The Tone so Prolonged is a motion picture first produced in Beirut in November 2012. Like a poem; it lives of rhythm, metaphors and emotions. It is a work of intimacy.
During a six-hour train trip in Europe in March 2011, I find myself installing a tripod in the middle of the cabin and disappearing into the viewfinder for the duration of the trip. I shoot with an unspoken desire to create a chain out of the images and to capture the juxtaposition between my own bodily immobility and the movement of the outside, that of space and time.
The spacial scenery in motion juxtaposed with the motionless self-reflection resembles a life no longer appropriated, the life of someone suspended in a daily circular routine and over the steady linearity of time. It doesn’t matter where they are, or where they are going; they are giving in to what is not themselves.
In capturing these photos, there is an attempt to grab a lost self. In the images, the self reflection is at times visible and at others, erased by the grandiosity of the outside; it disappears, re-emerges and disappears again in scenic views, mundanities, and what not.
In the resulting images, a poem is accomplished, and in the act of exhibiting them, the challenge of preserving the integrity of that poem is embedded.
With a desire to re-enact the experience of witnessing these images in a viewfinder, I create a film strip and I build a slightly altered version of Edison’s kinetoscope (film viewing machine) that allows the strip to loop subtly. The machine can only take one eye at a time. Inside it, the viewer scrolls manually through the images with a handle and creates their own pace of the film sequence, in an intimate encounter, not so far from that of the photographer with them. In a setting where the act of seeing is part of the exhibition, the work unravels the intimacy enshrined in image consumption. The machine failed to work properly because of an imperfect construction.
In a new iteration of the work, The Tone so Prolonged inhabits the form of video art, liberated from the image viewing experience that was part of its life as an installation. In becoming a video, the work is prolonged into a new life past its exhibition time, while simultaneously undergoing a closure. As a video, the work is released from its looping and suspended nature to settle in its finite time and space. Its own motion continues to point to the movement between self-loss and self-control, while it has been inter-parsed with additional intimate video footage from a life that came after, as a pseudo-consequence. As such, the photo series are mirrored with the new footage, marking the work as resolved, and transmitting it into what can be considered as its entirety today.
In obsessing over the capturing of a (self) image against the matter of time, The Tone so Prolonged, in its different iterations, puts on display the rhythmic encounters between the inside and the outside and unravels instances where these encounters are, at times, enmeshed, fused or harmonious, and at others, more violent and dissonant.
