Haplomatics
Concept, music, and text by James Sellars
Images by David Hockney
DESCRIPTION:
What is Haplomatics? A 40 – minute music video with David Hockney’s design and James Sellars’ musical narrative provides the answer – at least in part!
Introducing Haplomatics as a subject, the video presents a number of fanciful, abstract ‘beings’ called Haplomes, which exist (in the mind and elsewhere) in various Haplorealms, all within a larger Haplorama. Enthusiastic Haplomatics proculators Helen St. Thurple and Erag Elbonk explain Haplomatical existence, rattle off a mind-boggling exposition of Haplometry, and give us a quick read-down of the Haplo-postulates. This explosion of pseudo-scientific double talk includes any amount of expository wackiness, patter songs, logical puns, children’s rhymes, paradoxes, contradictions, in-jokes, and out jokes, tongue twisters, and satire, all virtuosically delivered by John McDonough.
As video art, Haplomatics is a techno-fantasy for narration, electronic music, and high-definition computer graphics. Although it appears to be nothing but marvelous nonsense on the surface, there is more to it than what first meets the eye and ear.
Hockney’s design of the video places images in paradoxical perspective that can be taken as realist abstraction or abstract realism. There are visual celebrations of semiology, calligraphic screens of fantastic words and symbols, and pictures, deconstructed and reconstructed, of Haplorealms and Haploramas. And then the Haplomes themselves – twenty-four simple to complex shapes that dance, fly, and float about in several dimensions, all part of a whole while retaining their distinct individuality.
Sellars’ music ranges from electronic sound effects to catchy tunes, overtures, pop-tech, soft rock, pompous fanfares, a 12-tone row, and numerous explicit and implicit musical jokes. There are ‘signature tunes’ à la Peter and the Wolf, a new age minimalist piece, percussion music, non-Western tunings, computer-generated sounds, sampling techniques, and digital signal processing.
Ultimately, Haplomatics is open-ended, to be developed and reinvented by its audience. It’s appeal lies partly in its inability to address or define itself, and in turning all its attempted objective definitions into conundrums and paradoxically self-definitions. In all, Haplomatics constitutes a world of objects and ideas, created with shapes, symbols, sound, color, and movement, which has its roots in Gulliver’s Travels, The Wizard of Oz, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and Alfred Jarry’s ‘pataphysics’.
Related to particle physics, set-theory, Zen Buddism, science, sociology, art, computer programming, and ecology. Haplomatics can be approached in many ways: as fantasy, frivolity, entertainment, or art, with our without structural meaning and philosophical content. As a programmed construct with and infinity of relationships, it can be studied and analyzed. But most important – on the poetic plane – Haplomatics is an imaginary universe, a bit utopian, but projected from a real world of current concerns. There is some hope that it may make a minute improvement in both the real and imaginary.
Haplomatics is mythology for the 21st century. -James Sellars, 2/7/89