Elephant Dialogues

Elephant dialogues are based on a manual on How to Be A Camera!

Warm-up the battery:

CLOSE-UP: Work with one person. Be in a short distance to him/ her so you only see one part of their body
FULL FRAME: Repeat action 1, but this time keep a distance to the subject so you see the full body.
DISSOLVE: place your index finger in front ofyour eyes. Move the finger slowly towards your eyes.
FADE TO BLACK: Close your eyes gradually.
HIGH CAMERA ANGLE: A camera angle which looks down on its
subject making it look small, weak or unimportant.
JUMP CUT: A rapid, jerky transition from one frame to the next, either disrupting the flow of time or movement within a scene or making an abrupt transition from one scene to another.
LOW CAMERA ANGLE: Sit like a frog and look up
PAN: Stand straight and make a turn from left to right with your entire body
TILT: Use your body as a tripod your eyes moves from down to up
ZOOM: Move your head back and forth

and…

ACTION!

Opening scene
Shot 1  FULL FRAME on the closed metal door  people talking/ flushing of toilet / someone giving instructions
Shot 2 door opens, ZOOM IN on door handle  SLOW TRAVELLING through dark room / lights turn on  ventilation system  door no 2. opens / FAST PAN 180o
Shot 3  PAN back and enter dark room slowly, take the first to your right  scary music open first door on your left
Shot 4  FULL FRAME of two elevator doors / camera is undecided and SHIFT FOCUS between the two / chose the right one / FADE TO BLACK  Inside of elevator, ZOOM IN on hand pressing 2. Etage k

Scene 2: The Dragon in the Chimney Shot 5  TILT: to top of chimneys  wind in trees and sound of street
Shot 6  move across the street following the white lines on the pavement  Follow the narrow path around the building
Shot 7  TILT: to see the black pedestrian bridge and the wind in the pine tree  wind in trees
Shot 8  TILT: up the chimney / ZOOM IN on dragon nostrils  sound of drafted beer/ sound of huge burp  steam comes out of dragon’s nostrils

Scene 3: The Golden PlatesShot 9  Park in different parking spots – PAN 90o FULL FRAME on red building with golden plates  a combination of the hum of idling interlock motors in aged movie projectors and interference caused by a television set on an unshielded microphone  ZOOM IN on one golden plate  UFO landing  communicate while looking at a golden plate, a vision of the past to the future
Shot 10  TRAVELLING fast 90o to the right – FULL FRAME of empty glass box  shattered glass, slow motion  circle 360o around glass box
Scene 4: Elephant Encounter

Shot 11  travelling towards the end of the road  full frame on elephants  ZOOM IN on elephant eyes  elephant dialogue
Shot 12  under the archways, slow TRAVELLING towards brick wall  approach red brick wall until it looks like a map
Shot 13  without turning around, move back under the archways  Rewinding
Shot 14  from the parking spot next to the arcades, move towards the park  shout to the tower  time passing
Shot 15  On the playground: JUMP CUT to HIGH ANGLE VIEW through megaphone  ZOOM IN and OUT of the megaphone frantically  The song  DISSOLVE
Shot 16  lay down on one of the three hills, FADE IN into open sky  silence  slow FADE OUT

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how to make a reading machine that is actualy a writing machine

By Andreas Wolfsteiner, Ann-Marie Hanlon , Orsalia Dimitriou,  Christina Christoforou, Martin Glaz Serup, Adam  Drewes.

Printing assistance Tryk-Tryk-Tryk

MANUAL

I.think of a text you’ve already read and know well, and want to know more about.

II.Divide the text into as many parts as there’re are members in your group. Assign each part to a group member.

III.Transcribe the text in its entirety while you try as accurately as you can to incorporate your thoughts on the text while writing. When finished , pass the reworked text to your left

IV.Take a black marker and delete information you find irrelevant in the text you just got. Pass the reworked text to your left

V.Insert personal comments/observations/pictures/drawings relevant to the text. Pass it on.

VI.Turn the remaining text into a short and clear set of instructions solely using imperatives.

VII.Discuss the findings-both the processes and in the texts themselves-and the potential application of this. Continue,

VII.Decide an eighth step.

IMPERATIVES

1. Don’t think of me as Barthes, because I’m dead. I never existed.

2. Choose whether or not to treat the author in question as dead or as performing biography

3. Disentagle everything, decipher nothing.

4. Use non alphabetic language

5. Let a group of robots or microphones do the job.

6. Reach the stage where language, like sculpture, gives its own performance at any moment in time, where it ‘acts’ on behalf of you.

7. Forget Tracey Emin.

8. Remember that language we use springs from a cultural collective; it’s not an individual effort.

9. In your text, quote extensively (in your own words) from the innumerable centres of culture.

10. Feel the presence of other in the text.

11. Consider whether or not the novel ends when language dies

Manual on How to Become a Poetic Revolutionary

Done by Poetic Revolutionaries

June 18th 2011

We invite you to wear your poetic gaze!

Now, imagine a gulf of transition. It can take many shapes and forms: A tunnel, a bridge, a storm, the ocean, the hurricane, a feather, a candle, a desert, a volcano…

You choose your image. Spin your image.

Is this image dangerous, embracing, confronting, provoking, beautiful, light…? You decide with what gaze and gesture you want to initiate your journey to become a poetic revolutionary.

When you have your image we can proceed.

BUT

Before we do our entrance into this transformative journey there are some pre-conditions that you should be aware of.

THE ETERNAL WARNING

x. Make sure that you are in a comfortable place and ready to dive successfully into your poetic state of mind. If this is not the case right now, consider revisiting this manual at another time.

xx. Remember to ask questions – that will keep you reflecting upon yourself and the situations occurring related to the notion of a Poetic Revolution.

xxx. Prosaic revolutions are very seldom transparent – We want The Poetic Revolution to be transparent.

xxxx. Prosaic revolutions very often end up in terrorism. The Poetic Revolution will not, because we do not prescribe how other people should live their lives.

STEP 1. Gazing at the initiator

Now we are turning our gaze at the ones already initiating poetic situations.

To those we say:

Create situations that evoke the sensibility and strengthen the sense of responsibility in each participant.

Tap into the desire of the participant by really sensing the other person and by letting the other person sense you.

Check in to see if engagement has occurred.

Remembering that engagement takes many forms and shapes – silence, action…

STEP 2. GAZING AT THE PARTICIPANT

Now we are turning our gaze at the ones becoming engaged in poetic situations initiated or created by those above.

To those we say:

Be brave. Facing your fears can be as simple as reaching out to touch a stranger’s hand.

Return to curiosity and wonder.

Become aware of what you experience in this very moment.

Encapsulate and then free your mind.

STEP 3. the transition

On the other side of this threshold, you will start using The poetic gaze consciously to activate poetry in your everyday life.

Conquer the reserve that is so inherent in this society – the lack of engagement with poeticism with sensuality with self-expression.

Turn everyday action into poetic activity.

Start spreading the word, and repeat initiatingg new journeys for yourself and others to venture. Let the non-existent become existent trough an elevation of the poetic gaze in everyday life.

To strengthen the poetic gaze is the experience of the world as poetic instead of functional.

STEP 4. the participant Becmoming an initiator

Go back to step 1.

Suggestions on how to activate your poetic self

• Go to a place you pass through everyday.
• Dwell.
• Situate yourself in a way or manner that compliments your mode of being this very moment.
• Close your eyes and listen to every detail around you.
• New day.
• New choice.
• Find some way to restrict your hearing.
• Look.
• Touch every detail of the scene with your gaze.
• Anything is possible.
• Trust your instincts.
• Act.

The poetic revolutionaries that begun this process of creation on manulas are:

Club de la Faye

Collective Unconscious

Erika Fischer-Lichte

Fiction Pimps

Hellen Carr

Hijas del mal

Sisters Hope

Time and space died yesterday

Manual on how to teach (art) teachers

 

 

The guide to keeping grounded and maintaining a sense of humour while engaged in academic pursuits

  Authors: Ann-Marie Hanlon and Stacey Pope

Oscar Wilde, the Irish writer renowned for his wit, once wrote: ‘Life is too important to be taken seriously.’ In the academic world this aphorism carries little import: humour has traditionally been bound in an uncomfortable relationship with academia. Humour has little or no role in lecture theatres, in academic writing or in conference papers: ‘serious’ work should not be funny and humour has no place in the often elitist rituals of academia. In recent years, particularly with the advent of post-modernism and its ensuing cultural and critical theories, the traditional canonic boundaries of academia are now subject to constant challenge. Finally we are beginning to take humour seriously, a fact witnessed by the blossoming field of parody studies and humour studies in general. Previously considered an anti-intellectual pursuit, in reality humour possesses a dual critical function in that it can be used to subvert or to reinforce dominant ideologies, conventions and behaviours. Many great minds of the past, such as Aristotle, Wittgenstein and Bergson dared to acknowledge its power. Simon Critchley reminds us that:

‘Humour is an exemplary practice because it is a universal human activity that invites us to become philosophical spectators upon our lives. It is practically enacted theory. I think this is why Wittgenstein once said that he could imagine a book of philosophy that would be written entirely in the form of jokes.’

This manual invites us to use humour to critique and hopefully rethink how we perform academia and the conventions of the academic systems within which we work. Humour can function to destablize conventions, but it can also be irreverent, inconsequential or silly. Let us ‘become philosophical spectators upon our lives’ in playing with the ideas of how we do academia, and refuse to take ourselves too seriously in the process. The manual should be fully read through and the points that resonate strongly with participants should be role-played/ told in anecdotal form to the group and discussed together. Perhaps we could even follow Wittgenstein’s lead and even rewrite this manual in the form of jokes. Laughter is not only permitted in this process, it is positively encouraged.

The guide to keeping grounded and maintaining a sense of humour while engaged in academic pursuits (self-help manual)

‘Life is too important to be taken seriously.’ (Oscar Wilde)

• Academic Skills

Practice controlling your language rather than let it control you.

Language in should serve communication not obfuscation

Just because it sounds academic doesn’t mean it is

Break out of your closet: knowledge should not have boarders

Discover other people’s ideas but do remember to come up with some of your own too.

Remember that the best academics are the best communicators.

Done is good. Doing is also good.

• Deportment

Don’t be selfish with knowledge, what’s the point in being the only person in the know?

Be social with your ideas – you can learn as much from people as from books.

Bring sexy back. Remember to smile in your work – it becomes instantly more accessible and appealing.

Never sound stupid, but never make people feel stupid either.

Remember that non-academics are not of a different species, much can be learned from them.

Confidence is indispensible, but arrogance comes in handy in certain circumstances.

• Reality checking

Your primary concerns are theoretical, not life-threatening

Always remember there’s more to life than academia

I’m sure what you’re staying is interesting, but does anyone else actually care?

Just because you’re better educated does not mean you’re morally superior.

Remember how lucky you are – billions will never have this chance.

• Self-reflexivity

Remember to navel-gaze but don’t lose sight of your own head

It might be your own work but you shouldn’t do it all on your own.

Always remember that some people will never understand you: that’s their problem, not yours.

Let your passion guide you. Study what you love, but remember to leave room for other types of love in your life too.

Paranoia can be good, but sometimes not, I bet you think this point is about you

Make learning fun

Manual on the Non-Art of Everyday Revolution

By Kata Halaz

Manual for reparative critical cinema

By Gabriel Menotti

How to Scrabble-a-manual in action!

Scrabbling manuals in Copenhagen produce great ideas and a lot of fun for the participants!

Some of the manuals include:

A Manual on How to fall in and out of love again

A Manual on How to Live and Die

A Manual on How to Commit Suicide in 7 different ways

A Manual on How to Produce a Pair of Twins

A Manual on How to Make Identical Human Beings

A Manual on How to Swim Like a Dolphin

A Manual on How the equation of being a Woman doesn’t work

A Manual on How to Escape an Arrow if You Are a Space Rat

A Manual on How to Conquer the Object of Your Desire

A Manual on How to Make A Baby

A Manual on How to Make Lego Pirates Dismantle Themselves

A Manual on How to Make Dinosaur Eggs Hatch Earlier

A Manual on How to Maintain A Romantic Life

A Manual on How to Become a Human

A Manual on How to recognize a Christian

A Manual on How to do it like DDR

A project by Christina Christoforou, Orsalia Dimitriou and Mary Ikoniadou played for the first time in Copenhagen Symposium on June 2011

A manual on How to Scrabble-a-manual

Scrabble-a-manual involves around new ways of producing knowledge. Academia evolves and revolves around a textual word. Different knowledge, on nature, on art works, on human behaviour is described and analysed by a text. We wanted to test a production of meaning based on a visual language and at the same time challenge what knowledge is. Can knowledge for example derive from an invented mythical device and the ways to construct it?

Scrabble-a-manual also reflects on the way academic texts are constructed, they are not tabula rasa but are acceptable once based on notions already proved by other academics. Plus the academic ‘speech’ has to form a logic sequence, which might be a traditional logic or something completely new and inventive, but the logic behind the sequence should always be justified.

Scrabble-a-manual is a collaborative action, both in its conception and in its realisation. The participants have to negotiate the ‘logic’ behind their manuals and can add or expand the manual of one of their fellow players.

The typical manual is a way to instruct someone to produce/assemble/montage/construct/do something that already exists. Furthermore the way it should be constructed/delivered/etc it is already known to the person who is writing the manual. Scrabble-a-manual on the contrary calls for open-ended manuals, where the final outcome is not known before and can be altered on the way. It is more dependable on the existing tools (cards/pictograms) than a final close-ended product.

Scrabble-a-manual aims at producing fantastic/impressive/impossible notions but the interest is mainly on the process (the manual, and the way the manual is constructed by playing).

Scrabble-a-manual draws inspiration by the ways an academic text is produced (using notions of others, logic sequence, open end) but it calls for larger collaborations, creativity and most importantly, amusement. Won’t we all learn more by playing?

Christina Christoforou, Orsalia Dimitriou, Mary Ikoniadou

How to set up our own free university

Making a Copenhagen Free University Manual: How to set up our own free university.

The aim of this workshop is to compile a manual to be used to set up a Free University. The manual will be compiled starting from the experience of the Copenhagen Free University, the material available on its website, the knowledge the participants could have of CFU or other free universities.

With this workshop we’ll try to codify into a manual what of the Copenhagen Free University is available to us – the participants to the workshop. By doing this we will invert the usual procedure that goes from the one who knows how to do something, to the one who needs to learn how to do it: we don’t have (much) experience and knowledge of free universities, but we still try to compile a manual for us (and someone else) to be able to set up a free university.

Our challenge would be to hold together the universality of scope of a manual (a manual as something that everybody should be able to make use of) and our specificity, that is, the motivations and desires of us, the participants of the workshop. This manual will be conceived not just for general users but also for us: us who would like to set up a Free University, us who would like to open up the possibility of thinking about setting up such a university. In order for this “us” to come together, the workshop will not be imposed onto the whole group of the symposium’s participants, and it will be not conducted by someone, rather, it will be run collectively by everyone interested in participating.

Still, as an “instruction”, I would invite people who are interested in free schools and would like to participate in the workshop to bring some material to share (for instance, something that one could pick up from the CFU website).

The workshop could be structured in three moments:

1 Collective introduction / discussion: What is a manual? (the other symposium’s activities can be used to address this question)

2 Gathering and sharing knowledge about free universities (each participants will present an aspect related to CFU or another free university): what is a free university? how to set up a free university?

3 Processing the knowledge shared producing a set of instructions (indications) for a manual. The CFU website could be used to find a way for this translation of knowledge and non-knowledge into instructions to take place.

One of the questions we will deal with during this workshop is: what is a free university? How does it differ (how does the CFU differ) from the university as we know it: Copenhagen University, Goldsmiths, Freie Universitat (what is the meaning of this “Freie” here)? How would a “really free” university differ from both an increasingly privatized “public” university and a “free” university that functions as part of the neoliberal model of the Big Society?

In this workshop we will also have to address the gap between theory and practice, reading and making, that a manual strongly exposes: how to make use of this gap? The gap between experienced experience (CFU) / the manual / experience to be experienced (by us who are going to set up a free school). The challenge here would be to both codify an existent experience (who is not ours) by turning it into a set of practical indications (for us and someone else to be used), and to keep open the possibility for something else to take place, for a different experience to happen – even a disastrous one.

Manual by Paolo Plotegher, presented by Sidsel Nelund and Trine Friis Sørensen