Interview with Magnus Bjørnstad

Synopsis: Hearing Squares explores a rare neurological condition called "Alice in Wonderland Syndrome", in which people experience disorienting and often uncomfortable sensory distortions of time and space, Hearing Squares is an attempt at visualizing the indescribable, using experiments with film grain, warped audio, and nebulous AI-generated backdrops.

IAG: Prior to watching this film, I had never heard of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. Tell me a little bit about it and your connection to it.

MB: It's a neurological condition that mostly affects adolescents, where the perception of yourself or the world around you gets distorted, and your sense of dimension and scale gets weird. Those are the most common symptoms, but the condition is such a new area in the medical field, relatively speaking, and few people who've experienced it can recognize it for what it is because of its obscurity. A common thread when reading about other people's episodes online is the joy in having found out you aren't alone; Other people are experiencing this, too.

The distortion in perception is most often related to spatial awareness, but can also involve other things like time, texture, sound and visual clarity, among others. It is frequently accompanied with a sort of inner scream or angry voice, for some reason. I still have no clue as to why. Any underlying causes are still unknown, but it has been theorized to be linked with migraines and the Epstein-Barr-virus.

As for my relation to it, I used to have episodes when I was younger, and they very rarely happen now. As a kid, I called it “hearing squares”, not because that was the most accurate name for it, but because it better conveyed the abstract sensations.

IAG: It’s not easy to create a film about an internal mental experience—and I mean that in a creative, technical sense. The approach you ended up taking is quite unique—it’s a blend of voice-over overlaid onto obscure and often distorted visions, blurry text on computer screens, etc. How did you decide on that approach?

MB: The project went through a bunch of different visual styles, but the one constant was that it had to translate the feeling of an Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS) episode in ways that words just can't. Luckily I landed pretty early on a technique that I felt pretty accurately visualized the sensation as I experienced it, and that became the backbone of the film.

I'm very thankful for the two interview subjects, Agis and Dusty, both of which was done over video, but I ultimately felt that the constant cutting back to talking heads detracted from the visual identity of the film, and opted to only use their voice-overs. I strongly resonate with the art philosophy of “design by subtraction”, coined by artist and video-game designer Fumito Ueda, in which you build up your project only to then strip it of anything that isn't 100% necessary and vital to the core concept.

The final film is the result of this. Grainy and distorted images of vague interior objects are what AIWS felt to me: lying in bed and feeling like I'm zooming in towards the living room table, which can barely be seen through all the brown static. As an extension of this, all the on-screen text is also blurred to varying degrees. I originally wanted to take it even further, and distort the voice-overs to the point where you couldn't understand them, but that would have been a bit disrespectful to the interviewees, so I discarded that idea.

I also want to touch on the use of AI and why I chose to use it. It is such crazy fast-evolving tech, and I don't even know if my stance on AI “art” will even be the same in a year or two, but as of right now, I feel that it can be a wonderful tool if used constructively. In this particular case, blurry images of vague, at times dreamlike objects was the initial visual concept, and I felt that generative AI, especially the earlier generations, have this uncanny, surrealist mood that matched the experience of AIWS pretty accurately. So those were used as a base for some of the imagery.

IAG: Were you influenced by any other films that specifically attempt to depict dreamlike subject matter?

MB: To some degree, I was inspired by Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Memoria (2021), not in a direct visual sense, but more so that it was interesting to see how another filmmaker tried to depict a different neurological disorder, which in the case of that film is Exploding Head Syndrome. It obviously takes a very different approach, as the nature of that disorder is simpler and mostly all sound, but I found it helpful to see how he balanced the factual and the supernatural, which at some point Hearing Squares leaned much more into. (There's a whole separate group of people who have experienced AIWS in a half-asleep, half-awake state, all seeing very similar-looking geometrical objects like platonic solids and huge wheels. I had to cut that out of the film in the end as it veered a bit too off course, but I find it very interesting.)

Other than that, I was just as inspired by YouTube essays and videos on obscure internet investigations.

IAG: More broadly, what are three films or filmmakers that have inspired your work?

MB: If we're talking filmmakers, there's a healthy dose of Lynch in everything I do, almost subconsciously, as he's been such a formative inspiration for me. Another one would be Scott Barley, whose 2017 film Sleep Has Her House (entirely filmed on an iPhone) really opened my eyes as to how I interact with the medium of film. I genuinely believe him to be one of our greatest living artists. Lastly, I'd mention Mamoru Oshii, especially Angel's Egg (1985). It's just a delicious, dark, damp, unmatched mood that hasn't left me since I first saw it seven years ago.

As for films, I'll narrow it down to films that inspired Hearing Squares in form:

• Sleep Has Her House, (2017) by Scott Barley

• 24 Frames, (2017) by Abbas Kiarostami

• Antonio Gaudi (1984) by Hiroshi Teshigahara

IAG: What’s your next project?

MB: I'm kind of juggling two very different films, and I don't quite know which will be completed first. One is an experimental ambient film about Synesthesia called Something Is Other. The other one is an animated narrative film about Alzheimer's disease called WHEM?