Synaesthetic Anesthesia

Synaesthetic Anaesthesia is the product of many long years, experimenting with optical printing, travelling mattes, high contrast manipulation and other film specific techniques and processes. The optical printer is used to manipulate archival imagery from the colonial era, forming a layered tapestry with contemporary images of landscapes, architecture and phenomena. By means of montage and optical recombination the film takes these historical fragments and builds them up to a frantic pitch. The film seeks to depict the frenetic digital information age but entirely through traditional photomechanical methods, a reversal of the norm. The sound design enhances the film’s transformations, and provides a sensitive counterpoint to the “colonial eye.” The role of the colonist as exploiter of natural and human resources is evident, the filmic mediation brings these images into a contemporary context. The current era of wartime is intrinsically linked to a historical progression of events, but the seeds are sown early, in the days of the Empire builders. The tapestry of images, sounds and ideas builds in complexity over the course of the film. The resulting visual chaos is suggestive of the chaos and destruction in the world today. The title Synaesthetic Anaesthesia is suggestive of a 1960’s sensibility. The film reveres the great synaesthetic cinema of the 1960’s, the Whitney Brothers, Jordan Belson, Pat O’Neill and others. The film also owes a debt to synaesthetic experimental artists in music, painting and film from the 1920’s onwards who relentlessly pushed modernity forward and, in particular, to their cross-pollination of ideas relating to image and sound composition and their interrelationship in the Age of the Machine.