Working draft · Open for discussion
The Work of Making It Raw
Intimacy, Artifice, and the Handmade Image
Companion essay for A Mixed Up Muddled Up Shook Up World
Research draft prepared for Jonathan Vasata for editorial review
Scope of this draft
This essay examines the film through its documented production decisions and the filmmaker’s description of the performance. It is not an independent review based on an uninterrupted audiovisual screening. Historical facts are sourced in the notes; readings of this film are proposed interpretations. Ace Owen’s account of the performance has not yet been incorporated. No final author byline is assigned to this AI-assisted research draft.
An image made through decisions
A Mixed Up Muddled Up Shook Up World brings together an intimate performance by Ace Owen, a continuous camera shot, a deliberately assembled soundtrack, and Jonathan Vasata’s phone recording of himself playing guitar. Its online presentation adds a theatrical entrance and a brief interval of black before the film begins. The materials have different origins. Some register an event that occurred in front of a recording device. Others were generated, processed, or assembled through digital tools. The work emerges from decisions about how those materials should meet.1
Vasata’s description of the project holds two ambitions together. He wants the central scene to remain raw and unflinching, and he wants the screening experience to be carefully made. Those ambitions can support one another, but their relationship deserves examination. A framing device can prepare attention; it can also overstate the significance of what follows. A recording can expose hesitation and awkwardness; those qualities can also become reassuring signs of artistic sincerity. Neither technical elaboration nor visible imperfection decides whether the film succeeds.
The useful question is what each decision makes available to a viewer. What becomes apparent because a shot continues? What does a manufactured room sound cause us to imagine? How does an uneven guitar performance change the distance between the filmmaker and the person filmed? These questions make the production process relevant to the work without allowing process to substitute for the experience of watching it.
The production record makes that exercise of judgment concrete. Vasata retained the scene’s framing, rejected certain effects, revised the sequence of the leader, adjusted the projector sound, and chose a raw musical take over a more elaborate assembly. The work’s particularity lies in those selections. The presence of AI makes the description of those selections more necessary, since the term can otherwise blur the difference between a recorded performance, generated sound, ordinary software processing, and a filmmaker’s editorial instructions.
What the continuous shot asks us to see
According to Vasata’s account, the scene begins with Owen holding an antler. A camera movement reveals a gun, identified as a plastic toy. An attempt to place it in underwear is followed by its fall to the floor. A later change in the view reveals fallen underwear and blood understood within the scene as menstruation. Clothing is pulled back into place. These are elements of a staged action, not evidence that the essay can use to determine the performer’s identity or bodily history.1
The sequence depends on the order in which information becomes visible. An antler and a gun invite different expectations of an object held close to a body. The plastic gun’s fall may interrupt its authority, making an object associated with threat seem awkward or inadequate. The movement of clothing and the appearance of blood introduce another set of expectations. Such readings remain contingent. The prop may seem comic to one viewer and uncomfortable to another; a bodily event may be read as injury before it is understood differently.
Continuity matters because it lets these changing judgments occupy a shared span of time. The camera can reveal another part of the scene while a viewer is still carrying an earlier interpretation. In an edited sequence, a cut could emphasize the gun or isolate a reaction. Here, the camera’s movement and the performer’s duration must organize the encounter. The viewer has time to anticipate, misidentify, and revise. That time can produce attention, but it can also produce impatience. The single shot has to earn its duration through what becomes perceptible within it.
The continuous image also carries a risk of seeming evidentiary. An uninterrupted view can encourage confidence that we have seen the truth of an event. Yet the event has been performed, the camera position selected, and its sound environment constructed. Continuity establishes a relation among visible actions; it does not remove interpretation. A careful account of the film should preserve that distinction, particularly when an apparent revelation concerns a body.
Warhol and the difficulty of looking
Warhol’s Poor Little Rich Girl offers a specific historical reference for the project. Harvard Film Archive identifies the 1965 work as a black-and-white 16 mm film with Edie Sedgwick and describes its out-of-focus photography, everyday activity, and accompaniment by the Everly Brothers. These details place intimate portraiture, optical uncertainty, and existing popular music within the same cinematic encounter.2 Vasata explicitly referred to the film while developing his opening.
The relationship is most useful at the level of looking. An indistinct image makes recognition take time. The viewer cannot immediately inspect a face or read an expression with confidence. The deliberately added opening defocus borrows that difficulty while working at a markedly shorter scale. The camera also loses focus within the scene; the opening treatment is a separate editorial intervention. It would be misleading to equate a few seconds of defocus with Warhol’s extended treatment of duration. The difference in scale changes the function: in this project, uncertainty becomes an entrance into the scene rather than a condition sustained across a long reel.
Warhol’s Outer and Inner Space, also dated 1965 in the Harvard program, suggests another relevant relation among technologies. Sedgwick appears alongside her recorded image on a monitor, and the work combines portable video with a film presentation.2 That documented example complicates an easy division between an earlier, materially authentic cinema and a later world of mediated copies. The historical comparison concerns what happens when a person encounters, or is encountered through, more than one recording arrangement.
Vasata’s opening invokes an older viewing apparatus before a digital screening. Handwriting, a focus card, countdown numbers, and vibration establish expectations about the image’s handling. Their usefulness depends on what they do to the viewer’s attention. If they become an extended certification that the work is experimental cinema, they risk doing too much interpretive work in advance. The historical reference is strongest when it creates a particular experience of uncertainty, anticipation, or duration that the subsequent scene can sustain.
Homemade staging and borrowed glamour
Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures provides a related but distinct reference. MoMA describes the 1963 film through homemade effects, nonprofessional performers, Hollywood and B-movie glamour, loosely connected scenes, and vintage music.3 Those documented features support a limited comparison with Vasata’s assembly of performance, props, and an inherited song. They do not establish that the works share the same politics, historical situation, or effect on an audience.
The comparison helps explain how intimacy and artifice can coexist. An inexpensive object can invite an association with theatrical glamour or authority while remaining visibly inadequate to it. A plastic gun may carry the outline of a powerful symbol while its material and handling expose its fragility. The resulting gap can be expressive. It allows the performer’s action to exceed the prop’s familiar cultural meaning, especially if an attempt to control or display it becomes awkward.
There is also a danger in making every object serve as a fixed symbol. The gun need not operate as a universal abbreviation for masculinity, nor the antler as an automatically stable alternative. Their meanings are produced through their appearance, sequence, handling, and relation to the rest of the scene. The paper should examine those relations rather than arrive with an iconographic key that explains the film before anyone has watched it.
The same caution applies to historical affiliation. Identifying a tradition of homemade staging can clarify a production choice, but it cannot supply the force of a performance. The present film must establish its own relation between tenderness and exposure. A reference to underground cinema is useful when it sharpens a question about this encounter. It becomes burdensome when it asks the earlier work to guarantee the later work’s seriousness.
A body and the authority to explain it
Vasata has described the scene in terms of a character’s effort to be a boy and an encounter with a body that appears to interrupt that effort. This is an important statement of his intention. A companion essay should preserve its specificity while asking what the film itself makes that intention mean. An action can express a character’s frustration without establishing a general proposition about the relationship between anatomy and gender.
In particular, menstruation does not determine a person’s gender. A visual revelation of blood therefore cannot, by itself, resolve an identity for the spectator. If the scene is framed as such a resolution, some viewers may experience it as a reduction of the performer to bodily evidence. Others may understand the same event as a character’s painful interpretation of embodiment. Those readings differ substantially, and the essay should not quietly collapse them into a single supposedly obvious meaning.
The camera’s role is central to this difficulty. It controls the sequence in which a spectator gains access to the body and the props. A revelation can feel intimate, but it can also feel like an inspection. The question is how the performance and the film’s duration position the viewer in relation to that access. Does the visible person retain an expressive life beyond the information revealed? Does the scene allow embarrassment, comedy, desire, or uncertainty to remain unresolved?
Ace Owen’s account belongs in this discussion before publication. Participation in a performance should not be treated as automatic confirmation of every interpretation attached to it. The filmmaker’s relationship with the performer gives the work a particular intimacy, but that intimacy does not make their perspectives interchangeable. A conversation about the action, the camera, and the intended audience could supply a second account of the scene. Its purpose would be to give the essay a more accurate understanding of the collaboration, including any differences between the participants’ readings.
The material history of an imperfection
Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight, dated 1963 in Criterion’s anthology, offers a material counterpoint. Criterion identifies it among works made without a camera and places it within Brakhage’s broader practice of working directly on film.4 For this essay, the relevant distinction concerns the physical production of an image. A mark resulting from an intervention in film material has a different history from a digitally manufactured resemblance to such a mark.
Vasata’s film makes that distinction productive because several histories coexist within it. The camera image records a performance. The phone recording carries a musical attempt. Digital treatments construct vibration and the appearance of film wear. Some sound elements were generated or assembled to suggest a room and a projector. These materials can form a coherent work while retaining different relationships to events and apparatuses. Their differences provide more information about authorship than the general claim that the film looks analog.
The title’s vibration is a particularly revealing decision. A version in which the lettering moved briefly and then settled was revised so that movement continued through the entire card, with additional movement in its horizontal background texture. The apparent instability required deliberate instruction and close control. That effort does not invalidate its expressive purpose. It does show that roughness can be an exacting aesthetic choice, subject to judgments about amplitude, rhythm, and when a movement should end.
This raises a difficult question for the work. When does a constructed imperfection encourage attention to an image, and when does it become a familiar sign of authenticity? An effect may begin as a concrete intervention and end as a style. The distinction has to be assessed in the finished encounter. If the vibration helps the title feel unsettled and physically active, it contributes to the film’s movement. If it functions mainly as a badge of historical legitimacy, it offers less.
Vasata’s proposal to project the digital film and record it onto 16 mm would add a physical recording stage. It remains a proposal in this draft. If completed, the resulting film would carry a new material history while retaining the history of the digital construction it records. Any account of format should describe that sequence plainly. A digital production, a digital simulation of film wear, and a later film recording are related stages with different evidentiary claims.
Hearing a room that has been assembled
The soundtrack extends the question of material history beyond the image. Projector noise, breathing, muffled voices, chair movements, and footsteps can suggest bodies and activity outside the frame. Their placement encourages the viewer to imagine a social space around the visible performance. According to the production account, this environment was assembled and repeatedly adjusted, including changes intended to soften the breathing and reduce mechanical repetition.1
An offscreen sound can alter the vulnerability of a visible action. A chair shifting may suggest someone watching; a muffled exchange may imply an audience whose language or response remains inaccessible. The performer can consequently seem to occupy more than the photographed room. These possibilities belong to interpretation, and their force depends on the actual balance of the mix. A sound that is too prominent may dictate unease or theatricality where the image could sustain a less certain response.
Repetition matters because it can expose the assembly in an unintended way. An identical breath or chair movement returning too regularly may make the imagined room feel mechanical. A digitally assembled track can preserve irregularity through decisions about spacing, overlap, and silence. Those decisions resemble the title’s revision in one respect: a sense of unstable presence is achieved through deliberate work. The editing process can be meticulous while the encounter it produces remains uncomfortable or unresolved.
The sound therefore deserves an account as an authored construction. Describing it as documentary room tone would obscure what was made. At the same time, reducing it to a technical demonstration would miss its relation to the performer. Its artistic task is to establish a way of listening around the image, with enough space for the visible action to maintain its own rhythm.
A familiar song performed privately
The Kinks’ official account identifies Lola as a Ray Davies song on the group’s 1970 album and describes its encounter in terms of gender ambiguity.5 The song supplies a historical and cultural reference for Vasata’s title and ending. Its established public life enters the project through a private act of performance: Vasata playing guitar and recording himself on an iPhone.
The production decision to use the take with relatively little musical reconstruction matters. Vasata initially explored a more fragmented assembly and then chose the raw recording, with a gradual introduction and fade. The retained performance gives the ending a different relation to time from the constructed ambient track. Its hesitations and unevenness come from a particular attempt to play. They can suggest the filmmaker’s presence without requiring a spoken explanation of what the scene means.
That presence should not be overclaimed. An imperfect performance is not automatically moving, and audible difficulty can distract as readily as it can disclose vulnerability. The ending has to establish a relation with what precedes it. One possible relation is a change in exposure: the person who has arranged the spectator’s encounter with Owen becomes audible through his own limited, unguarded performance. Whether that shift feels tender, self-conscious, or overly directive remains a question for listeners.
The song’s cultural familiarity also requires care. Its narration comes from a particular historical popular song, with its own perspective and ambiguities. It should not be treated as an exhaustive statement about transgender life. Vasata’s performance can bring that inherited material into a contemporary personal relation while leaving its historical difference audible. The credits distinguish Davies’s composition from Vasata’s guitar performance, preserving both forms of authorship.
A screening made for circulation
The website gives the film a designed threshold. Dark-red panels open from the center, followed by black before the image begins. Playback controls allow a pause, a return, or a restart, while forward skipping is restricted. These choices make a request about attention. They introduce a temporal form into a setting where viewers commonly control the pace and abandon an image before its duration becomes apparent.
Hito Steyerl’s In Defense of the Poor Image, published in 2009, connects the degradation and circulation of digital images with their conditions of access. Her account also places such circulation in relation to histories of underground and nonconformist distribution.6 The relevant point for this project concerns the relationship between an image and the systems through which it reaches people. Compression, copying, and bandwidth participate in the conditions of viewing.
That relationship became concrete during this film’s preparation. A comparatively large web file was followed by a lighter encode intended to improve delivery while preserving the desired appearance. The screening’s attempt to regulate attention consequently depends on an infrastructure it cannot completely control. A delayed start or an unexplained black interval can be experienced as a technical failure rather than an invitation to look. The revised player makes this distinction explicit: it downloads the complete film with visible progress before offering Begin screening. A longer initial wait is exchanged for playback from the downloaded copy. This behavior still needs testing on the actual devices and hosting connection.
The restriction on forward skipping deserves scrutiny as well. It can protect a first encounter with a time-based work, but it can frustrate a returning viewer or someone attempting to recover from an interruption. Its value should be judged against those experiences. The website is part of the exhibition arrangement, and that arrangement must remain open to criticism alongside the film. A carefully designed entrance can establish conditions for attention; the work still has to hold that attention once the entrance is over.
An unfinished judgment
The recorded body, uneven musical performance, and constructed signs of film wear converge around the single shot. Their relation can be assessed through the viewer’s experience of that sustained event, including the moments when the presentation draws attention toward it or away from it.
This account cannot establish that the film succeeds. Historical research can sharpen a description and identify a consequential problem; it cannot supply the attention of an audience. Nor should a companion paper settle every ambiguity in advance. The relation between the performer’s body and the camera’s revelations remains a question, as does the ending’s movement toward the filmmaker’s own vulnerability. Those questions are part of what a screening can test.
The essay’s task is to make the work’s decisions available for discussion. Its history includes the events recorded, the sounds and surfaces constructed, the popular song performed, and the revisions through which a desired encounter took shape. A full account can preserve the roughness that matters while examining the intentions attached to it. The work then stands before a viewer with a production history that can be described honestly and an experience whose outcome remains open.
Notes and sources
1. Jonathan Vasata, production discussions for A Mixed Up Muddled Up Shook Up World, 2026, supplied in the project conversation. Primary production account, not a published source. This supplies the scene description, relationship of filmmaker and performer, stated intentions, editing decisions, and account of the iPhone guitar recording. It does not supply an independent statement by Ace Owen. The production uses recorded footage, AI-assisted development, generated or assembled sound, and digital processing; this draft does not claim that every digital element was generated by AI.
2. Harvard Film Archive, “Outer and Inner Space / Poor Little Rich Girl,” program for February 28, 2004. https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/outer-and-inner-space-2004-02 . Institutional program notes, consulted for dates, formats, recorded music, optical treatment, and the relation between video and film in Outer and Inner Space. Comparisons with Vasata’s film are this essay’s interpretations.
3. Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Learning, “Jack Smith. Flaming Creatures. 1962–1963.” https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/flattened_pages/moma_learning/jack-smith-flaming-creatures-1962-1963/ . Archived MoMA Learning account used for the work’s homemade staging, performers, soundtrack, and relation to commercial glamour. Current collection record: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/316516 . No claim about the exact circumstances of censorship or seizure is needed for this argument.
4. The Criterion Collection, “By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume One.” https://www.criterion.com/films/731-by-brakhage-an-anthology-volume-one . Edition notes identify Mothlight as a 1963 camera-less work and describe Brakhage’s direct work on film. This essay does not attribute a specific fabrication procedure to Mothlight on the basis of general descriptions of Brakhage’s practice.
5. The Kinks, “Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One,” official fiftieth-anniversary page. https://thekinks.info/latest/lola/ . Used for the 1970 album context, Ray Davies’s authorship, and the official account of the song’s encounter. The essay paraphrases that account without adopting its terminology as a definitive identity for the song’s subject. No song lyrics are reproduced.
6. Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux journal 10, November 2009. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image . Primary theoretical text used for the relationship between image degradation, circulation, accessibility, and nonconformist distribution. Its application to this particular website is the essay’s interpretation.