Tagging Christian Svanes Kolding
Christian Svanes Kolding’s film, The Things We Keep is only one-minute fifty-seven seconds long. It lacks a plot and characters. It’s essentially a pan of a lot of stuff. And yet you end up watching it over and over again until what was supposed to be a short YouTube break has turned into an hour. This is in part because the film, made entirely of still images that Kolding’s digitally animated together and set to the tune of Broadcast’s “Corporeal,” is visually and sonically cool. But more than that, what makes The Things We Keep so compelling and addictive, is that it explodes with stories.
Kolding elegantly achieves this multiplicity of story in his short film–or as he describes it, a window into “augmented reality”—by providing textual tags for a number of objects that appear on the screen. Kolding, who was born in Denmark and is currently based in New York, provides nibbles of history to items such as “Handmade Doll, Venice, CA. Official Name: Edie Chickenpants. Gift from Carly. Received in 2008. Frequent Travel Companion.” and “Matchbook, New York City. La Esquina Restaurant in Nolita. Obtained in 2010. They make excellent breakfast burritos. Their fish tacos are not bad. Nothing like Los Angeles, of course.” These mundane yet offbeat descriptions are incredibly familiar to anyone who owns, well, anything. At the same time, they provide the viewer with enough of a seed to generate his/her own story about each of Kolding’s keepsakes, as well as Kolding himself–all of which elicits a feeling in the viewer akin to reading a Raymond Carver story.
Kolding is a self-proclaimed “director, creative consultant, and visual artist.” But given his deft textual work in The Things We Keep and his ability to evoke none other than the ghost of Carver, he should also be tagged as a “writer”—one we recently had the pleasure of talking with at length about augmented realities, reverse engineering, text and film, and yes, the objects he keeps.
BLACK CLOCK: I understand the opening credits of To Kill a Mockingbird inspired your film, The Things We Keep. Can you elaborate on this?
CHRISTIAN SVANES KOLDING: I’ve always loved the opening sequence of To Kill a Mockingbird because it shows us a world that is made up of fantasy as well as the mindset of a teenage girl from the South. I love the way the camera tracks across a variety of objects that will later have significance in the film, while these objects also provide us with clues for the setting of the film, and clues about the main characters. From a technical point of view, it’s a beautiful shot. The camera does a very slow track along a table top as we start from an omniscient point of view, overhead, and then moves along in a parallel line. It has always been a shot that I’ve remember, something that I’ve always wanted to recreate. I guess, I enjoy reverse engineering shots so that I can better understand them.
Deconstruction-reconstruction?
Yes, it is a deconstruction-reconstruction of sorts. It’s me trying to figure out how a shot is made. Plus there’s always the fantasy that in reverse engineering and recreating, I somehow [can] get into the mindset of the original director and can perhaps unlock some additional creative energy.
Do you feel like you’re able to realize that fantasy in reality?
Well, the fantasy is a bit of wishful thinking and not realistic. I could never get into another director’s mindset, and, I suppose, I wouldn’t want to try to borrow too much from another director, even those I admire a lot. It would become theft if I spent too much time trying to get into other directors’ mindsets, I suspect.
So, in terms of the reality, I would say whenever I try to deconstruct someone else’s composition, there are a few things that happen. First, there is an “Aha!” moment; I realize how something was done. Then there is a moment of disappointment.
Why disappointment?
As I realize that my first effort at reconstruction lives up neither to the expectation of emulating the original, nor does it stand on its own. Which is okay, because at some point you make the work something else. You transform it a bit, either by tweaking it in some places or just starting a different riff altogether, thus transforming the work. That becomes gratifying.
So, yeah, I tried to recreate pieces of the opening sequence, but knew all along that I wanted [the film] to be about objects that I keep–keepsakes. I didn’t know right away that I wanted to tag the objects. That came later.
How did you decide which objects were worthy enough to be considered things you keep?
There was little emotion involved. Primarily, it was a few practical considerations. 1) I limited the selection to objects that were already on display in the apartment and 2) the objects had to fit on top of the hutch/buffet–which acted as the stage. Don’t like the word buffet or hutch… The large Danish teak cabinet… That’s a mouthful…
That’s okay. Better than “hutch”?
So yeah, the object had to fit on top of the teak cabinet, and I had a limitation on the length of the shot. There were far more objects than space available, and [in the future,] I’d like to do more work using the “unused” objects, but not in the same way.
I started thinking about augmented reality, which I think about a lot. Not so much as ponderings on the theoretical aspects of augmented reality or the ethical issues, but more the practical issues. Such as, as I am walking down a street, what do I want to see? What information do I want to access? What’s interesting to me is not the retail aspect of augmented reality, but the submerged storytelling aspect of it. I walk past a mailbox, and I wish I could get some information from that mailbox on the street corner that tells me who has been there–that maybe even singles-out people I’d be interested in knowing about. Did they pause for a moment before dropping the letter into the mailbox? How much information should the mailbox give me in an augmented reality context? These are the kind of inane things that I might think about, and I started to think about them with these keepsakes.
These keepsakes in our home have meaning to Adriana[, my wife,] and me, but do they mean something to somebody else? No, not really. So, I can convey that in an augmented reality world, but even then, it’s not really effective because it’s not important. Important to me but not to you, except that you might be able to relate to the sentiments expressed in identifying the objects, which give them new meaning. You can relate to that because you might have objects that you keep yourself. That’s how I started to think about it. And so I started to think about what story was behind each object, and if that story was interesting to someone besides me. That was a central question.
How did you determine if a story was interesting to someone besides you?
I don’t know exactly.
Did you set out a criteria or was it a gut feeling?
It was more a hunch. I knew a bit of the audience in advance. In the sense that when I make things, I often make things for a specific audience. In this case, it was for the set of friends who had provided me with the objects. Not a limited set or a closed set, but a set that was created purely by the selection of the objects. So, I wrote the tags with them in mind, as if we were sitting around a dining table and I was explaining each object to each friend at the table while introducing other objects, most of which would be unfamiliar objects to most of the guests. That was the roundabout way of approaching it. Carly Eiseman gave me an object, so I wrote about it with her in mind, knowing that she would see the film, for example.
But the film certainly connects with a wider audience, selected for the Brooklyn Rooftop Films Summer Series and all.
Yes, but I didn’t know that right away. I wasn’t even sure it would connect with a wider audience.
Were you surprised?
I’m still a bit a bit surprised. I think it’s because I believe that the strength of the film is not its technical achievement, which is a bit gimmicky (truth be told), and even though I think the objects are interesting, they are ultimately not compelling enough to get people to respond to the story. So the strength of the story lies elsewhere. I think that people respond to the story because they reflect on their own keepsakes and what those particular objects mean to them, and each keepsake is not about the object itself, it’s about the memory, and the memory is more important than the object. The object is a proxy for a relationship, a person or persons that we hold dear, and their memory is embedded in the object. And so people relate to that, reflect on that, apply that to their own experience. Also, because ours is very mobile society (this one that you and I live in), these objects take on added meaning because they can travel with us while our friends can’t.
The film’s ability to affect this response from its audience also shows the strength in what you did with the text and the tagging. You talk about how in tagging the objects you offer meaning, which makes me wonder what you think about the importance of naming/tagging as it relates to the film, in communicating to the audience (both your intended or otherwise), and in general.
The perils of naming any object is that by naming it, you might already limit the potential of how other people experience it or name it themselves. Name it, tag it, define it. But, in terms of my story, I tagged the objects because I wanted the audience to understand a few things. First, what would life look like if you could look through the lens of an augmented reality world at someone else’s keepsakes resting on a cabinet top? What would that look like? In tagging them, I wanted the audience to understand what these objects meant to me. I tried to tag them using a language that was a bit more taxonomy-based. This faux-taxonomy voice was a bit of a put on–that was me trying to be funny. Not sure if that came off as funny but it worked in its own way. It wasn’t insincere, it was just meant to be a bit lighthearted.
It certainly works and provides a continuous voice to the piece.
Thank you.
The text is also small and moves quickly–
Yes. Adriana complained to me about that. It frustrated her.
The film asks to be viewed a few times to really be read.
Yes. One could say that. There were two opposing demands that I had to meet, or so I felt. A story like this needs to be short, or so I was convinced. Thus, in order to convey the breadth of meaningful objects that are comprised in The Things We Keep, the camera had to move rather quickly; therefore, the text moved quickly with it. That was one demand. The other was that when the text appears on the screen, it demand to be read. It is annoying when you can’t read it. In most of the films that I’ve created, there is always a lot of stuff going on in the background, which often demands more than one viewing, so it didn’t bother me too much if someone in the audience couldn’t absorb all of the details. In this case, I chose brevity and then tried to find the right song for the piece that might help people go back and view the piece again.
I love the music choice for the piece. But I think what compelled me to view it again was the text and knowing the film was short enough that I could view it in its entirety a second, third, fourth time around.
Good. I like mystery. I don’t know if there is too much mystery in The Things We Keep, but I like [people] not getting everything the first time around. That was also a bit of the rationale for the actual format of the tagging.
I wasn’t directly inspired by Nicholas Felton, the graphic designer, though there are some who suggest that I was. I love his work, and it probably influenced me in choosing the layout for the tagging, but the layout–that is, the format of the tagging–was created with the awareness that most people would have to go back and read it again. So, each tag had a headline and then supporting details with a bit of taxonomy thrown in. It’s funny, because in choosing the headlines, one becomes aware of the perils of such editorial power, which is relevant to me as a storyteller. [For example, I ask myself,] “Am I choosing the right headlines?”
Someone else also told me that I stole from Fight Club. That’s okay. I must have been influenced, but I didn’t have Fight Club in mind when I made this. But I do love that scene in Fight Club–the tagging of Ikea furniture in the apartment.
It’s always funny when people try to guess your inspiration or say “you got this from…”.
Yes, it is amusing, but I’m definitely guilty of the same thing.
In the watching and re-watching, reading and re-reading—through the repetition of engagement—the film becomes a “thing” precious to the viewer.
Ah, I like that. I haven’t heard that before. I wonder, then, how it will be received at the film screening on Saturday. Not sure that a film festival screening is the best place for a film like this. We’ll see.
I was wondering the same thing. I mean, I think it will be received well, but offer a different experience. Has working on this film changed how you work with text and image?
I think so. I’m creating more work based on this notion of tagging [to create] augmented reality. And right now, I’ve limited the scope of the tagging to a format and style that is similar to what we see in The Things We Keep. The next story will take place on a subway, with people. I want to create a series of video portraits on a subway. Each person is wearing a headset. An iPod. The augmented reality component uses the iPod experience as its launching point, but I want to explore things beyond the music that each passenger is listening to. The portraits are videos, not stills. But I digress…. So I’m continuing this style of tagging, but at some point I think I need to ask some deeper questions about tagging. It feels very surface level right now.
In addressing what to do with all of this material and informational “stuff”–how to organize it, ingest it–you have your finger on a pulse point that’s really relevant right now. People are hitting crises of informational overload, and your piece offers an alternative approach to these crises.
I want tagging to bring us closer–closer to unfamiliar objects and closer to unfamiliar people. I want tagging to unlock some mysteries, give us essential information. Of course, we are trying to figure out what is essential. For me, essential is about emotion, I suppose. We relate to objects and people through empathy, common experience. But I also want tagging to ask new questions that give rise to new mysteries, that which is uncommon, unfamiliar. I’m trying to have it both ways.
With regard to your comment about the informational crisis point and how The Things We Keep offers an alternative, the irony is that my piece centers around “stuff.” Stuff that is just lying around, a bit like information clutter or data clutter. Yes, we need to sort it, but I’m still wondering why we keep it around, even as I’ve already answered that question. Because the stuff is a proxy for relationships, is data clutter a similar kind of proxy? [If so,] what kind of relationship is that?
These questions come out beautifully in your film, which in turn raise the questions: What is more important, the object or the words? The thing or the memory/story? Not in a distracting way, but more philosophically. It sets up this duality, but also allows you to step away and mull it over and wonder why and if there even is a duality.
Ultimately, the memory is more important. We are reliant upon the object, but it is the story that is more important. I mean, I love good design and nicely design objects (in all manifestations), but, it is the memory, the relationship, that is more meaningful, and we must get back to that. We must keep the relationships vital and meaningful.
The Things We Keep screen debuts at the Rooftop Films Summer Series this Saturday, 5/29 at 8pm; it can also be viewed online here.
by Kyoung Kim
Assistant Managing Editor of Black Clock
photography by Birgit Richter
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