TERRÆ INCOGNITÆ

On the bright and radiant, crispy and warm Finnish Summer of ’96, I received one of the most peculiar Birthday presents, honestly among the best I had ever got, before and ever since. I owe this to a lady, Kati, she as well a radiant and bright soul whose company so much fitted the atmosphere of those days as we were together, as a couple, in what I called “the short and happy season of a functional deaf”.  My functional deafness was simply due to the fact that in the less than two years of our relationship I never mastered Finnish properly. Sorry, I never mastered Finnish period. I was fascinated by the 15  cases (which feel as 15! that is factorial 15) by which a name can end and its complexity also gave me the note to even start inventing some Finnish grammar on my own, such as new declination endings dependent on the weather, the time of the year, day of week or proximity to geographical districts, to animals or to particular pieces of furniture, or even depending on the initial of the person you’re talking to (now guys, that’s complicated).

This detailed lingual inventive trip must have intrigued Kati somehow… Be that as it may, Kati got straight to my heart when she lovingly packed the book that, once later unveiled, made me feel like an Eureka “So I am not alone !”. That book was a commemorative publication of the first hundred years of Bonk Industries: “Bonk Business Inc. 1893-1993 – Bonk 100 – Suomalainen menestystarina – En saga om finländsk framngång – A Finnish success Story” (Otava Publishing Company, 1993).

Now a rarity, to be found only by some online auctions or art selling ads, mostly used, the book illustrated in Finnish, Swedish and English the story of an enterprise born by the inventive spirit of Pärre Bönk, with his first sagacious observations of the behaviour of the Giant Anchovies he imported from Peru that allowed him to discover the peculiar “Anchovy’s effect” and exploit it as marine dynamo that could be used to power the whole Island of Helgoland, not the larger German island, but a small island not far from Uusikaupunki, Finland. Initially just straight forward attempt at revitalising the Baltic fishing industry, overburdened by years of overfishing, the Peruvian giant anchovies were observed to have a peculiar behaviour: when in a pool, if waters were crossed by a very light, non-lethal electric field, they ordered themselves in a school and started swimming synchronically along a vertical circle, causing a powerful stream that could work as a dynamo producing electric energy, hence multiplying the feeble electricity initiating their vortex and the relatively cheap fodder to keep them alive.

 

The small fisherman’s family could then start an enterprising venture that led to further inventive breakthroughs initially based on the most refined ways to exploit those prodigious anchovies. They could recreate the famous Roman gravy, the Garum, exported all over the world, along other anchovy derivatives, such as oil. Bonk, after dropping the “umlaut” for the comfort of foreign tongues, embarked in a saga of engineering explorations that led to a wonderful number of inventions, the Garum distiller (one exemplar had been possessed by Vladimir Ilic Ulianov, Lenin nonetheless) the Paranormal Cannon, and many more, based on even more enthralling observations that pushed the boundaries of scientific observation and imagination (quite more at ease with the latter, of course), giving us principles that we cannot forget (“It’s all waves!”) along with engineered creations we can hardly imagine our modern world without: the machines of the “Raba Hiff®” series, ADS (Advanced Disinformation Systems) and LBH (Localised Black Holes).

Lenin’s Garum Distiller.

If this fascinates you, be then aware that all this is just the creation of the prolific and eclectic Finnish artist Alvar Gullichsen, which in 1988 started developing the idea for a sort of post-modernist, Duchamp-like (but one should now say Duchamp-like-like) project that ended even into a museum and an exhibition in Finnish Uusikaupunki, the Bonk Museum, and obtained a success that simply asked the thing to live on further. In particular the defunctionalized machinery is a concept that de-structurized engineering in the same way that Dada and Duchamp de-contextualized art with their pissoirs and bicycle wheels stuck on a bar stool and other amenities, so original that after a century most modern artists still copy its essence, apparently not really getting the joke yet.

But Duchamp and Dada had been followed by their post-modernist legacy, which seemed to enjoy the ease, which became cheaper and cheaper along the decades, of simply telling what art is not, rather than what art is or should be, and created a plethora of delusional artists thinking that their non-art could be seen as art in itself and kept pushing forward (or at times literally into a can) their excremental productions.

Gullichsen’s story of Bonk Industries becomes an ode to machine beauty versus art, which is also a joke making fun of the post-modernist “look-at-this-piece-of-art-and-take-it-seriously-even-if-it-is-patently-painfully-excruciatingly-irremediably-nonsense”. The genius relies in not doing this in conventional areas, such as paintings and sculptures, but where the modern ever spreading functional analphabetism (which is not a painful form of phabetism) sees no art: machine engineering. Which, as we know from the Greek teaching of the word for art,τεκνη, is wrong.

But there is more than just a mere new context in the pointing out of the “kitsch” of art, or more, of modern art (hence the Duchamp-like -like, added extension I proposed before): there is really an homage, a celebration of the aesthetics of engineering, of Machines, of what Robert Pirsig might call the “underlying form” and its intrinsic underlying beauty of classical nature that machines, as all human creations can have, and often do have.

Indeed, Gullichsen’s creations are meant to move us with a laugh, but they indulge in the intrinsic beauty of the underlying form of classical nature, in Pirsig’s sense, and as such they do please our eyes and our senses and do not just make us laugh about or against anything or anyone. Especially they don’t make us laugh about the art and work of other people at their expenses, which instead was the result of Duchamp’s moustache on Leonardo’s Monna Lisa, in the same way as it’s probably on you the joke of exposing some canned faeces “produced” by some artist claimed to be sold for millions.

Therefore, Sir Roger Scruton’s epitaphic sentence “Real art is a work of love; fake art is a work of deception” might fly past by the Bonk Industries seemingly at a near distance, but does not cross their path and does not land on their premises in Uusikaupunki.

– (…I had a mail contact, over 20 years ago, with Gullichsen himself, but by the time he answered I had left my laboratory in Genoa and never got to read his answer. Let me see if I can get back to this whole Bonk Business again…)

Alvar Gullichsen

The Bonk Museum

The Great Swindle (By Sir R. Scruton, on Aeon.co)

A Review of Pirsig’s “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance” by R.C Zaehner.

 

Typically, a documentary has its major amount of work in searching and investigating, long before cameras are set to work. Depending largely on the character that the project has in its authors’ mind, whether more visual and artistically evocative, such as filming wilderness and nature in general, or a more factual disclosure, such a piece of investigation on industrial world or on its entanglements with political and financial interests.

Showing a chosen piece of reality to an audience always entails a work of documentation. It is the basis onto which the whole project can stand on its own in terms of credibility, ability to illustrate, ability to make people understand an aspect of our real world.

Less known is usually the amount of work for search and documentation in technical and/or scientific terms for purely fictional works. If considering documentaries, such work is, or should be, unavoidable. But for fictional films, even on historic themes, most people think that background search on scientific terms (including historic scientific terms) is somehow a minor aspect. There are quite some examples around that are the results of this conception (or “misconception”, if you will follow these lines further) according to which, we must assume, only nosy specialists and nerdy scientists will ever notice the mistake, the poor rendition, or even the utter nonsense, in a film.

As a scientific advisor I’m talking against my own interest, but let’ face it: a scientifically inaccurate film can still sell, and sell a lot, and even become a blockbuster.

Examples? There are many around, films where a technicality has been lightheartedly forgotten, a detail simply overlooked, usually because no attention has been paid, or just because, as Ed Wood would put it (at least what Johnny Depp would have him say in that marvellous rendition by Tim Burton in 1994), people will never notice it, they’ll just enjoy the bigger picture..

You have an X-Wing rocketing through the airless spaces in Star Wars after that the cockpit gets closed with the tightness (even the feel) of a candy box. You have the ever persisting gravity in any space ship no matter how far from any planet. Sounds, even echoes! reaching through the darkness of airless space . You have people wandering in the space around their module and suddenly …they’re falling. You have a young dynamic Leonardo Da Vinci professing himself atheist and skilfully dismissing any supernatural cause of death by devilish possession by pulling, straight out of the future, scientific names of a pathogen (Clavyceps purpurea) about a century before the disease Ergotism was described and two centuries before Karl Von Linné came to his idea of taxonomic bi-nominal nomenclatures. Add another century before C. purpurea is associated to Ergotism and another couple of centuries or so before the fungus and its role in the disease are recognised and you have a pretty darn perspicacious Leonardo, able to get his science from reading into the future nonetheless.

There are many other examples, but as you will concede for these ones above, it is in fact the main big wider picture that has to get the audience trapped in its emotional journey. Still any perceivable inaccuracy will inevitably break the magic.

Once the mistake is uncovered, it becomes a negative example on how things should NOT be done, regardless of how lasting the reputation of the production can be and how enduring the love from the audience will be. Also, if you don’t come up with a blockbuster, scientific nonsense will only make your work more prone to criticism, to say the least.

Setting things right on the science side will also help your work become a reference point for future ones, whether from you or from other authors.

 

A film is in essence a conveyed set of experiences, visual, acoustic, emotional ones. Apart of all aspects of scenography and set architecture, where a good deal of credibility actually relies, also physical and emotional experiences can profit from scientific information: describing very well a hospital with all its interiors and machineries is important, but also rendering perceivable, actually liveable, the story involving a condition, symptoms, behaviours, feelings, perceptions, different combinations of altered senses, can be as important if not more. The same for sceneries underwater, or in the rarefied atmosphere of the highest peaks… How do we avoid that for some imperceptible reason, the audience “feels” that we’ve been shooting at a much lower elevation? How do we make the audience feel what the senses of a climber or of a diver feel? What makes that experience sensorially shareable?

There is quite a lot that Science and even ongoing studies are able to provide, that could help answering these questions. Many solutions have a scientific basis, yet they have been applied without any specific scientific knowledge, but rather have come out of simple experience and good powers of observations put into creativity. There is a language that our body and soul have and knowing that language is the aim of large efforts of scientific research. What Science makes available from those studies can be used with profit from the industry of creativity and of dreams made real.

While most audio visual effects are every better and better mastered by the state of the art in film industry (naturally often depending by the budget available), not all of our senses are taken into the audiovisual ride: perfumes, smells and tactile sensations are eminently left out, that would include easily also pain and pleasure. But how often did we have some “conscience”of pain, pleasure, even of smell and perfumes, just because we had been taken into a scene and a situation, including the skills of actors involved, that “feels” so true and real?

Empathy.

This is largely due to some of the most interesting characteristics of our nervous system. Two of its main factors are the mirror neuronal circuits (so called as they “mirror” what we see happening to someone else, somehow making us “aware” of the feelings and perceptions of who and what are we looking at) at the base of our empathic experience and synaesthesia (or synesthesia) a phenomenon by which a perception of a certain nature leads to a coscience or a perception of another nature, by crossing its neural pathway: so you perceive a number or a word or a letter as almost directly associated (almost as “being”) a color, or a smell, or even a mood. A synesthete is someone who experiences this constantly and in an extremely concrete way, but in some way with different intensities and by different associations, we all have some kind of synesthetic experience going on in our life. Evoking a sensation, often quite physical, by images, is something the film industry has been good at since its early days. Maybe since its very first one, with a train running right through the floor of the audience in a shaky footage by the Lumière Brothers… Another example where empathy plays a strong role?

A nice one: erotic films, you might include any form of more or less pornographic depiction in it. All of them do provoke by design a physical sensation while we just watch. Actually the less explicit scenes do have a higher evocative power due to their capacity of taking our perception into the ride: the most explicit scene might do far less if inserted in a context and a story that simply hasn’t “taken” us, while our mind, longing for the pleasure of a situation, fills the gaps of what does not hit the eye and gives us fullness of experience, in a story that we almost completely entered in with our feelings.

Another strong example: music and soundtrack. No need to explain here, we know their importance in making us feel. But it is good to remind us of one simple universal type of synesthesia we all have: a minor chord? sadness, fear, melancholy, absence, loss… A major chord? happiness, positivity, elation.

Synaesthesia.

Synestethic aspects are probably the most interesting ones when it comes to make someone feel what a film depicts. Not all that is part of a scene can be delivered directly to the audience: smell, tactile sensations, pleasure and pain, cold and warm… Yet they may turn important for a story or a scene. Many of these sensations not conveyable to the audience directly can in fact be delivered by the roundabout ways of synesthesia. Sound, noise, colours, music, all of it can be filtered and edited to at least partially convey a physical sensation of pain, pleasure, cold or warmth…

Many situational contexts might really need this sort of physical authenticity. If you have a story involving or based upon some sleep disorder or some kind of mental condition, you might consider that part of your audience has a personal experience, that you have to somehow meet, in order to have sensorial and emotional credibility by them. While another large part of the audience might have not the slightest inkling of that type of experiences. You need then to be credible by the first part of audience and at the same time able to evoke a real experience in the second part, especially if your story has among its aims to show and share what such a given condition means to those who have it.

There is no specific recipe for it though, and this is also good: it leaves it all open to our artistic and creative imagination. But two main aspects might help us with a solid basis to build upon: one is knowing what scientific data or even anecdotes say about a given situation, the other one is to know what audiovisual stimuli can evoke in the viewers in order to set them in the context we want to design.

Understanding some scientific literature is unavoidable for a thorough preparation of the first aspect, while the second aspect can be also helped by understanding the mechanisms of synesthetic perception, at least in its general terms, in order to exploit them.

Good reads:

Ward et al. Synesthesia, creativity and art: What’s the link?  British Journal of Psychology (2008), 99, 127–141 © 2008 The British Psychological Society.