything can be the mental space, if only the person can construct or recall it from the memory. And I have chosen the dream for my mental space at this stage. But as the dream experience is very personal, and true only for one person, I couldn’t avoid making a film very personal as well.

Reading Freud and his ‘Interpretations of dreams’, I found this idea: if a dream can be analyzed through recollection of the memories that have formed it, then it should be possible to form a dream through building the train of memories, that would have connection, and form an ‘artificial dream’.

I have used my personal recent memories to filter the ones, which would occur in my own dreams, and using them, I have recreated a dream that I could have had. Using the fear of height as the starting point, I have recalled places with the same feeling to it. I have looked at the fear of height not as a phobia, but as the strong restriction of the available ‘active space’, the space where it is possible to move. It could be argued that fear of heights is quite close to claustrophobia, if looking at it from this point of view. So this idea led me to the main theme for my film: exploration of the limits (both emotional, or attached to people, and physical).

Design Proposal for Multi-Faith Prayer Room

The challenge we had to face was that the room is basically a closed box with no windows and low ceilings. The task was to design a multi-faith prayer room, that could also be used as a 'quiet room', and could be used for up to 30 people at once for Friday prayer. 

As some religions require strong orientation in the room(for ex. Muslims have to face South-East when praying) and flexible devision for male and female, we have decided to install a glass wall with the textile (that my partner for this project has created) between two glass panels onto the South-Eastern corner, and it is also lit from the behind, to create a sense of opening in the room, almost like a large window. 

The choice of colour palette came from nature: beige, golden and brown for earth, blue and turquoise are for the sky. We have chosen neutral colours and design for this room, because there shouldn't be anything flashy, when the room has to be a place, where people can relax and reflect.

 As all the lights are installed in the floor along the walls, it creates the sense of lightness and the walls are almost floating. Three roman curtains in the middle of the room can provide desirable devision and can be regulated in height and density. 

The washing facilities also needed to be redesigned, as Muslim Religion requires to have hands and feet washed before the pray. So a foot bath with a low separate shower for all the needs has been installed, and as it is completely flush with the floor, it keeps the desirable effect of modern neutral interior.

in a search of a surrealist interior: 'Inscape' by Matta

image source

'..search the interior depth of the psyche analogous to evocative metaphors of the natural landscape.'
(Mical, Thomas. 'Surrealism and Architecture, p.53)

the beauty of broken prospectives, where everything appears to be imagination in a sever vertigo,
where you can see so many things, but wait,
not to see them,
to imagine them, to reflect yourself onto the canvas, to be possessed by this surreal interior of the canvas,
where canvas is an escape from the surrounding,
or it is the surrounding, while you are approaching your subconsciousness.