Film

The Art of Noises (1913)

Zang Tumb Tumb, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. 1914.

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Filled with a sense of glory for the modern, the Italian Futurist movement saw beauty in speed, dynamism, and automation. Rather than yearn for simpler times, they wanted to break free from the past with a celebration of the new, liberate Italy from the weight of its tradition and history and see the present day for the marvel it was. Russolo, one of the founding figures of the movement, wrote this letter in 1913 to a composer and futurist friend Balilla Pratella. To read it today, it is hard to believe Russolo was considering these ideas more than a century ago, and this short letter is considered amongst the most influential pieces of music theory ever written. Proposing a new kind of music built from the sounds of the modern, industrial world, Russolo argues that traditional orchestral music has become stagnant, confined to limited tones and harmonies, while life around them overflowed with rich mechanical noise. Seeing with prophetic vision the technological revolution approaching them, Russolo urged Pratella to develop a new language, one that flowed with the infinity of the future.

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Luigi Russolo November 13, 2025

Dear Balilla Pratella, great Futurist composer,

In Rome, in the Costanzi Theatre, packed to capacity, while I was listening to the orchestral performance of your overwhelming Futurist music, with my Futurist friends, Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Balla, Soffici, Papini and Cavacchioli, a new art came into my mind which only you can create, the Art of Noises, the logical consequence of your marvelous innovations.

Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in muted tones. The strongest noises which interrupted this silence were not intense or prolonged or varied. If we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent.

Amidst this dearth of noises, the first sounds that man drew from a pieced reed or streched string were regarded with amazement as new and marvelous things. Primitive races attributed sound to the gods; it was considered sacred and reserved for priests, who used it to enrich the mystery of their rites.

And so was born the concept of sound as a thing in itself, distinct and independent of life, and the result was music, a fantastic world superimposed on the real one, an inviolatable and sacred world. It is easy to understand how such a concept of music resulted inevitable in the hindering of its progress by comparison with the other arts. The Greeks themselves, with their musical theories calculated mathematically by Pythagoras and according to which only a few consonant intervals could be used, limited the field of music considerably, rendering harmony, of which they were unaware, impossible.

The Middle Ages, with the development and modification of the Greek tetrachordal system, with the Gregorian chant and popular songs, enriched the art of music, but continued to consider sound in its development in time, a restricted notion, but one which lasted many centuries, and which still can be found in the Flemish contrapuntalists’ most complicated polyphonies.

The chord did not exist, the development of the various parts was not subornated to the chord that these parts put together could produce; the conception of the parts was horizontal not vertical. The desire, search, and taste for a simultaneous union of different sounds, that is for the chord (complex sound), were gradually made manifest, passing from the consonant perfect chord with a few passing dissonances, to the complicated and persistent dissonances that characterize contemporary music.

At first the art of music sought purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound. Then different sounds were amalgamated, care being taken, however, to caress the ear with gentle harmonies. Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated, strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-sound.

This musical evolution is paralleled by the multiplication of machines, which collaborate with man on every front. Not only in the roaring atmosphere of major cities, but in the country too, which until yesterday was totally silent, the machine today has created such a variety and rivalry of noises that pure sound, in its exiguity and monotony, no longer arouses any feeling.

To excite and exalt our sensibilities, music developed towards the most complex polyphony and the maximum variety, seeking the most complicated successions of dissonant chords and vaguely preparing the creation of musical noise. This evolution towards “noise sound” was not possible before now. The ear of an eighteenth-century man could never have endured the discordant intensity of certain chords produced by our orchestras (whose members have trebled in number since then). To our ears, on the other hand, they sound pleasant, since our hearing has already been educated by modern life, so teeming with variegated noises. But our ears are not satisfied merely with this, and demand an abundance of acoustic emotions.

On the other hand, musical sound is too limited in its qualitative variety of tones. The most complex orchestras boil down to four or five types of instrument, varying in timber: instruments played by bow or plucking, by blowing into metal or wood, and by percussion. And so modern music goes round in this small circle, struggling in vain to create new ranges of tones.

This limited circle of pure sounds must be broken, and the infinite variety of “noise-sound” conquered.

Besides, everyone will acknowledge that all musical sound carries with it a development of sensations that are already familiar and exhausted, and which predispose the listener to boredom in spite of the efforts of all the innovatory musicians. We Futurists have deeply loved and enjoyed the harmonies of the great masters. For many years Beethoven and Wagner shook our nerves and hearts. Now we are satiated and we find far more enjoyment in the combination of the noises of trams, backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds than in rehearsing, for example, the “Eroica” or the “Pastoral”.

We cannot see that enormous apparatus of force that the modern orchestra represents without feeling the most profound and total disillusion at the paltry acoustic results. Do you know of any sight more ridiculous than that of twenty men furiously bent on the redoubling the mewing of a violin? All this will naturally make the music-lovers scream, and will perhaps enliven the sleepy atmosphere of concert halls. Let us now, as Futurists, enter one of these hospitals for anaemic sounds. There: the first bar brings the boredom of familiarity to your ear and anticipates the boredom of the bar to follow. Let us relish, from bar to bar, two or three varieties of genuine boredom, waiting all the while for the extraordinary sensation that never comes.

Meanwhile a repugnant mixture is concocted from monotonous sensations and the idiotic religious emotion of listeners buddhistically drunk with repeating for the nth time their more or less snobbish or second-hand ecstasy.

Away! Let us break out since we cannot much longer restrain our desire to create finally a new musical reality, with a generous distribution of resonant slaps in the face, discarding violins, pianos, double-basses and plainitive organs. Let us break out!

It’s no good objecting that noises are exclusively loud and disagreeable to the ear.

It seems pointless to enumerate all the graceful and delicate noises that afford pleasant sensations.

To convince ourselves of the amazing variety of noises, it is enough to think of the rumble of thunder, the whistle of the wind, the roar of a waterfall, the gurgling of a brook, the rustling of leaves, the clatter of a trotting horse as it draws into the distance, the lurching jolts of a cart on pavings, and of the generous, solemn, white breathing of a nocturnal city; of all the noises made by wild and domestic animals, and of all those that can be made by the mouth of man without resorting to speaking or singing.

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“Sound, alien to our life, always musical and a thing unto itself, an occasional but unnecessary element, has become to our ears what an overfamiliar face is to our eyes.”

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Let us cross a great modern capital with our ears more alert than our eyes, and we will get enjoyment from distinguishing the eddying of water, air and gas in metal pipes, the grumbling of noises that breathe and pulse with indisputable animality, the palpitation of valves, the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jolting of a tram on its rails, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags. We enjoy creating mental orchestrations of the crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffling of crowds, the variety of din, from stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning wheels, printing works, electric power stations and underground railways.

Nor should the newest noises of modern war be forgotten. Recently, the poet Marinetti, in a letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis, described to me with marvelous free words the orchestra of a great battle:

“Every 5 seconds siege cannons gutting space with a chord ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB mutiny of 500 echos smashing scattering it to infinity. In the center of this hateful ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB area 50square kilometers leaping bursts lacerations fists rapid fire batteries. Violence ferocity regularity this deep bass scanning the strange shrill frantic crowds of the battle Fury breathless ears eyes nostrils open! load! fire! what a joy to hear to smell completely taratatata of the machine guns screaming a breathless under the stings slaps traak-traak whips pic-pac-pum-tumb weirdness leaps 200 meters range Far far in back of the orchestra pools muddying huffing goaded oxen wagons pluff-plaff horse action flic flac zing zing shaaack laughing whinnies the tiiinkling jiiingling tramping 3 Bulgarian battalions marching croooc-craaac [slowly] Shumi Maritza or Karvavena ZANG-TUMB-TUUUMB toc-toc-toc-toc [fast] crooc-craac [slowly] crys of officers slamming about like brass plates pan here paak there BUUUM ching chaak [very fast] cha-cha-cha-cha-chaak down there up around high up look out your head beautiful! Flashing flashing flashing flashing flashing flashing footlights of the forts down there behind that smoke Shukri Pasha communicates by phone with 27 forts in Turkish in German Allo! Ibrahim! Rudolf! allo! allo! actors parts echos of prompters scenery of smoke forests applause odor of hay mud dung I no longer feel my frozen feet odor of gunsmoke odor of rot Tympani flutes clarinets everywhere low high birds chirping blessed shadows cheep-cheep-cheep green breezes flocks don-dan-don-din-baaah Orchestra madmen pommel the performers they terribly beaten playing Great din not erasing clearing up cutting off slighter noises very small scraps of echos in the theater area 300 square kilometers Rivers Maritza Tungia stretched out Rodolpi Mountains rearing heights loges boxes 2000 shrapnels waving arms exploding very white handkerchiefs full of gold srrrr-TUMB-TUMB 2000 raised grenades tearing out bursts of very black hair ZANG-srrrr-TUMB-ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB the orchestra of the noises of war swelling under a held note of silence in the high sky round golden balloon that observes the firing...”

We want to attune and regulate this tremendous variety of noises harmonically and rhythmically.

To attune noises does not mean to detract from all their irregular movements and vibrations in time and intensity, but rather to give gradation and tone to the most strongly predominant of these vibrations.

Noise in fact can be differentiated from sound only in so far as the vibrations which produce it are confused and irregular, both in time and intensity.

Every noise has a tone, and sometimes also a harmony that predominates over the body of its irregular vibrations.

Now, it is from this dominating characteristic tone that a practical possibility can be derived for attuning it, that is to give a certain noise not merely one tone, but a variety of tones, without losing its characteristic tone, by which I mean the one which distinguishes it. In this way any noise obtained by a rotating movement can offer an entire ascending or descending chromatic scale, if the speed of the movement is increased or decreased.

Every manifestation of our life is accompanied by noise. The noise, therefore, is familiar to our ear, and has the power to conjure up life itself. Sound, alien to our life, always musical and a thing unto itself, an occasional but unnecessary element, has become to our ears what an overfamiliar face is to our eyes. Noise, however, reaching us in a confused and irregular way from the irregular confusion of our life, never entirely reveals itself to us, and keeps innumerable surprises in reserve. We are therefore certain that by selecting, coordinating and dominating all noises we will enrich men with a new and unexpected sensual pleasure.

Although it is characteristic of noise to recall us brutally to real life, the art of noise must not limit itself to imitative reproduction. It will achieve its most emotive power in the acoustic enjoyment, in its own right, that the artist’s inspiration will extract from combined noises.

Here are the 6 families of noises of the Futurist orchestra which we will soon set in motion mechanically:

1 2 3 4 5 6

Rumbles Whistles Whispers Screeches Noises obtained Voices of animals and
Roars Hisses Murmurs Creaks by percussion on men: Shouts, screams,
Explosions Snorts Mumbles Rumbles metal, wood, skin, groans, shrieks, howls,
Crashes Grumbles Buzzes stone, terracotta, etc. laughs, weezes, sobs
Splashes Gurgles Crackles
Booms Scrapes

In this inventory we have encapsulated the most characteristic of the fundamental noises; the others are merely the associations and combinations of these. The rhythmic movements of a noise are infinite: just as with tone there is always a predominant rhythm, but around this numerous other secondary rhythms can be felt.

Conclusions

1. Futurist musicians must continually enlarge and enrich the field of sounds. This corresponds to a need in our sensibility. We note, in fact, in the composers of genius, a tendency towards the most complicated dissonances. As these move further and further away from pure sound, they almost achieve noise-sound. This need and this tendency cannot be satisfied except by the adding and the substitution of noises for sounds.

2. Futurist musicians must substitute for the limited variety of tones posessed by orchestral instruments today the infinite variety of tones of noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms.

3. The musician’s sensibility, liberated from facile and traditional Rhythm, must find in noises the means of extension and renewal, given that every noise offers the union of the most diverse rhythms apart from the predominant one.

4. Since every noise contains a predominant general tone in its irregular vibrations it will be easy to obtain in the construction of instruments which imitate them a sufficiently extended variety of tones, semitones, and quarter-tones. This variety of tones will not remove the characteristic tone from each noise, but will amplify only its texture or extension.

5. The practical difficulties in constructing these instruments are not serious. Once the mechanical principle which produces the noise has been found, its tone can be changed by following the same general laws of acoustics. If the instrument is to have a rotating movement, for instance, we will increase or decrease the speed, whereas if it is to not have rotating movement the noise-producing parts will vary in size and tautness.

6. The new orchestra will achieve the most complex and novel aural emotions not by incorporating a succession of life-imitating noises but by manipulating fantastic juxtapositions of these varied tones and rhythms. Therefore an instrument will have to offer the possibility of tone changes and varying degrees of amplification.

7. The variety of noises is infinite. If today, when we have perhaps a thousand different machines, we can distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, as new machines multiply, we will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, not merely in a simply imitative way, but to combine them according to our imagination.

8. We therefore invite young musicians of talent to conduct a sustained observation of all noises, in order to understand the various rhythms of which they are composed, their principal and secondary tones. By comparing the various tones of noises with those of sounds, they will be convinced of the extent to which the former exceed the latter. This will afford not only an understanding, but also a taste and passion for noises. After being conquered by Futurist eyes our multiplied sensibilities will at last hear with Futurist ears. In this way the motors and machines of our industrial cities will one day be consciously attuned, so that every factory will be transformed into an intoxicating orchestra of noises.

Dear Pratella, I submit these statements to your Futurist genius, inviting your discussion. I am not a musician, I have therefore no acoustical predilictions, nor any works to defend. I am a Futurist painter using a much loved art to project my determination to renew everything. And so, bolder than a professional musician could be, unconcerned by my apparent incompetence and convinced that all rights and possibilities open up to daring, I have been able to initiate the great renewal of music by means of the Art of Noises.

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Rudolf Arnheim (1904 – 2007) was a German-born film theorist, writer, art critic, and psychologist, who helped develop an academic language around cinema.

Film

Gavin De Becker, Security Expert

Film

On the Harrow

Vincent van Gogh, Sketch of a Man with Harrow (detail). Brown ink and wash on paper, 1883, Van Gogh Museum. Fig 1.

Ale Nodarse, November 11, 2025

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“I walk on the ground and the ground’s walked on by me…”  — Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven¹

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A figure draws forth and away (fig. 1). Wrists cross as his wooden clogs shift homewards in syncopation. The farmer’s right leg and calf distend, as if to signal the weight of his wooden anchor. It is the harrow he draws forth: a wooden grid set with iron spikes and pulled—or “drawn” or “dragged” given their mutual root in the Dutch dragen—through the newly-plowed plot. 

One can feel the weight of such labor. When the drawing was completed in 1883, the use of the wood-framed harrow set without the advancements of articulated steel would have appeared as archaic as it was agonizing. Words remind us of this. In 1800, the arrival of the English term “harrowing” as synonymous with “distressing” heralded the recession of the wooden device to the margins of history. Still the figure proceeds, field to task, for only then could the sowing take place.

Anonymous Illustrator, “October,” in Jean Duc de Berry, Très Riches Heures. Fig 2.

“Here ’twas a farmer, dragging homeward a harrow or plough.”² Perhaps van Gogh, author of the letter and its attendant sketch, remembered that refrain. He had earlier copied the line, in 1873, from Jan van Beers’s poem, “The Boarder” (“De bestedeling”), as an epistolary gift for his brother, Theo, and for his London friends, Willem and Caroline. Van Gogh renamed it: “The Evening Hour.” Prior to his days as a painter, the image of the farmer and his harrow must have spoken to him of that other syncopation: diurnal cycles, daily bread, and liturgical hours. It was, after all, in a Book of Hours that the image of the harrow much earlier appeared, having received its own illumination in the “October” of Jean Duc de Berry’s Très Riches Heures (The Richest Hours). There, an unnamed painter resplendently, and truer to life, allotted the harrow’s weight to a horse (fig. 2).

Van Gogh had a closer image in mind. In 1880 he wrote to Theo of his latest embarkation. He would “translate” Millet’s serials — his Labors of the Field, his Four Times of the Day — and a number of single paintings and pastels that had been earlier editioned as prints. He counted an etching by Alfred Alexandre Delauney after Millet’s Winter: The Plain of Chailly amongst his possessions; and he proceeded, sometime between that year and 1882, to draw a grid upon it, in preparation for his painting of the scene: Snow-Covered Field with a Harrow (fig. 3, fig. 4). (The shift from painting to etching to painting again led, in this instance, to a field which favored snow and that particular cold of pale-blue and lead-white.)

The Sketch of a Man with Harrow departs from Millet in its insistence on the laborer (fig. 1). It is the harrower who composes the work’s perspectival center. His cap marks the convergence of diagonal recessions and lines. The force of his labor structures the field. Cleaving soil, he leaves imprints. Look closely at the dust which swells around the harrow, with its circular specks floating atop hatched lines, and the weight of each implement—of the pen, of the iron—which composes the fields and modifies their volumes becomes clear. 

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“You must regard it not as a change, but as a deeper movement through.”

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Millet, Winter: The Plain of Chailly. Fig 3.

Whereas the cold, the “snow,” prevents the farmer from attending to his ground, from drawing lines in his dirt, the harrower of the Sketch is in the season of his labor. The sketch has no precedent in the oeuvre of Millet, nor in that of another artist. Van Gogh, in the text which proliferates around and behind the figure, written on the reverse of his semi-opaque paper, makes no direct claim to past observation. Instead, it is an image of labor still to come, as the fields will be prepared for sowing and the figure’s anticipated return. No rope binds this farmer to his wooden anchor; he holds no cord against his palm. Perhaps van Gogh imagines him, finally homebound, having just dropped the rope. Or perhaps, in the world of the sketch, no such rope was needed. Its artifice may lead us to suspect that this is in fact the image of another laborer, an homage to the work of an artist, if not that of van Gogh himself.

In his only written reference to the Sketch of a Man with Harrow, van Gogh asks his brother to join him in the act of creation, to take up oil and canvas:

One must take it up with assurance, with a conviction that one is doing something reasonable, like the peasant guiding his plough or like our friend in the sketch, who is doing his own harrowing. If one has no horse, one is one’s own horse…³ 

For the artist, particular forms –– objects as well as gestures –– prompt others to come to mind. They inspire, as van Gogh would elsewhere put it, “curious rapports” between seemingly disparate things. The harrow appears here as one such form. It lives, so to speak, in likenesses. Its very shape echoes the frame of the canvas. Indeed, the painting may be imagined, its own “harrow” set — beams of woods and gridded stretchers nailed together — much like a canvas, now angled sideways. The harrower, in turn, offers an allegory for the painter himself, for one who also sought to weave through fields, to draw from and be drawn upon ground. (His canvases, as in the case of the grasshopper carcass left amidst the Olive Trees, quite literally absorbed the ground in the process.)

Vincent van Gogh, Snow-Covered Field with a Harrow. Fig 4.

In his final advice to Theo, as mediated through the “friend in the sketch,” van Gogh insists on the transformative potential of the harrower’s, and thus the painter’s, labors. “You must regard it,” he writes, “not as a change,” but “as a deeper movement through.” These “regards” turn constantly on metaphor, as the movement always occurs through “others”: the painter as plower, the painting as harrow, even, in what might initially seem a claim to independence, one’s self as one’s horse (to momentarily become, as it were, other than human). Such metaphors, rooted in “mere” empathy, might be dismissed as trite. And yet they invoke weight. Already in name alone, they signal the work of carrying: the word “metaphor,” which comes from the Greek metapherein, may be translated as “to transfer,” “to carry over,” “to bear.” 

The metaphor of the harrow as painting proposes an art which remains, in the most physical sense, grounded: that is, an art which might bring us to see our own labor as grounded in the labors of others — and tethered, as well, to the ground itself. (“Our work,” van Gogh writes in the letter above, “would flow together.”) For how much or how little, we might ask, do we carry alone? And what weight is entailed in such carrying? As the painter’s own metaphors in picture and in prose suggest, to be disposed to and transformed by wonder is not only to let one’s self be moved, but to recognize the weight of one’s entanglements. To let the ground, as it were, walk on us. 

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¹Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2008; originally 1971), 155.
²Van Gogh, Letter to Willem and Caroline van Stockum-Haanebeek (London, Wednesday, 2 July 1873). “Hier was ’t een boer, die egge of ploeg, op de veldslet huiswaerts.”
³ Van Gogh, Letter to Theo van Gogh (Nieuw-Amsterdam, Sunday, 28 October 1883).

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Alejandro (Ale) Nodarse Jammal is an artist and art historian. They are a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University and are completing an MFA at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. They think often about art — its history and its practice — in relationship to observation, memory, language, and ethics.

Film

Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

Film

1 Heaven (Order) - The I Ching

View fullsize

Chris Gabriel November 8, 2025

Judgment

Heaven is the origin of our pure and bountiful harvest.

Lines

1 
The Dragon is hidden, it goes unseen.

2 
The Dragon is seen again in the field

3 
The Sage is active day in, day out. 
In the evening he is watchful. There’s danger.

4 
Sometimes it jumps in the depths.

5 
The Dragon flies in Heaven

6 
The Dragon that flies too high has remorse

All: 
There appears a flock of headless dragons.

Qabalah 
Kether. The highest point on the Tree of Life. The 4 Aces.

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We start at the top, with Heaven as the first hexagram of the I Ching. The hexagram is made of six solid lines, creating a picture of a clear blue sky. The ideogram, on the other hand, gives us a very profound image: the movement of the Heavenly bodies, mankind, and nature in unison. The phenomena depicted here is the ordering, creative principle. This is the Will of Occultists and philosophers, and the “Energy” of the New Ager. Wilhelm Reich called this “Orgone” and wrote very directly about this very thing: 

“The same energy which governs the movements of animals and the growth of all living substance also actually moves the heavenly bodies.” 
(An Introduction to Orgonomy pg. 289)

Heaven can be symbolized as light itself. The first utterance of God in the Bible is “Let there be light”, just as this is the start of the cosmology of the I Ching. We can think also of the  rainbow as another good image to hold with Heaven, light refracted into an ordered and beautiful set of rays.

Crowley associated this Hexagram with the Phallus, and as we Qabalistically correspond it to Kether and the four aces in Tarot, we can associate this divine phallus with the Ace of Wands and Ace of Swords.

The hexagram calls to mind the Kinks song “Big Sky”, in which the Sky sees the problems of man, but is literally too big to sympathise. This is the very nature of Heaven for the Taoist. Consider chapter five of the Tao Te Ching: 

“Heaven and Earth have no compassion
Everything is like a toy to them”

This great energy, called Will and Orgone, is essentially amoral; it moves the world, while it itself is unmoved.

As for the Dragon written about in the lines of the hexagram, we can think of what the Yogis call the Kundalini - a serpent or dragon that lays dormant in all humans, coiled at the base of the spine, waiting to ascend. They are an ambassador of Heaven within us. Significantly, Heaven features a unique 7th line, which none of the other hexagrams hold.

“There appears a flock of headless dragons.”

Here, like the Kundalini connection, we can relate it to the Great Work of Thelemic magick: the Headless Rite. Through self beheading, the individual unites with their greater self, the Guardian Angel, Daemon or Genius. One can say a beheaded man makes the whole sky his head.

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

Film

Past Life Billionaires (Lost Songs Project)

Marfa, Texas, Early 1900s.

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Molly Hankins November 6, 2025

Welcome to the first Lost Songs Project, a new series telling the stories behind songs lost to the world. The vulnerability of being seen, particularly in an emotional state, can be overwhelming but  when all of that emotion is poured into a piece of music, it can sometimes feel too intimate to share. Those are exactly the type of songs this project was made for - the ones that didn’t fit an album, meet the expectations of a record label, or, in the case of the songs you're about to hear, were made by a couple of guys in Marfa, Texas helping their friend Dustin turn a broken heart into an album. 

This is the story of an east Texas painter, builder and mechanic named Dustin Pevey, co-founder and singer of the short-lived band, Past Life Billionaires. They released their self-titled album on SoundCloud in 2012, and deleted it less than two years later. We spoke with Tavahn Ghazi, one of the producers, musicians and friends that brought these songs to life. After learning that Dustin, who'd never sang before, had “the voice of an angel,” Tavahn gave himself fully to the project knowing it might never be heard. With the help of Joe Trent, the only classically trained musician of the three, they recorded Dustin's heart-wrenching vocals on an iPad borrowed from the public school Joe was teaching at. Joe made the backing tracks to sketch out the songs, then Tavahn recorded all the instruments for each one in an art gallery-turned-crash-pad next to the train tracks. His recording set-up consisted of a laptop running GarageBand placed next to the drums, keyboard or guitar amp. 

It is worth contemplating while listening to these heart-wrenching songs that the woman Dustin wrote this album about is now his wife. He declined to participate in the interview, but trusted his friend and former bandmate Tavahn to tell the story of how Past Life Billionaires came to be and not be. 

1. Nothin’ But Your Tail Lights 2. Call Me 3. Right On The Money 4. Left Me Cold 5. Lohan Stain
   6. Diamond Pillowcase 7. Winning Lotto Ticket. 8. Mercedes Benz Bounce 9. Criminals

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MH: What were the conditions that created the anomaly known as Past Life Billionaires?

TG: We were all sitting in Marfa, and there's not much to do. And that's kind of the point. I’d been in Marfa seven years, and you become friends with all the other weirdos who have decided to isolate themselves entirely from reality or bill paying jobs and get a shed in the middle of the Chihuahuan plains, and figure yourself out. I bumped into these two characters from East Texas named Dustin Pevey and Joe Trent. Joe was a high school teacher, and Dustin was making paintings that were phenomenal. And we all had a musical background, but it was like, in Marfa, there's just nothing else to do. So  the nothing of just getting the freedom to sit around and write or play music is almost too much. You think, ‘maybe I should watch the shadows move across that plane just for a few more days’ and see if that works. 

Ultimately, that grows sort of old. I got this old guitar, and Joe just got an iPad from the school.  We were using GarageBand and then something called iPad studio which was the most cursory software. That project started happening really quick, and it ended really quick because Dustin would just keep showing up to my house. I was living in a kind of gallery next to the train so my house would vibrate 22 times a day. We'd be recording and have to pause to feel an earthquake. Past Life Billionaires was that. It just started with learning that my friend Dustin had this soul singer inside of him, that this stoic East Texas mechanic kind of person had this vibrant, heartbroken soul singer inside of him was just wild. 

We all knew that we're doing this for the sake of doing it, but we were listening to Miguel and Frank Ocean and these kind of ethereal, sad boy, R&B guys, but we're sitting in the country. And these kids are from East Texas, so they got twang in their hearts. And I'm from God knows where, and so I've got the whole universe in my heart. 

MH: What was the recording process like? Were you just holding your MacBook up to the instruments?

TG: Oftentimes in underpants, with some just ferocious hangover and getting blasted by drums and guitar. We would just set the laptop up in front of the amp and just go. They would give me these sketches, and then I would work them out, and we'd expand them. And then after a few days, the whole thing was done.  Dustin was going through this renaissance in himself of power and heartbreak and that's why that the record’s good, because it's very honest and direct, and you can feel that, and it doesn't need to be from someone who has had a music career or who had a background. I think that the transcendent aspect of it is just the direct, immediate honesty. 

And you can relate to that, can tell it was done for the right reason. So at that point, we've already satisfied the whole experience, and then everything after that kind of would be, you know, how much does my ego need to be fed? And what am I willing to do to bring myself into that level of light? When it's that intimate, it doesn't really have to extend that far for it to have fulfilled its purpose. It was a whirlwind because neither of us were making music. I had gone to Marfa to produce for this other band, and they stopped making music, so I just sat there quietly and learned how to produce on my own. And it was nice to be given some project that I liked a lot with a dear friend that was a really exploratory, cathartic adventure. It just so happens to sound cool, so that's good. 

MH: What's your musical background? 

TG: I got a leftover guitar from my brother when he went to college, and I started listening to Jerry Garcia really intensely, taught myself to play guitar, and then failed out of high school miserably. I went to music school to make up for it, and learnt how to translate dreams or feelings through instruments, and then came home and didn't do much with it.  So I went to Marfa  to learn, and started producing. 

I've just been making music non stop since I was a kid, and not releasing any of it.

MH: So Joe and Dustin would come to you with these ideas and then you'd bring them to life?

TG: Yeah, they'd do little beds, little chords, really cool changes. Dustin had a strange ability to capture melodies from other songs like you could put on any radio station in the world. He knows every lyric and every melodic run. He has a brain that sees those options and sees sort of how to fumble through which options you're gonna make, which choices you're gonna make. He was somehow also very fast at distilling that and then finding something. 

People have such stringent ideas of their categories, like ‘I'm a singer, so you have to filter me as a person through this identity that I've chosen for myself’. But when you don’t define yourself by that, and it just becomes another tool or medium to figure out what's happening to you, and, it's just significantly more interesting.

Marfa at that time was full of a sense of  ‘I'm here to be alone and to work on my craft’, but then the sheer vast loneliness will get you. And I watched a lot of people leave after six months. I think there were a handful of us that were just so committed to that, that emptiness. And the scene there was, how do you fill that in? 

We knew Dustin didn't want to be in front of people playing music and so we already knew what the future of it was, which is a blessing and a curse.  But we knew we weren't going to really support it or push it. Dustin was friends with Pat Carney, who's the drummer of The Black Keys, and had played it for him. And he's like, “Yo, this is, like, one of the best records I've heard this year.” Like, and so, like, we had people who were interested in that record in a very serious way. And somehow we got on NPR’s All Songs Considered.

But the scene in Marfa, there's really nothing there. Dustin was experiencing something that hurt him, and he's a  person who happens to have a variety of tools with which to describe that. He had been, at that point, a visual artist, but has a background in just being able to do anything.  Joe is this masterful human being, and really knew what chords are supposed to happen when and why, in a way Dustin and I didn't.  

And so he would just give Dustin a little bed to lay on. I think they just trusted each other, having this old familial background. And then I'm likely to come into that process and want to throw every wrench I can find at it, because it's how you manage insecurity when you're talented and you don't know what to do with it. I've engaged with the recording process in so many different ways, and I've just never felt this immediate sense of ‘I get it and I'm doing it correctly, that's weird.’ And so it kind of blew us all away to feel that.

MH: So between writing and recording, how long do you think it took to make these songs? 

TG: Oh, I mean, each of those songs would would take a day to sketch up, and then Dustin would go home and lay in bed and sing into the fucking iPad and and he next day they'd essentially be done. Then we just spent all this time on YouTube trying to learn how to mix in Garage Band, because none of us knew shit about a computer. So I think it took four years, but probably only two hours of work. 

You know, this the last record I made, the releasing had to happen, sort of because of a tragedy that happened regarding that. But part of what stopped me from really giving it more credence was the question, ‘What am I going to do with it?’ It's almost going to be more heartbreaking to stretch that out. In Past Life Billionaires we were never really doing it, like, professionally. 

Having known that earlier in the process was really cool, because you don't build this big idea up of what it's going to be and how people are going to react, you're just like, fuck, it's going to die on the vine with a lot of other delicious fruit.

There's a song “Diamond Pillowcases” that was the first song that was made, and the lyrics are so good. He says  “A rock and roll souvenir that you bought with predatory lending from a Shell cashier.” And I was like, ‘What are you doing? What's happening inside of you?’ I love whatever story you're trying to tell me. 

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Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.

Film

Mike Gordon

Film

Towards an Interspecies Architecture

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Robin Sparkes November 4, 2025

Bird’s songs are swallowed by human cacophony. The low hum of industrial noise, the pulse of traffic, the ongoing percussion of construction, drown out their call. Noise pollution erodes communication across the living networks, our resonant ecology. Birds, like so many species, are disrupted by the presence of humans in the places we build and live. 

As architects and as humans, it is our responsibility to design for multispecies resilience in acts of attunement. It requires a sensitivity, a listening to the subtle soundscape of cohabitation. From the materiality and form of space - its orientation, its ecological companions - to trees and shrubs, wind and sun. Design, in this sense, becomes an instrument capable of amplifying or softening the audible world. Our task is to compose spaces that listen as much as they speak, acknowledging the lives of our neighbours as part of the living score.

To design for birds is to think like a bird. What works, they learn, what they learn, they remember, and what they remember, they refine, and adapt. "Cognition in birds is subject to a positive feedback loop involving niche breadth. Greater cognitive potentials permit more elaborate nests, which can enable species to enjoy broader niches" (Gould 2007). In this way, birds are architects of their own worlds, shaping and reshaping their environments in response to sound, space, and shelter. Therefore, when we observe the bird, we can begin to understand what needs are specific to their environment.

Just as it does for the bird, every element participates in shaping our domestic space. This is a matter of materials; vegetation shapes space and dampens intrusive noise. We can create acoustic shadows, subtly linking structure to substructure and the life around it. Porous, absorptive or diffusive surfaces help dissipate low-frequency noise, reducing reverberation. Precise orientation, elevation and spatial arrangement can preserve communication exchange. 

How can we begin to imagine interventions in our design choices that sustain life in an anthropocentric world? Birdhouses and nesting niches can be incorporated into the surfaces, ornamentation and rhythm of a building, where we provide space to live alongside other species.

When we design with research-led intentions, paying close attention to how birds think, we engage in what Donna Haraway describes as "tentacular thinking”. Haraway uses the metaphor of tentacles to suggest that life is threaded, interconnected, and networked. Instead of thinking of individual beings as isolated points or bounded spheres, she urges us to see them  connected by many lines, paths of relationship, influence, response, and affect. When we listen to the birds, we begin to hear our own environment anew. We can apply through the act of research and design, both the lives we neighbour and the spaces we ourselves inhabit.

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“Designing with birds teaches us to listen differently”

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History offers both architectural precedents and spiritual connection to living with birds. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, during the Ottoman empire, architects integrated birdhouses, known as kuş köşkü, serçe saray, or güvercinlik, into the walls of mosques, madrasas, fountains, mausolea, and other public and religious buildings. These miniature palaces were often ornately detailed, harmonizing with the aesthetic of the host structure. They were placed high to receive sunlight, oriented away from human made noise, and sheltered from predators. This careful integration reflects a cultural ethic of respect for birds and an understanding of their role in urban biodiversity. Many of these birdhouses still survive on the façades of Istanbul’s historical architecture.

Antoni Gaudí’s Park Güell (1900–1914) offers a modern parallel in Barcelona. Terraced walls and walkways incorporate built-in bird nests, while abundant vegetation and stonework create habitat niches, perches, and feeding grounds. The sheltered cavities reduce mortality from cold and rain and, acoustically, offer places where quieter calls have space to be heard. The park supports many bird species, for both resident and migratory birds. It uses organic geometries, local materials, and the subtle integration of built and natural elements to merge urban environment and nature. In this way, architecture, material choices, spatial arrangement, and flora converge to create spaces where birds thrive. 

Both precedents demonstrate that designing for birds can be an act of cohabitation. Ottoman birdhouses and Gaudí’s integrated nests show that ornament and function can coexist. Vegetation continues to play a critical role by absorbing noise, partitioning space, and creating acoustic shadows. Elevation, orientation, and exposure to sunlight and wind enhance the transmission of high-frequency calls while also preserving cultural and spiritual practices in connecting us to nature. 

Designing with birds teaches us to listen differently and to carefully observe the interplay of sound, space, and life. Through attentive research and considered intervention, we can learn about the birds and also about the sites we inhabit, the environments we shape, and the connections between human and nonhuman life. Here we can discover new ways of inhabiting the world ourselves. Architecture, therefore, can become a bridge across species, a reminder that responsible design is an act of listening, learning, and responding.

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Robin Sparkes, is a spatial designer, studying the kinesthetic experience of architecture. Her design, research, and writing practice traverses the relationship between the body, temporality, and the acoustics of space.

Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

The Trigrams

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A diagram of I Ching hexagrams sent to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz from Joachim Bouvet.

Chris Gabriel November 1, 2025

The Trigrams are the eight base elements which make up all of the hexagrams of the I Ching, they are made of three solid or broken lines, which form simple pictures of their elements. Their ideogrammic names can also help us understand the character of each element. Together they form a sort of visual poem from which we can feel the state of nature they signify.

A solid grasp of these eight elements and their names will allow you to intuitively grasp their combinations.

☰ 

Heaven 

Heaven is the purest expression of Yang: positive, light, creative - it is natural harmony. Within a hexagram this can be “treasure”, divine manifestation, or clear sky.

When we see this trigram we can visualize the three solid lines as a clear, bright sky.

乾

When we look at the ideogram for Heaven, we can see the motion of the Sun through the sky, a little man, and a growing plant. Together, this is akin to Heaven as “Natural Order”.

Qabalistically, Heaven is given to Daath, the veil over the Supernal Triad of Kether, Chokmah, and Binah. But to simplify things, it is essentially Kether, the highest expression of the Divine among the trigrams. 

☷

Earth 

Earth is the purest expression of Yin: negative, dark, receptive - it is material reality. Within a hexagram this can be dirt or darkness.

When we see this trigram we can visualize the three broken lines as dark fertile soil, a tilled field.

坤

In the ideogram for Earth, we see soil and God. The good Earth.

Qabalistically, Earth is Malkuth, “the Kingdom”, the lowest part of the Tree and relates to Saturn and Earth.

☲

Fire

Fire is the second expression of Yang. It is called Clinging, for the way that fire clings to what it consumes. In a hexagram this can be either the Sun or fire itself.

When we see this trigram we can visualize the broken line as a piece of wood and the two solid lines as flames. 

 離

Looking at the ideogram for Fire, we see “Legendary” - a little creature with a tail, an X face, a crown, and a Bird. Together, these become “Legendary Bird” and I relate this to the Phoenix. In modern usage, the character means ‘to depart’, to fly away.

Qabalistically, Fire is Tiphereth, the sixth Sephiroth “Beauty”, and the Sun.

☵

Water

Water is the second expression of Yin. It is the Abysmal, in the way water falls. In a hexagram it can be a puddle, a body of water, or rain.

When we see this trigram we can visualize the solid line as a piece of wood floating and the two broken lines as the water upon which it floats.

埳

As we look at the ideogram for Water we see earth, and a man falling into an abyss.

Qabalistically, Water is Yesod, the ninth Sephiroth “Foundation”, and the Moon.

☳

Thunder

Thunder is the third expression of Yang. It is the Arousing or exciting. In a hexagram this can be thunder directly, or simply an excited movement.

When we see this trigram we can visualize the two broken lines as a dark sky, and the solid line below as the explosion of a lightning strike.

震

When we look at the ideogram for Thunder, we see rain, which is made up of sky 天, a big man, and the little drops of rain in his chest. Below is the character for shake, which is a cutting tool. Thunder is the shaking that accompanies rain.

Qabalistically, Thunder is Gevurah, the fifth Sephiroth “Severity”, and Mars.

☶

Mountain

Mountain is the third expression of Yin. It is stillness, focus, and heaviness. In a hexagram, this can be a mountain directly or simply something heavy.

When we see this trigram we can visualize the two broken lines as the dark mountain and the solid line as the point where the peaks reach the sky.

艮

The ideogram depicts an eye with legs, literally focusing.

Qabalistically, Mountain is Netzach, the seventh Sephiroth “Beauty”, and Venus.

☴

Wind/Wood

Wind is the fourth expression of Yang. It is subtle, gentle, and penetrating. In a hexagram this can be wind directly, a tree, or wood in general.

When we see this trigram we can visualize a growing tree reaching for the sky, the broken line below is the tree, the two solid lines are the sky.

巽

Fittingly, the ideogram for Wind depicts two serpents or two people kneeling at a table. 

Qabalistically, Wind is Hod, the eighth Sephiroth “Intelligence”, and Mercury (the two serpents perfectly fit with his Caduceus)

☱

Lake

Lake is the fourth expression of Yin. It is joyous, pleasant, and easy. Unlike Water, the lake is contained, just as a cup contains. In a hexagram this can mean a literal lake, or pleasant easy movement.

When we see this trigram we can visualize the two solid lines as the depths of the lake and the broken line as the surface. Consider how the surface of water ripples and makes waves, but the depths remain calm.

兌

The ideogram for lake is a dancing man, a smiling face with arms and legs.

Qabalistically, Lake is Chesed, the fourth Sephiroth “Mercy”, and Jupiter (the Bringer of Joy).

Elements

In these eight trigrams we are given a doubling of the traditional four Western elements. Unlike Tarot, which draws from planets, signs, and elements, here we are dealing with a much more streamlined system. If you can grasp these eight elements, their interactions across the hexagrams will be much easier to understand. They form images of natural phenomena, rather than human characters.

By utilizing Qabalah and Astrology, we can make fascinating connections between the Tarot and I Ching. Consider the opposition of Thunder and Mountain, one excited and one still, their corresponding planets, Mars and Venus, function in exactly the same way. If you are familiar with Qabalah or Astrology, this will make the hexagrams far more accessible.

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

Film

Art Today and The Film (1965)

Still from Federico Fellini’s ‘8 1/2’, 1963.

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Written in a moment of existential change for Cinema, the great theorist of his time, Rudolf Arnheim, makes an impassioned plea for the continued importance of the medium. In a liberated, confused, post-war world that was moving away from detached, representational images and toward a more direct engagement with reality and physical existence, Cinema seemed particularly under threat. As the art form perhaps most directly built upon a mimesis of everyday life, it had to adapt or die. Arnheim makes the argument that, in 1965, this adaptation was already underway with a burgeoning new wave able to, by portraying reality itself as strange, ghostly, and disoriented, express the same existential unease that drives other modern arts away from images. Cinema, he argues, has the unique ability to explore the interior world of the mind, while other mediums must move towards a physicality.

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Rudolf Arnheim October 30, 2025

If the various arts of our time share certain traits and tendencies they probably do so in different ways, depending on the character of each medium. At first glance, the photographic image, technically committed to mechanical reproduction, might be expected to fit modern art badly—a theoretical prediction not borne out, however, by some of the recent work of photographers and film directors. In the following I shall choose a key notion to describe central aspects of today's art and then apply this notion to the film, thereby suggesting particular ways in which the photochemical picture responds to some aesthetic demands of our time.

In search of the most characteristic feature of our visual art, one can conclude that it is the attempt of getting away from the detached images by which artists have been portraying physical reality. In the course of our civilization we have come to use images as tools of contemplation. We have set them up as a world of their own, separate from the world they depict, so that they may have their own completeness and develop more freely their particular style. These virtues, however, are outweighed by the anxiety such a detachment arouses when the mind cannot afford it because its own hold on reality has loosened too much. Under such conditions, the footlights separating a world of make-believe from its counterpart and the frame which protects the picture from merging with its surroundings become a handicap.

In a broader sense, the very nature of a recognizable likeness suffices to produce the frightening dichotomy, even without any explicit detachment of the image. A marble statue points to a world of flesh and blood, to which, however, it confesses not to belong—which leaves it without a dwelling-place in that world. It can acquire such a dwelling-place only by insisting that it is more than an image, and the most radical way of accomplishing it is to abandon the portrayal of the things of nature altogether. This is, of course, what modern art has done. By renouncing portrayal, the work of art establishes itself dearly as an object possessing an independent existence of its own.

But once this radical step has been taken, another, even more decisive one suggests itself forcefully. It consists in giving up image-making entirely. This can be illustrated by recent developments in painting. When the abstractionists had abandoned the portrayal of natural objects, their paintings were still representing colored shapes dwelling in pictorial space, that is, they were still pretending the presence of something that was not there. Painters tried various remedies. They resorted to collage, which introduced the "real object" into the world of visual illusion. They reverted to trompe l'oeil effects of the most humiliating dullness. They discredited picturemaking by mimicking its most commercialized products. They fastened plumbing fixtures to their canvases. None of these attempts carries conviction, except one, which seems most promising, namely, the attachment of abstract painting to architecture. Abstract painting fits the wall as no representational painting ever has, and in doing so it relinquishes the illusion of pictorial space and becomes, instead, the surface-texture of the three-dimensional block of stone.

In this three-dimensional space of physical existence, to which painting thus escapes, sculpture has always been settled. Even so, sculpture, as much as painting, has felt the need to get away from image-making. It replaces imitative shape with the left-overs of industrial machinery, it uses plaster casts, and it presents real objects as artifacts. All these characteristic tendencies in the realm of objectmaking are overshadowed, however, by the spectacular aesthetic success of industrial design. The machines, the bridges, the tools and surgical instruments enjoy all the closeness to the practical needs of society which the fine arts have lost. These useful objects are bona fide inhabitants of the physical world, with no pretense of imagemaking, and yet they mirror the condition of modern man with a purity and intensity that is hard to match.

To complete our rapid survey, we glance at the performing arts and note that the mimetic theatre, in spite of an occasional excellent production in the traditional style, has sprouted few shoots that would qualify it as a living medium. Significantly, its most vital branch has been Brecht's epic theatre, which spurns illusionism in its language, its style of acting, and its stage setting, and uses its actors as story-tellers and demonstrators of ideas. Musical comedy, although so different from the epic theatre otherwise, owes its success also to the playing down of narrative illusion. The spectacle of graceful and rhythmical motion addresses the audience as directly as do Brecht's pedagogical expositions. And the modern dance can be said to have made its victorious entrance where the costumed pantomime left off. The most drastic move toward undisguised action seems to have been made by the so-called happenings. They dispense the raw material of thrill, fear, curiosity, and prurience in a setting that unites actors and spectators in a common adventure.

If we have read the signs of the times at all correctly, the prospect of the cinema would seem to look dim—not because it lacks potential but because what it has to offer might appear to be the opposite of what is wanted. The film is mimetic by its very nature. As a branch of photography, it owes its existence to the imprint of things upon a sensitive surface. It is the image-maker par excellence, and much of its success derives from the mechanical faithfulness of its portrayals. What is such a medium to do when the artificiality of the detached image makes the minds uneasy?

Ironically, the motion picture must be viewed by the historian as a late product of a long development that began as a reaction to a detachment from reality. The motion picture is a grandchild of the Renaissance. It goes back to the birth of natural science, the search for techniques by which to reproduce and measure nature more reliably, back to the camera obscura, which for centuries was used by painters as a welcome crutch, back to the tracings of shadow profiles, which created a vogue of objective portraiture shortly before photography was invented. The moving photograph was a late victory in the struggle for the grasp of concrete reality. But there are two ways of losing contact with the World of perceivable objects, to which our senses and feelings are attuned. One can move away from this world to find reality in abstract speculation, as did the pre-Renaissance era of the Middle Ages, or one can lose this World by piercing the visible surface of things and finding reality in their inside, as did post-Renaissance science—physics, chemistry, psychology. Thus our very concern with factual concreteness has led us beyond the surfaces to which our eyes respond. At the same time, a surfeit of pictures in magazines and newspapers, in the movies and on television has blunted our reactions to the indiscretions and even the horrors of the journalistic snapshot and the Grand Guignol. Today's children look at the tears of tragedy and at maimed corpses every day.

The cinema responded to the demand for concreteness by making the photographic image look more and more like reality. It added sound, it added color, and the latest developments of photography promise us a new technique that will not only produce genuine three-dimensionality but also abolish the fixed perspective, thus replacing the image with total illusion. The live television show got rid of the time gap between the pieture and the pictured event. And as the painters took to large-size canvases in order to immerse the eye in an endless spectacle of color, blurring the border between the figment and the outer world, the cinema expanded the screen for similar purposes. This openness of form was supplemented by an openness of content: the short-story type of episode no longer presented a closed and detached entity but seemed to emerge briefly from real life only to vanish again in the continuum of everyday existence.

The extreme attempt of capturing the scenes of life unposed and unrehearsed, by means of hidden cameras was received with no more than a mild, temporary stir—somewhere between the keyhole pleasures of the peeping Tom and those of the sidewalk superintendent. For the curious paradox in the nature of any image is, of course, that the more faithful it becomes, the more it loses the highest function of imagery, namely, that of synthesizing and interpreting what it represents. And thereby it loses the interest. In this sense, even the original addition of motion to the still photograph was a risky step to take because the enormous enrichment gained by action in the time dimension had to be paid with the loss of the capacity to preserve the lasting character of things, safely reomoved from their constant changes in time.

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“The cinema remains faithful to its nature. It derives its new nightmares from old authenticity.”

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Following the example of painting, the cinema has tried the remedy of abstraction. But the experiments, from Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling to Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren and Len Lye, have amounted mainly to a museum's collection of venerable curiosities. This may seem surprising, considering the great aesthetic potential of colored shapes in motion. But since abstract painting is also on the decline, my guess is that once the artist abandons image-making he has no longer a good reason to cling to the two-dimensional surface, that is, to the twilight area between image-making and object-making. Hence the temporary or permanent desertion of so many artists from painting to sculpture and, as I said, the attempts to make painting three-dimensional or attach it to architecture.

The film cannot do this. There seems to be general agreement that the cinema has scored its most lasting and most specifically cinematic successes when it drew its interpretations of life from authentic realism. This has been true all the way from Lumière to Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Robert Flaherty and more recently de Sica and Zavattini. And I would find it hard to argue with somebody who maintained that he would be willing to give the entire film production of the last few years for Jacques-Yves Cousteau's recent under-water documentary, World Without Sun.

However—and this brings me to the main point of my argument—Cousteau's film creates fascination not simply as an extension of our visual knowledge obtained by the documentary presentation of an unexplored area of our earth. These most authentically realistic pictures reveal a world of profound mystery, a darkness momentarily lifted by flashes of unnatural light, a complete suspension of the familiar vertical and horizontal coordinates of space. Spatial orientation is upset also by the weightlessness of these animals and dehumanized humans, floating up and down without effort, emerging nowhere and disappearing into nothingness, constantly in motion without any recognizable purpose, and totally indifferent to each other. There is an overwhelming display of dazzling color and intricate motion, tied to no experience we ever had and performed for the discernible benefit of nobody. There are innumerable monstrous variations of faces and bodies as we know them, passing by with the matter-of-factness of herring or perch, in a profound silence, most unnatural for such visual commotion and rioting color, and interrupted only by noises nobody ever heard. What we have here, if a nasty pun is permissible, is the New Wave under water.

For it seems evident that what captures us in this documentary film is a most successful although surely unintentional display of what the most impressive films of the last few years have been trying to do, namely, to interpret the ghostliness of the visible world by means of authentic appearances drawn directly from that world. The cinema has been making its best contribution to the general trend I have tried to describe, not by withdrawing from imagery, as the other arts have, but by using imagery to describe reality as a ghostly figment. It thereby seizes and interprets the experience from which the other visual arts tend to escape and to which they are reacting.

In exploiting this opportunity, the cinema remains faithful to its nature. It derives its new nightmares from old authenticity. Take the spell-binding opening of Fellini's 8½, the scene of the heart attack in the closed car, stared at without reaction by the other drivers, so near by and yet so distant in their glass and steel containers, take the complete paralysis of motion, realistically justified by the traffic jam in the tunnel, and compare this frightening mystery with the immediately following escape of the soul, which has all the ludicrous clumsiness of the special-effects department. How much more truly unreal are the mosquito swarms of the reporters persecuting the widowed woman in La Dolce Vita than is the supposedly fantastic harem bath of the hero in 8½ And how unforgettable, on the other hand, is the grey nothingness of the steam bath in which the pathetic movie makers do penitence and which transfigures the ancient cardinal.

The actors of Alain Robbe-Griilet move without reason like Cousteau's fishes and contemplate each other with a similar indifference. They practice absent-mindedness as a way of life and they cohabit across long distances of empty floor. In their editing technique, the directors of the Nouvelle Vague destroy the relations of time, which is the dimension of action, and of space,. which is the dimension of human contact, by violating all the rules in the book—and some readers will guess what book I am referring to. Those rules, of course, presupposed that the film maker wished to portray the physical continuity of time and space by the discontinuity of the pictures.

The destruction of the continuity of time and space is a nightmare when applied to the physical world but it is a sensible order in the realm of the mind. The human mind, in fact, stores the experiences of the past as memory traces, and in a storage vault there are no time sequences or spatial connections, only affinities and associations based on similarity or contrast. It is this different but positive order of the mind that novelists and film directors of the last few years have presented as a new reality while demolishing the old. By eliminating the difference between what is presently perceived and what is only remembered from the past, they have created a new homogeneity and unity of all experience, independent of the order of physical things. When in Michel Butor's novel, La Modification, the sequence of the train voyage from Paris to Rome constantly interacts with a spray of atomized episodes of the past, the dismemberment of physical time and space creates a new time sequence and a new spatial continuum, namely, those of the mind.

It is the creation and exploitation of this new order of the mind in its independence of the order of physical things which, I believe, will keep the cinema busy while the other visual arts explore the other side of the dichotomy—the world of physical things from which the mind seems so pleasantly absent.

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Rudolf Arnheim (1904 – 2007) was a German-born film theorist, writer, art critic, and psychologist, who helped develop an academic language around cinema.