Ophelia: Apophenia

20 July to 16 August 2012, Spare Room
FLOOR TALK Thursday 2 August 1.30—2pm

Darrin Verhagen
with visuals by Richard Grant
and actors Daniel Schlusser and Karen Sibbing

Ophelia: Apophenia is a composition about the perception of meaning, featuring the slow wordless close ups and the intense gazes of the principles: Ophelia and Hamlet. As a means of drawing the perception of the meaningful into meaningless formalism, Verhagen uses sound design, score and silence to frame and reframe the audience experience.

images

Essay

Ophelia:Apophenia is a composition about the perception of meaning. Through sound design, visual transitions are materialized, made real — impossible mutations authenticated into effortless metamorphoses. Through musical score, the protagonists on screen become "known". We connect. Insights into characters, intentions, and circumstances are gently coaxed into feint relief through sound. Suggestions are made about the feelings we can share, and contemplation is encouraged — but ultimately, contemplation about what?

A simple vocal melody, combined with a direct visual gaze sees our minds lock into an instinctual Pavlovian response. Canine drool demonstrates a trained understanding of a bell's importance. Our own dribbling obsession with meaning speaks to an innate impulse to project (if we can't extract) as much perceived significance onto a given dataflow as possible. We take what we find where we can; we make up what we need where we must.

As a species we have a demonstrably feeble susceptibility to apophenia (a spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated phenomena). Sound has always been ready to exploit this addiction — facilitating the rushed, makeshift construction of something useful from the useless, sensing signal in the noise. Music shuts down critical thought, aligns emotional valence and synchronizes group emotions — all executed off radar whilst the audience is concentrating on something else. It has successfully subjugated the masses for centuries, and sold us rubbish at the cinema for decades. Theorists often complain about the lack of registration, acknowledgement or deferential accolades for the sonic practitioners engaged in such black-ops. But composers and sound designers actually revel in the subterfuge of this manipulation. We make things right. We get things done. We are Keitel's "The Wolf" from Pulp Fiction. We are Hitler's loudspeaker array1. We are the sax solo from Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night".

We know you're your own worst enemy. And we have a bridge to sell you.

Darrin Verhagen, 2012

Endnotes:
1."Without the loudspeaker we would have never conquered Germany." Hitler in the manual of German radio, 1937.

Acknowledgements

This exhibition is element #5 in the ongoing multimedia, multiplatform work Ophelia doesn’t live here anymore..., an opera created by the Daniel Schlusser Ensemble for Chamber Made Opera and Bell Shakespeare Mind’s Eye.