“We’re so limited in our capacity to translate these experiences to one another”
Phase Shifting Index is an immersive seven-channel video installation by the Berlin-based artist Jeremy Shaw, now on view at Hamburger Bahnhof as part of the group exhibition ‘Museum in Motion. The installation features seven distinct subcultures, each captured exploring variations of modern dance, with costumes and choreography that evoke historical footage from the 1960s to the 1990s.
As each film plays simultaneously, their intensity builds, and the scenes – along with their soundtracks – suddenly snap into synchronised choreography. This climactic shift creates a deeply visceral experience, transforming the work from a mere depiction of transcendence to one that induces that same experience in the viewer. Tucked away right at the end of the Rieckhallen, the work is an overwhelming sensory experience that stays with you long after you’ve encountered it.
Maybe because the world is in crisis, so people are looking for salvation.
Phase Shifting Index is such a complex, ambitious and, in many ways, visionary artwork. How did the initial idea for it take shape?
It started with being invited to do a show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which was the biggest thing I’d ever been asked to do. And I didn’t want to show old work or build a load of walls, I wanted to use the whole space and make a kind of exploded, immersive, multi-channel installation – a development from the single channel works I had been doing with the Quantification Trilogy.
It’s quite a dense and messy work in a lot of ways, incorporating so many of the themes and strategies I’ve been working with for the past 10 years. I knew that I wanted the viewer to have autonomy, to be able to sit on a bench in front of one of the seven films or choose to sit at the back and take it all in as a kind of tableau.
But then at a certain point, I wanted to revoke that by enforcing this trans-temporal, synchronised moment, where the choreography comes together, and these different temporalities converge. Once I’d come up with that general idea, I began reverse-engineering to get there.
Why give the viewer autonomy and then take it away?
Because I’m into that kind of manipulation. To play with the potential of media and effects and how susceptible we are to them as viewers. The progressive build up with the dramaturgy is an attempt to elicit a phenomenological response from the viewer in a similar way to the catharsis you’re witnessing with the dancers on screen.
As the chaos of all the dancers and narratives come together, the competing soundtracks lock in, too, but just when you think it will break out into something euphoric, it teases us with something more mellow…
Yes, there’s a massive build of tension and movement and sound that ends up dropping into this synchronised, strobing choreography. But there’s no beat, no drums, which is largely associated with collective ecstasy in the contemporary sense. There is a restraint in there – it’s slow motion with very long shots, which is not what you would commonly get with, say, a music video aiming at a similar goal.
It’s more of a hypnotic trance than a full-on ecstatic experience. But this again builds and builds before rupturing completely. I’ve always been more into a kind of hypnotic abandon than full-on hands-in-the-air ecstasy.
Watching it, you realise each video has its own story, but within the cacophony it is incredibly hard to focus on just one…
I think the imagery is compelling enough that you can just sit at the back and take it in fragments. But the worlds within these films all have para-fictional future narratives, with fabricated belief systems and ideologies and related movements and rituals situated in the future. I went through extreme amounts of writing and researching for each one, but they’re also only about 40% scripted. And they’ve only been rehearsed to a certain degree in an attempt to capture a natural verité aesthetic.
We shoot them like actual documentaries, with the cameras continuously rolling, allowing for a lot of chance and intuition on set. The goal is to try and perpetuate that the material is original, archival. If you don’t realise it’s been fabricated, it’s even more dramatic when the narratives suddenly come together. All these disparate subculture groups spread out across 20th century media, unifying for that last dance.
Why do you want visitors to think it is found footage?
It’s a strategy that I’ve been developing over time. I find that when using outmoded media, creating something that appears to be ‘found’, there is a sense of familiarity that makes the viewer somewhat vulnerable. With the potential of science fiction and setting it somewhere ahead in the future, it becomes a very ripe place to subvert expectations. Because what you’re being told is not what you think you’re seeing.
It’s a completely mind-blowing experience, often a total death-of-ego kind of thing.
So, when the veracity of the material becomes really suspect, it creates a lot of dissonance. And it’s very open-ended and propositional. Some people perceive the climax, that moment as they synchronise as being utopian and very euphoric. But then others see it as something incredibly negative. As if everybody’s consciousness was being consumed into this totalitarian grid, a matrix. I love hearing these polarities in how people receive it.
Isn’t a transcendental moment an impossible reaction to create? It’s such a subjective, personal experience.
Most probably, yes. In 2004, I made an installation about people taking the drug DMT. When you’re high on that drug, you’re completely incapacitated, and if you ‘breakthrough’, as they say, it’s a completely mind-blowing experience, often a total death-of-ego kind of thing. It has a super short and immediate duration and comedown; you go from being sober to higher than you’ll ever be in your life, back to being sober, within minutes.
The only instructions I gave anyone was that when you start to feel like you’re returning to ‘normal’ reality again, that they try and explain what happened. And language just fails completely, right? It gets totally fractured and lost. We’re so limited in our capacity to translate these experiences to one another, and that’s been a constant thread throughout my work to this day.
Where does this fascination come from?
I was raised Catholic, so from a very early age I was aware there was something people aspired to that was beyond the present reality, beyond our immediate experience. And I was very enamoured with the ritual and the mystery of Catholicism. And when I fell out with religion, I moved into other explorations to achieve other ways of sourcing this type of experience and eventually became more and more interested in other people’s aspirations as well.
I love hearing their stories, the mundanity of them as we try to describe them! Everyone’s definition of transcendence is unique and dictated by personal, cultural, social, political, backgrounds et cetera, but still, it does seem to be a potentially inherent human trait. And my interest has never waned. It went from religion to drugs and dancing to meditation, science and whatever somatic practices I could search out.
Science?
I’m fascinated by the activity of the brain during a presumed transcendental experience. If a scientist could pinpoint exactly what is happening in your brain at that moment when you believe you’ve seen God, does that validate the experience or discount it? I’ve always been super intrigued by that loop.
Are we losing that ability to experience transcendence?
I think the desire to achieve it has been coming back quite strongly for a while, at least in the West. Maybe because the world is in crisis, so people are looking for salvation. When I started making these works, I was dealing a lot with the psychedelic experience. And back then, hallucinogenic drugs were still a footnote of the 60s, largely a joke within the scientific community from what I could see.
Yet in the past 10 years, there’s been a real psychedelic renaissance with the re-introduction of them into clinical and medical studies and the advent of microdosing et cetera. Look at things like Burning Man and who attends it now – the stigma has been completely lifted. But, of course, almost immediately after the loosening of restrictions, they’re marketed for capital gain. Suddenly, a productivity element has come into play. It’s no longer about dropping out, but about working better, staying focussed, self-optimisation in the capitalist sense rather than soul searching.
You’ve tried DMT yourself. Do you see it as your responsibility to experiment with all these mind-expanding practices?
I don’t think it’s my responsibility at all but something I continue to be interested in on a personal level that happens to also inform my art practice. I recently did a Vipassana retreat, which is a 10-day silent meditation: no talking, no reading, no writing.I don’t know how much I have to say about it yet – it’s still kind of resonating with me and the whole experience was so intense that I feel like it’s going to take some months to unpack! But it can be a bit of a paradox for me when I engage with something like that these days, as I am committed to being a part of the experience, but I can’t deny that I also go in there as an artist, doing research.
Have you yourself ever had a transcendental experience through art?
I think transcendental may be too strong of a description, but I have certainly had some pretty transformative moments with art works. I’ve never spent longer with a work than I did with Tino Sehgal’s This Variation at documenta 13. This was the piece that was in complete darkness and a group of dancers moved in and around the space singing reworked versions of various pop songs. I felt like I couldn’t leave – I was completely entranced and absolutely compelled to know if it was going to continue to shift and change.
What have you got coming up?
I have a show at Vienna Secession in May. It will be purely sculptural objects. Since making Phase Shifting Index, I have been primarily focused on taking strategies from my moving image works and applying them to physical works. Whereas the films and installations use documentary aesthetics to glue these disparate interests and concepts together, the objects isolate more specific elements and amplify them, kind of zero in on them in a more explicit or precise way.
These often incorporate tropes of representation of what may be considered “the psychedelic” or “the sublime”, or ubiquitous ways of illustrating transcendental moments, spiritual and profane. I think this all comes back to that crisis of translation I was mentioning, we end up relying on clichés as we don’t have the means to truly illustrate what we’ve experienced. I’m definitely up for trying though.
- Museum in Motion on until further notice, Hamburger Bahnhof, Invalidenstr. 50, Mitte, details.
