This cameraless film is an intimate collaboration with the ocean and the various animate and inanimate agents that exist within it. Gatten placed raw 16mm film stock in crab traps and submerged it off the coast of Seabrook Island, North Carolina, leaving the photochemical surface to register the voluble utterances of the depths on the image and sound tracks. He relinquishes authorial control to a significant degree, embracing the tactile, nonhuman transfer at the heart of the filmic medium. The resulting work of direct animation is a non-objective play of light, colour, and shape in which the image’s capacity for resemblance is completely overtaken by its existential connection to the referent. These patterns change according to time, weather, and film stock used. What the Water Said conceives of 16mm film as surface of inscription for the traces of the world, traces that baffle any and every system.
