Three Pound Films

Ascension/Descension

Jesse Brossa

Genre: Experimental
Length: 5:01

"Ascension/Descension" is a short film about the seductive natures of technology and the consequences of humankind's imminent merger with it. A loss of humanity as we know it is certain, but what will emerge from the ashes/embryos is not. The film is a rapid-fire series of imagery that was shot in my garage in a day with the help of three friends, my sister included. Hundreds of prints were then generated in a crowded darkroom I shared at a local college.

I needed the piece to transcend the real, so I employed every technique I had learned by then. I decided it had to be hyper-contrasty, as some of the "robo-elements" used in the shooting process were a bit obvious and needed to be further transformed; I had shot the piece using 3200 speed film and printed the photos at a maximum contrast. As the prints began to emerge from the developer, I knew I was on to something; the prints exuded a very dark and sterile, binary feel, just the effect I was looking for. In a furious manner, I began collaging and printing with transparent sheets covered in binary code and circuitry designs. For some, I solarized, for others I inverted so I could utilize the negative print. I printed for two days straight.

I showed the photos to everyone I knew. The movie "Pi" came out a few weeks after I had finished shooting and printing; I felt as if I had entered a dialogue with the director Darren Aronofsky. His film had truly transformed the real and had gone beyond what many filmakers stop at and proclaim as surreal and transcendant. Coupled with synaptic and microfine electronic musical stylings, "Pi" succeeded in bringing its viewers into the film completely.

While photographing everything from San Francisco's graffitied walls to the poetry of the Mojave desert's endless expanses, I had also been writing and creating electronic music for a few years. Music, perhaps, that might score the frenetic drop from space in a burning shuttle while a smiling captain and crew sipped beverages made from digital liquors. Sound both ironic and strange, at once pleasing and at times terribly grating. I knew the photos needed to be animated now and a score set, but I hadn't the tools to do so. The photos sat in a large folder for a year.

A year later, while at Cal State Fullerton, I was offered a coveted spot in a video class taught by Eileen Cowin, a Los Angeles area photographer and video artist. It was there that I picked up the skills necessary to sequence and transform the still images into a motion-picture affair.

I sat at home and started composing the soundtrack by collaging sampled bits from obscure records, drum breaks I had written and by playing the keyboard as I flipped through the ordered photographs in their portfolio. From that point, it became a quick and furious rush as I began cutting to the drums and instrumental movements. The piece nearly complete, I turned to Adobe's AfterAffects program for titling and the credits sequence which turned out having as much to to with the content of the whole as the photographs did. The bar code-like credits roll as a barrage of digital meta-language symbols run across the screen, establishing the correlation between commodified products, digital expediancy, increased homogenaity in a man-dreamt future and the loss of organic and unpredictable mutations which color our universe. The film is 5:01 minutes long. It is my first motion picture work.

-Jesse Brossa

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Ascension/Descension

Jesse Brossa

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