All for No Reason I.
full HD video, 4:06, 2011
Script of All for No Reason I.:
Can I ask you something?
Go ahead.
I already asked.
And I already responded.
What did you respond to?
To what you asked me.
Are you serious? Are you autistic or something?
No. I’m only attentive to what you asked. I merely try not to dodge the question, to be specific, and not to play any games.
Your answer seems like a game to me. You eliminated the context of the question, its tone, the other person. That’s no way to communicate.
Bullshit.
What’s your name?
They call me Three Dots, but that’s just a title, an imprecise term. Just a word. Don’t imagine anyone behind that.
So what should I imagine?
Nothing concrete.
So you’re not concrete. And what about you arm hair, nails, hair, teeth, flesh, muscles, bones, kidneys, heart, liver, skin, spleen, lungs, intestine, peritoneum, undigested food, digested remnants, bile, phlegm, blood, sweat, fat, pus, tears, skin oil, saliva, nasal secretions, synovial membrane, urine, excrement and brain?
That’s not you either?
No, damn it. You mean to say that that list is me?
So what are you? A face? A figure, feelings, perception or consciousness?
You’re nuts.
So who are you?
Three Dots is just a sound that contains everything you named in it.
Well in that case call me Summary. You didn’t ask me my name – at least it will be easier. This Hellenistic dialogue will be on the truth.
What about the food? I came here to eat and drink, but if you want we can blather about the truth. But only after I eat.
You sophists are underfed. Here’s a ring of sausage.
Thanks. I’ll eat about a half meter of it then we’ll start debating, Summary. So that you won’t just sit there staring emptily at me, here’s something to think about while I eat:
“It’s clear that we came to this planet thousands of years ago from another planet. This is as clear as these kinds of things get.
“It’s clear that we didn’t come to this planet thousands of years ago from another planet. This is as clear as these kinds of things get.
All for No Reason II.
full HD video, 4:50, 2012
Script All for No Reason II.:
A: Let’s talk about the crisis.
B: About what?
A: About the crisis, in general.
B: That’s just an empty phrase, nothing like that exists. It’s just an alibi for laziness.
A: You don’t believe in the crisis?
B: Is it possible to believe in the crisis?
A: You mean everything’s going smoothly in your life? Everything that happens is just part of the normal run of things?
B: Sometimes better, sometimes worse.
A: I don’t believe in the normal run of things, everything is in a rut, once and for all. In a certain sense, it’s a permanent crisis. You know what Spinoza has as an epitaph on his tombstone?
B: No.
A: Be on guard!
B: Yeah, but that doesn’t rule out that it can be the normal run of things. It’s all about how you face it. That’s what counts. You can take it completely at ease…
A: But now you just denied the charge of revolutionary change present in each moment.
B: Yeah, that’s because there is none!
A: We really don’t understand each other in this.
B: Look, you ripple the water in a glass of water. Nothing happens, it’s nothing. Whatever’s going to happen will all the same. That’s the natural course of things, the cycle. Everything is normal. Little deviations return to normal…
A: Somehow this doesn’t sit well with me…
B: It sits fine with you. You just take it too much to heart. Look, you’re just skittish. You’re a real thinker, that’s for sure… Calm down and you’ll see that there’s no crisis. You just started turn the situation into a problem. You’ll get over it…
A: No, I won’t get over it. You’ll have a hard time convincing me that way.
B: I don’t want to convince you, you’ll find it out for yourself, or else you’ll get over it…
A: Let’s try this another way. What if awareness of the crisis turns the world inside out. It’s an awareness that the order of things as we know it is not infinite; that it will end and that there will occur a different, radically different…
C: It seems as if we have here two polarities of sorts; it appears to be an irreconcilable duality in which you are floundering, but also convincing…
B: Who are you?
C: A third – with a different opinion.
A: What’s your opinion?
C: You’re way off track. You come up with artificial questions and artificial problems…
B: I told you so!
C: But I’m not supporting your position either. I came to radically defend a different position… slightly performative, making use of elements and lines of both of your views…
A: Oh great, a clever boy…
C: My dear friends, the fact is that you’ve got yourselves stuck in a loop that has no solution. The only way out is to take a step back, to withdraw from what you’re speaking about.
A: Give another example. You think we shouldn’t discuss things?
C: Have you heard of Flatland?…
D: Careful there, friends. Don’t let yourselves get caught in the trap of intellectual clichés! Flatland is now a popular example of depicting the incomprehensibility of the other, which hierarchically exceeds that which is experienced and apparently well known…
B: Good lord, who are you? And how many more of you are here?
D: I’m a nurse and I’ve brought you the pills that you take every day at 4:00 pm. Everyone take one plastic cup… and down it goes, right in front of me so I can see that you take it, then you can continue. According to the rules of drama, I’m the narrator who diverts attention and redirects the action somewhere else. Since this is Brechtian drama, there needs to be more focus on an awareness of actual social problems and not in hiding behind speculative philosophy. So back now to the theme of understand that which is an awareness of the true state of things. Either that or we can check out what’s on the television if you’d like…
Why would you live if you knew what was going to happen tomorrow
Zbyněk Baladrán and Vít Havránek
HDV, 6:48, 2012
(with text and support by Ruti Sela, Babi Badalov, Hafiz and Xu Tan)
Adaptation
Zbyněk Baladrán, Vít Havránek and Eva Jiřička
HDV, 3:36, 2012
Script of Why would you live if you knew what was going to happen tomorrow:
GONG
All my stories are secret. If I write them, I could go in to the jail. All my best.
GONG
Under this circumstance, as a ambitious primary school student, my basic
idea was to become a “good successor” and MAO Zedong thought was the absolute
truth.
It continued to the year 1972, I was 14 years old and enter 8th grade.
Suddenly I started to resist the highly uniformed ideology. I began to doubt all the
statements of mainstream values which I used to believe. My mind was obsessed
by constant doubts.
At that time, indeed, some significant events happened in the political field.
In Chinese expression, declarative sentence and interrogative sentence share
the same patterns, the only difference rely on the punctuations at the end of the
sentences. For example, declarative sentence: “socialism is good”; interrogative
sentence: “socialism is good?” Sentences ending with full point are declarative
sentences; with question mark, interrogative sentences.
My case was that I tended to change the full point of a statement of mainstream
value into question mark. And I have incessancy doubts in my mind, I can’t stop
them.
But some sentences can not be different by only changing the punctuations,
such as: “Chairman MAO’s words, a word is equal to ten thousand words”. My
question was: what kind of word can be equal to ten thousand words? According to
grammar, each character,each word and and each phrase can be part of a sentence.
The true mining of above sentence is that MAO Zedong could not be doubted.
It was the belief of the whole society.
So my first doubt was: How to prove that each word of Mao Zedong was
undoubtedly correct?
I can’t find any help from my surroundings to verify my doubt, I can’t consult
anyone, because letting others know what I thought was very dangerous. So It
remained my private inner battle. This inner battle lasted for long time, it almost
became a sickness. I kept questioning all the mainstream faith, which often led me
to stop my routine matters.
My doubt, my resistance and inner conflict pushed me into a kind of spiritual
predicament. It was like a chronic disease, sometimes better,other times worse.
Sometimes I underwent hours of mental conflicting which I could not pull
myself out. I suffered from a severe asthma since I was a child. According to my
limited medical knowledge, asthma is bronchial smooth muscle spasms. And my
inner struggle got me into the same experience as the asthma: paroxysmal, choking,
out-of-control, interfering with your normal life, so I gave it a name: “thought
spasm”.
GONG
I am a refugee from a country X. To arrive to in an EU country I was obliged to contact people who organize transport of illegal immigrants in to the EU to seek for an asylum. Because when you enter an EU country legally with a visa and then you seek for an asylum, you get less chance to obtain a status of a refugee. If I tell true how I came to EU my refugee application will be refused and I will be deported.
GONG
I live in two different political situation in Indonesia; dictatorship and democracy. The concept of alienation in my society is not exist. Indonesia people way of life is always interact eachother; being together. However, the issue of allianation, offcourse happened in the dictatorship era. And it’s much strong appear when freedom/democracy gained after the collapse of the military regime. Me and my generation is lost in seeing our orientation see society and history. Before, we have a common enemy; military regime. Now, our enemies could be living in my neighborhood who may be do not like the way I live. The emergence of conservative groups, which sometimes can not be predicted., makes us sometimes losing orientation in seeing of my society. But it’s a paranoia. It’s more making you aware to dig what happen in your history. The other thing is a stigma against what media imagined as a common enemy of the international community. Often I find it to be an ‘exiled’ because I am Indonesian with Muslim name.
GONG
I think that “story” can be about past and also future. this time, here, I would think the “story” more about past,
Personal story, related to individuals memory, means more about the past direct experience, if not a fiction, it should be about fact happed before.
specially we have experience of fast social change, we have more story,
If we not talk, memory will be lost, and memory can be changed as time.
and another aspect, when we talk our personal, past, story, time by time, the fact will be manifested more clear and also changed, story not only changed the memory of ours but also change the fact in our mind, we trust our memory, believe that is the fact.
Although it is the situation, I think that remembering, talking, are valuable. For it’s somehow about our history.