Metronome
Onscreen text: “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!”. Choral voices sing this quote from Wittgenstein (orchestrated by Steve Reich in his piece Proverb).
Cut to the artist sitting in a kitchen in his pyjamas, pounding a regular beat (144 bpm) on the table with his right hand. After declaring in voiceover that “This will be my rhythm for the day”, he transfers the pounding to his chest… but the sharp sound of the table-slapping continues in sync. He prepares for his day (toothbrushing, showering, dressing) while his chest-beating and the insistent pounding sound continue.
As he travels through the city (riding the bus, going to a movie, playing pool), his voiceover continues at a rapid pace, following a carefully controlled seemingly free-associative line of thought about rhythm, determinacy, and free will. When he acknowledges his inspirational debt to various Hollywood films, appropriated clips begin to infiltrate the video, intermingling with the beat-keeping footage. The voiceover incorporates the Hollywood footage into the quotidian imagery, painting a picture of a psyche formed of loops both rhythmic and ideological. Mass-produced masculine rebellion is conflated with the romantic video-artist ideal; the first-person narrator wonders how much of his daily thought is his own and how much the product of the “cinematic conditioning machine, or even the universal conditioning machine” as he returns home to more onscreen Wittgenstein: “Language sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of wrong turnings… What I have to do then is erect signposts at all the junctions where there are wrong turnings so as to help people past the danger points.” He lies in bed and ceases beating his chest, but the pounding continues until a bell rings and a public-transit sign decrees “STOP REQUESTED”. A few seconds of silence and black are followed by end credits, to the tune of a cut-up remix of Reich’s proverb.