ACID POP Film MANIFESTO
ONTOLOGICAL RUPTURE | PHENOMENOLOGICAL TRANSFIGURATION | SEMIOTIC INSURRECTION
ANTI ART ART FILM POETRY Presents THE ACID DREAM EXPERIMENTAL VIDEO ART FILM MAKING MANIFESTO WRITTEN BY AMERICAN VIDEO ARTIST BIRTHDAY GURL LAURA GRACE ROBLES
THIS FILM which is about to be created MUST BE MADE TO BE SEEN AS
A computer simulated hidden dream world fantasy of unpredictability and experimental
digital video art film making.
The Barthesian subversion of signification, the Deleuzian rhizomatic multiplicity,
the Derridean deconstruction of binary oppositions within the liminal space of becoming.
An Acid dream experimental video art film IS a dislocated narrative translation
of avant-garde moving imagery manifested within the discovery behind experimenting
with the visual poetry behind a cinematic expression of ABSTRACTION AND experimental
art form using an ACID art film aesthetic.
Heideggerian unconcealment of aletheia, Artaudian cruelty of visceral consciousness,
Eisensteinian montage of dialectical collision, a Bachelardian poetics of oneiric space.
AN ACID DREAM EXPERIMENTAL video art FILM
- NOT ENTIRELY BLACK OR WHITE - made with some color. An Acid dream experimental
video art film encapsulates the escape from normality; it translates the real world into
DISTORTIONS of representational MOVING imagery with the use of ACTION PAINTING,
the moving painting PAINTING THE UNKNOWN. HERE WE experience the challenge to
mask human identity where the TRANSCENDED LIES WITHIN THE psychedelic
nature of colorful chaos AS UNEXPECTED YET PLAYFUL ACID DREAMING
MANIFESTING
A DREAM REALITY.
Acid dream experimental video art film alters the cognitive psychological state of mind
EXPANSION with the psychedelic pata-physical expression projected from a circus of
infinite moving paintings - the colliding rainbows from a development of fantasy THAT
speaks an X-ray of the sun.
Acid dream experimental video art film aims to depict painterly moving poetry built
upon an interesting form of non-linear film ideas as the WRONG strategies FOR continuity
make way.
Merleau-Pontian chiasmic intertwining of flesh, Baudrillardian hyperreality of
simulacral precession, Debordian spectacle of détourned signification,
Cixousian écriture féminine of jouissance.
The acid dream experiment becomes a cinematic language of
DIGITAL film making POETICS - a spiritual medium of film making as
part of your spiritual ESSENCE, expressing ones soul as an acid DREAM
ant-art art film OUTLET of visual language having art form.
Heterotopic interstices of Foucauldian liminality, Bataillean transgression of
sublime expenditure, Lyotardian differend of incommensurable discourse,
Kristevan abjection of semiotic disruption.
A perfection of BEAUTY found in the ANTI-BEAUTIFUL mistakes that allow the re-discovery
- THE experimenting PROCESS.
Kantian sublime transcending phenomenal experience, Benjaminian aura in mechanical
reproduction, Adornian negative dialectics of aesthetic theory, Blanchotian literary space of
infinite regression.
Acid dream experimental video art film IS A translation of encapsulated multiple layers
OF AN EDITED SEQUENCE IN THE electronic digital moving paintings combined,
constructed and re-constructed by a game playing of concepts that is the experimental
process by intuitive CONCEPTS, spontaneous decisions, instincts, digital renderings of
iterations, instances FROM an improvised expression of intuition, a design made up of
electronic computerized algorithms SIMULATING acid dream-Tronics.
A spectrum of CHROMATIC COMPOSITION, archival RARELY captured footage OF
entangled DREAM EXPERIMENTS of collage film making, never TO be recreated the
same way twice. HERE WE create the unexpected again and again.
Acid dream experimental video art films allow the testing of ones attention span; it is the
motive for THE ACID DREAM imagination. ITS desire FOR EXISTENCE lies within the
oss of reality. An audience examining their emotional state within moods from a
combination of colors depicting emotion as the spectators cognitive experience
transcendING THE DREAMER FROM A screen UNFOLDING disruptions of a flowing LOSS
OF circumstance IN sequence.
The outcome of an ACID TRIP and its acid dream OFF TRACK reality allows youR
IMAGINATION TO BE RESCUED UNIQUELY. The influence for creation and self
actualization is aroused. A chromatic spectrum of colorful catharsis that explores a
communication of channeling AN ACID essence elsewhere outside of the cinematic
investigations AS A SPIRITUAL MEDIUM - not associated with a timeline of predictable
story telling but tunneling through a parallel universe of alternate realities.
WITHIN A metric chaos OF illusion AND HIDDEN metaphors WE ARE DESIGNING
The non-representational transcendence of real world reality TRANSFORMED into a
counterpoise of new GESTURE OF LYRICAL DISTORTIONS.
AN UNDEFINED EXPERIMENTAL CINEMATIC VISUAL LANGUAGE HAVING A
rt Form AS VISUAL POETRY MOVING POETRY MOVING PAINTINGS
EPISTEMIC RUPTURE | ONTOLOGICAL DISSOLUTION
| PHENOMENOLOGICAL TRANSCENDENCE | SEMIOTIC INSURGENCY
CREATE A language from multi-dimensional analogous depictions OF undefined
PRESENCE WITHIN THE LOSS OF CIRCUMSTANCE as it can melt into the
SUBLIME AND shape the CULTIVATING VIVIDNESS OF AN ACID DAY DREAM
METAMORPHOSIS.
FROM An AWKWARD REPETITION OF NOSTALGIC RE OCCURRENCES
THE imagination OF AN UNPREDICTABLE UNMISTAKABLE dream IS simulated to be
CONTAINED BEYOND its mystic frequency OF EXPLORATIONS THAT LIE WITHIN
ITS PURPOSE FOR EXISTING IN a surreal fantasy CREATED IN the BROKEN NARRATIVE
of acid dream experiment adventure.
Acid dream experimental video art film IS anti-art acid art film translating a dadaIST fluxes
anti-art inspired motivation for ambition behind its desire to become a manifestation of
ACID dream reality IN A DREAM Experiment FROM A guerrilla punk no wave
DIY film making generation that CHALLENGES a pop audience by subjecting them
to the implementation of their own freedom to DREAM AND Imagine the
BROKEN
narrative without story telling, Craving the weird world seen through another
video artists looking glass caught without a camera.
Acid dream experimental video art film imaginativeLY engageS THE DREAMER in the
anti-art ACID art film AESTHETIC FROM THE repercussions OF ACID DREAM
experimentation USING digital AND COLLAGE film making as the UNEXPECTED
MANIFESTATION OF ACID DREAMING.
An additive process built from within a deeper meaning of lifes endless cycle of growth
and repetition - devolution, evolution. Across layers, A Timeless escape from the
everyday predictions IS LIKE losing ones self into the past of dreaming timelessly
AS IT BECOMES THE FUTURE SIMULATED ACID DREAM.
This is the PRESENT IMAGINARY MOVING IMAGERY; this is the past as the future in
THE IMAGINARY moving IMAGERY, a determination geared to seek out the
true meaning of dreaming as ultimately undefined WITH AN untraceable ORIGIN AS ITS
simulated nature, its altered IN AN UNKNOWN universe OF DREAMT UP TRIPPY
AWAKENINGS.
THIIS SHOULD AWAKEN THE psychedelic anD emotional illusion DEPICTED IN a
fantasy OF some unknown space and time SUSPENDED IN BELIEF.
A video artists interpretation explainS how dreams are recreated from the audiences
mind expansion OF sub-conscience meditatiON expansion of THE DREAMERS imagination
AND EXPLORATION OF ones cycling thoughts - a time for self actualization.
Acid dream experimental video IS art film - a digital sequence of esoteric arbitration
from the mind boggling collection and conjunction of conceptualized methods created
by the experimental film maker as a video artist, as a visual artist, as a painter who
paints their film POETRY.
Dreaming to allow the ARTISTIC FREEDOM necessary to experiment BY THE artists own
rules WHICH man does by breaking the philosophies associated with Hollywoods CAGE of
film industry standards IS confronted as a theory we must avoid BY THINKING OF
CONTINUITY AS WRONG BUT embrace its art form in order to reference THIS AND
translate our own techniques into an art film conquering irresponsibility.
Do not calculate failure. Indulge in ones self film making pleasures; allow the unforgivable
EXPERIMENT to arise as the healthy madness which takes over your souL for designing
THE FILM composition that is evident art.
Acid dream experimental video art film IS A never ending artistic PROCESS LENDING
THE impression of lifes open window to which we are blinded by WITH colliding hidden
DREAMS worlds of the unexplained, realizing creative solutions from re-discovery from a
journey of mind expansion exploration OF the path tHAT escapes cinemas film making
conformity of conventional story telling AS WE re-invent CONCEPTS with new visions of
the future untold dreams within a plotless BROKEN narrative.
At times dont be afraid to understand the narrative with missing plot for dreams and
stories are unexpected visions OF UNFEELING THE STORY AS substitution and
RE-invention for re-REDISCOVERING THE Acid dream experimental video art film.
At most times THE FILM MAKER SHOULD supersede the camera BY includeING
archival or captured footage or use of animation from time to time. Acid dream
experimental video art film is Anti-Art ACID art film made up of film making acid dream
collageexperiments MADE UP OF A beautiful anti-beauty THAT INTENDS to investigate
the UNUSUAL surrender tO pr-axis of scientific complexities and experimentation
WHERE WE loose OURSELVES in the discovery of what WE did wrong which was
the right way to experiment by OUR rules and by OUR idea of fun and self satisfaction.
WHERE Imperfection that CAN BE PERFECTED ANTI-BEAUTY IN AN experimental
vision FOR perfect dreamy imperfections imagined as ever-changing controlled chaos
where THE FILMS AESTHETIC lies WITHIN the Spontaneity strategies OF Acid dream
experimentation WITH VIDEO ART.
THESE FILM MAKING CONCEPTS DO not determined THIS FILM MAKING STYLE ALONE
as we consider it AN acid dream experimental video art film THE FILM can evolve into much
more than any vision STATED HERE IT MUST BE AN ONGOING exercise
AND RE-DISCOVERY FOR ACID DREAM re-invention AN evolutionary outcome true to
psychedelic worlds IN a FANTASY universe of acid dreaming.
We SHOULD strive to design ACID simulations containing A computerized acid paradise
as AUDIENCE INTERACTION ALLOWS YOU TO DREAM A mesmerizing ACID dream
among the hidden worlds of surrealism IN an acid day dream metamorphosis of non
objectivity WHERE human identity BECOMES A procrastinatED subject matter.
AS AN abstract EXPRESSION which we can ASSUME IS a mystery TO BE designED
freely - with or without a camera, with or without video synthesizers, with or without
recorded video performance, with or without video feedback - but BY masking the
representation of TRUE identity for the sake of transcendence, designing the
new MOVING image from a real world imagination of illusion FORMING an acid dream
PSYCHEDELIC AWAKENING of fascination.
NOW PUR the audience can easily escape into a loss of predictions erasing the images
proof of real world existence as PART OF a simulated ACID dream within a computerized
simulation OF THE MIND EXPANDING fascination WHERE A simulated computerized
ACID DREAM paradise CREATES THE DREAMERS ACID DREAM AS
THE AUDIENCE AND THE COMPOSER ARE aware that THEIR ACID DREAM
reality is not exactly reality.
WE allow the transformations to be seen in an acid day dream reality of experimental
awakenings OF PSYCHEDELIA CONVINCED THAT even reality is possibly a DREAM
simulation WE ARE LIVING IN possibly here an abstraction of truth in which we want to
escape in order to dream up our own explanation for the missing pieces to lifes mystics
WHERE the untold story is the mystery we may explore like children playing freely
thinking without boundaries.
May we color outside the lines as we once did during our childhood as pure AND creative,
intuitive and vulnerable with our instincts - like the innocent, like the boundless,
like the bountiful COLORING IN THE ACID DREAMS THE WAY WE CAN COLOR
IN THE POETRY BOOK WITH MOVING PAINTINGS.
JOUISSANCE BEYOND SIGNIFICATION
| DIFFÉRANCE BEYOND PRESENCE
| SIMULACRA BEYOND REPRESENTATION
| HETEROTOPIAS BEYOND CHRONOLOGY
SWEET ACID DREAMS: Chromatic
Transcendence of Oneiric Consciousness
Where abstracted illusions of distorted reality bring together a poetic dream experiment,
the entropy of chromatic lyrical gesture unveilS a colorful motion of awkward beauty
among a chaotic mystic mystery of energy from moving paintings made up of collage film.
Phenomenological deconstruction of temporal consciousness, ontological dissolution of
representational boundaries, semiotic insurgency against narrative hegemony,
Bachelardian poetics of oneiric space.
IN A celestial orbit of lost dreams, The video artist Creates an imagination of unseen
dream worlds composed within a chromatic spectrum of non-objectivity explorations
showing the hidden destiny among A psychedelic journey of time travel and spinning
rainbows against a sublime computerized acid paradise of moving imagery on the
edge of spoken word transcendence.
Deleuzian deterritorialization of perceptual planes, Kristevan chora of prelinguistic
signification, Barthesian jouissance beyond textual pleasure, liminality of Foucauldian
heterotopic space.
I continuously find inspiration in my Acid Dream Experimental Video Art Film Making
Manifesto, Which I wrote for myself and others as a strategy to rediscover new ways of
dreaming up the unusual psychedelic visions of acid dreams and its awkward film beauty.
With spoken word of an acid day dream reality for transformations, a transition of dream
interpretation FORM a translation of poetic transcendence unleashing DEpictions of dream
experimentation are TO BE RECOGNIZED AS A spiritual exploration of the acid DREAM
essence.
Heideggerian unconcealment of aletheia in visual form, Merleau-Pontian chiasmic
intertwining of perception, Lyotardian differend of incommensurable discourse,
Blanchotian literary space of infinite regression.
This experimental film became an embodiment of simulated dreaming seeking
empowerment from unpredictable miracles uncovering fates inevitable destiny to
dream up a simulated future FOR THE DREAMER IN ONES DREAMS becoming a
manifestation of AN acid day dream metamorphosis reality.
Baudrillardian hyperreality of simulacral precession, Derridean différance of perpetually
deferred meaning, Debordian détournement of spectacle subversion, Artaudian cruelty of
visceral consciousness.
Abstract Expressionism joined with recordings of recited spoken word TAKEN from my
POETRY book, A portrayal of dreaming weightlessly joined together digital moving
paintings AND collage film.
Kantian sublime transcending phenomenal experience, Bataillean transgression of
sublime expenditure, Cixousian écriture féminine of embodied writing, Kristevian
abjection of semiotic eruption.
An engaging mind expansion of spiritual growth allowed a self actualization to become the
explanations of understanding MY acid visions existing in a dream state of everlasting rapture,
caught up in the endless possibilities of dreaming in the present moment of reconfiguration.
EPISTEMOLOGICAL RUPTURE | ONTOLOGICAL DISSOLUTION
| PHENOMENOLOGICAL TRANSCENDENCE | SEMIOTIC INSURGENCY
By testing the audience attention span with a unique perception of Lost dreams, the
encapsulation of unexpected illusion is dreamt up by the viewer within THE abstractions
of expression. BY confronting an acid DREAM simulation, Where the recreation of dreamt
up acid day dreams are THE reinvention FOR meaning through a translated understanding
of automatic action Painting for moving PAINTING that IS an acid dream film Volta of THE
dreamerS DREAM paintING the unknown.
Adornian negative dialectics of aesthetic theory, Benjaminian aura in mechanical reproduction,
Eisensteinian montage of dialectical collision, Mallarméan spatiotemporal typographical
constellations.
By using a non-objective disguise for a haunting real world familiarity, the mysterious design
allows the computerized acid paradise to be the outcome of lucid VISIONS OF DREAMING
from a pure demonstration of magical whimsicality among REALITIE'S escape.
JOUISSANCE BEYOND SIGNIFICATION | DIFFÉRANCE BEYOND PRESENCE
| SIMULACRA BEYOND REPRESENTATION
| HETEROTOPIAS BEYOND CHRONOLOGY
The acid dream vision becomes eternal return, the chromatic cascade
dissolves perceptual boundaries, the oneiric consciousness transcends rational
thought, the liminal space between existence and nonexistence.
The Phenomenological Cinema of Laura Grace Robles
Laura Grace Robles imagines a form of existence not constrained by predictive algorithms of aesthetic determinism—above the binary ecology of artistic attribution—somewhere between conscious construction and unconscious revelation. The artist's consciousness creates not out of beauty's traditional paradigms, but because of its deliberate countering; that is, aesthetic anti-being is ontological rebellion.
The artist perceives signals of collage-like electronic interruptions, which merge to a spectrum of colors, foreshadowing a speculative vision of futurity as mythopoeic stories in a parallel universe. She asserts that there are archetypical dreamscapes of countless stories inscribed in the caves of antiquity by un-initiated shamanic people who came upon the hieroglyphs as transcendental indications.
This metaphysical cartography captures the transcendent incongruity of Birthday Gurl's oneiric cinema: consciousness manifesting as effortlessly transitional temporal visual poetry. In the midst of its emotive practice, the artist will demonstrate a mysticism of frequencies that ride between becoming and unbecoming, where narrative absence is compelled to resurrect the avant-garde (and so, chromatic saturation) of the infinitely shifting. In the chaos of the metric, the lyrical wave comes and goes; the concentration and separation of composed dis-locations coalesce and diverge. The filmmaker must indulge in epistemological amnesia—imposed amnesiac throwing-away of accounted for knowledge. This self-surrendering subdueing of memory and permanence entails that she engage in cinematic production as quasi-mediumship—the dis-embodiment of possession that deliberately avoids technical reproduction with identical references.
Media destruction, becomes possibility space for emergent image—captured not by artistic calling, but through deterritorializing, not technique, uncallable around what it already cannot define but is instead called to . You don't fool anyone. Ontological inversion occurs as the artist, feels the horizonality of the experimental become the imaginative as event.
In Birthday Gurl´s approach to directing, she moves all expectations of teleology and hierarchical systems of control. This primitive liberation allows her to explore infinite rhizomatic spatialities of the inter-object formed, where the prismatic convergence, takes form in temporal spontaneities—a fractal medley from algorithms in code.
The artist dimensions become fate that is edified through electronic mathematics—where waves of delirium cognition, and her chaotic event process take form of the language of the cinema. Like transparent shape note melodic spectra, Birthday Gurl must trust in this veritable fantasy that is situated in order to steer around filmmaking as illusion non-fiction within the architecture of dream.
Through an expressive stylization, her disengaging from sanctioned reality becomes affianced a shamanic possession by the ethereal essence of experimental cinema that allows for her dis-constitution, appearing over and over, yet un-deadrifted by convention within an experiment of dreaming.
In rejecting normative percepts from from Hollywood industrial structures, Birthday Gurl can give the spectator one wish of transcendental affirmation—where they witness the unfolding dissolution of human identity through its erosion occurring at the obscured cosmic planes.
She assuages distortion of abstracted vison through cloaked perpetually-transmuted absurdities—accompanied figures, place and things exist as yet-transformed sonically-phenomenon perceived through skin, instead of ear-brain pathways. Floating and convening in this equally sacred heterotopic dreamspace, the artist channels constructs of fiction, who transmute themselves into non-fiction— endeavouring a false awakening of paradoxical actualization, where the belief of being-falling is diminished in acid-experiment in the poetice of cinematic language she uses.
Having been both problematic and advocate for proposing puzzle-solving, as resolution to being alone—the artist now indifferently re-accounts reinvention fantasies and ambiguous dreams as non-formed delusions. This inventional process is proposed to us by gifting us a empty chromatic container within which we can project our own whimsical potentials—the voyage begins. Birthday Gurl's aspiration for the conditioned
DECONSTRUCTED ALICE: Oneiric Experimentation in Acid Wonderland An interview with experimental video artist Birthday Gurl (Laura Grace Robles) by Simone Valère, curator of New Visions: The Deconstructed Cinema symposium at the Institute for Post-Digital Aesthetics
THE DIALECTICS OF DREAM-CINEMA VALÈRE: Your latest experimental piece, Alice in Acid Wonderland, is a curious ontological divergence from traditional cinematic temporality. Can you elaborate on the conceptual origin and process behind this hypnagogic work?
BIRTHDAY GURL: The initial phenomenological inquiry required figuring out the primary thematic concern. I became aware that my cinematic practice seems to have a particular oneiric value, or dreamlike liminality existing between conscious structuralism and unconscious free-associational processes. I wanted to push deeper into this territory by using my "Acid Dream Experimental Video Art Film Manifesto" as a conceptual agenda—a sort of map for charting, and moving through the uncharted territory of the unconscious.
The Carroll narrative, with its surrealist qualities that seem already embedded in the collective unconscious, was the perfect vehicle for this exploration. Once I had found dozens of cinematic interpretations of Alice in Wonderland in the digital commons, I decided it was meta-textual—potentially a palimpsest of all of these contradictory interpretations to do a heteroglossic re-imagining of Alice, where this re-imagining was the avant-garde aesthetic’s development into an acid pop aesthetic that leads to the title: Alice in Acid Wonderland.
The editing experience resembled a Jackson Pollock’s action painting re-imagined digitally—improvised movements of image animation manipulation. I was making kinetic paintings with this film that expressed internal dreamscapes. This method is in a similar vein of inquiry as Pipilotti Rist’s video installations, especially "Ever Is Over All" (1997), where the excess of abstraction takes on a dreamlike contextual trajectory— a sensory differentiator where she constructed worlds void of conventional narrative.
DECONSTRUCTIVE METHODOLOGIES
VALÈRE: Your experimental characteristics cause a challenge to establish the unconventional of cinematic construction. What particular techniques or philosophical positions makes your work experimental?
BIRTHDAY GURL: The work is primarily collage cinema—a pre-existing footage work without camera-based production methods. This sort of experimental cinema as a collage method is in the same tradition as Bruce Conner’s groundbreaking "A MOVIE" (1958) and Craig Baldwin’s "Tribulation 99" (1991), where previous visual elements are recontextualized and rearranged to create new referential semantics.
I enjoyed the freedom of owning my aesthetic vision completely—taking the DIY perspective as early in the tradition as Stan Brakhage or a contemporary ever-evolving artist like Harmony Korine, who judgments of later works like "Trash Humpers" (2009) are incorrect about the failure of technical production, those 'mistakes' represent core stylistic qualities—their aesthetics contain anchored meanings.
My aim was to dislocate Carroll's narratively linear progression to fracture it into a form or structure that could not be Euclidean—where multiple Alices were experiencing parallel universities and variant outcomes of the same dreamscape simultaneously. The "now" iconic sequences from Alice are displayed in repetitive yet transformative waves to communicate multiple Alices existing in a parallel universe, introducing a quantum narrative concept in which the act of observation determines a material.
Adopted as authentic, my approach to editing was intentionally reckless and impulsive to be true to the potential of chance operations reminiscent of Duchamp's "3 Standard Stoppages" or the aleatoric compositions of John Cage—where I've embraced the unconscious to become a catalyst for formal decisions rather than necessarily conforming/unifying wholes through predetermined structures.
ARTISTIC IDENTITY & PHILOSOPHICAL POSITIONINGARTISTIC IDENTITY & PHILOSOPHICAL POSITIONING
VALÈRE: You traditionally self-identify as a "video artist" instead of calling yourself a "film director", which has implications of more commerciality. Can you explain the philosophical implications of this wording?
BIRTHDAY GURL: I envision my practice as video art rather than directing a film for a number of reasons. Primarily, I reject the established "industrial" hierarchies, and standardized way of making a film as a director, which suggests some level of authority and some level of control over the action, the people and the technology. Video art is a much more holistic and solitary (less hierarchical) position to be creative.
In this work, I have completely bypassed the camera (i.e., the basic means of practice in traditional cinema), and focused on appropriation and digital image manipulation. This method also relates to the Situationists' notion of the "détournement," who were apprehensive of the limitations of conventional visual representations of social meaning and reality, as well as the experimental found footage artists, like Matthias Müller and Martin Arnold.
My identification as a "video artist" represents a conscious position within the historical tradition of art as exemplified by Nam June Paik, Valie Export, Joan Jonas, etc., in which moving images exist as material to sculpt, perform and conceptualize, not primarily as narrative delivery mechanisms. I have total power over my aesthetic without the burden of having to conform to even the minor caveats that commercial cinema would necessitate.
SPECTATORIAL ENGAGEMENT & COGNITIVE ACTIVATION
VALÈRE: What kinds of thought or awareness do you seek to provoke in viewers when engaging with your work?
BIRTHDAY GURL: Ultimately, I want to compel viewers to think imaginatively, and engage with their creative thinking, by enacting the cognitive re-assembly of my fractured narrative elements within their experience. This requires active-reflective viewing, not the passive viewer that a commercial cinema frame constructs so diligently not to disrupt.
I want to re-awaken what Gaston Bachelard would call the "material imagination," that ability to engage with the phenomenal world without any means of rational thought as barriers in the way of their phenomenological engagement with the world. My acid cinema at its best acts as mediating objects for re-engagement; a re-formative experience reminds viewers of how to engage without demands for pre-socialized inputs, like they may have done when they were still children.
My approach, I think philosophically, connects with Heidegger's proposal of "Gelassenheit," or "releasement," which allows for things to show themselves as they are as calculative thinking recedes. Basically, the audience needs to dismiss conventional narrative expectations, and come to representational understandings as a receiver, almost like within a conscious dream-state.
AESTHETIC EVOLUTION & CINEMATIC DEPARTURE
VALÈRE: In what ways does Alice in Acid Wonderland represent an evolution or a departure from your previous cinematic explorations?
BIRTHDAY GURL: Alice in Acid Wonderland represents a massive dialectical shift in my practice, conceptually and formally, by engaging with a recognizably familiar narrative frame. I have always avoided engaging in any recognizable narrative frame and have always attempted to compose abstract non-narrative pieces instead. I do not feel that I am rejecting methods I previously pursued, but I am applying familiar methods to recognized source material.
I have translated Carroll's (sometimes) familiar narrative into a dis-located dream-structure (a contradiction being that a dream-structure attains meaning in a dream state). I think it is the subjective resemblance to how we experience our possibilities, with multiple identities, when we dream and the dream recurs and does have slight variations, although memory fails us often and our conscious brain is not absolutely reliable.
My practice has transformed traditional narrative cinema into dream analysis, which is psychoanalysis of the collective unconscious, and where films become my living manifestations in my own oneiric.
Interviewed by Dr. Elise Moreau, Chair of Post-Digital Aesthetics, Institute for Contemporary Art Ontologies
MOREAU: Your debut as "Birthday Gurl" at the beginning of 2006 marked what might be considered a paradigmatic rupture in multi-media aesthetics. Your latest work, Scoonnies, has already been referred to as a "skitsto-effective film you'll hallucinate to." Can you discuss the philosophical frameworks that have underwritten this project?
ROBLES: When I began to determine an ontological approach for Scoonnies, I wanted to elevate sound visualization and noise music to the limits of the conformed body, and then push the limits of those limits by moving beyond psychedelic experience while still seizing on the aesthetic of the acid-junk film. In 2009, Scoonnies started as a readymade painting—very Duchampian for me—before I gave myself over to simply designing moving imagery through recorded video performance. .
I gave up conventional camera work for a palimpsestic deployment of effects on reworking recorded performances and bunches of video fragments from Jørgen Leth's The Perfect Human. It became a colour vortex where the human subject detaches from origins in the dimension of perfect psychosis of the subliminal universe, or what perhaps Deleuze might call a body without organs—that still exists simply as pure intensity.
This process developed as body inquiry and corporeality itself became medium rather than subject, which puts me in conversation with Merleau-Ponty and his phenomenology, which moves toward the distancing or disengagement of corporeal movement. I engaged in Scoonnies as non-representational contagion—somehow, it was not just a dreamworld, but perhaps catharsis through video and nude performance. Scoonnies became a necromantic channeling of Michael Jackson's ongoing evolution after his death—auditory hallucinations positioned me again as oracle—much as Zarathustra became Nietzsche's mouthpiece for the powerful truth.
MOREAU: Do filmmakers have any obligation to culture? Or does the act of creative practice entail contribution, narrative, restriction?
ROBLES: Beyond determining the human identity beyond aesthetic or director, and their distortion through the sensibilities of human cinema, I think my only cultural obligation is as fidelity to creative intuition. The act of filmmaking exist as a kind of dream index as it has become to me: made, silent, no-budget, not scripted, strategies towards object-less narrative construction, and the will, or act to blatantly disregard the premises of central cinema. My value, in addition to the paradox of fidelity to self-through-transgression, is heard in Derrida's "différance," which circumscribed the impossibility of fixed meaning through the endless deferral of meaning.
I believe we have been telling the same stories over and over again, and we are fixated inside our minds on a narrow half-dozen superficial images as a fantasy mode of existence. And we have developed the myth of role models—superhero, or piracy genres of mass film archetypes—have poisoned ordinary people with easy and hackneyed standard sources of cinematic consumption. We should all formways of learning to uncover future narrative methods of omission, narratively substituting for the psychedelic fairy tale—to anti-fantasy absurdities and religious horrors instead of the vestiges of the style of beauty pagent and instructional video—a kind of reversion nonfiction, or deformation video.
MOREAU: Why did you feel motivated to organize public nudity at Walmart, and how does this transgression enter in relation to your cardboard semantics?
ROBLES: Clearly Scoonnies, or more broadly, the cardboard I had inscribed, "Will cheese crossed out work to gas uhh cola moon woking IN PAINT" worked symbolically in relation to The King of Pop. I ended up seeing a news broadcaster announcing Mike's death, and at that moment something dawned on me.
MOREAU: Currently, film is predominately defined by serious deliberation. In Scoonnies, you commingle absurdity with levity to negotiate meaning and intent and translate Spinoza's ethics. Please discuss how absurdity and levity inspire your practice.
ROBLES: Absurdity happens when you look at the tragic and existential, and the beauty and absurdity of that. Leavy is levity's role, strategic lift in negative tensions, jumping to meaning practices using folds into compassionate spaces, without objective condemnation, of madness!
MOREAU: How does levity reveal absurdity?
ROBLES: Levity creates a kind of abstraction, suspension, that allows social context, mind time, to become humorous. The gravity of the situation shifts to the absurdity of whatever the outcome of this phrase or position re-presents. In Scoonnies, I res savored and relished but these acknowledgments are quite complex and absurd all at the same time! Everything is not so dire even if the situation is tragic.
MOREAU: Thus, absurdity becomes the subjective interpretation of incompleteness, perceived loss turned glimmering achievement. You transform thin air into gas. Apply this theory to your scientific work or sociological quagmire. Absurdity of mind-thinking in capricious chiaroscuro. Narrative characteristics being eccentric actors of tension uncontained, competition with PERFORMATIVIST. Cunning fucking humor. Arrange all of this at once while dynamically shifting spaces with levity or hypertext.
ROBLES: I revel in absurdity and post-structuralist thought. Absurdity becomes social condition for ethical body transcendence. This is engaging madness. The film generates questions about character thinking theories to develop energy, human agency. Movement questioning movement. The entire film emerges fluidly at the level of absurdity while embracing it! I embrace absurdity archaically in every single aspect of living in a rapidly complicated time.
MOREAU: Thus, the full implications of modernist principles become explicit. Everyone is mad and this is an absurd world.
MOREAU: Creating an opening but simultaneously producing the impossible. Please compare and/or contrast your behavior to Scoonnies.
Robles: Another significant experiment is knowing how to behave so there've been a lot of difficult times. Scoonnies. I want to emphasize the absence of rules, but simply focus on the greatness. This absence allowed contextual practices such as risk.
Summary: In thinking performance, Scoonnies questions the mental status of behavior possibilities of humans as singularities, then elaborates away from a singular, while experiencing the fear of cultural conventions, uninhabited. Scoonnies asks how to produce something made with seriousness, to ask what it means to recreate (seriousness). The tension culminates into absurdism through playful, ridiculous antics.
Certainly. Therefore, "What is" the whole title would lend itself to suggest something, like to be serious. We would discover "Scoonnies people" who would laugh simultaneously...if the film was pleasance kind of serious. This mingling when the demonstrate is corporeality tension expands; your spirit is feeling another expressive.
As expressive as abstracted reels feels like the same as mediated intersection. Monster is becoming from.
Everything, Scoonnies have things in time/reality element become real due to the absurdity of the time differences. Is it something about itself to be? To be fetishizing, perception as trick.
Detail from the absurdity to oblivion, to the wonderous. In sum, the marginal, powerful themes become experiential. Finding retrospect from perceived humorous to being recalled as phantasm.
Think the think/performance.
Visual come close to passage, become ethereal reflection --- I am here.
ROBLES: I view my work as a hermeneutic rupture operating within the presumed parameters of conventional cinema; it functions as a détournement of 'functional' filmmaking techniques, compelling audiences to think about the limits of their own paradigms of perception. Using the tactic of public space engagement, (including bodily movement and psychic interiority), I produce experiences that unsettle the comfortable distance between audience and what is deemed to be 'the viewed.'
The acid dream experimental video art manifesto is not an ontology but an ethos, a provocation and a challenge to artistic categorization itself. My films exist as heterotopic spaces in the Foucauldian sense: where multiple incompatible orderings coexist simultaneously, creating zones of temporal and cognitive dissonance that cannot be commodified.
Laura Grace Robles (Birthday Gurl) is a multi-media artist whose work includes Jesus Practice, The Jesus Monster, and the sixteen-film Foxy series. Her experimental films and guerrilla installations have been shown internationally, going against the grain of how we think about cinema, performative work in a public context, and conventional public space. This interview took place at the Institute for Contemporary Art Ontologies in Spring 2025.
An interview with an experimental video artist by Théo Marchand
GENESIS THROUGH MATERIALITY
MARCHAND: Your artistic practice originated in the sculptural form before moving into time-based media. Can you explain this metamorphosis?
ARTIST: The transition to time-based media happened organically when I was in university and started casting the elements of large feeding devices for infants. I had a shift in practice that reimagined these objects as performative objects, a helmet-shaped device and elongated inflatable shapes tied together by clear membranes. This corporeal intervention became the way of reframing through a notable 19th century painting that depicted multiple women in a bathhouse—a painting created by an octogenarian master who I wanted to reconsider through the lens of an alternative vision. Video documentation became an important part of my early investigations as it allowed me to use multiplying effects and repetitions of groupings of people much as the painting had arranged the figures. It was red paint on my body as both surface and participant, while the helmet device shifted into a form that operated as an androgynous archetype purposefully moving beyond categories of social relations. What began as a straightforward documentation had many alterations to it during post-production—using looping operatic soundscapes that moved it beyond conventional understandings of documentation. The form that resulted positioned film as a painterly investigative practice across disciplines—a method that resonates with some feminist performance artists in the 1960s who used their bodies as site and subject of production while transgressing expectations of documentation, and expanding all aspects of the documentation into an extension of painting practice.
METHODOLOGICAL SUBVERSIONS
MARCHAND: Your work consistently subverts your viewers’ expectations in the convention of image-making. In your opinion what forms your systematic methods of subversion?
ARTIST: My practice intentionally embraces the calculated risk that comes with methodological subversion: by intentionally avoiding camera-based production and being open to crossing any and all known boundaries. This approach also recalls certain notions of psychogeography that were common among avant-gardes in the mid-20th century—deliberate wandering of space by negating the usual path. I try and wander the cinematic landscape by disregarding registered pathways in terms of the production and reception of images altogether.
AFFECTIVE ATMOSPHERES
MARCHAND: Your most recent work creates a particularly interesting emotional environment for its audience. If you could, how would you define the psychological environment it performs?
ARTIST: The mood that is felt emerges through a deliberate unpredictability or psychic hygiene each time a levitational catharsis is experienced by the body and a sound meditation soothes and churns the audio sense. The artwork acts as a forced confrontation with one's "imaginative potential" as it becomes an external cue of internally conceived ideas. Viewing consciousness will always attempt to create meaning that this psychic condition will not allow reaching beyond whatever it deems coherent meaning structure, substituting a traditional narrative construct with symbolic fragments. There is a presencing/absencing actually happening that provides listening in a perceptual habitat of subliminal suggestion and a revisitation of attention spawned earlier, affording a new perspective. The work will provide you with visual nourishment for three possible viewers: the transgressor, the romantic, and the visionary—a sort of triangulated audience akin to what some German conceptual artists considered art offered—a three pronged affect of revolutionary, emotional, and spiritual.
MARCHAND: What thematic concerns does this recent work explore in metaphorical terms situating it beyond a mere formal exploration?
ARTIST: At its conceptual center, the work explores a cultural originary instinct to want to freely express our humanity, which is a resonance of the pre-historic imperative of making something, that can be linked to the creative expressions of paleolithic creative expression. It also probes the breadth of human rights with respect to aesthetic inquiry.
In relation to this are examinations of documentary forms that examine prehistoric cave painting—a subject that represents our unbroken chain of creative expression as human beings that has not changed in our desire to be to create something for millennia.
TECHNICAL PROCESSES
MARCHAND: Can you elaborate on the technical and collaborative processes that shaped this work?
ARTIST: The process was one of deliberate simple and complex at the same time—a form of a child-like game of insertion and removal, of breathing sound in and out, of rhythm and exploring rhythm through repetition and variation.
The sound was a particular priority for us; four separate recording sessions were professionally maximized by technicians in pairs of dual state of the art hardware as our "audio interface" with dual audio channel sound interface. This provided for 32 channel input/out capability with a high level of technical specification and software environment.
The audio was made from a composition of multiple synthesizers—an analog rhythm generator was programmed and performed, and I performed on multiple analog modeling synthesizers and a workstation synthesizer. The defining property was linking all the instruments via standard protocol with the rhythm generator functioning as "tempo lord."
My model here has a lot in common with the German electronic music of the late 1970s—where "electronic" instrument made sound not as a simulation of a non-electronic instrument, but as a sonic open-user-exploration, for sonic exploratory reasons.
INNOVATION IN MODERN PRACTICE
MARCHAND: As we are in an age of cultural originality, how do you think you keep innovative practice?
ARTIST: I have developed a theoretical framework for making "acid-based" cinema—presenting the original concept as "video art," but the concept has transformed to also include practices redefining non-traditional movement image making. Historical paradigms have been set up to avoid connecting previously identifiable forms of experimental media; my practice purposefully collapses this distinction.
The "manifesto" I have written as funding for the grant positions these works as existing equivalent polarities within anti-art movements, as video art exists as a relatedness to experimental film. This framing of the ideas provides a theoretical framing for viewing non-representational moving imagery through experience, while the visual representational aspect of the work is the "pop" end of the spectrum and an underdeveloped genre of work exploring the mind's untouched abstract dream state.
I have an aesthetic within the anti-art frame simply counters the representational code of originality in a narrative linear coherent structure. Instead, the work can properly be advanced as cinema to counter against the very canon film industry structures of censorship and legible rejection of cinematic convention—an achievement of dynamic innovation to visual language.
For instance, my process of writing the script involved a careful epistemic distraction—for example, rewriting till enough of the narrative element diminished, where the character or thematic elements existing simply as informative fragments or scatter into random sequences intentionally as a way to honor conceptually the distruction of coherence.
OF NOTE, I have coined "mock performance" as my directorial contrived modality in works; a motif taken with my conceptual rhythm systems—a unique method to build rhythmic structures through such dialectical metric structures that repattern visual experience as the transitory alternative actual reality corresponding discriminately action coordination exploring rejected sound in consumption—auditory always.
This coincides into an idea similar as a weight into the positional with theorizing the discerned territory of significant experimental female filmmakers' thinking of "vertical" as opposed to a more familiar "horizontal" method of storytelling, thinking for example, when in poetry vice causal linear elements, as por for instance, a mark of causality is turining to associations of emotional tone through a fractionally fragmented story structure.
MARCHAND: You've cited "mock performance" as a separate way of operating. Would you discuss that further?
ARTIST: That is a foundational aspect of a conceptual frame that came from my experience of an abundance of chance investigations through experimental documentaries. The operating modality blurs the boundary between acting and performance art by probing the psychology of the body's and the acting tradition's way to create meaning (verbally or through silence).
The performance modality examines how stereotypical presentations or attitudes can influence what is said or not said. There is a decision to use calculated expressiveness rather than normal rehearsal so that the performers rehearse their performances in a way that they think about acting, rather than think into it. The performer is not tied to the contingencies of time but, rather, is an artist in constant awareness of the precise moment that informs the performance. The performer is a codified structure that is available or not at that exact moment as opposed to a structure that dictates meaning.
Time ceases to matter once physicality, performance, becomes paramount on the life-death continuum. The performer experiences a dual thought process—one thought as "the performance artist" and the other as "the actor"—fueled by their ego in the instant but separated from some dialectical relationship in time, again to ultimately distract from the performance, not so much thinking of the future but thinking about the performance itself, not time per se.
When it works, the mock performance oscillates intellectually and physically back and forth between deliberate and accidental, performative, expressive action. This may also involve some kind of sensory remove, e.g., testimony presented to an audience, who all have different capacities for knowing—such as the entertainers, who have limited focus or the theoretically organized audience, who have clearer concepts and ideas about the performance.
As a consequence, you can use mock performance to play with the limit of a person physically—but, more so, to extend the action to an unreasonable duration; both the performers and audience knowingly participate in an understanding of the exercise's constructed nature. The performers would purposely engage or extend the action longer than reasonable duration, whereas the unreasonable aspect continues without a predetermined aim aside from absurdity and dysfunction.
This evolves to a critique on acting once you make it an inherent part of monologue durations or mimetic/recursive mockery. The mock performative act arose between several processes of an inquiry and attempts to identify the capacity of a performer's attention during performance of a documentation, which itself is unidirectional and categorical, and more particular, decision to let attention lapse without consequence, and then somehow had a transfer of attention from performative space to documentation space. All of which were being deliberated simply to not have a rational plan for an idea that had continued since the pantomime.
The concepts within mock performance also lean towards other durational performances, as being one of endurance, and it is true that endurance creates type of transcendence, but the mock performance intentionally applies traditional layers that pure performance art rejects.
EMBLEMATIC INTERVENTIONIST STRATEGIES
MARCHAND: Your public intervention into a major retail space is a particularly audacious act. What some of the conceptually founded rationale did you draw on to produce such provocation?
ARTIST: This could be classified as having immediate exposure and, thereby, there are possible risks. Legal risks associated with public exposure can be considered a misdemeanor for exposure of the original act, but a felony for being charged with the second public act and provided judicial past experience could could involve fine both civilly and incarceration. In some jurisdictions, the legal ramifications require participant registration, which is serious and makes the personal act of public art performance problematic.
This was my second organized growth of an act within the public sphere, as related to my element of a performance when an artist performs work without convention or with regulatory consequences. At the moment of performance I thought about what seemed like prophetic weight, as if these planned actions were different from their immediate context, that was drawing importance for some future gesture or passing of icons—had seemed 'prophetic' too while I was crafting the textual descriptor.
The temporal synchronicity of initiating our performance within the month of a celebrity coincided with the passive choreographed notes of one participant's sign, along with the remains of my perception of importance, about all the related incidents, came together and further reinforced my conception of prophetic-ness.
AUDIENCE RELATIONSHIPS
MARCHAND: What do you think about audience desires, and what is the creator's culpability to the specator's anticipation?
ARTIST: I think there's an intrinsic alignment in a discursive but larger sense in general between the desires of the creator and audience. Both are attempting to undergo a transformation of sorts—a shift in cognition from despair to a more buoyant optimism, a sense of sensory satiation, a reframing of the inspiration behind everyday habits, discovering new imaginative responses to the unimagined, revealing the poetic in the mesmerizing moment of eloquent allusion, and reconciling with the conceptual aspect of the work.
The audience not only wants to have the experience, they also want the experience they physically or cognitively or emotionally aren't prepared to anticipate—a paradoxical notion which places the artist in the role of the translator of unarticulated desires of the unconscious collective. I think that this sense of responsibility should be seated at the heart of our practice—internalized, metabolized, and transfigured into a creative experience.
The creator's responsibilities lie beyond just trying to satisfy audience expectation. It would be an artistic failure to be overtly predictable about imagery someone might anticipate. That would simply be more of a reflection, not transformation. We go beyond that, we act as perceptual alchemist—revealing the image-world of the unconscious in its psychedelic and sublime splendors, quickening consciousness of moving toward a future perceptual experience, and uplifting the experience of everyday into a transendent vision.
This perspective resonates with a notion of "ecstatic truths" as suggested by various German filmmakers; a deeper sense of reality and being which can only be achieved through the invention of style and aesthetic intervention rather than through representation of factuality.
Théo Marchand is the founding editor of Cahiers du Cinéma Expérimental and has published several pivotal texts on the evolution of moving image practices in the digital realm of the 21st century. His research primarily investigates emergent forms of audiovisual expression that challenge the boundaries between various art forms, technologies, and exhibition formats.
ACID POP VIDEO STILLS
"Where human identity transcends directorial determinism and lyrical distortion becomes the ontological continuity, the artist's singular cultural responsibility manifests as fidelity to creative intuition through the alchemical transmutation of acid junk cinema—a FILM VOLTA that ruptures conventional perception. By casting semiotic enchantments upon the spectator through encounters with the incurable and inexplicable contagion, I invoke that liminal psychosis requiring ritualistic remediation within the theatrical heterotopia, intermedial spaces, architectural projections, or nomadic gallery installations. These become revolving kaleidoscopic apparatuses for anthropomorphic objects that revolutionize the spirit of future cinematic thanatology.
We shall no longer be imprisoned within predictable narrative architectures contained by commodified stimulants—those vulgar telecommunication devices submitting to architectural hegemony—all while disregarding the warrior-mystic who claims authorship and performance in works deemed unworthy of institutional validation within the reified boundaries of video art and experimental film festivals. Their failure to accommodate the frogtroyhogs epidemic—an airborne contagion of psychic liberation—reveals their inability to embrace the sublime terror of claustrophobic dissolution."
