NOTES: April 2007

What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the way in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media

1970s Structuralist/Materialist Film:

Peter Gidal Theory and Definition of Structural Material Film…

           

Berlin Horse

Malcolm Le Grice

1970

9mins Colour 16mm

This film is largely filmed with an         exploration of the film medium in certain         aspects.

It is also concerned with making certain conceptions about time in a more illusory way than I have been inclined to explore in many other of my films. It attempts to deal with some of the paradoxes of the relationships of the "real" time, which exists when the film was being shot, with the "real" time, which exists when the film is being screened, and how this can be modulated by technical manipulation of the images and sequences.

The film is in two parts joined by a central superimposition of the material from both parts. The first part is made from a small section of film shot by me in 8mm colour, and later refilmed in various ways from the screen in 16mm b/w. The b/w material was then printed in a negative positive superimposition through colour filters creating a continually changing 'solarization' image, which works in its own time abstractly from the image. The second part is made by treating very early b/w newsreel, of a similar subject, in the same way. As a two-screen film the second screen has a b/w version of the whole film. MLG.

Horror Film 1

Malcolm Le Grice

1971

14mins Colour

Performance with slide projector, two film projectors.

           

All are superimposed on each other with the projectors aimed from different angles.  The superimpositions create a continually changing colour light mix. I interrupt the beam with a series of formal actions creating a complex set of coloured shadows. The final section involves focusing a pair of skeleton hands onto the screen in relationship to my own hands. The intention with this as with my other shadow pieces, is to build a complex visual experience out of simple and readily available aspects of the projection situation. M.L.G. from 'Real Time/Space', Art and Artists Dec 1972.

The colours change purely by the interruption of LeGrice’s own body through the projected light.

Structural/Material Video:

70s emphasis on the apparatus:

Transforming the spectacle, Moving Image was being refocused from its projection over uniformed chairs onto a screen, to being contained behind the glass window of a three-dimensional box in a white gallery space. It was most notably through this use of the monitor, that video began to herald itself as a new form of installation work. The monitor as a three-dimensional object offered artists an opportunity to examine the suggested space within the image, while simultaneously allowing study of the actual physical and spacial presence of the monitor itself. 

As well as the monitor, video possessed another seductive phenomenon: its live feedback technology.  Connecting a camera directly into a monitor, transformed the technology into a mirror, giving instant perpetual life to the image.  Suddenly, Moving Image was interactive. David Hall’s installation Progressive Recession (1974) draws directly from the viewer’s experience of seeing themselves relayed through a camera onto a monitor.  By being exposed to the very processes by which the image is made, the viewer’s experience completes the work

A subtle shift occurs in these 70s British video artists’ explorations.  Where at first we can see a canon of studies into video’s unique capabilities, this gradually developed into an analysis of video’s limitations.  Since video’s history of experimentation often contained imagery of the body, these limitations could be legible as being transferred onto the video bodies themselves.  In a search for the limitations of video, the limitations of the video bodies become analogous to the limitations of the human body.  When explored as deconstructive video, the video bodies became paradoxes, in constant conflict with the medium that generated them. They appeared contained within screens, looking and talking outwards, yet somehow tragically, constantly reminded and reduced to their actual physical state as deconstructed video.  Through the physical and virtual material properties of early video, the video bodies moved from being subjective phenomena towards becoming an objectified, moving, talking material.

The Continual Loop

In Behold we see a futility in the running woman’s efforts to climb the mountainous plank.  Stuck in a continual video loop, there is neither progress nor culmination to her efforts.  It is reminiscent of the fate of Sisyphus.  Cursed by the Gods of ancient Greece, Sisyphus is eternally condemned to the futility of pushing a rock up a mountain that on its arrival rolls back down again.

In his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus…

…introduces his philosophy of the absurd: man's futile search for meaning, unity and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God and eternity...

It is not the world that is absurd, nor human thought: the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world, when "my appetite for the absolute and for unity" meets "the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle."

Taking the absurd seriously means acknowledging the contradiction between the desire of human reason and the unreasonable world. Suicide, then, also must be rejected: without man, the absurd cannot exist. The contradiction must be lived; reason and its limits must be acknowledged, without hope. However, the absurd can never be accepted: it requires constant confrontation, constant revolt.

The video bodies’ existential concerns are further addressed in Mick Hartney’s States of Division, 1979.  A paranoid work, Hartney continues this suggestion of presence within the monitor, but from a more detached perspective.  Hartney is seemingly addressing the audience as his video body talks outwards from the box that creates him.  The content of the dialogue describes the subjective experience of being contained within the monitor.  As it develops, it begins to describe techniques and effects created uniquely by the video technology, including multiple layering, grainy black and white low-resolution image and the loss of focus.  Simultaneously, with each description, the technique is performed on and affects Hartney’s video body.  But it is not a pleasant experience.  The dialogue begins to hint at the confinement of the monitor and with it, a sense of perpetual imprisonment:

‘I’m caught in a chunk of time, snatched out of my time and left to drift in a gallery of people... Trapped in a box inside of a box’

This emphasis on how far removed from our perceived illusion the figure is, creates a feeling of alienation and isolation, which we attach to Hartney’s video body with empathy.  Again the work plays with this strange duality.   The video technology creates and defines him.  He inhabits the video and he is the video, all the while subject to its definitions and limitations.

But it is in David Hall’s This is a Video Monitor, 1973 that the deconstruction of the video body extends to the absolute denial of its existence.  Ironically it is also in this work that the video body begins to form physicality through the deconstruction of the image via Hall's material use of the video deterioration and the actual destruction of the videotape.  The work is a video image of a woman describing the audience’s perception of her in contrast to her actual existence as a video image.  As soon as the apparent monologue is complete, the image cuts.  There is a moment of snowfield, and then the image of the woman’s face appears again, except this time, the picture has deteriorated considerably.  The take is then repeated, before a third image appears, degraded even further. 

David Hall’s description is that it is

…an attempt to construct a wholly 'videological' experience, and is built on an initial take of a woman describing the paradox of real and imagined functions of the monitor on which her image appears. Sound synchronisation wavers as she mimes to her pre-recorded voice - an analogy to part of her description.  Vision and sound progressively change, at each stage distorting the expected characteristics, displacing the imagined for the real.

The work is created through a process of recording, rewinding, replaying and recording again. Through this endless replaying and rerecording, the videotape material deteriorates, which in turn results the deterioration of the video signal.  Each degree of deterioration is a distortion of the image, the face and the voice.  Ultimately the woman is reduced to what she really is, a series of moving lines behind a glass screen. 

1980s

Material Video: compositing and the electronic colour bleed

Steve Littman

I felt that the language that I best had an aesthetic for, at that time, was electronic.  I was in control of what I was doing.  There was a certain freedom of expression that didn’t seem to me possible in film. By 1979, I’d seen Berlin Horse (LeGrice), and although I felt that that work was just magical, I started to think “Well how would you do that in video?”  I spent most of the eighties trying to learn how to do it in video. …I was trying to learn about how to create video as an aesthetic, imagistic space rather than just symbolic, or something with dramaturgy.  It was something that was allowing me to create iconic spaces.

I developed an aesthetic around three machine editing.  So that process enabled me to have the possibility of an aesthetic…  It also made me realise that I was trying to develop work as an optical printer would, but instead of it taking me months to so something as an optical printer, I could do it instantaneously. I could do it through mixing and layering and I could be completely in control.

Between 1983 and 1995, I think videotape systems were comparable to an optical printer if controlled in the right way.  I felt that they gave you a certain type of freedom to play.  You couldn’t play with film because it was so expensive and it meant that you would have to decide how long you could afford basically.   If you had a multi-layered work, it was going to be an expensive process.   I felt that the only way you could really discover multi-layerism, was to play with video, even though it may not be like a film aesthetic, projected on a screen.  I felt that in the future, these technologies would be available, and they would be able to show work in a projected or cinematic environment. In 1983/84, David Larcher started to first use video and through my help, he started to make Granny’s Is.  David also helped develop an aesthetic because of the way he used his film knowledge from playing with optical printing. He was using it directly in the editing suite, and he automatically changed the way I felt about certain layers of images.  So, we were feeding off each other.  I was showing him new techniques, and he was showing me possibilities by just playing with the editing process.  That play, I think, was essential with the early work that I made.  SL (REWIND)

Pickelporno

Pipilotti Rist

…a kaleidoscope of mesmerizing bodily images, which the camera fabricates before the eyes of the viewers as though on a visual roller coaster of glowing colors.  Unique about the filming is how Pipilotti Rist zooms in on individual parts of the body, using a microscopic nearness to show the material delicacies of skin structures. Bold perspectives, breasts, eyes, toes, and pubic hair, swell to oversized and uncustomary dimensions.  In Pickleporno the camera assumes the perspective of the sexual partner, and with her macro-shots the artist pursues the question of how to make sexual feelings visible.

(Source: Andrea Springer, Pipilotti Rist: Werkmonografie, diss. Karlsruhe, 2002, pp. 44ff.)

In both Littman and Rist’s work, the electronic compositing of hyper-coloured images exaggerates imagistic textures, which are specific to this particular use of video, and portray a sense of materiality to video.  These qualities are reminiscent of experimental film’s material effects, seen in LeGrice’s Berlin Horse etc, but have there own qualities.

Rist’s work is particularly interesting because the effect distorts the image of the body: the flesh almost pressing against the screen, the organic to the hypermediated…

1990s: Projection in the Gallery…

Hill?

My Practice

Chamber:

(reflects 70s structuralist video, the spatial model of the body in relation to artists’ use of the body in the monitor…)

Chamber addresses the way an image is physically created in digital video.  When Pixels appear in a digital video it is suggestive of the deconstruction of the image itself, as though the image is corroding.  In the ‘virtual’ environment the pixels have a physical presence, not only is it corroding the image, but if the image is figurative, it appears to corrode or scratch the figure as well.  In addition, where the pixels appear over the face, the image becomes suggestive of hiding a person’s identity. 

Chamber involves a two-way screen suspended in the centre of a space.  Projected onto the screen is a life-size image of a figure: creating a sense of the figure being contained within the screen.  The light itself is caught by the screen, and therefore so is the figure.  The screen however, is too short for the figure to stand up straight in and too narrow to sit down.  Essentially the figure will be imprisoned within the screen in a sort of twisted contorted position.

Of particular importance is that the screen is disproportionate to the standard 4:3 format.  Although the projection is in this format, the screen will only catch the central section in a 1:3 format, leaving a great deal of light spill to escape.

The projected image has no physical presence itself until the light hits a receiving screen.  So in this scenario the light is caught and contained by the screen, but only the part that contains the figure.   Thus that section of the light becomes the image and adopts a physical presence, only to be violated further by its own pixilation

Disjointed Momentum

3-screen HD projection

Disjointed Momentum is a cinematic installation that belies its state as either a film or digital video. The work is made using photographic film and is then translated and reinterpreted through digital production.  Digital manipulation is used to give a sense of history or nostalgia to the work, which, combined with suggestive sequential imagery, is reminiscent of the early experiments in photography and movement, particularly those of Edward Muybridge. 

However, unlike the Muybridge works, there is no consistent sequence of movement in this work.  Not only is the sense of movement disjointed but also the sense of time.  The photographs were sequenced and animated.  They were then played back on very high definition.  This resulted in too much data for the computer to handle resulting in a disjointed, unsequential, jarring outcome.  There is a further sense of the accidental as spilt light occurs as the uncontrollable, obscuring and clouding the image.  Its ethereality has a physical presence in the image and the figure appears to interact and play with it.  The sequence becomes like a dance and the flicker of frames like a rhythm.

New Work:

Halo: 

I’m experimenting with hot spots.  These are the reflections of a projector’s light passing through the lens caught on a semi-transparent screen.  Hopefully, where the image is a portrait, if I can somehow magnify the hot spot, it might seem like a halo…

Notes:

In the above chunks of text, I find that in my articulation work, there are two responses:  One being a response to the technique and media specificity, which relates itself more to the actual apparatus, the process of creating and the functioning of the work.  The second relates to the content, which is entirely interpretative, i.e. relating Sinden’s Behold to Sisyphus.  I’m not particularly sure I can justify this second response…

Where I discuss the media specificity, I can probably make quite a solid argument and suggest a historical linear narrative to it.  Particularly because one could suggest that a lot of video work made in the 70s was very video specific for a reason.  It gets a bit woolly because my re-interpretation of the content of the work is not necessarily what the artist intended.  I’m concerned that I could potentially write anything I like and therefore there’s a lack of depth.

In my practice, the figure is always non-physical or possesses some kind of physical limitation in its imagery.  It is through this concept of materiality (the video textures etc) and the apparatus that I want to create a suggestion of physicality.  What is important is that the suggestion is also a reminder that image is not physical.  It’s a kind of contradiction or a paradox that I find interesting, and slightly tragic. 

The contradiction must be lived; reason and its limits must be acknowledged, without hope. However, the absurd can never be accepted: it requires constant confrontation, constant revolt

Bolter JD & Grusin R, 2000, REMEDIATION, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, pp 15

It is worth noting that this new aesthetic largely differed from today’s Black Cube

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus