Kate Pelling

Blind Editing Tutorial: The Making of Die Erweiterung (2025, 09:33 Mins.)
By Kate Pelling
All rights reserved.

 
An extract from Kate Pelling's PhD Thesis – ‘Select Reject Reconfigure: Editing Speech in Artists’ Direct Address to Camera’ (2016)

Blind-drawing is a technique adapted from ‘contour drawing’ (Nicolaïdes, 1941, pp. 9-10), where the artist draws the contour of a subject without looking at the paper. In an extension of this process, blind-editing is when a cut is made along the timeline of the video editing software without first looking at the video material in the viewer. In this way, I could select or reject entire sections of video material without knowing what I was selecting or rejecting. This process takes the editing decisions away from the content of the material and causes disruptions and unexpected connections that can be exploited in other ways. I have found the process to be useful from a linguistic perspective because it manufactures a technological variation on a stuttered or stumbled speech utterance, which in simple terms means that I can create speech errors within the technological editing process.

An example of this is that blind-editing can result in a cut being made through the centre of a single word, which affects the word’s meaning and emphasis. In Elephant and Punishment (2011, 02:54 mins.) this technique is only applied to the primary informant, the commentator’s speech remains whole. At 00:19 mins., the primary informant says the phrase ‘achieve my ambition’, and blind-editing resulted in the removal of a single digital frame from the word ‘achieve’. This shortened the word to sound more like ‘achiff’ which makes it sound strange and adds more emphasis than there was in the original recording. The distortion opens up several possibilities, the word may remain recognisable because it has already been said in its full form, it might be a mistake, because there are speech errors present in the video, or possibly it is a new word that is unfamiliar to the viewer. Cutting out a piece of a word in this way also questions whether the smallest linguistic form is a word, or whether editing should be used to break the word down even further, into syllables or frames. The McGurk experiments (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976), used single syllables to demonstrate an interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception. However, I decided that removing more than one frame from the centre of a word, or breaking the words down into incoherent syllables that no longer form words would be counter-productive for my research, because some sense of the word needs to be retained so that the speech maintains an integrity related to being natural speech and not scripted speech. I had previously experimented with using lists of words that had no relationship to natural speech, for example Palilalia Interrupted (2012, 02:00 mins.) in which I list numbers ‘one, two, three, four’ and words such as ‘head, shoulders, knees, toes’, and then use the editing process to disrupt the lists of words. But this approach did not produce any speech errors and so I did not continue with the strategy in my research.

In addition to blind-editing, which can create technological variants of speech errors, I have found that technological faults have also driven this research forward. A Conversation With Myself (2010, 08:10 mins) had been a defining moment in this research because it was the first video in which I talked directly about the subject of direct address to camera. Another significant shift took place shortly after making that video, as a result of a mechanical fault in a camera. The fault caused all of the recorded speech to slip out of synch, and I had to correct this issue during the editing of the piece. In subsequent video works, knowing that my camera was responsible for making the speech out of synch and unable to replace it due to financial restrictions, I began to edit out the majority of the speech from the videos. I only retained the moments without speech, the spaces in between words and the pauses. The editing was very visible, with considerable use of jump cuts and blind-editing. At this stage of my research the technological editing process became my key strategy for expanding the language of editing.