The Great Art of Knowing

A history of scarred surfaces, an inquiry, and an imagining: for the marks we see and the marks we make, for the languages we can read and for those we are trying to learn. Reproduced by hand on an old contact printer resulting in individual, unique release prints.

"Excerpts from Sir Thomas Browne's 1658 text Hydriotaphia Urne-Buriall Or, A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk are superimposed with the stone faces of grave markers and burial urns. This image-text bookends a series of objects framed in the ancient glass window panes of a tiny shop, in a tiny snow covered town, on a mountain top in Colorado. A pocket watch, a postal scale, a small mirror. A stop watch, some stamps, a knife, some bandages, an hour glass. Time is short. Time is running out. The time left is all the time we have."--Gatten

An unexpected letter leads to an unanticipated encounter. Some windows open easily; other shadows remain locked rooms. Have a cup of tea dear. I’ll trade you a stitch from the past for a leaf from the future. This is a Valentine and a fragment: for the one who mends my rips; from the next film in the Byrd project.

Cut-glass gleaming, shards of vision interrupted, reformulated, and freshly shaped into a response to the power of words and their ability to both describe and create sensations of outer worlds and inner realities. A movie made on the occasion of the publication of the volume of poetry ANARCH. by Frances Richard, published by Futurepoem.

The result of a series of camera-less collaborations between the filmmaker, the Atlantic Ocean, and a crab trap. For three days in January and three days in October of 1997, and again, for a day, in August of 1998, lengths of unexposed, undeveloped film were soaked in a crab cage on a South Carolina beach. Both the sound and image are the result of the ensuing oceanic inscriptions written directly into the emulsion of the film as it was buffeted by the salt water, sand, rocks and shells.

Suggestion is the rock, and the physical evidence is the evanescent spray that breaks against the unseen. Transitive enharmonics of things touching in middair, an air which is Time—not an actual intersection, but with a consequence as powerful as predestination, a momentary fulfillment, a trail beyond mere pattern, like a streak of truth alive and uncontained, like something that runs through infinity slowing to leave condensation, sonority, a temperature. Lines crossing lines. Not there. There. Invisibilities smudging. Gesture and impression, optic suggestions, agents on and in the mind. Each with vibrations, dollops, whispers, throbs, particles and waves. A finger of pigment brushing a lip of language exchanging carriage supports, liquidities, fire. Moire of meanings. Micro settings in the heart. The time it takes. The very least one can say is to say The Extravagant Shadows is a major work. Humanly essential, adventurous and necessary.

"Linked together by the texturality of forgotten objects and frayed (or physically manipulated) imprinted text images, the film represents a thematic collapsing of distinct objects that further erases the bounds between image (and text) from meaning, where recursive shifting of once seemingly separate entities become alternate presentations of a visible (and invisible) continuum - a decontextualized mood piece where absence and emptiness become increasingly tactile - an impression."

A portrait of one of Gatten's mentors, the filmmaker Zack Stiglicz, filming on the shore of Lake Michigan.

Four short interludes on filmmaking, chemistry, the American West and interplanetary communications.

Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Concentrate your attention. What Question will you ask? The Matter Propounded... makes use of an early 20th-century “Tablet of Jupiter” system for attempting to tell one’s future. The film invites viewers to make their own suppositions about the relationship of the questions we ask of the world and the answers we find for ourselves. A "letter-press" 16mm film.

This timeless experimental film draws on the work of 17th century scientist Robert Boyle to present a varied combination of texts, objects, colours and textures. The traditional tone of the cinematic impressions takes us back into the past (evocations of Boyle’s era, projection using damaged film stock) and the images have something of a cathartic quality about them. The title of this dream-like, mood- -inducing film, a tribute of sorts to the Irish thinker, was inspired by a Jorie Graham poem and underlines the nature of the 14-year process during which the film came together.

There are two women. Or there were two women. Or there will be two women. One of them is here today. No one knows about tomorrow. There is one river, there are two oceans, three registers, four velocities, five planes of time, six expanses of space, seven ways to listen. Time is measured out but each interval has its own Eternity. - David Gatten and Ashley West

“A single piece of paper, a second stab at suture, a story three times over, a frame for every mile. With words by Charles Darwin. A long-distance dedication for a far-away friend halfway up the mountain.” —David Gatten

“A companion of sorts to WHAT THE WATER SAID. An attempt to assess the potentials, possibilities and pitfalls of finding meaning in – or assigning human meaning to – the natural world; by way of Wallace Stevens. ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ and ‘Of Mere Being’ translated into Ogham (the 5th-century ‘tree alphabet’ derived from a notational system used by shepherds to record notes on their wooden staffs), and carved a letter at a time into a piece of semi-transparent flexible wood (black leader).” (DG)

Film for Invisible Ink, case no. 323: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (2010), was composed as an epithalamium, or matrimonial poem, for Erin Espelie. Bringing together Western Union Telegraphic Code and Francis Bacon’s list of twenty-seven privileged instances from The New Organon (1620), along with passages from the Book of Common Prayer, the film is as stenographic as it is steganographic, a shorthand for the immense and indescribable “instances” that shape a life.

The last time I had dinner with Peter we spoke of sunsets – both sunsets we had experienced and sunsets we had filmed – and, of course, of boats; shrimp boats in particular. We made a plan to share with each other all the rolls of all the sunsets we'd never put into our films. That was November of 2015. By June of 2016, Peter was gone. We never had the chance to exchange our sunsets, but in the 72 hours after his passing, I composed this film, made of up some of the elements about which he cared so much: sea and sky, water and light, boats making for the horizon. In memory and in celebration. - David Gatten