Songdelay,

1973

Songdelay records an improvisational performance Jonas staged with young artists in downtown New York at the Hudson piers, then a derelict area slated for redevelopment. The film is divided into two parts. The first shows a series of vignettes of the artists improvising with props—sticks, a hoop, a metal rod—interspersed with shots of participants clapping their hands above their heads, moving their bodies in angles and arcs along the piers. In the second part, performers tilt mirrors to send flashes of sunlight toward the camera, at times completely saturating the celluloid and overexposing the film. The performers playfully exploit an idiosyncrasy of perception—the delay between the processing of visual and auditory stimuli. Breaks between scenes or vantage points and overexposed celluloid were maintained after the editing process, foregrounding the film’s status not as documentation of the performance but rather as a distinctive work of art that embodies Jonas’s process-based experimental practice.