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Darrin Martin & Torsten Zenas Burns Interviewed by Billy Miller “The Darrin Martin & Torsten Zenas Burns Interviewed by Billy Miller “The Abominable Freedom” - originally published in the online book: “LIMINAL: SPACES-IN-BETWEEN VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE”, Edited by Erica Eaton & Tara Smelt – (page 50) October / 2007 http://www.amazon.com/LIMINAL-SPACES-BETWEEN-VISIBLE-INVISIBLE/dp/0615151175 “THE ABOMINABLE FREEDOM” - What lead you guys to collaborate on the project? We have been collaborating on videotapes since the late 90’s though we also collaborated on performance pieces in our early days as undergrads at The School of Art and Design at Alfred University. As artists in training, I once killed him off as my Siamese twin and he once transformed us into cyborg Butoh boys. Because of a very similar primary artistic upbringing, if you will, we have always had a common ground to creatively meet. The Abominable Freedom was just a kind of organic growth that sprung from a whole series of projects based on speculative educational practices that we’ve made together. In our first video works, our fictions were inspired by uses of media in the training of therapists and uses of electricity in therapy. Our Learning Stalls series was where we first moved into dealing with the subject of the paranormal; a topic that has appeared throughout our works as solo artists. We even constructed a whole net art site that reimagined our educational paradigm complete with channeling guidance councilors, pyrokinetic fluid demonstrations, psychic surgery professors and spoon bending workshops. The Abominable Freedom was our decisive moment to push sme of that content into a more adult terrain. What were/are some of the ideas and inspirations behind “The Abominable Freedom”? Of course one of the earliest influences was, as the title alludes to, a fascination with Bigfoot and his/her many variations. Besides being an iconic terror from our childhood, Sasquatch is the walking embodiment of nature amongst other things. Whole careers are based on this possible unknown and we were interested in its presence as a looming reminder of cryptozoological mysteries explored but unsolved; land known but uncharted. Then there is a selection of films that inspired the piece. Many of which became part of the project. Three films which are particularly noteworthy that even become appropriated into the piece are The Harrad Experiment(1973), Premonition(1972), and The Wicker Man(1973). All three are commingled with other found and shot sources to unpack a couple major themes; the prospect of an educational social structure that questions the rigidity of monogamy and the untapped magic inherent in its chance. Ironically, in The Harrad Experiment these questions take place in an educational institution set up as a sociological experiment, a college that instigates sexual relations by organizing co-ed roommates. As one component of the learning environment students are asked to consider the possibility of other human relationships not dependent on a limited coupling. Our main appropriation of some of the classroom dialogs from the movie is an exercise in the slippage between what is being said and who is actually speaking. The professors and students take turns being ventriloquists and dummies. Actually, in the original book, the texts were from the fictional diaries of the students themselves. The students were the authors of realizations that were inspired by their Human Values seminar. In the movie, many of the choice lines about human sexuality are delivered though the fairly didactic pedagogical method of the lecture. We wanted to mess with that convention by dismantling the voice from its original speaker. Premonition was a film exploring shared psychic dream spaces as activated through the inhalation of the spores of a certain kind of red flower. We also used some material from this obscure gem in an earlier video we consider a kind of prelude to The Abominable Freedom called Volcanica. In the latter, we used footage that was either harrowing or celebratory in nature. For Abominable the material added a sobering tone from a classroom lecture about the limitations of shared phenomena in the fact that doubt often turns memories into personal secrets. We also used a few portions of The Wicker Man and other sources to bring in a musical element. We started with a couple of choice songs from Bill Rebane’s The Capture of Big Foot, which was a kind of B-horror flick that included some amazing music. Researching and excavating key songs became part of our process. The Wicker Man is one of those rare movies that uses songs in an intriguing and mystifying way but would never necessarily be called a musical. We wanted to experiment with that notion but drop the idea of a literal narrative. The video uses footage from several films of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s...why that period?...is it the relative innocence or perhaps the environment of experimentation? Definitely the environment of experimentation…The counter-cultural revolution of that time period was more than hippy fashions and an anti-war movement. It was a moment when even the sciences funded global conferences and educational experiments to explore psychic and temporal research. A lot of those experiments never really came to full fruition but merely puttered out as funding sources shifted their concerns in other directions. In almost all of our work there is a mining of that time period for these reasons and probably also because the 70’s was the decade of our childhood. A lot of very interesting questions were being raised and things were unfolding. To recontextualize some of them as content in our experimental works is an attempt to resurface and understand them as artists and adults. Our first memory of hearing the word sex on television was regarding the sexual revolution. It seemed so positive. Children of the 80’s didn’t really ever experience that enthusiasm as their first mention of sex on television was in the shadows of the AIDS epidemic. The Abominable Freedom not only nostalgically considers the liberation of that revolution but also inserts its own fictional strands as a way to resuscitate the conversation and make it contemporary. Vis a vis Freud/Jung, etc., I am wondering if any of these topics strike a sympathetic chord? Time travel, out of body experiences, the outer vs. inner environment, sexmagik, psychological and psychic experimentation is a reoccurring strand in our cosmology. In an earlier project we coined the term paraphysiology as counter to parapsychology. As a term, it is defined as the manifestation of any phenomena beyond scientific explanation that occurs in the actual biological structure of the organism. I’m sure some paranormal phenomena such as the secretions of ectoplasm and tulpoidal materializations would fit into this category. In The Abominable Freedom we wanted to explore the notion of paraphysiology through sexuality because of its unique place in our lives as a privileged form of reproduction. Several scenes refer to reimagined systems for procreation. These systems may be in the alternative insemination via mouth streams or spectrophilia or they may be in the actual birthing act or simulation of the act via ritual. One can take these scenes at face value or project a plethora of open-ended possibilities to their reading. Could sex with spirits actually be virtual coupling or teledildonics? Might the (man-infestation) of male birthing be a genetically altered option? Is Bigfoot an ancient link between man and animal or a future species that will help repair the dichotomy that lies between them? Is the occult the missing link in the scientific prerogative to unmask nature? May we ultimately find out that nothing is aberrant and ultimately devise new sexualities and new freedoms because it is within humankinds’ disposition to invent? While each of these questions fit uniquely into the realm of paraphysiology, psychology is not far behind. The altercation of the family structure calls for a shift in the overall mental state of the members of the reinvented family. While some questions would demand a reexamination of gender roles to their biological core, others would shake the hierarchical structure seeming to enslave most family pets. Can you say something about the naked suburbanites performing strange rituals, mysterious crystals, and the extraterrestrial orb/melon? (Ideas off the top of my head that were possibly evoked: Alistair Crowley, Wilhelm Reich, Kenneth Anger, L. Ron Hubbard, Space Cults, Luis Buñuel, Jack Smith...?...a “Third Mind” evocation of your daemon brother?...a “Whole Earth Catalog” for innercranial / interstellar exploration?) Suburbanites? That was the deep dark country. Don’t be fooled by the glimpse of the other house in the opening sequence. We were pretty much in the woods. Oh, except for the interior maypole hijinks…that was Brooklyn. But anyway, we’ve always joked about the egg (orb/melon) as being the offspring of the Yeti. Our ritual is an excavation upon which all the images from the tape unfold. Our collaborative dissection and augmentation of the object in question is a possible experimental stem cell workshop gone terribly wrong. The unanticipated visions that exude from the egg upon its insemination with a foreign body have caused the participants even the viewing audience to share a consexual vision of naked desire and occult longings. The list of possible reference you have come up with have a lot of validity as well as other sources of influence. Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Annie Sprinkle, and Carolee Schneemann are big influences upon both our costumed and naked revelry. Space cults that mix it up, including the Raeliens are on our radar. And Crowley, Tantrism, Spectrophilia, Wicca, and Satanism are a few other influences that fueled the work.
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