Across Lips

Longstanding interrogations into the nature of storytelling and its contradictions abound in the fields of science, philosophy and spirituality since the time immemorial. From the very beginning, they all have pertained in one way or another to the overarching grand narratives that defined the stuff of the world and set a sure course into the future. But what happens in the times when thought escapes itself, ideas fly off, eroded by forgetfulness? What kind of storytelling can adapt to the technological novelty and to the vastness of big data as an archive?

Across Lips sprang out from a timely coincidence of my simultaneous research into the Internet Archive, one of the world’s largest digital libraries, and the history of free jazz. Mirroring the world of today, jazz is built on the contradiction between restriction and freedom, joy and suffering—it is a worship of present in the face of having no future. The perils and pitfalls of improvisation lie in the very danger of losing sight of one’s path and never quite finding one’s way back. If the Internet can be archived, will it ever have anything to tell us? Won’t it be useless? What’s in there is too big and might never be sorted, allowing for black holes to emerge in the history’s presumed linear trajectory.

In the view of all this, the rhythm of improvisation as a decoding method and a form of interpretation gives hope, regardless of its inherent intangibility, as a tool for better coping with and digesting social/political/economic events as an active bodily experience. Pairing up jazz improvisation with the vastness of big data, Across Lips attempts to decode what it means to tell a story for a digital age. Framed by the gradual and comprehensive expansion of the Internet, this film questions what it really means to believe in something.

Alyona Larionova​ in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (June 2017)