Mediated

MEDIATED -The Act Of Filming As An Osmotic Force
An essay by Miina Hujala

"Silly as it might seem - the act of taking an image is the form that is currently presenting the substance of our contemporaneity. Osmotic force is the act of infusion or movement without adding or removing, just finding balance and stability between the elements in action.

That means the act in question (filming, shooting, capturing…) in its active presence and the way we depict with or through it our surroundings - ourselves involved with and in it.

It is not an easy thing – but it happens effortlessly. The act just passes with us, like we pass moments. The act of filming has a membranelike - quality; it’s there to depict the passing – to capture the act itself – to show that it is. It composes us in that moment; it finds us a place, a function, a way to relate - to happen in here, to create the now - a way to act in the presence of life.

"Snapshotting the air, I was there". The need to capture our daily lives has become a tool for expressing not just what we did, ate and wore but also that we are. It is the means of having an action to present us being-here. The act of raising one's camera or an iphone to clip a piece of this thing that surrounds us (this all, this everything), is a way to try to balance the brute raw existing and the need to cope with being here. The act of filming is somewhat absentmindedly carried out as a sort of an osmotic force that drives us to perform without the ability, or need, to analyze why we are capturing. It is not reaction and taking an action, it is just act indicating the 'having-been-there' as a sort of immanent response to the mixture of this mess of mind and matter constantly folding. With the act we don't aspire to capture or take something in from the outside, it is the passing of a world where we dissolve, and for us to be actualized in the moment the residue is obsolete. It is about sharing (in a situation) where the counterparts are undefinable.

"The words: a purposeful noise constituting a choice." It has always been in fashion to dig deep on the meanings and past usages of words. To walk the paths once walked and find the connotations and connections enriching and enlightening, to have the realm of now and then as an open passage. We navigate in the layers of meanings, we flirt with words – deliberate and excavate in aspiration that our choices will set a tone or give a direction, make the said things more purposeful (and useful). We want to them to carry content, we have purpose for them and hope that they serve us well. A weight of uncertainty constantly follows when we want to be precise. The vessel of words is a medium that escapes our reach of control, (no matter how directly we lay our choices). The said things become heavy, the need to say things, a burden.

And as medium is an agent in-between, by definition formed through ”the sides”, it leaves itself blank. ‘Mediated’ is a way of referring to the act of bringing things to an agreement and it describes the attitude towards the act of passing through in the act of filming. It is a position that seeks to be neutral, a standpoint that is never actually there. We seek that neutrality with the act of filming - osmotic stabilization. We want to escape the burden of words, of making decisions over meanings. Like sugar solutes to water we want the transition of meanings solute to us - or us to solute to meanings. We are seeking the right consistency through the membrane machine. We raise our camerahands to experience the expiration of the moment.

"Otherworldly" advise that one seeks when visiting a clairvoyant is being clashed with a mundane advice-giving In Joonas Jokiranta's video piece Fortune Teller. Capturing the discussion as if eavesdropping, we glimpse something hidden, but not mysterious. The element of monetary capacity as a limiting aspect in attaining the needed "knowledge beyond" is recorded with a silent humour.

Maija Timonen’s video essay depicts something unrecordable: a dream. It does it through the piling up of memory, theory, visual references and narration. We can start peeling off the layers but soon have to recognize that the layers are parts of the coalesced whole that cannot anymore be put to parts.

The will to put things into parts in order to examine, scrutinize and describe is based on a will to understand. Documenting is an act of drawing lines and creating an object to look at. By placing something in between, removing ourselves with a tool, we have an instrument to poke life with. But that doesn’t mean that life itself is less mean. “Evilia” is a pseudonym that places distance to the acts recorded in the work Wings of A Fly, which displays microscopic close-ups of insects being mutilated, ripped apart and burned. The difficulty in drawing values from the specimens we take seems to intensify even more the need to archive.There is absent-minded danger involved with the pursuit of making notes to be filed to their appropriate category that we have created for the purpose of having a place for understanding. Our own involvement being subtly detached from the act in the gesture of “I’m just documenting” - and not taking part.

"I Was Here!" is not anymore carved in the wall or felt-tipped in the lavatory, it is a button-pressed-second and the "I-tube" in the end. Even if it is not always the place you'd thought you'd want to find yourself in. Timo Bredenberg's Sparta is a compilation of videos of low-res kick and punch - the high school colosseum of fun. It manifests the multitude of the act of capturing paired with the need of instant sharing.

When we face violence or cruelty, to capture and then share it at the same time places us in the scene and removes us, saving the deliberation for later. I have been there, they have been there but what do we stand for? Do we HAVE to stand for anything, can we just be here, clicking and recording the constancy of being.

If we constantly feel the need to document we then navigate in the threshold of the present and the past. Sari Tervaniemi portrays the lingering in “archaic” scenery and the ease with which we incorporate the ”mechanical” to the ”natural” as well as the roles of - taking an image and being in one - being constantly concurrent. Our comprehension of the technology as well as nature is shrouded with the liquid mysticism; where does our placement begin and where is it limited to.

If a laconic remark is a way of sustaining distance - asking “so what?” is the hymn of current sublime. Iidu Tikkanen presents us with what is the most fascinating element of the pure magic of moving image – that the image isn’t reality and perhaps was never meant to be.