Spherical Objective

2007-01-21T20:44:00.000+00:00

CLOSED

2006-09-27T10:47:00.000+01:00

Experimenta Imperialism

2006-09-17T11:58:00.000+01:00

It usually happens around this time of year and it happened yesterday morning: the London Film Festival catalogue flopped onto my doormat. I turned quickly to the ‘Experimenta’ pages to get a first glance of the "...cutting edge cinema, artists’ film and video and the avant-garde..." (they seemed to have managed to collect as many possible cliched generic terms in there as possible) fare on offer, my heart, (perhaps I should have predicted this) sank.

This weekend there is a fascinating series of screenings on at Tate Modern, Cinema of Prayoga, Indian Experimental Film and Video 1913 – 2006, which has been devised by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler following their work with the Indian organisation Filter India. One of their stated aims in the programme notes is to “...challenge the dominant US and Eurocentric histories mainly known in the UK”, presumably the idea is that this can be achieved in a some part by showing hitherto rarely seen experimental works from a non-western culture which ironically has one of the largest film industries in the world, but an all but invisible ‘avant-garde’. A rather ambitious aim perhaps, but a worthy one, and one that would appear to be the polar opposite of the London Film Festival’s ‘Experimenta’ programming.

I did a few calculations: in ‘Experimenta’ there is 1,248 minutes (38 individual works) of programme time (not including the Luis Recoder & Sandra Gibson performance – no duration given), 815 minutes (24 individual works) of this originates in the USA (not including the Luis Recoder & Sandra Gibson performance – no duration given, but also USA). So it certainly seems that US cultural dominance is alive and well at the LFF. Putting aside any residual Iraq/War on Terror driven anti-Americanism that might be somewhat biasing my current attitude towards the USA in general, the figures still add up to something considerably less than anything like a survey of international artists’/experimental/avant-garde/callitwhatyouwill film and video. The exception that serves to prove this rule is the ‘Queer China: An Evening with Cui Zi’en’ programme which looks like one of the few opportunities to see anything remotely ‘different’ in ‘Experimenta’. ‘Queerness’ elsewhere is represented by Mary Jordan’s film about Jack Smith and a retrospective of Kenneth Anger. Nowadays, in ‘the West’, queerness occupies pretty much a cultural centrality, hardly radical or transgressive, and Anger’s films tend to seem rather dated, their aesthetic has been pretty much absorbed by mainstream moving image culture, Scorpio Rising is pretty much classic Americana, and most of his films have been shown to death over the years, so why is it that we need to see them all again? Are there not other international filmmakers whose body of work is under-represented and crying out for the retrospective treatment? Queerness in China at least sounds as though it might have a currency and be genuinely ‘avant-garde’ and transgressive in its particular cultural context. In this particular context its inclusion looks more or less tokenistic.

Elsewhere there is a new film by James Benning. I happen to be a big fan of Benning’s work so will be watching this quite happily, but still, why after such a big slice of last year’s ‘Experimenta’ programming was dedicated to Benning, is he here again with a 120 minute film. The dominance of US film and video makers is problematic in itself, but to compond the problem most of those prominently represented are over middle aged white males whose approach and aesthetic hardly represents a current experimental enquiry or are particularly ‘avant-garde’ (Nathaniel Dorsky, Ken Jacobs) except by some kind of static moribund historical definition of that term. This would not be quite so bad if it weren't for the fact that we see the same pattern at LFF's 'Experimenta' year after year.

Paradoxically I am looking forward to seeing many of these films, but ideally I would want my experimental film festival, rather than to confirm established notions of the ‘avant-garde’, rather than to once again trot out the old names doing the same old work in the same old formulistic formations, to show me work by obscure and unknown artists from obscure and unknown places working in new and different ways with new and different concerns. Why, in what as part of a major international film festival, in what should be an international survey of artists’ film and video, is there virtually nothing (apart from a seven minute piece from Russia) from eastern Europe, nothing from Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East, when there is a thriving and situated experimental practice in all these places? What is happening in African artists’ film and video? I certainly don’t know for sure, but I do remember seeing some interesting work from African countries at Documenta a few years ago. Why, when there is so much astonishing video work from central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan - and it’s not exactly a secret, there was a load of it in the Venice Biennale last year) are we not seeing this or work of its ilk?

Instead the ‘Experimenta’ strand with its quaintly titled ‘Avant-garde Weekend’, presents an international experimental practice as being predominantly American and male. I should also note that only six out of the 37 films screening are by women and that even local practice is woefully under-represented by a measly three films. This selection and programming is lazy, safe, unadventurous, conservative and tired. As interesting as any of the individual works might be on their own terms, overall ‘Experimenta’ fundamentally presents a hegemonic distortion of global experimental film and video practice.

Chromacodes

2006-08-24T10:52:00.000+01:00

Chromacodes 1998

2006-08-15T00:01:00.000+01:00

boroughbeamerlooperpooler

2006-08-04T15:57:00.000+01:00

Next Wednesday 9th August the looppool project featuring Beamerlooper, comes close to home to the recently opened Roxy bar and screen at 128-132 Borough High Street, London SE1 at around and around and around 8pm.

writing on water

2006-08-02T23:27:00.000+01:00

Seven Days, Chris Welsby, 1974

My review of the recent BFI DVD compilation of Chris Welsby's films is in Vertigo Magazine's new 'electronic' edition, published on CD-ROM and also available to subscribers to the Vertigo website. I've only seen the website version so far but editor Metin Alsanjak promises that with the CD-ROM version we "will also have a chance try out new film criticism software 'Reframe', which allows clips from any DVD you have in your possession to be played alongside text or audio commentary". Hmmm. I will report back when I've had a chance to try out this digital marvel.

there will be shoulder pressing in the hall

2006-07-11T23:36:00.000+01:00

The Plague of Language

2006-06-25T01:00:00.000+01:00

so, product placement, the connoisseur of the art of valuing: as art theft ranks third amongst property crimes, we begin to suspect that arts main function is to facilitate money laundering. and as ninetythree percent of art thefts remain unrecovered, we have then proof. (logic: i know that the poor are terrorists. i mean ask anyone, language is what you do when you can�t. its a last resort. and yes, All media are forms of therapy, its just that Some (the being an object of art) are more Ethereal, more Portable, more suited to the vagrant refugee..)
from you know, the thing by Chris Mann, new sound and text piece at dispatx

"Language is the mechanism whereby you understand what I'm thinking better than I do. (Where 'I' is defined by those changes for which I is required)" - Chris Mann

writing on paper

2006-06-15T08:56:00.000+01:00

My piece about Matthew Noel-Tod's video 'Nausea' is in the new issue of Vertigo magazine, which will be launched on Saturday with a live event: 'Fingertips', a collaboration between experimental filmmaker Tereza Stehlíková, with an original soundtrack performed live by Touch label's Philip Jeck. The event will also feature a screening of a Stan Brakhage short from his 1994 Chartres series. Curzon Soho, London, 17 June 2006, 6pm. See you there.

CogCollective: Shifting Latitudes

2006-06-12T23:21:00.000+01:00

new regular screenings at Candid Arts

4pm, Sunday 2nd July 2006
videos by sue.k., Marcus Bergner, Mike Leggett and Steven Ball
more at www.cogcollective.co.uk

writing online

2006-06-01T00:45:00.000+01:00

Just published: "Open Play: The Work of Riccardo Iacono" at Axis, Open Frequency (link to full essay at the bottom of the page).

Also starting to collect other writings already published elsewhere online at as a tag on my del.icio.us bookmarks log. I'm trying out del.icio.us as a way of collecting bookmarks. Interesting facility for sharing and linking bookmarks with other people that I've only just found (thanks Sonia). A little random as they appear in the (whimsical) order that they were added, so tags are key.

Art Irritates, Reality Imitates

2006-05-28T14:20:00.000+01:00

Why does anyone bother to watch Big Brother these days when they can get their voyeuristic fill of narcissism from people making intimate soap operas of their lives on blogs? Perhaps the relish with which ‘ordinary’ people seem to persist in jumping at the chance to be parading their insecurities, arrogances and some of the other less attractive aspects of their personalities on public media, is paralleled in the personal diaristic style of many a blog.This year BB also demonstrates a particular tendency of mainstream television, which is to use ideas first explored by artists in experimental media. In this case the BB graphics use a similar digital fragmentation to that which I explored 5 years ago in Sevenths Synthesis.

What took them so long?

Dancing About Architecture

2006-05-14T14:45:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I gave a talk about my video Ex Local Authority as part of Kinetic Fields at Chisenhale Dance Space. The curator of the event Gianluca Bonomo wanted to investigate common grounds between avant-garde and dance filmmaking. As well as me Maxa Zoller gave a presentation about the history of experimental film and video in relation to ideas of space and movement and Gitta Wigro talked about dance film. It was an interesting experience relating ones work to another discipline and the enthusiastic audience, who I guessed were much more familiar with dance and choreography, responded with genuine curiosity and interesting questions.

Below is a transcript of my talk.

When Gianluca suggested that my video Ex Local Authority might be shown in an event concerned with experimental film and video and dance film, I was rather surprised because on the face of it my video has little or nothing to do with dance film: it contains no human movement choreographed to music, in any conventional dance sense. Gianluca has spoken about other works in the Stillness of Movement section but in my own video and those by Fil Ieropoulos the relationship with notions of movement and choreography are perhaps more diffused and abstracted. Fils videos, like mine, concentrate closely on very particular phenomenon of every day subjects, however the 'choreography' in his work takes a kind of ecological approach, using the diegetic or ambient sound - the sound of the space at the time of shooting - collecting and shaping it into a rhythmic and textural dance.

click on the image for an extract from Local Authority (QuickTime 7 required)

There is an expression I’ve heard used occasionally which goes along the lines of “writing about music is like dancing about architecture...” usually followed by “...is impossible” or “...is a really stupid thing to do...” I did a search on this expression and found its origins attributed to a number of musicians, among them Elvis Costello, Thelonius Monk, Frank Zappa and John Cage. The last surprised me the most because if anyone was likely to recognise the potential of applying actions associated with one creative activity as a way of expressing another, it would be Cage, I thought. And besides he often wrote about music. Whoever the originator of this expression was, they displayed a rather restrictive, somewhat conservative lack of capacity for lateral thought, a sort of “place for everything” apartheid of expression (so I’m guessing Costello... whose puns are worse even than Zappa’s).

But 'dancing about architecture' appeals to me as, rather than being impossible, it's a useful way of thinking creatively and spatially about choreography, movement and the moving image. It’s stating the obvious to say that dancers rely on the existence of physical spatial environments within which to move: dance so often happens within, around and about, architecture. Filmmakers also rely on architecture as the setting for the reception of their work: whatever or wherever the screen, it is almost inevitably in a room or at least architecturally located, and movement through architectural space is the default setting for much cinematic subject matter.

Ex Local Authority is dancing about architecture in another way. The video is made from static - but not still - images of a 1920s council tenement estate. The images consist of framed architectural features viewed through the trees in a courtyard. The relationship of stillness to the moving image is a complex one, but suffice to say that in many ways there is no such thing as a ‘still’ within the context of film: in a medium which moves through time. Although we might think of a static image as having qualities of 'stillness'. The video used to Ex Local Authority was shot on a static camera on a locked-off tripod and the motion in most scenes was the branches and leaves on the trees moving slightly in the breeze. Using editing software I was able to move the image from being absolutely still at one point on the timeline, to moving it back and forth along the timeline. The simple process of how I achieved this will be demonstrated later, but it works in such a way that it’s not immediately clear in the video which are the static and which are the still images, until the movement up and down the time line becomes more frenetic. Additionally one of the integral elements in this process was to simultaneously create a soundtrack from the midi music that I had laid along the timeline.

When I made this video - and others using a similar technique - I was aware of the similarity of this process to a practice common in 16mm experimental filmmaking of reworking extant film footage by repeating and changing the dynamics of movement, often using an optical printer. I was interested in the way that processes from the analogue moving image medium of film could perhaps find new life, and new efficacy, in digital media.

The reanimation of existing sequences often work to quite different ends in experimental film. As an example the following extract from Malcolm Le Grice’s 1968 film Little Dog for Roger takes a sequence from some found home movie footage which Le Grice copies in a way that exaggerates and transforms what would normally be considered to be errors, such as frame slippage, dirt, scratches, sprockets, thereby foregrounding the intrinsic material qualities of the medium. This is a classic structural materialist film technique.

frame sequence from Little Dog for Roger by Malcolm Le Grice

So, as well as the film material we still see the dog running around, we still follow its movements reanimated as it leads us on a merry materialist dance. The next example is less interested in the material properties of film and more in the movement of figures in space. In this extract from the 1993 film Passage à l'Acte, Martin Arnold reworks a family breakfast scene (taken from a 1950s film version of To Kill a Mockingbird) by reprinting small segments frame by frame, building up repetitive movements to the point where a everyday activity becomes infected by repetitive tics transforming an otherwise domestic normality into a mad dance.

frame sequence from Passage à l'Acte by Martin Arnold

Arnold’s technique is painstaking, the materialist signifiers of the film media as seen in Little Dog for Roger are largely absent and we begin to imagine that so intense is this mad dance that it expresses some deeper psychological violence. The movement is seamless it is human movement and while the ‘unnaturalness’ is clear we still imagine that they could be ‘real’ choreographed human not machine created movements.

Such effects are not quickly achieved. The passage from re-photographing film to producing visible movement involves a significant time delay. From one piece of film, the backward and forward movement of one frame after another has to be re-shot, slowly pieced together, then chemically processed, perhaps printed again to achieve a viewable copy. The time taken between the manipulation of the material to seeing the result can be days. In Martin Arnold’s case, considerably longer.

In many digital practices which inherit their form from analogue media, there is still a time lag at the processing stage for compositing, rendering and often computer based animation is still carried out at the level of the single frame. With my video however, this was not the case as this demonstration of how I animated the sequences shows:

click on the image for Local Authority demonstration (QuickTime 7 required)

So rather than having to make new sections of digital image, which might then have to be rendered, or re-photograph images frame by frame, with this technique the movement of the image was a direct result of my own physical movement, my dancing with the mouse, playing the video like a musical instrument as I improvise a soundtrack by scrubbing along the timeline. The subtle & not-so-subtle movement of the playback head affects & produces movement in the image.

At the point of realisation, performing the video, I was less concerned with the image, to the point where it could almost be considered to be a side effect/affect of the performance of a music track, a direct improvisational dance, following the physical movements used to improvise the sound.

The dynamics and co-reliance, the correlation or co-relationship of movement, stillness, space and time, are fundamental to both moving image art and dance, with the addition of music and sound, which can have an equally integral relationship.

In discussions of computer based moving image technology, one often encounters notions of the virtual, the cyber, the moving image as an ethereal immanent entity without material form, as though the computer provides some kind of virtual post-physical space and visible form only occurs through the magic of software. But the computer is a machine; it relies on electrons to make it work; it has moving parts and there is still as much of a direct trace of the physical source in a moving image made on a computer be that visual or process based. In Ex Local Authority in using the computer as a kind of real-time optical printer - the moving images were output to digital tape in real time as I performed - I am reasserting the physicality of the relationship between movement and image. I am suggesting that through the use of the computer the physical place can be made to dance in direct relationship with a human activity; moving images that are the result of real time manipulation are essentially performative. My processes have a lot in common with the way VJs work with the live manipulation of moving images and music simultaneously. Although so far I have resisted using a lot of the software.

In spite of this talk being dominated by more formal concerns, the primary impetus of Ex Local Authority was to evoke the uneasy daytime stasis of a 1920s Housing Estate, a stasis that is an illusion of stillness disrupted by the erratic but determined movement. The possibility of an almost imperceptible transition between movement and stillness suggests that both or either are ‘illusory’. It is a kind of image/movement/sound synaesthesia; it is also, perhaps, dancing about architecture.

now it’s personal

2006-05-01T11:49:00.000+01:00

When I started this weblog it was never intended to be one of those “I-spill-my-guts-with-woe-is-me-tales-of-depression-ennui-or-frustration” blogs, or one of those “aren’t-my-friends-and-my-life-so-endlessly-fascinating,-creative-and-clever” affairs, or detail the minutest details of my life for the whole world to see. In short it was never intended to be self-absorbed or particularly personal. As an ‘appendix’ to my main website it was to be a space where I expand on ideas and observations directly or tangentially related to mine and other peoples work, exhibitions, critical theory, etc. Of course there is bound to be a large amount of ‘personal’ opinion and information as a result of this, but this has not been ‘about me’ as such.

Until now.

Recently I had cause to query the amount of journeys debited from my Oyster card. This card is the way we pay for our public transport in London. Through a pervasive campaign and persuasive pricing (it is the cheapest way to get around for anyone who travels by bus or underground on a regular basis) Transport for London has made it all but impossible not to use one of these things. The way it works is that you add cash credit to your card, which is then deducted from your account when you get on the bus or at the ticket barrier of the tube station by some magical technology as the card is swiped over a reader. I was convinced that my credit was going down faster than I was using it and discovered that I could request a statement from TfL. I received my statement and within minutes realised that I hadn’t been ripped-off as I’d suspected, but I also realised that there was a record of all my journeys on public transport. In the case of the bus journeys the date, time of boarding and bus number. The tube journeys are even more detailed as with the tube one swipes when entering and exiting the ticket barrier. As the statement has my address on it, it would be reasonably easy to compile a fairly detailed record of my movements from my Oyster statement alone, and as a result get to know quite a bit about me. I think knowing quotidian details about the bus and trains and patterns of journeys that someone takes is getting to know quite a bit about them, personally. It’s certainly the sort of information that marketing companies and government agencies might find useful.

So here with the address and card number removed to avoid complete disclosure, is the most personal information I have posted so far on this weblog.

There has been speculation about the potential for the misuse of this information and, given that there are now plans to extend the capabilities of the Oyster card to paying for small inexpensive items which in the past may have demanded small change, in this most recent version of the vision of a cashless society the Oyster statement could contain an even more detailed record of the holder’s day to day activities. Obviously this is not that much of a revelation of a new tendency, bank account and credit card statements already provide accurate details about purchases, mobile phone records potentially track not only who and when you call, but also from where; so with access to the range of information about an individual, it would be fairly easy to build up a reasonably accurate and comprehensive profile of their activities, movements, the details of their lives. If they also keep a gut-spilling weblog it’s not unreasonable to speculate that it might be possible to get to know someone better than they know themselves (looking down my Oyster card statement I certainly don’t remember each of those individual journeys, but I must have taken them) and not just the mundanities of public transport and spending habits.

Some people regularly get concerned about encroachments on privacy and the rights of the individual and the pervasiveness of the virtual panopticon of the industrial military complex, while marketing companies and government agencies might equally point out that personal information is protected by law and data mining is illegal. Of course it isn’t that paranoid or an indulgence in fanciful conspiracy theories to point out that it doesn’t take much to legally or otherwise extract this personal information residing on various databases, and I’m sure these systems are less secure than they might claim. And it’s an inevitability that there will be an increase in such information gathering, at least until data overload results in network entropy and the whole thing comes crashing down. And as governments of allies in the US/UK paranoid alliance over terrorism strengthen resolve, one can more or less assume that opinions and statements made in public fora can potentially be scrutinised for subversive or inciting statements and one might just find oneself detained indefinitely without charge or trial at a government holding facility. This is just the bare facts about how the governments might, and do, operate these days.

What might be more shocking about the current ‘intelligence’ networks is not the incursions into an individual’s private information, but the incompetence in not being able to use intelligence intelligently, to avoid making stupid and dangerous mistakes, like, let’s say, releasing thousands of criminals instead of deporting them and then not being able to trace them, or murdering innocent people at point blank range on a tube train at Stockwell. Such levels of incompetence would be laughable if their consequences weren’t so consistently tragic, and the danger is not so much in what is known and accurately deduced about the individual by the industrial military complex, but what it is more likely to get wrong.

Big up Bare

2006-04-22T13:52:00.000+01:00

The twostep/grime explosion of a few years back seems to have run its road, overtaken by dubstep as the languorous rhythms and caverns of reverb of dub infiltrates the jerky twostep, dropping deep sonic bass notes in its path. A music at once raw and expansive. The DJs on the 'pirate style' Dark FM, Sub FM and the veteran pirate Rinse FM play sets that start up slow lazy, morphing into livelier, nervier beats. But there is a foreboding, a darkness, a melancholy, to the music with its minor key shifts with sampled dislocated voices rising through swathes of echo as though out of some deep ketamine hole. It is simultaneously disassociative and brooding, thrilling and uneasy, constantly on the edge of trouble.

At Bare Files you can find mp3s of the best of the latest pirate sets, the barest dubstep.

The word surrounding the Burial album’s imminent release (read an interview with Burial and some mp3 previews on Blackdown) is that it will become the record of the moment, if not the year. Dubstep is set to go overground, and on this sunny weekend, with long term reports that this could be the longest warmest UK summer since 1976, it sounds like becoming the inner city soundtrack of the season as pavements around the Borough melt, the humidity rises, a steamy fug settles and the city slows into an uneasy and frazzled hallucinatory dub daze.

Keep it locked.

scope notes from a work in progress

2006-04-13T00:17:00.000+01:00

51° 31' 08.46" N 0° 07' 14.84"W - distance 34.01m - elevation 133ft
51° 31' 09.12" N 0° 07' 15.69"W - distance 37.63m - elevation 128ft
51° 31' 08.45" N 0° 07' 16.49"W - distance 31.85m - elevation 133ft
51° 31' 08.99" N 0° 07' 16.14"W - distance 27.84m - elevation 130ft
51° 31' 08.91" N 0° 07' 16.72"W - distance 38.27m - elevation 131ft
51° 31' 09.06" N 0° 07' 16.00"W - distance 25.68m - elevation 129ft
51° 31' 08.46" N 0° 07' 16.47"W - distance 34.36m - elevation 133ft
51° 31' 08.46" N 0° 07' 16.68"W - distance 38.25m - elevation 133ft
51° 31' 09.13" N 0° 07' 15.62"W - distance 23.47m - elevation 128ft

so what’s the point of Sam Taylor-Wood?

2006-03-21T00:29:00.000+00:00

Last week, before the Interval 2, I went to another Deleuze-related event at the Photographers’ Gallery. Part of Catherine Yass’s seminar series The Other Side of Silence: On Silence, Sound and Filmmaking which investigates issues around Deleuze’s notion of the sound-image. Although neither of those that I’ve attended (the other was AL Rees in conversation with Jayne Parker a couple of weeks back) have really touched on Deleuze much at all. Deleuze’s role in these things seems to be little more than to provide the veneer of a spicy bit of theory on the side, a contextualisation at best. This event’s speaker was the redoubtable Professor David Rodowick, presumably chosen as a bit of a Deleuze expert (having published Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine in 1997), but the great man figured hardly at all in the talk. Neither much did the topic of sound. Rodowick’s presence at Interval 2 has already been noted in this blog. He admitted that this series of London talks (he’s based at Harvard) was an opportunity for a public airing of various chapters of his book The Virtual Life of Film, which will be published some time next year. I did rather cynically think that by attending all of the events I would hear enough to not have to buy the book. Alas I can’t make the third talk so I might have to buy the damn thing, which on reflection might be worth it as Rodowick is taking an interesting, complex and useful approach to developing broad theories around (dreaded phrase) ‘moving image art’ practice.

The theme of Rodowick’s talk, following his book’s theme of “film after photography”, was to do with how film as an analogue medium, in particular 16mm and 35mm, is increasingly being used by artists just at the point where it is being replaced by digital media in the film industry; as film disappears from cinema it appears in the gallery in a digital/electronic era. He made some interesting observations about the use of the comparative landscapes of film in b&w, and the saturated colour digital video in Godard’s 2003 film Eloge d’amour, how film deals very well with time and history, but the bulk of his talk was taken up with the work of Sam Taylor-Wood. I wasn’t the only person present to find his choice of artist slightly perplexing, not least because Taylor-Wood, in her role of court photographer to the rich and famous (any friend of Elton John’s is a friend of a friend of a friend...), her use of Hollywood celebrities and the nature of some of her clients (Selfridges to name but one), make her about as establishment as Prince Charles, the very antithesis of where theoretically interesting contemporary art might come from and throw some light upon the state of contemporary moving image artists. Rodowick himself confessed an ambivalence towards her work but found some interesting processes happening which, apparently on being quizzed about, the artist herself was not aware of. There were a number of aspects of her’s and other artists’ works, both still and moving image based that Rodowick drew on, which pointed to interesting ways of thinking about the moving image in the gallery.

Five Revolutionary Seconds XIII is a 1998 work of Taylor-Woods’s that consists of a large panoramic image and a documentary sound recording of its photo-shoot. One of the two main points that Rodowick made was about the nature of the juxtaposition of the fictional/theatrical images, with the documentary, ‘realistic’ sound . But the more revealing observation is the one that might at first sound like the most mundane: that due to the scale of the piece, the size of the photo, it is not possible to take in the whole scene from one vantage point; time is thereby spatialized and the work relies on the movement of the viewer to produce a narrative moving image, and that this was to reintroduce to photography the strategy of time.

Perhaps if we take the long historical view we can see that it is photography that arrested the representation of movement by its mechanic insistence on the momentary, movement reduced to the split second exposure of the shutter, while the cinema took on the responsibility of the time based representation of movement. If, as Rodowick suggests, the analogue is good at representing time through movement with digital image capture better at representing spatial relationships, then perhaps the introduction, or the reintroduction, of the moving image into the gallery, the traditional location for the ‘static’ image, post-photography, is not surprising. But the history of the representation of movement in art is longer than one might expect.

In Philippe-Alain Michaud’s Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (Zone Books, 2004), we learn that the art historian Warburg had excavated a long history of examples of the representations of movement in the history of art. As a near contemporary of Étienne-Jules Marey he might well have been inclined towards the subject of the representation of movement, and he used associative montage in his ‘mnemosynes’ to construct his time and movement based pictorial theories.

His discovery that many of Botticelli’s paintings showing multiple figures were not so much examples of the same model being used to represent different figures in a group, but a deliberate attempt to depict the figure in motion, is quite revolutionary. See as an example, the 'Three Graces' in the foreground left of the painting here. Warburg's forensics indicate that this reproduces the movement of a single figure dancing. The painting represents a temporal passage through the repetition of a subject in a sequence. It is as though one is looking at successive frames of a film. This suggests that the representation/reproduction of movement existed as a practice at least four centuries before Duchamp’s nude descended. The strategy of time was there centuries before cinema or photography.

Rodowick also talked about the work of Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij who exhibited here in London in the Time Zones show at Tate. De Rijke and de Rooij have a very particular approach to the film medium, their works are static fixed duration film shots of locations which have significance not always obvious from the bare images, such as images of the outskirts of cities like Jakarta, where the socio-historical-political references are very particular to a knowledge of the local context. The artists have strict conditions for exhibition, usually the film will be projected in the gallery space with specific seating and at pre-determined times of the day, with intervals of precise duration between the screenings. So the context and conditions of exhibition are part of the work, the film will never be seen outside of these circumstances.

Contemporary gallery based artists are using ‘moving image’ medium in a way that returns to the pre-history of cinema, before the age of mechanical reproduction, before mainstream cinema, before television, before video even. The very specificity of the location of reception (as with De Rijke and de Rooij), the static image animated by the movement of the viewer (such as Rodowick suggests is the case with Five Revolutionary Seconds XIII) takes us back to the picture house, the Victorian painted panorama, the magic latern show; it certainly has more in common with these earlier manifestations of the image in motion than with any subsequent developments in experimental film and video. In incorporating film media they return to a point where the visual arts were engaged in movement, a process historically arrested by the two poles of cinema and photography.

As irksome as it might be to those of us who have been engaged in ‘the moving image’ as ‘artists’ before or parallel with the recent incorporation of those media into mainstream art practice, as the ‘other’ to the mainstream cinema our practice has inevitably been umbilically linked to it. Now, when cinema as digital media is fragmenting across multiple media spaces, gallery artists use of moving image media can be understood, not simply as cinema (or anti-cinema), but as a return to a pre-cinema when, as Aby Warburg's discoveries suggest, the image in movement was an intrinsic, but subsequently lost, part of visual art practice.

A re-invention of the wheel, or perhaps a return to the horse-drawn carriage it perambulates? This might be the point of Sam Taylor-Wood that David Rodowick has inadvertently uncovered. And doesn’t this provide some succour to an experimental practice? A radical practice may go unacknowledged by the mainstream, but why would a progressive, experimental artform want to be acknowledged as an agent by a conservative orthodoxy anyway?

Deleuzian Delusion and the Enigmatic Cinematic

2006-03-18T23:39:00.000+00:00

About 15 years ago I became very interested in Gilles Deleuze and bought a copy of A Thousand Plateaus. I still have it. There it is as it is today, battered from wear after all these years. Deleuze and Guattari were all the rage back then, name checked and quoted aplenty throughout the post modern artcrit and artists’ crowds alike. At the time, as a relatively recent arriviste in Australia, steeped in ideas about nomadism, migration and mobility, I found A Thousand Plateaus full of analogous concepts, the rhizome as a metaphor for thought and idea formation, deterritorialization as an almost direct description of the migrant experience, becoming a body without organs in the context of questions of identity and individuality, all chimed with the post-colonial complexity of my Australian situation. My super 8 film Periscope 180° was the one that most directly picked up on these ideas, primarily through the voice over which in part lifts snatches of phrases from A Thousand Plateaus; in fact it quotes from many sources but reworks the references into its own semi-poetic essayistic flow of tenuous unresolved concepts, open and connectable, inconclusive yet evocative and with the suggestion of a profundity, however unfounded.

Just over 11 years since he threw himself out of a window to his death, there seems to be been a definite resurgence of interest in Deleuze’s theories, in particular with regard to cinema and artists’ moving image here in London. A series of seminars at the Photographers’ Gallery, organised by Catherine Yass, is premised on Deleuze’s theories about the relationship of sound to image, particularly how this might be used to elucidate contemporary artists’ work in the moving image.

And for the past two days I have been attending Interval 2, a conference and screening event organised by Steven Eastwood, taking Deleuze’s ideas about how the cinematic must have a ‘shock effect’ on thought and the idea of the irrational interval, a cut between two moving images not motivated by movement or action which allows the brain to pass into the not yet thought. The presenters at the conference were an impressive and quite diverse range of professional international luminaries like David Rodowick and Janet Cardiff, alongside PhD students and artists. I haven’t had time to process the implications of all that I’ve seen and heard but a few particular impressions have formed.

My first impression is that those speakers whose presentations were only tangentially related, or completely unrelated to Deleuze’s theories, were actually the most interesting and developed. Rodowick’s presentation in particular dealt with his ideas about the different ‘cosmogenies’ of the digital and the analogue in the moving image and the implications of the transitional period we find ourselves in right now (this was a chapter from his next book so to save time and blogspace you can look forward to checking it out there!). Janet Cardiff and her partner Georges Bures Miller’s assured presentation of their work, which relies heavily on the relationship of sound to image and geographic situation was, particularly in The Berlin Files, full of irrational intervals, and made no reference whatsoever to Deleuze.

It seems though that Deleuze’s theories are indeed so open that they can be applied to more or less any work. This is due to an emphasis on non-conclusion, an interest in mid-points rather than end-points, his own writing as experimental philosophy evinced a great interest in the creative act, creativity as thinking in action, and makes him all but impossible to pin down: in short producing a very useful and adaptable philosophy.

More related to Deleuze, albeit indirectly via Bergson, who was profoundly influencial on Deleuze, was Firoza Elavia’s presentation on Claire Denis’s film L’Intrus. Elavia used Bergson’s idea of the passage of intuition into intellect (or is it the other way around – no matter I suppose) to identify the processes at work in L’Intrus, that somehow this idea that intuition results in an irrational interval that is equally intellectual was all very well but made for a very dull ‘explication’ of the processes at work in what is a remarkable film actually influenced more by the post-Lacanian subjective metaphysical pyschoanalysis of Jean-Luc Nancy (the film being adapted from one of Nancy’s essays). But of course the point is that there can be a Deleuzian ‘reading’ of pretty much anything. When asked if her readings had actually allowed her to reach an interpretation of the Denis film Elavia had to admit not. But was quick to point out that that was not the point, because Deleuze encourages open readings.

So many years after their publication in the early 80s, Deleuze’s books Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time Image are being used as texts to investigate cinema and artists’ moving images. Perhaps in a time when film (specifically 35mm and 16mm) is becoming used by artists’ reinvention of the cinematic wheel in a gallery context, this might be appropriate. Deleuze’s idea of the irrational interval was prompted by an examination of Godard, and his writings rarely stray far from a cinema which, like Godard, while partially disrupting the codes of cinematic dramatic narrative, relies on the understanding of cinematic semiotic codes as a pre-condition in order to conceive of anything like an irrational (irrational in respect to the self-perpetuated rationality of an ‘illusionistic’ cinematic language) interval as disruptive and worthy of investigation. So the veneer of radicalism relies on a deep conservatism, it is a theory that is ‘normative’, as wide ranging and imaginative as it might be, it has to rely on a ground zero of cinematic expression. This is why Deleuze was not equipped to deal with structural film and other practices that eschew the normalisation of cinematic language: partly because they were outside of his purview, and partly because in some ways they had already done the job of philosophy for him.

The kind of film that best suits Deleuzian cinemantics is the enigmatic, which can use that irrational interval in an indefinable and hence poetic way. This cinema is very attractive and interesting precisely because it is either located in the realm of cinematic codes, or borrows those codes to enhance its sense of an internal, perhaps intuitive, and irrational logic which speaks to a subjective poeticism.

What interests me about the Deleuzian irrational interval is how it speaks to contemporary conditions in rather complex and problematic ways. On one hand it is a deeply western notion: while appearing radical and intellectually challenging, it is deeply imbedded within the canon of western, particularly French, philosophical development. Its re-emergence as theoretical currency comes in a recent history of the retreat of post modern moral relativism and a rise of the clash of civilisations and the new religiosity. The failure of relativism was in its inability to take account of a lack of relativism in other cultural formulations. The Deleuzian seems to suggest that it’s all good with a kind of liberal openness and inconclusiveness, but it shies away from idealism and determinacy, this unfortunately seems to be at odds with the contemporary social and political reality. It seems to date from a (pre-neocon, pre-Taliban) time when the (western) world thought it had finally become secular. So perhaps Deleuzian theory, in its anachronism, ironically offers a kind of intellectual certainty, a reminder of a cinematic golden age when post-enlightenment politics were straight forward and secular.

The idea of cinematic coherence, the Hollywood dream, the unproblematic linear narrative, is an escapist myth, which is precisely why it is so attractive and continues to play a role in lowest common denominator mainstream cinema and television. But this is becoming more rare at all levels of both mediated and everyday contemporary experience (is all everyday experience mediated now? I think mine might be), which is already located in the irrational interval. There is a continuous discontinuity in the urban experience as signs, symbols, sounds, referents, signifiers jumble through the landscape, on the television, on the internet, on the radio, in magazines, on the buses, on your Playstations, Gameboys, mobile phones and iPods, everywhere life is more than simple irrational intervals, it is multiple coexisting and competing moving images. Deleuze may prove a vital, important and illuminating historical theoretical touchstone. But the world has moved on.

Directors Lounge Television

2006-02-28T09:11:00.000+00:00

The first 3 minutes of Metalogue is now online at Directors Lounge Television.

Directors Lounge

2006-02-22T00:22:00.000+00:00

Berlin's Karl-Marx-Allee, which was called Stalinallee until 1961, is known as “the first Socialist street” on German soil. The 2 kilometres between Strausberger Platz and Frankfurter Tor is considered to be the most monumental 20th Century street development in Germany. In the 1950s the road was widened to 90 metres and seven to nine storey buildings were built in accordance with party instructions in an anti-modernist Stalinist/neo-classical style. The two towers at Frankfurter Tor, designed by Hermann Henselmann, became the street’s symbolic landmarks.

In the faded austere grandeur of what must have once been a shop or expansive lobby on the ground level of the imposing Frankfurter Tor north tower, Directors Lounge screened an impressive 10 day programme of film and video. Impressive partly because, unlike Transmediale, the event receives no funding, none of the organisers or curators receive a Euro in payment and there is no admission charge. The only money to be made is from the bar where a 0.5l bottle of Berliner Pilsner will set you back €2, so I did my best to help contribute towards some income there. Of course it’s not as expansive as Transmediale, neither is it as ambitious. The motivation for Directors Lounge is simple. According to artistic director André Werner, at this time of year most people he knows from outside Berlin are likely to be in town for Berlinale, so it is a good time to put on an event where they can get away from the mad bustle of the festival and relax and watch some films the like of which are unlikely to be seen in Berlinale. There is a strong sense of this being the result of a collective effort by dedicated individuals. We only had two evenings there before having to return to London, but if what I saw samples the overall standard it would have been well worth staying for the entire ten days. There was a fascinating programme of experimental film from Bombay and mixed programmes of works from Germany, UK, US, China and elsewhere. Later in the week there would be screenings of Finnish video art from AV-arkki in Helsinki and Chinese works from Yunnan Arts University, and of course the wonderful Intimate Journeys programme curated by London-based Lynn Loo, featuring In Transit by Ooni Peh. André seemed genuinely and pleasantly surprised at the quality of the work and the willingness of people to contribute. It rekindled in me ideas about putting on screenings in London, thinking that with the right motivation and a good collective will it might be possible to stage something regular. A recurring experience for me in visiting ‘artists’ film and video’ festivals in Europe has been that the majority of work I see never gets screened in London or, as far as I’m aware, the rest of the UK.

My video Metalogue screened on Saturday (11th February) night as part of Klaus W. Eisenlohr’s Urban Research project. The thematic nature of his project gives Klaus the ability to programme works drawn from a range of generic types while all broadly speaking independent, experimental and personal. So in the Reading Surfaces programme Diane Bonder’s If You Lived Here, You'd be Home by Now uses documentary conventions to mis-contextualise images and stories from small town USA, while in On a Slow Boat to China by Sonja Lillebaek Christensen imagines the sad lives of the men she stalks with her camera in a park. Rebecca Baron’s How Little We Know Of Our Neighbours is a documentary about the Mass Observation Movement (interesting to reflect on how the roots of market research are in what was essentially a surrealist project). The programme weaves through a range of approaches to surveillance linking the neo-voyeuristic, the fantastical, the mundane. Notions of urbanity are imagined and constructed, not simply in orthodox terms of cities and spatiality, but also in personal and cultural terms.

Metalogue was imaginatively programmed with the 90 minute I Was Born But by Roddy Bogawa in the Where is Memory? session. A long programme to start at midnight, but people stayed, they stayed and watched, intently. Bogawa is a native Hawaiian, whose rite of passage was the L.A. punk scene. This autobiographical personal voyage recovering the past is compelling. Shoot on super 8 the film reminded me vaguely of Jem Cohen’s work, both aesthetically and with its cultural location in around the music scene, but more directly personal and candid. It seemed to share little in common with Metalogue, but Klaus astutely unpicked the theme of memory and its location as reflected in the programme’s title. Bogawa recovers memory through retracing his adolescence and young adulthood through urban space and music, while Metalogue constructs a meta-memory, as Klaus suggested: “...what happens when memory becomes a database”.

Moving into the Garden

2006-02-19T17:21:00.000+00:00

“Neo-fascististic” (see last post) may be a little strong, but to take one element of culture and posit it as the only valid development of specific cultural forms presumes a political fait accompli. Simon Penny seemed to be presenting a construct whereby media and technology in art, determined by developments in “consumer security culture”, has reached a point where other media technology based artforms are anachronistic. The proclaimed redundancy of the old paradigm of the ‘passive’ viewer’s reception of a single and materially ‘non-interactive’, most often ‘linear’ artwork, and the new age of the viewer as an integral and physical agent in the production of the artwork, is something of a smokescreen. What it masks is the fact that there is still ultimately an artist figure there making the decisions, the interactor can only work within the parameters programmed by the artist. To me it seems that Penny is still working within modernist paradigms of evolution and enlightenment, he has installed himself as one of the authorities and represents the very latest in the evolutionary development, ironically a very linear way of thinking. This is not an argument against his particular achievements and the particular qualities of his artworks, but against his position as representing the only game in town when it comes to the way to do art now. It is not surprising perhaps that Penny is an Australian, emerging from a country in which technological and cultural development have gone hand in hand for some years: a technocratic determinism informed by government cultural agendas and industry, which ignores or attempts to set the agenda for the ‘evolution’ of what actually grows out of the broadest cultural activities. Of course an ‘interactive’ art practice is one of these activities but other practices, which might equally be considered as having currency, lacking the modish veneer of cutting edge technological advances and not speaking the new regime's language of interactivity (a Holy Grail for approved Australian media arts for some years) became marginalised, starved of funding and critical attention. (Apologies for all the ‘scare quotes’).

So it was refreshing to have Hilary Koob-Sassen around a couple of days earlier to present another way of thinking about things. I wrote about Koob-Sassen’s work a while ago, in the context of a screening at the Whitechapel. In that entry I concentrated on the formalistic aspects of his work, and indeed that was the main context for that screening. However at Transmediale the context changed the way I read it and I was able to more fully appreciate the scope of his project. The video exhibited here was Future Garden Structure.

While the formal elements, the lyric/song format of the text performed by his band The Errorists, the layering of ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ images, are particularly structured and resonant in themselves, they are used to elaborate complex multi-layered concepts which counter notions of modernist linear development with an ecological analogy, in this case based on gardening and a microbiological appreciation of the internal workings of the organic (human) animal (which as the song in the video states is “...delightfully unfascististic on the inside...”). I hope I’m doing these concepts justice, but I’m sure Hilary will pop up and correct me if I’m not! In the talk afterwards he spoke of two materialisms, that of modernity and that of gardening. He also suggested that the body is a perfect model for global organisation in that it represents the coexistence of multiple economies with mutual benefits. (In this he was positioning himself as the "contra-nutter" to David Icke. Tim Blake’s video Fear and Control in the same programme gave Icke a platform to deliver a talk about his extraordinarily paranoid mother of all conspiracy theories which suggests that everything in the world is, and has always been, controlled by an Illuminati, a secret society behind the activities of the church and most western governments and can be held responsible for the assassination of every free spirit from Jesus Christ to Princess Diana...). Koob-Sassen talked of elaboration rather than evolution and of the possibility of super-humanity; his ideas both in person and on-screen, while apparently eccentric, expressed with breathless enthusiasm and parenthetic complexity, suggest a refreshingly new and undeterministic model for cultural and political organisation and make the self-reflexive modernism of the techno-interactive crew appear like anachronisms.

In a later conference panel session Mistakology Norman White spoke of how increased function in terms of computers does not necessarily lead to more usefulness, how leading edge technology doesn’t lead to a qualitative increase in the work and that there is more opportunity in experiments that go wrong. At one point a questioner asked him if this wasn't "counter-intuitive" when related to computer programming. What a puzzling question. What could be more intuitive than accepting the 'hidden intention' of a mistake when working in an experimental practice? Such a relaxed and accommodating approach to the relationship between art production and media technologies, fits well within a future garden analogy in which political and cultural development is based on growth, coexistence and interdependency and less on dogma, competition and paranoia. Or as Hilary Koob-Sassen poetically puts it:

THE PARACULTURE seeks proposals for THE TRELLIS ECONOMIES: Actual structures in the MATERIALISM OF MODERNITY which will steer the elaboration of Modernity’s inherent (apocalyptic) eschatology, towards a very specific (fruiting) end-point: towards the production of an interior structure-a TRELLIS- on which the MATERIALISM OF GARDENING can manifest THE WORLD ORGAN ECONOMIES. (from the text on the “mouse coffin” box Koob-Sassen gave to the audience, which formed a multi-dimensional polemic which I think might be titled ‘Super Humanity in the World Organ Economies’)

In Berlin at Transmediale

2006-02-16T23:49:00.000+00:00

I'm starting to gather together impressions and notes from my recent trip to Berlin. The first stop was a crowded Transmediale. Inevitably my view of such an extensive event was partial and the impressions and ideas form a subjective viewpoint. It is interesting though to trace through connections and resonances and riff on their implications. The umbrella theme for Transmediale this year was ‘Reality Addicts’. Reality addicts we are told, among other things

love reality... culture...music... machines, images, words and people... are dependent on manifold realities... enjoy paradoxes... celebrate technical defects... play with the almost possible... subvert the technological paradigm...

as a way of exploring “...how art and society are changing under the influence of media and technology which become more dominant in our everyday lives” Transmediale is no longer concerned with ‘media art’ but ‘art and digital culture’. There’s a fine distinction in there perhaps, but with such an ostensibly wide brief it is probably just as well that the festival didn’t attempt too narrow definitions. The theme becomes a non-theme or an ante-/post- theme: we might pick on parallel practices or contradictory positions, divergence and convergence, it’s all good, it seems, because it’s all ‘real’. This at least is a way of acknowledging that media art, digital culture, call it what you will, has inevitably become a wide field, the only field perhaps in contemporary art that ‘post-medium’ has a specific range of common concerns and media technology (often, but not necessarily, specifically or identifiably digital) but the widest variety of practices and theories.

By upping the 'reality' quotient Transmediale largely dispensed with the old digital media occasional obsessions with the virtual, the immanent – these seem to have become encouragingly unfashionable - and engaged more with immediacy, direct experience and material culture. The centrepiece Smile Machines installation exhibition, while patchy, was nonetheless interesting and entertaining, because of course Reality Addicts also like a laugh! The exhibition included a range of works intended to simultaneously raise a smile through its playfulness and “...expose the power of the media by derision and critique” (Smile Machines curator Anne-Marie Duguet) and traced uses of technology from video to the sculptural to the interactive, from Nam June Paik’s TV Rodin, through Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation Wonder Woman, Michael Snow’s remake of his eighties film So is This as the three monitor tri-lingual, That / Cela / Dat to more contemporary works such as Christian Moller’s Cheese and Jodi’s Max Payne Cheats Only Gallery.

The Smile Machines exhibition suggested a diversity of coexisting regimes of engagement and interaction but some of the concepts artists involved suggested something less playful lurking beneath the work. The Media Addicts 1 conference panel suggested that it would discuss how media transforms reality. Jordan Crandall spoke of the ‘state of readiness’, the affect, the vibe between bodies that can be sensed in a room; that the power of media subsists in the transmission of effects, like music, preconsciously rather than rationally through perceivable meaning, we are suspended in a ‘what will we do next’ state, with a disposition to act in the potentiality of states, like anxiety. In spite of purporting to describe a new state, it seemed all very abstract in a vaguely post-Deleuzian way, suggesting a reductive notion of an history-less audience, not influenced by previous encounters with media artefacts, or that their consciousness, awareness and embodied memory gives itself up to some kind of ineffable cognition suspending immanence: "...we are talking about incorporealization not representation. Implication, not objectivity. Bodily intensities, not linguistic mediation. Motivating power, not meaning or rational logic."

Simon Penny was exclusively concerned with modes of machine presentation and he outlined an evolutionary trajectory through four stages; starting with media works with a linear script, then computer based interactive works that required simple dynamic behaviour such as keystrokes or mouse clicks, then real-time sensory data through interactive behaviour of the user and a machine in an environment (such as his Petit Mal piece in Smile Machines). He spoke of how the computer automotive model rejects ‘passive perception’, and represents a fundamentally different neurological learning process and traced the relationship between ‘preconscious’ learning reactions on a sliding scale from physical athletic training, simulated military training, gaming and interactive art. He described the nightmare scenario where computer gaming was a common activity among the perpetrators of mass shootings in US high schools, where the intended victim was perhaps a girlfriend or teacher but the shooter just kept on shooting everyone in their sight. This he suggested was due to conditioned behaviour, abstract and repetitive, learned from the shoot ‘em up computer games where you don’t stop shooting until all the opponents are dead. He also related this to the processes used in military training. This is behaviour shaped in immersive situations transferred to the real world. His suggestion that this is abstracted and pre-conscious is somewhat undermined by the specifity of the almost exact correlation between the artificial and real situations. However, give him the benefit of the doubt on this one for now.

Penny goes on to suggest that interactive art works operate in the same way, relying on a learned response to environmental stimuli. Because the ‘user’ is ‘trained’ through interaction which results in a ‘feedback loop’ between the user and artwork, this media work is ‘more powerful’, and conventional critiques of representation is rendered inadequate. This of course is the sort of work he is doing thus implicitly placing him at a higher stage of evolution (ironically the older Petit Mal work was quite cute and clunky, presumably because it represented an earlier evolutionary stage of artificial life). Such post-Darwinistic technological determinism left me feeling rather depressed, not least because of the blinkeredness of the theory and also because of the apparent lack of a critical distance. It was as though Penny had decided that this was the way to make art because it represented the way things were going in terms of human/machine relations. When presented with the concern that wasn’t it a little worrying that he was making works which at best mimicked, or worse extended these practices, he seemed unable to reflect on the implications of the effect of the works on the viewer/user.

Apart from reservations about basing a media art practice around ideas of power and behavioural manipulation deliberately extending processes that have the potential to turn people into serial killers, I had serious doubts about Penny’s lazy assertion that the conventional linear time-based media experience is passive. In Blow-Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain, Warren Neidich develops a biological theory of perception, which suggests that the most basic cognition operates at a neural level, the human brain is never passive but relies on constant stimulation to learn and to construct its own reality from cinematic images. Neidich’s ideas are necessarily a theory in progress, suggesting how things might happen based on ongoing neurological research. It shares with the Andersons' cognitive theory (discussed a while ago over on Brut Smog the Andersons' being particularly opposed to the implicit passivity of the 'persistence of vision' theory), the idea that the perception of moving images is far from a passive experience, but engages the viewer in the active construction of images. Neidich suggests that this manifests itself as physical changes at the neurological level as the brain learns and adapts, constructing its perception of reality. Apart from refuting the ‘passive viewer’ notion, in some ways this, suggests that Penny’s behavioural practice may be less ‘powerful’ than he claims: in Neidich’s formulations the cinematic is often experienced as more ‘real’ than lived experience as it is a more active and heightened cognitive experience. But worse is the implicit intention of Penny’s practice. While we are still discovering exactly how the brain perceives, retrospectively as it were in the case of film and cinema, why would anybody want to produce artworks that explicitly and deliberately work with processes which, by his own admission, have the (proven?) potential to effectively brainwash the user into dangerous acts.

I needed to find a way away from such reductive neo-fascististic control freakery. I found it in the garden....

Mistaken Human Babelfish

2006-02-06T10:35:00.000+00:00

I am in Berlin spending time at transmediale.06 which has been an interesting mix of fascination, frustration and consternation. But more of that when I'm back in London and have had time to reflect on and process my impressions.

Yesterday we went to one of the conference panels, 'Mistakology', which promised to examine the mistakes and accidents built in to technology, taking the suggestion that "...technical dysfunction is 'repressed' by modern society..." as its starting point. The Canadian artist Norman White has made interactive and computer-based pieces for decades, and came up with some interesting and cautionary reflections on the uses of the latest technology, but more of him in a later post. Claus Pias's talk was in German. I could have had simultaneous translation but, having just the day before had my pocket almost picked by a guy on the S Bahn (he wasn't successful and I fear his career as a fingersmith might prove not too fruitful as I could feel the tugging on my pocket), I was feeling reluctant to leave my passport with the transmediale garderobe as deposit for the radio headphone device. So, instead I made my own translation based on my feebly non-existent German and guessing at what the words might mean from their sounds.

As though translated by a human version of Babelfish in honour of all the bizarre and sometimes poetic results of mistaken online translation, here is an extract from my translation of Herr Pias's talk:

Overfull messing German light, vilest kind of perfection, habitats come after plus minus. Writer the error. They mashed up contradiction and uncertainty. Concept overcomes mistakes.

Forever night.

Rolling over performance competence, the lot of decanters is a mathematical definition. Transcend the lime shine stump? I can't. Unfasten three wagons. Cybernetic technical umbrellas.

The night light arises.

Understanding the crumbling dimension as text for the conservatorium. Unfastening the technical hat, it is not a cider economy.

Tonight Beamerlooper makes a brief appearence at Club Transmediale as part of the looppool project.

"Goodbye Mr Video"

2006-01-30T18:55:00.000+00:00

from dongA.com (requires Windows Media Player)