The iPhone as a Medium of Queer Aesthetics and Fluid SubjectivityCharlie Prodger’s Bridgit

Bridgit

Bridgit is the title of a 32-minute video that earned the Scottish-based visual artist Charlie Prodger the 2018 Turner Prize.11Bridgit, dir. by Charlie Prodger (2016). The film consists entirely of footage that Prodger shot with her iPhone without any technical support like a tripod or an additional lens. Bridgit is the second in a series of films that revolves in complex ways around questions of identity and queerness. The first film, Stoneymollan Trail, from 2015, is a 43-minute compilation of video camera and iPhone footage.22Stoneymollan Trail, dir. by Charlie Prodger (2015). The most recent video, SaF05, was shown at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.33SaF05, dir. by Charlie Prodger (2019). In this 43-minute video work, Prodger includes Beginning of page[p. 116] film scenes from digital wildlife cameras and drone images, and places them in a ‘queer context’, explicitly playing with them.44See Henriette Gunkel, ‘Codes, Raster, Technologien queerer Erinnerungslandschaften: Charlotte Prodgers SaFO5’, in Queeres Kino/Queere Ästhetiken als Dokumentationen des Prekären, ed. by Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky and Philipp Hanke, Cultural Inquiry, 22 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 97–117 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-22_05>.

Before Prodger turned to digital imaging media and presented films as single-channel videos in art spaces, she worked with 16mm film and other analogue media, assembling playback devices into sculptures that she exhibited as installations. She was interested in experimenting with the materiality of these technologies and in exploring the relationship between the body, technology, and the possibility of expanding the experience and perception of bodies through the development of a new queer aesthetics. A queer aesthetics is one that resists those processes of normalization that Judith Butler analysed so convincingly in the wake of ACT UP and the AIDS epidemic as the invisibilization and non-intelligibility of queer forms of desire and queer bodies.55Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky and Philipp Hanke, ‘“What?” — Prekäres Dokumentieren’, in Queeres Kino/Queere Ästhetiken, ed. by Deuber-Mankowsky and Hanke (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 1–21 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-22_01>. In Bridgit, Prodger draws on an already established aesthetics of queer cinema but also goes beyond this. Her interest in both the materiality of technology and in the sculptural plays a central role here. It is an interest that also guides her experimentation with the iPhone as a small, digital film camera held close to the body. The media-aesthetic entanglement of bodies, desire, perception, self-perception, landscape, time, and queerness is sculptural and releases a virtual force. With the philosopher Beginning of page[p. 117] of technology Gilbert Simondon, I understand this virtual force as a force of becoming that — in connection with the tradition of transcendental philosophy and its thinking about time — can allow the future to run back into the present as potentiality.

Situated Subjectivity

The video’s title, Bridgit, refers to the name of a Celtic goddess who is associated with the power of fire, light, and fertility, and has a complex appearance. Though known as Bridgit she, like other Neolithic deities, probably had several monosyllabic names, such as Bride, Brid, Brig, or simply Bree. Names form the biggest problem for the study of the deities in the ancient world. Not only were deities known by different names in different places. But they would even be attributed different names in one and the same region depending on their stage of life: young, middle, or old. The names are mostly monosyllables, iterations; when recited, they form a rhythm, almost a refrain, a ritornello, and simultaneously seem to have remained unchanged since the Stone Age.

This information is relayed to us in the video via an excerpt from Julian Cope’s book The Modern Antiquarian: Pre-Millennial Odyssey through Megalithic Britain. It is relayed by a rhythmic, bright voice speaking English with a Scottish accent and accompanied by images of a landscape through which a red road train is passing in the distance, in parallel with the movement of the camera.66Julian Cope, The Modern Antiquarian: Pre-Millennial Odyssey through Megalithic Britain (London: Thorsons, 1998). After a cut, the voice continues to speak and we see two barges across the water being moved by the wind. They are stationary but appear to be moving, since the camera itself is in motion Beginning of page[p. 118]— Prodger clearly shot the scene from a moving ship.77Bridgit. The scene can be watched on Vimeo <https://vimeo.com/222200361> [accessed 31 January 2024]. The iPhone is held horizontally using the 16:9 format, also used for landscape shots.88See Mason Leaver-Yap, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics in Charlotte Prodger’s BRIDGIT’, published by Bergen Kunsthall NO.5 as part of the exhibition Charlotte Prodger, BRIDGIT/Stoneymollan Trail, 3 November 2017–3 January 2018. See the site of Leaver-Yap <https://leaveryap.wordpress.com/2018/01/02/aesthetics-and-anaesthetics-in-charlotte-prodgers-bridgit/> and of Hollybush Gardens <https://hollybushgardens.co.uk/artists/charlie-prodger/#texts> [accessed 20 February 2024]. As a viewer you feel somewhat dizzy, as you would if you were on a train and didn’t know if it was standing still or already moving. The shot might also evoke the thought experiment with which Galileo formulated the principle of relativity in the seventeenth century, a little more than 270 years before Albert Einstein. According to this thought experiment, the movement of a body can be determined only relative to the movement of other bodies.

The very slow and slight movements perceptible in Prodger’s long takes on the hand-held iPhone sensitize us to her breathing. Prodger uses this effect to experiment with a situated subjectivity and a fluid identity that is in constant movement relative to other movements. Thus, even the connection to Celtic deities does not come out of nowhere but is connected to memories. These memories hark back to the years 1992 and 1993, during which Prodger, who was 18 and 19 years old at the time and lived in the countryside in Aberdeen, Scotland, where she grew up, was recreationally consuming ecstasy pills, not long before her coming out. This is the landscape to which the rock musician, songwriter, pop star, and author Julian Cope often travelled to visit its mysterious, more than 4000-year-old Neolithic stone circles. These stone circles Beginning of page[p. 119] are particularly numerous in Aberdeenshire but had been little described until then. During this period, Julian Cope was researching stone-age monuments in Britain for his aforementioned book from 1998, to which he gave the title The Modern Antiquarian. The book itself contains many pictures of Neolithic landscapes and has gained widespread popularity.99See Cope, The Modern Antiquarian. In March 2000, The Modern Antiquarian website was launched as a platform for the collaborative continuation of Julian Cope’s research. It continues to be used and posted on to this day, standing as a testament to the popularity that this landscape and history research has gained in the UK following Cope’s illustrated book <https://www.themodernantiquarian.com/home/> [accessed 31 January 2024].

Private Cinema

Bridgit’s opening scene uses a point-of-view shot to show Charlie Prodger’s elevated, crossed legs and carefully tied sneakers (see Fig. 1). Shot on an iPhone, the scene depicts the inside of a room in which the online radio station NTS can be heard playing its characteristic live music programme, with the camera facing a window through which light streams in. You can see green plants on the windowsill. The scene seems private and equally strange due to the rhythmic electronic sound, which is reminiscent of a ritual. The camera is static and yet also sways slightly up and down, so that the footage seems to respond to the rhythm of the music. This subtle undulation is the breathing movement of the body holding the iPhone. Then, in addition to the image, the sound, and the live voice from NTS, we hear Prodger’s voice off-screen:Beginning of page[p. 121]

There’s this huge event. A group of people are focusing very closely on you. The minute details of you and also the macro.1010Bridgit, 00:50-00:59.

Then, after a short pause in which only NTS' live music is audible, we hear:

It’s all women. They’re totally in control of you. There’s three main people in charge, and an outer layer of others, each with their specific roles. And they all are focusing very intensely on you.1111Bridgit, 01:20–01:35.

Another NTS-filled pause ensues, after which Prodger’s calm voice announces:

You are at the centre of the whole thing. Every part of you. But you are not there!1212Bridgit, 02:25–02:27.

A cut follows. Then there is a long shot in which we see the view of a wooded slope in the fog. We hear bird whistles and forest sounds. Our feeling in this scene may again be likened to that of witnesses to a ritual, or perhaps to a performance at a subcultural event. Only later do we learn that the described scene depicts someone about to be placed under anaesthesia and undergo abdominal surgery, though the precise nature of the operation is not further specified; perhaps it is uterus surgery. The scene takes place in the transition room, which is located in front of the operating theatre and next to the recovery room. Prodger reads the text, which sounds like a diary entry, over a black image that slowly lightens to become a warm brown. The people named in the opening scene turn out to be an anaesthetist and some nurses. Prodger reports in detail on what they do Beginning of page[p. 122] and say to her. They try to distract her and keep her calm while administering the necessary injections; then the anaesthetist leans over her and says:

What you think about now is what you are going to dream about. So, think about something nice.1313Bridgit, 07:54–07:57.

But there is not much time. Prodger tries to picture a field, the specific image of a field, but the one that comes is not the right one; she cannot find the right field, the right depiction, so the images start to move, departing from the very idea of a right depiction.

Now this field, now that one like slides. I never settled on one and that slideshow, searching for the right field, was the last content before nothing.1414Bridgit, 08:14–08:28.

The film is composed of footage, sometimes just the smallest snippets, that Prodger had been collecting for many years in the video archive of her iPhone. It can be understood as a performance of searching for the ‘right slideshow’, of the kind that might occur in the period between wakefulness and sleeping. Mason Leaver-Yap describes Bridgit as a private cinema that, while it opens directly onto the body, does not have recourse to any bodily presence:

This is a private cinema that opens onto the artist’s body in direct address. ‘It’s all about you.’ Yet the artist goes on to speak in voice-over not about the body’s presence. Rather, she speaks about the inability to register presence at all — the total absence of self under the effect of anaesthetics.1515Leaver-Yap, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics in Charlotte Prodger’s BRIDGIT’.Beginning of page[p. 123]

The shots, often static, are sometimes overlaid with Prodger’s voice, or with that of a friend reading diary-like texts and notes, as well as with carefully selected soundtracks that pick up the rhythm of the image. The source of those soundtracks remains invisible but can sometimes be seen in the picture: the sound of a ship, a train, a machine, or the wind in a landscape that seems to overwhelm the iPhone’s small microphone. Particularly beautiful is the scene in which a black cat is visible in front of a bright lamp, its fur seemingly quivering to the rhythm of jazz music. The whole image vibrates and feels electrically charged; it is the bearer of a virtual force. One cannot help but think of the goddess of life and fire: Bri, Breu, Bridgit. For Mason Leaver-Yap, Prodger reconfigures subjectivity to a point where the relationship between bodies, places, and things can no longer be described as one of proximity, not even as one between subjects. Instead, it is a transcendental idea of fluid relationships through and across time, appearing as a deliberate distancing from the modern subject and its overemphasis on the individuality and rationality of the individual.1616Ibid.

Politics and Aesthetics

The experimental use of the iPhone as camera and queer-image archive, the presence of the queer subculture in Aberdeenshire, and the interest in formulating a fluid and situated subjectivity, all tie in with a queer aesthetics and address a queer community. In fact, the film not only refers to a social and political reality that lies outside the art world; it also seeks to have a transformative effect on Beginning of page[p. 124] this reality. Prodger articulates this clearly in a five-minute video produced for Tate in which she introduces her work: queer struggles and the memory of them are important to her, and especially today, at a time when the commodification of queer aesthetics in fashion, music, and the art world is encroaching on these spaces and leading to a deflation of the political content that was originally so important.1717Tate Britain, ‘Charlotte Prodger|Turner Prize Winner 2018|TateShots’, YouTube, 17 September 2018 (3:06–3:43) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsVWk5DlbCE> [accessed 31 January 2024].

In this way, she positions herself at a critical distance from current celebrations of certain ideas of gender diversity, which are essentially guided by the attention economy of the digital media, and seek to conform to majority society and gain its approval and recognition. Compared to the neoliberal-digital conditions of production of pop culture, the art world retains the ability to open spaces of possibility in which political and media-aesthetic problems can be explored: aesthetics can be tied back to politics, and new aesthetic forms and media can be experimented with, as we see in the case of Bridgit with the iPhone.

The Hamburg-based film scholar Daniel Kulle has therefore suggested that we refer to films and videos on the fringes of this mainstream as ‘queer experimental films’.1818Daniel Kulle, ‘Innovation an den Rändern des Queer Cinema. Ästhetische Strategien des Queeren Experimentalfilms’, in Queer Cinema, ed. by Dagmar Brunow and Simon Dickel (Mainz: Ventil, 2018), pp. 226–44 (p. 226; my translations). By this term, Kulle means films that are ‘in aesthetic and political opposition to the heteronormative mainstream as well as to assimilationist currents in the LGBT movement’;1919Ibid., p. 227. queer experimental films thus share Prodger’s aforementioned critique. According to Kulle, queer experimental films are characterized by their ‘systematic hybrid Beginning of page[p. 125] position between art and cinema’. They represent a ‘highly volatile field “in between”, between art and film, between the film world of festivals and that of YouTube and Vimeo’.2020Ibid.

Indeed, in an interview conducted on the occasion of her nomination for the 2017 Film London Jarman Award, Prodger pointed out that cinema was the ideal media environment for Bridgit.2121Film London, ‘CHARLOTTE PRODGER — shortlisted artist profile — Film London Jarman Award 2017’, Vimeo, 23 August 2017 <https://vimeo.com/230803422> [accessed 31 January 2024]. Although the film was not released in cinemas, it has been shown as a single-screen video in simulated cinema situations, that is, in the projection rooms of galleries and exhibition spaces, including the renowned Hollybush Gardens gallery, which, founded in 2005 by Lisa Panting and Malin Ståhl, sees itself as an experimental field for visual thinking.

Alternatively, Bridgit can be requested from LUX, a UK-based arts and distribution agency, and, depending on the need and the price, can be viewed for research purposes, used in learning environments, or shown publicly. Founded in 2002, LUX is a not-for-profit and non-commercial organization. It was established as the successor to the London Film-Makers’ Co-op (LFMC) and is part of the ‘counter culture’ that dates back to 1960s London. The London Film-Makers’ Co-op was inspired by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative founded in New York in 1962 by, among others, Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke and twenty other film artists, and dedicated to the dissemination of avant-garde film art. The London Film-Makers’ Co-op became an important and productive venue for experimental visual art in the 1970s and the 1980s. In 1976 the London Video Arts group formed to promote the production and Beginning of page[p. 126] distribution of emerging video art. Finally, in 1994, London Electronic Art was established, and in 1997 all three self-managed organizations moved into the Lux Centre, which provided a gallery, cinema, archive, and production space. LUX followed these movements in 2002 with the aim of continuing collection and distribution activities.2222A very nice introduction to the politics of the initiative is given by author, art critic, and former director of LUX Scotland, Mason Leaver-Yap, in a conference titled ‘Archeology & Exorcisms: Moving Image and the Archive’, YouTube, 30 May 2016 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S2NrqaZ0qY> [accessed 10 January 2025]. The fact that Charlie Prodger has distributed her films through LUX shows how consistently she understands the policy of independence and how she pursues it with regard to the distribution of her work even in the age of digital reproducibility.

So, can queer experimental film be considered a subgenre of queer post-cinema? The answer is both yes and no. Kulle persuasively describes the aesthetic and political strategies with which queer experimental film resists the mainstream. The description of queer post-cinema also ties in with these strategies. But Kulle does not inquire into the technical conditions and their significance for queer experimental films. This means that his criteria fail to capture precisely the critical commitment that characterizes the queer post-cinema in question here: a post-cinema that is dedicated to experimenting with technology and, as stated in the introduction to this volume, to reinventing resistance in a different way each time.2323See ‘Introduction’, pp. 13–14.

In the following, I engage in an in-depth discussion of Kulle’s criteria for queer experimental films to show how Prodger succeeds in reinventing resistance by playing with technology.Beginning of page[p. 127]

The Body as a Virtual Site of Sensations

In the conclusion to his text, Kulle writes that ‘queer experimental film’ does not comprise a genre, but rather a ‘loose group of films that largely defies categorization’.2424Kulle, ‘Innovation an den Rändern des Queer Cinema’, p. 240. Instead of categorization, he identifies three ‘aesthetic friction surfaces where these films can collide with the mainstream of LGBT festivals’. He characterizes these surfaces of friction as ‘subversive aesthetic strategies that oppose hegemonic aesthetics as well as political norms in the sense of a micropolitics of power’. The aesthetic strategies identified by Kulle can also be discerned in Bridgit.

The first of these strategies relates to the production of evidence and visibility and is directed against the marginalization, repression, and denial of queer bodies, lifestyles, and desires. This strategy is centrally concerned ‘with the historicity of the body and the traces that time and change leave on it, with the malleability of the body, with biopolitics and governmentality’.2525Ibid., p. 229. It aims to show the body in its ‘versatility and in the field of tension between erotic attraction and semiotic charge’.2626Ibid. Kulle counts among these strategies the post-pornographic representation of genitals in all their diversity and multiplicity of meaning, as well as the concept of ‘queer abstraction’ proposed by Jack Halberstam as an alternative to figurative visibility, and the concept of ‘abstract drag’ as formulated by Renate Lorenz,2727Ibid., p. 232. the latter also including the ‘excessive aesthetics of camp’, through which ‘pleasurable dream worlds are constructed in which the possibility of an otherness in itself is central’.2828Ibid., p. 234.Beginning of page[p. 128]

The question of the body is also central in Bridgit. Here, however, the body appears neither in abstraction nor figuratively, nor as the bearer of a utopia, but rather in processual entanglement with the technical, the medial and as a subjectivized relational spatio-temporality. You don’t see the body; you feel it — through the voice(s) and the traces of breathing in the movement of the images; through the narrated stories; through the landscape images captured with the iPhone; through the intense and carefully selected sound; and through the rhythm that permeates the film. Bridgit addresses the body not as a material substance, but as a virtual site of sensations and intensities in a set of relations with technical objects, which we might understand together with the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon as a ‘transindividual’ set of relations.2929For Simondon, the ‘transindividual relationship’ is bound to ‘technical thought’ in the emphatic sense. ‘Technical thought’ is the prerequisite for the development of a ‘mental and practical universe of technicity’. In the transindividual relationship, the technical object is no longer an instrument but is ‘taken according to its essence which is to say, the technical object insofar as it has been invented, though and willed, and taken up by a human subject’. See Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2017), p. 252. Here, virtual does not mean the digital virtual. Instead, it is to be understood in the sense of transcendental philosophical modal logic, which has a long tradition going back to medieval philosophy and to which Simondon refers, as do Charles Sanders Peirce and Deleuze. In this sense, the virtual denotes a force that has an influence on actuality, and that means that it can change the present. As a force of becoming, the virtual is simultaneously in the future and in the past. The virtual ‘diffuses’, as Simondon puts it, ‘an influence of the future on the present’.3030Ibid., p. 61. Simondon introduces the concept of the virtual in the context of the distinction between ground and form instead of substance, or matter, and form, as a condition of possibility of technical inventions. See also p. 156. While he criticizes Gestalt theory for not having thought of the ‘ground’ radically enough, and for still ascribing the formative power to ‘form’, he turns this balance of power around through a recourse to philosophical modal logic, a long tradition that stretches back to Duns Scotus. According to this tradition, ‘the ground is the system of virtualities, of potentials, forces that carve out their path, whereas forms are the system of actuality’; see ibid., p. 61. In this tradition, the virtual is no less real than the actual. The difference between the virtual and the actual presupposes processual thinking. This means that the actual is a reality that has gone through the process of actualization. The virtual has become actual and is no longer virtual. See Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, ‘“Für eine Maschine gibt es kein echtes Virtuelles”: Zur Kritik des Smartness Mandate mit Felwine Sarrs Afrotopia und Gilbert Simondons Philosophie der Technik’, in Digital/Rational, ed. by Dieter Mersch and Katerina Krtilova, special issue of Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie, 6 (2020), pp. 131–45 <https://doi.org/10.1515/jbmp-2020-0007>.Beginning of page[p. 129]

Prodger’s video focuses the body and materiality. Matter, however, is not addressed as a substance or matrix, nor is the body thought of as an organism with defined boundaries that would set it apart from a surrounding or external world. Rather than providing evidence, the very idea itself that one can form or invoke the right notion becomes questionable. The body loses its boundaries, and all control over the forming of right notions slips away, as do the notions that the body is a property and that thought is an organ of control. The body appears as the centre of sensations and intensities in a transindividual structure of relations.

Leda and the Swan: Queer Lesbian Desire

The second aesthetic strategy in films that, according to Kulle, can be described as ‘queer experimental films’, involves finding a unique ‘queer voice’ or narrative position. Here, voice means ‘both a queer narrative position […] from which meaning is carried into the heteronormative world, but also quite explicitly the corporeal or acousmatic Beginning of page[p. 130] voice’.3131Kulle, ‘Innovation an den Rändern des Queer Cinema’, p. 234. The acousmatic voice, becomes an ‘autobiographical marker’.3232Ibid. While the voice-over tells a personal story, it confronts a world of images and sounds that are initially independent of it. These images can be urban, cultural, or natural landscapes. They can also be bodies that contrast with the voice. Kulle cites El Abuelo (The Grandfather) by Dino Dinco as an example in which ‘a yearning and tender voice’ stands over against ‘a gang tattooed, muscular body’.3333El Abuelo, dir. by Dino Dinco (2004); Kulle, ‘Innovation an den Rändern des Queer Cinema’, p. 235. This process is not only characteristic of a long lesbian and gay film history, but, as Kulle emphasizes, has also been a ‘classic aesthetic strategy of all counter-cultural video and film production since the 1960s’.3434Kulle, ‘Innovation an den Rändern des Queer Cinema’, p. 234. The juxtaposition of the off-voice and the worlds of images and sound enables the formulation of a minority position and the simultaneous undermining of the established representations that it is confronted with. According to Kulle, the contrast between the visual world and the acousmatic voice ‘simultaneously revokes the supposedly unproblematic process of individuation that the voice performatively asserts’.3535Ibid, p. 235. The queer self is thus necessarily an ‘ironic and meta-subjective one: as the self develops out of the friction with visual worlds without ever being able to overcome the difference to them, it remains a construct without a foundation, a purely provisional arrangement’.3636Ibid.

Clearly, then, we understand that Prodger also works with acousmatic voice and landscape. What’s more, the possibilities of generating a queer narrative position in Beginning of page[p. 131] the context of digital remix culture and found footage, to which Kulle refers, can also be found in Bridgit. The film is comprised of video sequences that Prodger filmed with her iPhone and archived digitally. However, this footage is not, as in Kulle’s examples, pop-cultural imagery. Instead, it consists in images from her own personal archive that achieve a new structure of expression in the montage. Referring to two of Barbara Hammer’s films Nitrate Kisses (1992) and Tender Fictions (1995), Kulle brings another element into play that is also important for the analysis of Bridgit: he points out that voice-over and remix are ‘part of the basic inventory of queer experimental film’,3737Ibid., p. 236. especially in the reflection on forms of queer collectivity. The concern to create new forms of expression of queer collectivity is also one we find in Bridgit.

In the following, I make use of a particularly impressive shot in which acousmatic voice(s), queer collectivity, biographical experiences, landscape, and sexualities all come together to show how Bridgit ties in with the aesthetic strategy of an individual voice as presented by Kulle, and to show where and how the film transcends this strategy aesthetically and politically by using all the means provided by the iPhone to create a fluid and transindividual relational infra-structure.

The sequence lasts for two-and-a-half minutes and occurs right in the middle of the film. The shot is static and displays the already familiar, barely perceptible, slight movement that indicates breathing and, through it, the presence of the body on which the camera is connected. The picture shows mossy stones in the foreground, between which the water flows back into the sea (see Fig. 2 and Fig. 3). It is clearly low tide. At the edge of the beach,Beginning of page[p. 134] a bevy of white swans stands before the open water. The swans are elegantly craning their long necks as they drink, preening their plumage, and moving about.

Meanwhile, the already familiar voice, which is not Prodger’s, reads the following diary entries:

November 14th: bought two t-shirts, a pair of jogging pants and some socks at JD Sports. The check-out girl asked if it is my son I am buying for. I said, no it’s me. She didn’t say much after that.3838Bridgit, 15:40–15:57.

January 28th: I am on a shift at the bar where I work as a DJ. I put on a long record and went to the toilet […]. One girl sees me in the queue and shouts: ‘there is a boy in the girl’s toilets.’3939Bridgit, 16:05–16:24.

March 23rd: Helen, in the bed next to me just asked me if that was my daughter that was visiting last night. I said: ‘no, actually it’s my girlfriend.’ She raised her hands: ‘Don’t have a problem with that. My son is gay.’4040Bridgit, 16:28–16:44

Other entries follow that deal with the unrecognizability of queer desire and lesbian lifestyles in a heterosexual environment. The scene ends with the following sentences:

I told Isabelle. She said that usually her and L get: ‘are you twins?’ And once L got: ‘is this your son?’. I told Irene. She said V has variously been her mother, aunt, or brother.4141Bridgit, 17:34–17:42.

With these statements, lesbian desire is placed in a heteronormative setting through its association with a relationship of twins, of mother and son, or of mother and daughter. However, instead of lesbian desire disappearing in this Beginning of page[p. 135] operation of substitution, instead of it becoming invisible and non-intelligible, the montage of voice, narrative position, and quoted diary entries results in an overlapping of erotic and familial relationships. This leads to an unsettling of the symbolic position of the incest taboo, which, as Judith Butler argues in Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, against both Jacques Lacan and Claude Lévi-Strauss, is itself based on the prior repression and tabooing of same-sex love.4242Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 43. In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler distinguishes between ‘heterosexual melancholy’ and ‘homosexual melancholy’ to explain the respective effects and dynamics of the tabooing of homosexuality. This tabooization, she convincingly argues, precedes both the Oedipus complex and the incest prohibition, thus supporting the heteronormative constitution of the kinship system; see Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 146. In the scene described, the taboo of lesbian desire is now suddenly turned against the taboo of incest itself. It resists disappearance and thus, through the overlapping of sexual and familial relationships, simultaneously challenges the symbolic law of the incest taboo. Nothing less than the frame itself becomes visible in the scene, which produces and reproduces the precariousness of queer bodies and queer sexuality.

At the same time, the scene with the swans, the constantly moving water, and the clouds that reflect the movement of the water, appears as a virtual image of strong sexual desire. Even without the presence of a Leda figure, the swans recall art-historical depictions of Leda’s sexual encounter with a swan. In the written tradition, the story is that Zeus falls in love with Leda and approaches her in the form of a swan one night. On the same night, Leda has sex with the Spartan king Tynadereos, who is her husband, and becomes pregnant, giving birth to two eggs, each containing Beginning of page[p. 136] a set of twins: the immortal twins Helena and Pollux, and the mortal twins Clytemnestra and Castor. While the story of Zeus and Leda is told in written tradition as one of Zeus’s many sexual assaults, the figurative representation of the swan’s and Leda’s sexual encounter, by contrast, is separated from Zeus. The encounter of Leda — the name, translated, means nothing else than woman — and the swan was given pictorial representation in antiquity and became a popular erotic motif in Renaissance painting. The decisive factor for these pictorial representations, and likewise for the scene in Bridgit, is that Zeus is not shown in these pictures; in other words, he is not present and can accordingly be conjured away. The figures presented instead are Leda, the swan, sometimes Cupid, or the eggs laid by Leda, and sometimes Leda’s playmates or her maids. Without Zeus, however, the scene of Leda and the swan transforms into a gratifying sexual encounter, interpretable as a non-heterosexual scene. These figurative representations have been interpreted from a feminist perspective as trivializing sexual violence against women and, accordingly, as male fantasies. However, if one does not see what indeed is not there, namely Zeus and the heteronormative marking of sexuality represented by him, they can also be perceived as non-heterosexual, queer-sexual scenes.

To name only a few of the surviving examples of these depictions: there are Leonardo da Vinci’s studies and the resultant sketch, which also shows the eggs to which Leda gives birth and on which she sits while tenderly embracing the swan (see Fig. 4).

There is the oil painting by Correggio, which hangs in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and combines, in a single picture, the scenes in which Leda and the swan meet, unite sexually, and then separate (see Fig. 5).

And there is the painting by Rococo painter François Boucher, a confidant and friend of Madame de Pompadour, which Beginning of page[p. 140] depicts two women lying together and welcoming the swan with obvious joy (see Fig. 6). In Bridgit, we see only stones, swans, and three ducks. However, just like the water, the clouds, and the landscape, they become allies of a queer-lesbian desire that connects the scene via the movement of breathing with the body of Charlie Prodger holding the iPhone.

Prodger carries the everyday situations of exclusion and perversion of queer-lesbian desire shown in her film into the space of aesthetics, where they become the starting point for the creation of something new. With Deleuze, we can thus interpret the scene as a bloc des sensations, a bloc of sensations. In a bloc of sensations, fleeting, lived and ephemeral sensations are given a foothold, a being-there.4343Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 164. Art thus becomes not only an aesthetic medium of expression of sensations, but simultaneously expresses the virtuality that these sensations have as intensities. Here, this virtuality is the power of the queer-lesbian desire that appears in the scene.4444See ‘Affective-Political Work with Documents: Sharon Hayes and Yael Bartana’, pp. 62–64. The worlds of images, as well as the landscapes and animals seen in the images, become allies in the formation of a strong, fluid, queer identity, which is to say of a fluid and transindividual relational structure.

The iPhone as a Medium of Queer Aesthetics

The third and final aesthetic strategy of queer experimental film analysed by Kulle is titled ‘Performing the Self’.4545Ibid., p. 237. Among the films that are concerned with the performance of a queer self, Kulle counts those in which drag queens and Beginning of page[p. 141] drag kings take centre stage. Here, too, a ‘queer self’ is associated with ‘ironization’ and with the overwriting of the natural with the artificial. In addition, as low/no-budget productions, these films have developed a ‘do-it-yourself culture’ as a counter-model, meaning that they experiment with limited resources and technical means.

At this point, Charlie Prodger’s decision to film with an iPhone could be located in the tradition of queer experimental films. Prodger herself emphasizes that the conditions of the technical formats she works with — whether 16mm films, an iPhone, or even drone cameras — are closely linked to the autobiographical content of her films.4646Film London, ‘CHARLOTTE PRODGER — shortlisted artist profile — Film London Jarman Award 2017’, 6:56 (0:45). However, this does not mean that she seeks, in Kulle’s sense, ‘an aesthetic of the fragmentary, the unfinished, the raw’.4747Kulle, ‘Innovation an den Rändern des Queer Cinema’, p. 239. On the contrary, precision and consistent thinking-through play a central role. Thus, it is no coincidence that for an instant we see the bright appearance of Prodger’s fingertip in the picture; rather, just like the subtle up-and-down movements in the static wide-angle shots, which last over two minutes and were filmed without a tripod, the fingertip is a deliberately placed material trace of the body that, for Prodger, refers to the specific relationship that obtains between body and technology when filming with an iPhone. Indeed, even in the case of digital technology, Prodger considers that technical conditions are mediated through sensations and feelings, that is through aesthetically mediated material traces performed with the body. This becomes clear, for example, when she describes how the iPhone becomes very material, almost ‘sculptural’, in the process Beginning of page[p. 142] of filming.4848Tate Britain, ‘Charlotte Prodger|Turner Prize Winner 2018| TateShots’, 0:58. You can, she elaborates, turn the iPhone mid-shot; you can make your fingers visible in the frame; you can see the blood in your own fingers when you hold them close to the little camera; when you film in the landscape, the wind takes the little microphone to its limits, almost ripping it apart; and when you take a static shot, you can see the body breathing. The body and its systems intertwine with the camera. It’s a kind of symbiosis and at the same time a kind of interlocking. In this thoughtful treatment, the iPhone appears as a ‘technical object’ in the emphatic sense, which Simondon insisted be grasped as an ‘invented, thought and willed’ object.4949Simondon, On the Mode of Existence, p. 252. Also see footnotes 29 and 30 in this chapter. Only in this way, he argued, could the technical object become an element in a transindividual system of relations he called the ‘universe of technicity […] in which human beings communicate through what they invent’.5050Ibid. To sum up, by thinking with technology Prodger's experimentations expand the possibilities and the ability to grasp the body in thought. This is precisely how Bridgit differs from other mobile-phone or iPhone films, which are becoming increasingly numerous.5151These films, all shot with a mobile phone or an iPhone, are either mostly new forms of documentary film (see Florian Krautkrämer, ‘Revolution Uploaded. Un/Sichtbares im Handy-Dokumentarfilm’, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, 6.2 (2014), pp. 113–26), or else, as with Steven Soderbergh’s iPhone films, feature films that take their cue from the aesthetics of theatrical motion pictures. Here, the iPhone is used primarily because it is cheaper and allows for more independence when undertaking film projects. This applies not only to the iPhone film Unsane, dir. by Steven Soderbergh (2018), but also to the Netflix series High Flying Bird (2019), which is also filmed entirely on iPhone.Beginning of page[p. 143]

If Prodger calls filming with the iPhone sculptural, the video itself can be described as a sculpture. We recall that, as she slipped into a state of anaesthesia, Prodger tried to counter her loss of consciousness with an attempt to find a suitable, accompanying image for this state, the upshot being that the images she conjured up began to separate out like a slide show, and yet she was unable to find the ‘right slide show’. Waking up from the anaesthesia is again connected with a movement, which this time is not horizontal but vertical: in a static shot we see the menhirs of a Celtic stone circle in the Aberdeen landscape. In the next shot, female first names are superimposed on the image: ‘Margaret, Deborah, Eimear, Helen.’ In the following sentence, also set in yellow letters, these names are described as dots in a moving grid. And suddenly it becomes clear: this grid is the representation of a hospital infrastructure and the names ‘Margaret’, ‘Deborah’, ‘Eimear’, and ‘Helen’ belong to some women who are about to undergo surgery. As they arrive at the ward in the morning, they are admitted, taken up in the elevator to the transition room, and from there to the operating room, after which they go to the recovery room, and are finally escorted via the elevator back down to the ward. We hear only the wind rustling the grass, and read the following sentences superimposed over the static shot of the menhirs standing in the landscape:

Coming in at 7.30. Waiting, then down in the lift, into theatre, out to recovery, back up to the ward, next ones come in, go down, go in, come out, go up.5252Birgit, 19:09–19:28.

Prodger compares the diagram that is superimposed on the images of the landscape to the minimalist paintings of Beginning of page[p. 144] the lesbian painter Agnes Martin. The repetitive sequence, she says, is like an ‘Agnes Martin with moving parts’ — a series of dots moving in vertical columns called menhirs (see Fig. 7).

In the next step, the idea of the stone circle as a series of moving points is expanded once again. It now stands for an ‘infinite space-time rhythm’, which, as we can now read above the stone columns that seemingly emerge from the grass, was there long before ‘I’, meaning Charlie Prodger, was there. The infinite space-time rhythm was there, according to the words still appearing on the screen, when she wrote these sentences and when she edited the film, and it is there and continues to be as we, the audience, watch the film. In this way, Prodger inscribes both herself Beginning of page[p. 145] and us in a history of life oriented not by the order of the family tree and the kinship system, but by a system that is more comprehensive insofar as it encompasses the history of technical objects as well as that of living things and the landscape.

The next shot begins with a black frame. We hear Prodger’s voice recite the various names of the trans* media theorist, sound technician, performer, and activist ‘Alluquére Rosanne “Sandy” Stone’; it sounds almost like a rhyme or a poem, and recalls the many names of Bridgit. Sandy Stone, famous author of the 1987 The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto, is brought into close association with the fluid identity of Celtic deities. Moreover, the trans* woman Sandy Stone, from whose 1990s cyberfeminist texts Bridgit subsequently quotes, is presented in the following as a mastermind of the very concept of fluid identity and the intertwining of technology, body, time, and gender. The reference to Sandy Stone is eminently political in many ways. In one of the next shots, Prodger’s voice-over quotes the interview with Sandy Stone that appeared online about her relationship and experiences with lesbian separatism in the 1970s.5353Zackary Drucker, ‘Sandy Stone on Living Among Lesbian Separatists as a Trans Woman in the 70s’, Vice, 19 December 2018 <https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmd5k5/sandy-stone-biography-transgender-history> [accessed 20 February 2024]. During that time Sandy Stone worked as a sound engineer for the women’s music publishing company Olivia Records. The claim made in the interview is that while Olivia Records officially professed to a radical feminism, it privately opted for a lesbian separatism. Unlike representatives of radical feminism, such as Janice Raymond, who accused Sandy Stone of not being a ‘real’ woman and criticized the label for working with a trans* woman, lesbian separatists had no problem integrating Beginning of page[p. 146] the transsexual Sandy Stone into their lesbian community. On the contrary, in many ways they felt closer to Sandy Stone than to cis* women. For Prodger, they thus presented a form of lesbian separatism that is relational and ever-changing.

One must see this statement, on the one hand, against the backdrop of the ongoing struggles being waged in Britain by the representatives of TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) against trans rights, as they fear the erasure of cis* women by trans* women. Only against this background does it become clear that the prominent reference to Sandy Stone in Bridgit simultaneously signifies a distancing from TERF politics. On the other hand, however, Prodger’s statement in favour of the sort of lesbian Beginning of page[p. 147] separatism that affirms a fluid and relational identity is also a rejection of an identity politics that associates identity with a strong self and a partial group. This is clearly evident in the last two scenes of Bridgit. The first of these scenes takes place in her home and shows a T-shirt emblazoned with the head of a lion draped over a radiator, easily recognizable as the queer lioness who will star in Prodger’s next video, SaF05 (see Fig. 8).

This lioness is like those that surveillance cameras pick up in Botswana’s Okavango Delta; lionesses that behave like lions, have a mane, and go hunting alone, but are lionesses nonetheless. The proud, skyward posture of the maned lioness’ head accompanies us into the next and final scene, which shows a stone pillar in a landscape, superimposed on a white grid that widens and finally dissolves (see Fig. 9). We are left in the final picture with the stone pillar from the Neolithic period, which is as reminiscent of Bridgit as its top part is of the proud mane of the queer lioness, SaF05.

Incidentally, a ‘queer’ lioness once inhabited the Oklahoma zoo. This lioness is famous for having suddenly grown a beard at 18 years of age. The story appeared in the news after Prodger had already finished the film. The maned lioness was named Bridget. A mere coincidence, perhaps. In any case, it shows that the fluid identity Prodger opts for is not limited to people. Rather, similar to technology, it can be said that the landscape, nature, water, stones, plants, and animals all become allies in the process of a queer subjectivation that is not centred around a frame of reference, but that is in constant movement relative to other movements. Although playful, there is nothing ironic about this queer subjectivation: it attests to a force of virtuality, to an ability to change the present, and therein lies the political moment of this queer aesthetic.