Tim White’s recent video series Confession offers a visual meditation on memory and the postulation that memory is perhaps genetically transferred from generation to generation. We watch a young female protagonist (a substitute for the artist himself), in present moment solitude interspersed with images incongruous to her seemingly bucolic existence wandering through densely thick woodland. She muses on intensely imagined flashbacks while seated alongside the bank of a leafy lake, going from the present moment to an imaginary "present moment" then back again. A barely discernable voice-over monologue spoken by the pre-teen drones on equidistant and eerie to the dream-like footage. On the surface some of the images relate to her guilt over armed conflict but indicate her coming to grips with the psychological post-traumatic results of the heightened sensation of combat.

One can feel most alive when living in the moment of survival. It is memory then, which provides us with an emotional play by play from which to draw upon. White chooses to "document" the "reality of imagination" in an ambiguous scenario that evokes the mystery of nature and man’s contradicting actions between religious communion with the sanctity of all living things and the desecration of a life-force that comprises our psyche’s balance and well being.

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard has stated that "history survives its disappearance", so the question here is, do children inherit the sins of their forebears in much the same way one may incur the outstanding debts of a deceased parent? How often does a child’s playtime dredge up then dwell on the past undoing of others, where familial history could have gone one way or another?

White’s tangential tale offers a meditation on those moments of decision where the outcome of a single event or a series of events from an earlier generation maintains its power in the present day. The moral identity of an individual, their character and resilience takes on religious significance, as the sanctity of life and its frailties confront us from the graves of immemorial as chapters written with the knowledge of hindsight.
 
 

MH: Does the internal conflict of the protagonist of Confession indicate a fear of controlling one’s destiny?

TSW: I never thought of my hero as someone having internal conflict. On the contrary, I see the central character as a rather integral and firm personality capable of making decisions for herself, while being strong enough to take responsibility for others. The only possible fear she can carry is fear of not being as absolute as she could be or would like to be. There is certain knowledge in this state of mind that makes her safe. As long as she can control her destiny, Confession presents her the final point in a theoretical analysis of reality, upon the assumption that there is one. The fascination of it lies, I think, in its apprehended inevitability.

MH: When you say absolute, do you mean in the moment?

TSW: That is certainly important to define. We are always trying to find this sense of perfection and unity and superimpose it on future decisions; that something was in you at a certain moment and you want to experience it again. If it is a right energy then the moment can transform into momentum that will extend this condition indefinitely in time. This is such an interesting characteristic of memories, that of being identified with a particular moment in your life (if these are not inherited memories) they can be stretched in time and determines the direction in your future.

MH: What do you mean by apprehended inevitability?

TSW: A recognized predetermination of events in the time flow. I use this collocation talking about freedom of choice and manipulation of fate in a sarcastic way because it’s casuistry by itself. From the standpoint of the universe we are not required to understand its certainty to play our own mind games.
 
 

MH: Your establishing long shot opens with a dimly lit interior of a church. What is the proximity of religion to this story?

TSW: The beauty of cathedrals is that they exist somewhere in parallel space, above our playground, beyond geography and time. I think that is why they always remain so personal and pure, outside the specifics of determined religions. For me, as an artist, it was important to introduce not a religious institution but to show some sacred environment that some people carry with them all the time and that some cannot see. There must be always a place in everybody’s life where one can turn to any-time he wants, as if restoring default values in a system.

MH: By default values, do you mean upholding morality? If so, are you saying that the religious institutions systematize our sense of morality, therefore convincing us that their doctrines are an absolute that the individual or society as a whole may veer away from, only to return to its fundamental principals?

TSW: The function of any institution is a categorization and creation of presets of behavior or rules of a game if you want. That is in the definition of institutions. It is certainly their duty to create an absolute or at least convince us with that. The basis for the multifarious interpretation of human morality and obligations is that the truth, as a pure matter, does not exist. We do not accept that but deep inside we understand it. The fundamental principles or default values are not developed by individualism and are not acquired from an institution. They are inherited. Again, by introducing an image of a cathedral I mean to convey a temple and religion within us ourselves.

MH: It is often said that the children will reap the benefits or pay the price of the decisions of their forebears. What is the price?

TSW: There is no conscious price if you do not want to recognize the transgressions of your fathers.  And here we are returning back to religion. It is a religion that from its primal existence was about acceptance, negation, renunciation and suspense. Doubts of conscience are always an inevitable trade-off for acquired knowledge experienced by yourself or taken with the milk of your mother. That’s the history of humanity. And children carry memories and guilt for what they did not do or commit.

MH: As the story unfurls in a slow steady time-lapse we see this young girl is in communion with nature.  Are you as the artist seeking a transcendental experience?

TSW: I would rather say not seeking but creating which is a much more satisfying sentiment and presents the inspiration by itself, superimposing the artistic process over result. The metamorphosis of the girl returning from our secular world to the primal roots of nature happened very organically when I was finalizing the film.

MH: But isn’t the very act of creating a seeking in-of-itself? Is not the primal the dwelling place of the sublime?

TSW: Ideally, yes. However, there is no universal, unanimous "primal". It is subjective.

MH: What is the transgression of your descendents that gives you these feelings of sin?

TSW: I think you meant to say ancestors, depending, of course on how you position yourself in the timeline. It is question of history that everyone writes about as they please. On a higher level of comprehension there is no time. However, I do wonder why the physical appearance of Christ has the precise attachment to numerical time. Returning back to your question I have to say that we do not have to experience transgression in order to have the feelings of sin and the relevance of deeds. Their evaluation certainly depends on the given geographical, ethnical and historical moment.  There is no "pure event" here per se and subjectivity always prevails in judgment of events. It is only us who treat certain instances in time among millions of occurrences as critical. It is guilt for the dark side in human nature, so to speak.

MH: Yet the appearance of Christ, in say the so-called second-coming, is always projected by the church in a physical way, when in fact it is more likely a metaphorical carrot dangled for the masses. An epiphany: should Christ appear any day now, he’d be crucified once again, first with dismissal, then disinformation, ridicule, and eventual tragic accident or suicide.

TSW: That is so true! I was thinking about this myself. That’s the marvelous reality of our life. But what I meant by "appearance" is the already written history, the given and accepted event that we unlikely will revise. What you are mentioning here "a metaphorical carrot", is a simulacra of history, introducing the events that will never take place thus artificially replacing the real and actual with pseudo-reality. When a certain occurrence is supposed to happen it generates a vacuum of unfulfilled anticipation. That leads in its turn to filling that space with disruptive energy. (Hence dismissal--disinformation, and a vast variety of consequent appalling events).

MH: Why are some children fascinated with the unseemly or macabre?

TSW: That is really an enthralling fact. I think that the only explanation to that is the uncanny ability to live in an imaginary world so characteristic to the green mind, playing on a verge of good and evil to its extremes with all of its impunity in unreality. The game is a subconscious strategy accepted by the children that gives them a tremendous advantage over generic behavior to play with any situation.  It is another form of disappearance of subjectivity, "the possibility of assuming roles without identifying with them" (Sylvere Lotringer)

MH: Can you more clearly define green mind?

TSW: I think I am being too poetic here. I meant to say immature mentality. Speaking again of which, I think it is a thrilling period in everyone’s life when you can make wonderful mistakes and utilize this bellicose delirium in small portions during the rest of your life. Returning to your first question on children’s games, I would like to refer you to Jean Baudrillard, who, theorizing on the category of childhood, concluded that "childhood does not exist and that the child is perhaps the only one to know it". Also "children do not have a kind of subject-consciousness, they have a kind of objective ironic presentiment that the category into which they have been placed does not exist. Which allows them at any given moment to make use of a double strategy. It isn’t psychology, it’s strategy." (Jean Baudrillard-"Forget Baudrillard", Semiotext 1987) It was by no accident that Lewis Carroll introduced Alice to play his mind games.