“Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.” — Karl Marx

Working on this final project, one thing that I was led to think about was the topic of Marxism, specifically the idea of dialectical materialism. This reflective essay will focus not on Karl Marx’s principal belief on the development of society, but more on several ideas and thought processes from Alexander Spirkin’s Dialectical Materialism, a published piece transcribed by Marxist, Robert Cymbala. There are many fundamental concepts emphasised in his writing that reflect on the growth and maturing of society, focusing on their associations with particular objects and various social relationships. I found that his thoughts and propositions, though are beliefs reworked into no more than words on a page guiding conceptual and theoretical ways of life, were also sentient and relatable in nature.

As I began to construct ideas for this project, I looked at the topic of ‘obsession’ as deeply studying a particular thing or entity – in this case, lines – and breaking it down into little pieces; an idea where those experiencing it would be prescribed to think of it through dialectics, intensifying yet directing the production of meaning. Utilising footages that encircled four central themes, I wanted to create interlinked ideas and connections between two individual elements that had a sort of parallel tie-in. The four main themes I had were: relationship, future, humanity, and passion. With each theme, I had two separate videos playing on each side of SIGNAL’s building. Both videos were different in nature, but similar and connected in idea; mutual in understanding. Spirkin (1983) believes that harmony exists in the world for the reason that materiality is present, signifying that it is the ‘carrier of multiform properties and relations’. Having that said, one can almost associate objects and elements of the world around us with one’s daily interactions and life in general – this is what I mean when I talk about the two individual aspects that I wanted to make respective to my themes.

Drawing on the concept of universal connection, it is stated that ‘every object is a link in an endless chain … [uniting] all objects and processes in a single whole and thus has a universal character’ (Spirkin 1983). The overall existence and narrative of the universe in which we reside is said to be dependent on an ‘infinite web of connections’. My audiovisual project was inspired by that idea of connecting one thing to another – I generated a story that told about the purpose and interrelations between Man and World, through my obsession with lines. In fact, considering the SIGNAL site as inspiration, I chose elements for my videos that had some form of association with the building’s physical surroundings – such as trees, train lines, people, and art.

Now, going deeper into dialectical materialism, Spirkin (1983) also talks about the principle of universal connection and development. ’Investigation of the various forms of connections is the primary task of cognition.’ Here, he emphasises the importance of careful reasoning and exploration, and how it guides our thought processes and ideas regarding universal connections. For instance, when I associated lines with the theme of humanity, I chose to think about it from two perspectives: the first being the ‘human barcode’, referring to the controversy revolving around the idea of having electronic chips assigned to every person upon birth; and the latter as a signifier of humanity, whereby the laughter lines from a person’s face were obliterated as a result of the occurring disorder. With two narratives simultaneously transpiring, it stirs the mental process by which one can acquire a deeper understanding of the given theme.

The playful behaviour between sound and visuals is another thing to explore in itself. ’Interaction is a process by which various objects influence each other, their mutual conditioning or transmutation and also their generation of one another’ (Spirkin 1983). As I watched my eight-second footages concurrently with the spontaneous sounds that emerged from SIGNAL’s sound system, it is likely to generate different understandings as art itself is subjective. After all, as Spirkin (1983) remarks, ‘interaction is causal’ and leads to what he believes is ‘development’, which is the notion that every form of connection or interaction will take a particular direction. As I ended each eight-second clip with a single word that iterated the theme, in a sense, I challenged that direction, orchestrating a specific course. There were many factors that could have influenced the audience’s perceptions, be it the visuals and/or the sounds; whether or not the text was successful in its efforts, is a question whose answers will remain a mystery.

By concocting pairs of videos for every theme, I fabricated a narrative that held universal connections with and within one another. My audio, in itself, was also a piece that contained bits of meaning and information that revolved around the brevity of human life, almost an epilogue to the four main themes. All in all, this project was an interesting exploration, and I am glad to have had the thrill of producing audiovisual works that were rich in both expression and obsession.

REFERENCES

Spirkin, A 1983, ‘The System of Categories in Philosophical Thought’, in Dialectical Materialism, Progress Publishers, Moscow, viewed 30 October 2015, <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/>.