Here is some early 70′s video work by the artist Ernie Gehr. One of two videos suggested to me by Mark Wallace.

Vast corridors, simple movements – I could perhaps use this simplistic video style in my own work.

Paul Sharits, an influential visual artist in the Structural film movement, is well known through his extraordinary piece, T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G. This is a significant structural film since it can be interpreted in countless numbers even though the film seems simple to perceive. In my opinion, this simplified side of the film is what makes it more complicated and profound in terms of approaching the ideas of the film. Not only in this film but also other structural films by different artists such as Len Lye’s A Colour Box and Malcolm Le Grice’s  Berlin Horse and many more pieces have the same effect on me. The reason is that the simpler it gets in order to emphasise the materiality of the film, the more it “negates the filmic illusion and places the focus on the function, as well as on the viewers’ subjective perception” (Sharits). Thus, it is inevitable to consider how the viewers perceive these films psychologically under the illumination of the simplicity of the pieces.

    The way the sound is constructed in T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G has a major impact on how the viewers react to this piece psychologically since it is also as powerful as its’ flickering imagery. Beauvais states that “the soundtrack also developed into an equally important, rhythmic and independent element within his film. With the single loop word, “destroy,” one hears such things as “It’s gone” or “It’s off,” “It’s cut,” “His straw,” “History,” and more.” I completely agree that this powerful element of this piece increases the possible interpretations towards it and confuses the viewers mind. This illusion of the sound is a great factor that causes the various interpretations since no one can clearly hear what the exact word is in T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G. It ends up creating many opinions and various perceptions in the viewers. Therefore, the more one thinks about this piece, the more interpretations occur simultaneously, even though the piece might appear as a simple work of art at first.

Ernie Gehr, American experimental filmmaker, is well known for his innovative film Serene Velocity. His piece mostly focuses on emphasising the materiality of the film by using repetition of the images, fixed camera perspective, and creating a space which is continuing and not bounded within the film strip, with the ideas of the work underneath the images onscreen. Aside from drawing the attention to the materiality of the piece, Serene Velocity also creates a fabulous visual experience for the viewers through the optical illusion that creates geometric shapes in the viewer’s perception. Gehr expresses his thoughts about the materiality of film in the following words:

Traditional and established avant garde film teaches film to be an image, a representing. But film is a real thing and as a real thing it is not imitation. It does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind. Film is a variable intensity of light, an internal balance of time, a movement within a given space. (Gehr)

The looping word in T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, “destroy”, loses it meaningfulness when it is repeated over time in Sharits’s piece. As he indicates: “ “destroy” actually destroys itself.” Even though that word loses its power after being repeated many times, this self destroying sound creates a space pulls the viewers into that space and draws them more since the distance disappears between the screen and the viewers. In my opinion, the silence in Gehr’s Serene Velocity has the same impact on the viewers. The lack of sound in this piece manages to create a space and break the distance by “exploring the use of fixed photographic images, perception and time” (Boruszknowski, 53). For instance; If there was a sound in Serene Velocity, it would not be as impressive as it is now. Because this piece manages to achieve to pull the viewers into that space by “using the medium to expand minds and stretch the limits of what is possible to see in simple images” (Hall). In other words, through perception.

Michael Snow, Canadian artist and experimental filmmaker, is one of the most significant names who has made great structural films. Especially; his piece Wavelenght, a landmark of Avant-garde cinema, is quite influential since it is so meaningful and well thought. Watching Wavelenght and the slowly zooming camera for forty five minutes is a great experience because of the way it makes the viewers question the space and time in the room that they are in. Even though we see a similar creation of space and time in Sharits’s Touching and Gehr’s Serene Velocity, this relation between the time and space in Snow’s piece appears more profound in terms of the dense relation of the sound and image of the piece. In my opinion, the use of the sound in Wavelenght is quite irritating. It is a type of rising sine wave tone which is not that easy to listen. However, it is one of the major aspects that I find highly interesting about this piece. Because after watching halfway through the film, you start not to hear it even though the frequency of its tone rises. Interestingly, the perception towards the combination of the sound and image works against each other. While the impact of the sound disappears, the influence of the image on the viewers’ perception starts to become more recognizable. Sitney says that in Snow’s film “simplicity is foregrounded” (Sitney). However, I completely disagree with this statement. Even though Snow’s piece appears simple, its only the imagery which appears to be “simple”. The psychological perception of the piece is not that simple in addition to the ideas and the various interpretations of the work. “Michael Snow’s work is in many ways the most dense and complex.” (Boruszknowski). Snow expresses his own ideas about Wavelenght in the following words:

I wanted to make a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings, and aesthetic ideas. I was thinking of planning for a time monument in which the beauty and sadness of equivalence would be celebrated, thinking of trying to make a definitive statement of pure Film space and time, a balancing of ‘illusion’ and ‘fact,’ all about seeing. The space starts at the camera’s (spectator’s) eye, is in the air, then is on the screen, then is within the screen (the mind). (Snow)

As I mentioned before, the structural films are open for many possible interpretations since it can be perceived in different ways by the viewers. I believe that the structural films happen to belong to the viewers since they can vary and expand the meaning based on their personal perceptions. In other words, structural films free themselves after they are publicized. Therefore; even though Snow explains his ideas about his own film in these words, limiting the content of the work only based on that would not be fair for the viewers who can interpret it from a different perspective.

In conclusion, Paul Sharits’s T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity, and Michael Snow’s Wavelenght are all related with each other in terms of the materiality of the film. More importantly, those are three major examples within the structural film movement that creates its own space and time with the use of sound and visual imagery. Therefore, with the creation of this space, perception of these films varies along with the interpretations.

Ishmael Reed – Mumbo Jumbo
William S. Burroughs – The Soft Machine
Kathy Acker – Blood and Guts in High School
Carole Maso – Aureole
Jean Toomer – Cane
David Markson – This Is Not A Novel
Gertrude Stein – Tender Buttons
Ben Marcus – The Age of Wire and String

This post won’t be about adding or subtracting books from his list (although I’d suggest Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress over This Is Not a Novel, and Carole Maso’s The Art Lover or AVA over Aureole.) Rather, I want to talk about experimental fiction as a genre.

Because Chris’s question reminds me of a debate that comes up frequently in US experimental film circles…

Experimental film, like most recognizable (and recognized) genres, has its own canon of seminal texts. Thanks to scholars like P. Adams Sitney, we have today a fairly agreed-upon list of essential experimental US films, as well as a critical narrative that organizes and explains it.

Part 1: 1920s through the 1950s: A handful of early American experimental filmmakers made work largely influenced by European filmmakers like the Expressionists, Dadaists, and Surrealists:

1928: James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber: The Fall of the House of Usher

1939–1956: Harry Smith’s Early Abstractions series

1936: Joseph Cornell: Rose Hobart

1943/1959: Maya Deren: Meshes of the Afternoon

1949/1970: Kenneth Anger: Puce Moment

Part 2: Starting in the 1960s, the widespread availability of cheaper film equipment led to a “second wave” of American experimental cinema:

1958: Bruce Conner: A Movie

1962–64: Stan Brakhage: Dog Star Man

1963: Andy Warhol: Kiss

1963: Jack Smith: Flaming Creatures

1963: Shirley Clarke: The Cool World

1964: Carolee Schneemann: Meat Joy

1964: Jonas Mekas: The Brig

Part 3: Later that decade, the Structuralist, FLUXUS, and Flicker movements turned their artistic gaze inward, to formally explore the film medium itself:

1966: Yoko Ono: No. 4

1967: Michael Snow: Wavelength

1969: Paul Sharits: T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G

1970: Ernie Gehr: Serene Velocity

1970: Hollis Frampton: Zorn’s Lemma

(Note that for some of these directors, you can choose more than one film that’s representative—Schneemann’s Fuses instead of Meat Joy, for instance—so long as you include something.)

…Experimental film has continued since 1970, of course (although you wouldn’t always know that from some film classes or textbooks). And more recent scholarship, as well as DVD sets like Anthology Film Archive’s Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941, and the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Treasures from American Film Archives, have helped flesh out the original canon, adding previously overlooked artists like Lois Weber:

…and Mary Ellen Bute:

…not to mention changing how we view formerly “non-experimental” artists like Robert Flaherty:

…Edwin S. Porter:

…and Bubsy Berkeley:

…But the above list still constitutes the core of the US experimental film canon.

Whither Experimentation?

So what does this have to do with experimental fiction? Well, that oft-recurring question in experimental film circles is: When we say “experimental film,” what are we referring to? The established canon, or the tendency to experiment in cinema?

Experimentation as Historical Genre

On the one hand, we have a list of seminal works, which are taught in film schools, and which therefore teach film students what a “proper” US experimental film is. The canonical works define the style and range of such cinema: It is non-narrative (favoring surreal logic or structural organizing principles), abstract, often incorporates found footage, and also frequently involves directly treating the film itself (scratching it, painting it, growing mold on it, and so on). It often demonstrates some aspect of the film apparatus or filmmaking process, sometimes by taking a self-reflexive approach (foregrounding the use of the camera) or a conceptual approach (projecting through alternate substances, or projecting plain black leader, or projecting nothing but the projector light itself).

It comes as no surprise that the film students of today frequently make work that employs those techniques. The question then becomes: Are they making experimental films? Or are they making Experimental Films? And if it’s the latter, are they still making experimental films?

Meanwhile, another danger with recognized and known experimental films—with any experimental art—is that over time they can lose their rougher, more innovative edges. (I’m thinking directly of Adorno’s thinking here; see his Aesthetic Theory.) Beethoven was, in his time, avant-garde; today his music is used mainly to sell cars. And, as we have learned from examples like Porter and Flaherty, when experimental techniques are absorbed into the mainstream, viewers no longer perceive them as experimental (see also D.W. Griffith, Orson Welles, Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, cinéma vérité, …).

Due to several factors (including Hollywood’s long-held monopoly over distribution and exhibition, as well as the experimental film community’s historic animosity toward video), few of the above-mentioned filmmakers have to worry about their work ever becoming the cinematic equivalent of muzak. (Obscurity is a mixed blessing.) That said, even if the Culture Industry fails to repackage an artist’s work, it can still co-opt that artist’s techniques. Thus, as every film experimental student knows, the music video for Alanis Morissette’s Ironic (1995) stole from Maya Deren:

…as did the video for Milla Jovovich’s Gentleman Who Fell (1994):

…and, before them, Madonna’s Cherish (1989). Meanwhile, the opening credits of David Fincher’s Se7en (1995) ripped off Stan Brakhage:

..and the “plastic bag” video in American Beauty (1999) was stolen from Nathaniel Dorsky’s Variations (1998):

(…although Dorsky himself has claimed that the shot is hardly original. And Dorsky is of course a more recent filmmaker, but I think my point still stands.)

Well, let’s not get bogged down in the argument that experimental art is the Prime Mover, or a world apart from Hollywood; we all know that experimental artists get as good as they give. The point I want to make here is that one doesn’t necessarily need to see Deren, or Brakhage, or Dorsky, or any of them, to be inspired by their work, or by their ideas. Their innovations—some of them, at least—have entered the larger culture. They have had influences.

No experimental work is ever wholly experimental, but I think we can see that Cornell’s Rose Hobart was pretty innovative for its time (even though Salvador Dalí accused Cornell of stealing the film from his subconscious). But today, chopping up found footage to make a new work is pretty old hat. An experimental filmmaker can’t coast along on just that—although many try to; attend any experimental film festival to see for yourself. Such artists are Experimental Filmmakers, and not experimental filmmakers: they work according to the proper conventions of an established tradition—the Experimental Film genre.

It's been fakery from the get-go.

Have you ever had a friend who’s written a metatextual story in order to point out that narration is a convention? Or worse yet, to prove how artificial narration is? I’ll confess to having been such a friend myself; my only excuse is that at the time I didn’t know that Barth, Barthelme, Coover, and scores before even them had done precisely that, and much more besides. (No one needs to make art that points out or proves how art is artifice—that was understood by even the cave-folk who painted Lescaux. Rather, what’s worthwhile even to this day is exploring the nature—and the beauty—of that artifice.)

In 2010 Lescaux yet dazzles, even as it disintegrates, but it and many other once-experimental artworks, while still beautiful, have grown familiar, and as such no longer challenge our expectations of what art can do. When we see them we think, “But of course art can be like that!” They have inspired legions of imitators and successors. They have become the foundations of traditions, of genres and of subgenres.

A fox’s trick, once observed by the farmer, will not get him out of the trap a second time. (The fantastic Mr. Fox learned this all too well.)

And so the fox has many tricks.

Criticism’s Role

Shklovsky wrote in Theory of Prose, “The story disintegrates and is rebuilt anew” (17). Art has no telos, no location it’s trying to get to. An artist finishes her sculpture, or painting, or novel, or film, and then lets it out into the world (or tries to). Once released, if released, that object begins to live many lives.

What did Leonardo have in mind when he finished La Gioconda? (If you don’t know, then don’t worry—Dan Brown has figured it out.) Leonardo’s opinion, if he even had one, would be of great historical interest, but it wouldn’t change the fact that La Gioconda is, in my opinion, an image most often encountered on a t-shirt. Or in need of a mustache.

Robert Mitchum rules supreme.

Meanwhile, many less familiar artworks look strange to us now, by virtue of their having passed, for a time, out of popular favor. Artists well understand this, which is why they are ever looking backward, searching for once-popular ideas and forms that they can try making new. (We too often forget that “Renaissance” means rebirth.)

The critic should understand this as well, and not only because artistic progress is never strictly linear. Criticism is a story, a narrative, and in order for it to interest us then it too must not grow over-familiar. Each new generation of critics, and of audiences, demands at least a few new twists and wrinkles. Thus the recent Spectator list of the 50 most essential films elevated to #1…The Night of the Hunter.

That was a good twist: surprising yet plausible. As Roger Ebert responded:

Their selection passes my most important test: It is interesting. It contains ten titles that aren’t included in my ever-growing Great Movies Collection, and I am now inspired to consider them. In fact, my recent inclusion of Howard Hawks’ “Rio Bravo,” which would have become a Great Movie anyway, was given a nudge when my Spectator arrived in the mail.

I suspect that Rio Bravo made the Spectator‘s list because Quentin Tarantino has been one of its most vocal boosters—and so that film is now important for us in a way that it wasn’t fifteen years ago:

A few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with some of my film-watching friends (the ones whom I only ever see at the movie theater), and our talk eventually turned (as so many film conversations do) to the question of what Hawks picture is the greatest. I nominated Bringing Up Baby; others proposed Scarface, His Girl Friday, Only Angels Have Wings, The Big Sleep, and, yes, Rio Bravo. (These are the conventional choices.)

But then one of our number insisted that it was Monkey Business. “Monkey Business!” the rest of us exclaimed. “Monkey Business!?”

He was certain that it was Monkey Business. “Or Ball of Fire,” he eventually conceded.

Experimentation as Innovative Principle

Meanwhile, today’s filmmakers continue to innovate, to experiment. I predict that right now, an enterprising young film student at the Pratt (class of 2013) is thinking to herself: “Stan Brakhage started scratching and painting on films before my parents were born; I’d rather not do that, it’s so boring! I like much better Roundhay Garden Scene, which is so much stranger—it’s so short, and so low-res. How can you even watch a thing like that? It challenges so many assumptions we have about cinema. And so I think I’ll try making something that’s more like that—I’ll use my iPhone’s camera to make a series of two-second movies…!” (At which point the student’s Experimental Film purist teacher might well gasp: “VIDEO?!”)

Such a student will be making an experimental film, not an Experimental Film. And that film may look little like the films made by Brakhage or Deren or Cornell—just as their films bore little resemblance to what had come before them. That is experimental art’s purpose, and power.

So if I were teaching a class on American experimental fiction, which books would I choose? Well, that would depend on whether I wanted to teach a class on Experimental Fiction, or experimental fiction—experimentation in fiction. The former affords far fewer choices than the latter.

Where it gets fun is how the money is being allocated. This winner of the NFF’s annual Claibone Pell Tribute Award will get to select which films MOMA should restore. So here’s our question to you. What was the last film you saw where the print was so bad that it demanded to be restored? And if you had $10,000 to spend, which movie would you have restored to wholeness and cleaned to a Criterion-like sheen? Tell us why would be helpful, too. Answers in the comment box, please.

While you’re thinking about you’re answer, here’s Earth, Wind and Fire from Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song:

At any rate, my impression of the symposium was fantastic. I got to see Ernie Gehr speaking about time as it affects his art. His speech went through the first optical coin tricks to the first animations and later, moving pictures as first explored by the Lumière brothers. We saw two of his short films, one by the name of Greene Street, where objects and shadows floated surrealistically until you realized it was a time-stop filming of the sun’s movement and the lights and shadows it caused on the buildings of Greene Street.

After the speech was finished, we moved into concurrent afternoon sessions. I could not stay until the very end of the symposium, but what I saw was definitely interesting. The panel discussion I chose was about short film and audiences in the era of YouTube. With the explosion of user-created content, especially short movies and videos, the short film has more exposure than ever, but is it its own market? We first explored the topic by watching this, which got the panel discussion off to a hilarious start:

YouTube Contest Challenges Users To Make A ‘Good’ Video

Unfortunately, as most know, YouTube is a catch-all (a term used in discussion by panelist Ralph Vituccio) where not every video is of great artistic merit. With this flood of content, what is a viewer to do? Panelist Kim Ann Pfau (who organizes the Sandy Valley Independent Short Film Series) advocated seeing short films as an audience experience, as the reactions of the crowd around you can greatly affect your perception and enjoyment of the film. All expressed concern over wide exposure via sites like YouTube or Atom Films, or the traditional film festival circuit.

It’s definitely an experience I would recommend if film and the visual arts are your passion in life.

This first test was taken with a handheld cam, but recorded on the Imac. The slight shifts of movement by my hand reveals the fluid geometry and delay of the feedback loop. The loop creates a strange virtual space, where the repetition of the frames suggest a corridor, but when our image intrudes, we are reminded of its illusion. This gets more clear in the second experiment below:

The effect on how we perceive is different when we are in front of a mirror, inspecting an image of ourselves. The effect is more like seeing your shadow, an objectification of the self-image. But watching the replications makes you aware of your body, as you try to match your movement (or more specifically, your awareness) of your image to the reflections on the screen.

The video below is different; found it in on youtube and it shows the video feedback that is native to TV. The cathode ray tube has different parameters, and if you observe the details of the image, these become apparent. The rate of delay, the timing of the transformation of colors is endemic to the technology of the tube- the millisecond firings of light to create a picture.

For our project, our focus is on the nature of self-conception through the image. Perhaps the flat screen offers a less complicated, and hopefully more direct way of revealing the dimensions of the experiential work.

TV Buddha- Nam June Paik

My collaborative project with Katrin churned out a strange creature, this video feedback loop that harks back to the funky video experiments of the 60′s by Nam June Paik and the other pioneers of Video Art. We spent quite a while jamming our thoughts together and just throwing ideas on the table. The best thing about it was when our thoughts started to have its own thoughts, mutating into its own monster (haha- please read Hofstader’s I am a Strange Loop). Both of our research led to this realization that the collaboration must be a tangible thing, a digital thing; quite fun to finally hit the concept and ruminate on the possibilities over endless cups of coffee and thick puffs of tobacco.

I’ve been reading about Peter Campus and Ernie Gehr, experimental filmmakers who are still making provocative moving images. Even after their groundbreaking work in the 60′s and 70′s, they still developed their work, and they still challenge and reveal new things with their sheer ingenuity and imagination.

What struck me was how they went the opposite way; most filmmakers went straight to the narrative and pursued the thematic evolution of their visions, but Gehr, Campus and a few other filmmakers walked the long trapeze line between the act of perception and the moving image. The thing that gives me hope is that their recent work is imbued by their personal visions. They still investigate the mystery of meaning-making and are never afraid to come to their own conclusions on what the act of seeing means.

In Cinema 1 , Deleuze makes a persuasive argument for a new definition of the moving image:

The analogous statement above basically reorients the understanding of the moving image as a constitution of movement, rather than an illusion of movement. Deleuze also concludes that the moving image in this context becomes a reality , rather than a representation of it.

This follows the theories of Manovich surrounding the nature of the moving image in New Media; the Macluhan ‘medium is the message’ dimension kicked up to the level of the waking dream.

So how do we see the world now? More importantly, how do we see ourselves?

Yes, it is increasing difficult to create something in this era of the screen, especially if you are fueled by all of this philosophical polemic. But again, knowing how powerful the moving image is (proof? Just look around at how many things you buy and believe because of things you see on screen), artists do bear a responsibility. This ethical stance actually bears more possibilities for innovation, because I feel that the other paths are slippery and well-exploited already by TV and the advertising industry. Why make moving images that merely re-imagine the technical capabilities of the machine? Why not turn the technology on itself, transform its function, re-imagine how it makes images?

Abstract

The moving image and its many incarnations present many issues regarding its production, consumption, perception and ultimately significance as a cultural artifact. In a Baudrillard age, where moving images shift seamlessly through different channels of media, one can argue that the territory has shifted as well; these simulations play and exploit the very nature of perception, the locus of meaning-making for the moving image. This paper will focus on the art practices of the cinematic avant-garde who still question and challenge these issues. I place my practice within this context, and with the examination of the works of Ernie Gehr and Peter Campus, the intentions and processes evident in my practice will bear a shared philosophy (or strategy, or even both) with the aforementioned artists.

New Media and its Malcontents

Lev Manovich in his essay Abstraction and Complexity describes the nature of the current manifestations of the moving images as simulations; the power of the computer’s processes to reproduce not only the nature, but also the techniques.

The cumulative result of all these developments – 3D computer graphics, compositing, simulation of all media properties and interfaces in software – is that the images which surround us today are usually very beautiful and often very stylelized(sic). The perfect image is no longer something which is expected in particular areas of consumer culture – instead it is an entry requirement… the mixing of different representational styles which until a few decades ago was only found in modern art (think of Moholy-Nagy photograms or Rauschenberg’s prints from 1960) has become a norm in all areas of visual culture.

As outlined and discussed by Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media, the very medium that I use to make moving images has come about in an interesting way. Unlike the other traditions of art where the medium evolved from artisanal and craft-based practices, the technologies I create with come from the rapid industrial developments of the 20th Century. From the acquisition of footage to the composition of media elements, the nature of the machine is ever-present.

*frame grabs from Final Cut Pro project of Progress,
video loop with sound, 2008

Inherent to the computer are both the artistic possibility and problematic nature of its power. Through its capability to simulate all old media and even remix its techniques, this power cannot be ignored as merely an aspect of a digital art practice; rather, in my practice, it is its consequences that I confront.

Ernie Gehr: The Deconstruction of the Gaze

The seminal work Serene Velocity (pictured above) by Ernie Gehr is a critique of the apparatus of cinema and spectatorship, the center of the problematics of the moving image. The film at the start may seem just a play on the dynamics of perception, but as it progresses, the moving image reveals a different, even subversive nature.

Instead of using the representational power of film, he focused on a singular image and pulsed it by rhythmically by moving the focus plane of the lens. But the film is not in the least static.

The filmmaker positioned his tripod within the corridor and then proceeded to alter his zoom lens every four frames. At first the shifts are not dramatic. He alternates four frames at 50mm with four frames at 55mm. After a considerable period the differential increases: 45mm to 60mm. Thus, the film proceeds with increasing optical shocks. In this system, the zoom never “moves.” The illusion of movement comes about from the adjustment of the eye from one sixth of a second of a distant image to one sixth of a second of a nearer one. Although the absolute rhythm never changes, the film reaches a crescendo because of the extreme illusion of distance by the end. (P. Adams Sitney, as cited in Caroll.2006:p178)

The work’s minimalist aesthetic is not only to serve the construction of an image, but a meditation on the act of perception itself.

In representational films sometimes the image affirms its own presence as image, graphic entity, but most often it serves as vehicle to a photo-recorded event. Traditional and established avant garde film teaches film to be an image, a representing. But film is a real thing and as a real thing it is not imitation. It does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind. It is not a vehicle for ideas or portrayals of emotion outside of its own existence as emoted idea. Film is a variable intensity of light, an internal balance of time, a movement within a given space. (Ernie Gehr, January 1971)

As described by Gehr, the moving image can be something of its own, and in the case of Serene Velocity, the image becomes the gaze itself; the corridor becomes the shape of the gaze, the moving image an active work of confrontation.

Peter Campus: Concepts of Self

Unlike Ernie Gehr, Peter Campus’ work started with video. He was one of the pioneers of video art, exploring the unique properties of the medium (such as the double-channel, chroma-keying image above). His focus though was the self, a rigorous and diverse set of approaches to the concept of self expressed in the moving image.

In the video Three Transitions (frame grab above) and other works made in the 1970’s, he explores different acts of self-cognition (Laguiera.2006). For example in the installation Interface (1972) he turned the camera on the viewer, providing instances where one would see the self as both reflection (on a glass) and moving image (video projection).

In these explorations, Peter Campus reveals the paradoxical nature of the image, even when it comes to the one we are most familiar with: the self. Having a background in psychology and the cognitive sciences, he criticizes the ever-growing postmodern concept of the self as merely a cognitive function, an essentially materialistic and dehumanizing view. Campus’ tool of analysis, his way in so to speak, is perception. A review by J. Laguiera of his work, specifically of his installations, puts it thus:

Perception is one of the routes explored in trying to answer this question, which philosophers and psychologists ponder continually, among others. Certain artists have also explored it by developing a dimension often deliberately dismissed by cognitive science theoreticians, which is none other than lived experience. Such experience is understood here as a unitary perception, a human experience that does not validate, even on a purely theoretical level, the duality of body and mind. Such a position has been criticized by a number of authors, such as proponents of psychophysical identity (the identity between mental states and neuronal states), eliminativism (psychological experience is eliminated for the benefit of a neurological explanation), or cognitivism (which notably separates cognition and consciousness).

As Laguiera explains in the quote above, this duality, and this conceptual separation of the body from the mind, can be critically examined by the act of perception. This paradoxical approach, shared by Ernie Gehr, reveals not only the qualities of the medium of the moving image, but also an insight into the postmodern condition. Manovich’s theories on simulation already illuminate its consequences: the image without meaning, the gaze bereft of understanding, the making of art without meaning-making.

So where are the possibilities?

The Avant-Garde: Locating the Core

The avant-garde filmmakers of the 60’s and 70’s were working mostly on 8mm and 16mm. Stan Brakhage, Ernie Gehr, The London Film Co-operative and numerous other experimental filmmakers were making films that sought to criticise, examine and deconstruct filmmaking itself. In the various historical and critical books and essays on these practices, the films were diverse; the sexual polemic of Andy Warhol, the materialist/structuralist experiments of the London Film Co-op, and even the Lacanian leaning of the Surrealists found itself in the films of Malcolm LeGrice (Hamlyn.2003). What united the avant-garde was its mode of creation.

The avant-garde is an ‘artisanal’ or ‘personal’ mode. Avant-garde films tend to be made by individuals or very small groups of collaborators, financed either by the filmmakers alone or in combination with private patronage and grants from arts institutions. (Murray Smith as cited in O’Pray.2003:p2.)

This independence is marked by a critical approach to the status quo, and thus creates a space to innovate outside the concerns of mainstream culture (Rees.1999).

This historical antecedent is actually quite similar to the emergence of video art, whereas the introduction of inexpensive technology created opportunities for artists like Nam Jun Paik, Peter Campus and Bill Viola to investigate issues outside the concerns of the status quo.

In this diversity of intentions, philosophies and agendas (political, artistic, etc) where can an avant-garde practice locate its engagement? Lev Manovich’s interesting theory is that new media’s precursor is film, and therefore the promise of film to be the Gesamtkunstwerk of all the arts can be found in even greater potentiality in New Media (Manovich.2001). But upon examining the precursor, Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, it is the language of the machine that dominates, the endless transformations and permutations of the image, very much like a formula multiplying its algorithms so that it gains value, but not meaning.

Perhaps one can argue that the kino-eye is much like the apparatus of cinema, endlessly replicating representations of reality. New Media’s simulative capabilities, with its hybrids of representation and technique, will not offer any restitution or even an avenue for critical engagement in New Media.

Within my practice, I have chosen to locate my critical concerns in the space of perception. In Luis Bunuel’s Andalusian Dog, (image part of composite above) the eye is sliced open, inter-cut with the moon being obscured. This piece of surrealism is instructive in the sense that it is the literal cutting the eye open that becomes the act of engagement; to release the pre-conceived notions of the moving image, one has to slice into the process of perception itself.

The simulations offered by New Media in a digital art practice must be viewed critically, and even confronted by revealing the nature of the image itself.

Collaboration

In this context, the collaboration work with Katrin Maria Escay evolved, reflecting the research we have done.
The current setup will now include video cameras placed atop each screen and captures the images from the other screen, creating a video feedback loop.

The rationale behind using feedback loops instead of self-generated imagery as the main aspect of our work stem from our discussions about the things we’ve found on our individual research. Katrin’s focus is on the experiential quality of the work, while I wanted to incorporate the dimensions of the gaze, of perception.

The resulting image on each screen will be dependent on the presence of a viewer. Because of the video feedback loop, a seemingly endless corridor will be seen by the viewer, with the image of his/her back, similar to Magritte’s Reproduction Prohibited (1937).

There will be infrared sensors mounted on each screen, providing the possibility of adding subtle details (through real time compositing and video feed manipulation- Puredata) to the virtual corridor and the image of viewer when gazed at for a certain amount of time.

The collaborative piece will be at times opaque, and at times ambiguous- these parameters will be triggered by the variation of viewer interactions.

The two monitors will also have distinct characteristics in terms of the digital reflections- the project is open to the mixing of elements from the two screens, and also techniques of video feed manipulation.

The proposed interactive work will turn the gaze of the viewer upon itself, like the experiments of Gehr and the installations of Campus, and yet also reflect a negated image of viewer, which can change over time. The corridors also simulate a sense of space, where meaning-making can be triggered by certain elements. But we will let the investigation and the experiment determine if there will be elements at all- it might be just the slight manipulations of the reflection that will form the more interesting parameters of the interaction.

Bibliography

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Danino, N. and Maziere, M. eds. (2003) The Undercut Reader:Critical Writings on Artists’ Film and Video, London: Wallflower Press
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Gordon, C. ed. (1980), Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, Essex: Pearson Education Limited
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Carroll, N. (2006) Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of “Serene Velocity”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Internet Winter 2006), Vol 64 no. 1, p173-185. Available from: http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com/hww/results/getResults.jhtml?_DARGS=/hww/results/results_common.jhtml.7
Diaz, E. (2007) Peter Campus: Leslie Tonkonow Artworks+Projects, Modern Painters (Internet July/August 2007), Vol 19 no.6, p 80. Available from: http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com/hww/results/getResults.jhtml?_DARGS=/hww/results/results_common.jhtml.7 – record_2
Eamon, Christopher. Becoming Digital. Flash art (Internet March/April 2003) Issue 36, p80-83. Available from:
http://e-library.arts.ac.uk:3210/sfxlcl3?sid=HWW%3AARTFT;genre=article;pid=<an>200306003226022<%2Fan&#62;;aulast=Eamon;aufirst=Christopher;issn=0394-1493;title=Flash Art %28International Edition%29;stitle=Flash Art;atitle=Becoming Digital;vo
Fitzpatrick, A.D. (2007) Why Warhol Now? Afterimage (Internet March/April 2007), Vol 34 Issue 5, p6-9. Available from: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=afh&AN=24667078&site=ehost-live
Lageira, J; Pomerance, S. tr. (2006) Peter Campus: Le corps en point de vue / Peter Campus: The Body in View Parachute (Internet January/February/March 2006), no. 12, p16-39. Available from: http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com/hww/results/getResults.jhtml?_DARGS=/hww/results/results_common.jhtml.7 – record_3
Rush, M. Peter Campus at Leslie Tonkonow Art in America (Internet May 2005), Vol 93 no. 5, p168. Available from: http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com/hww/results/getResults.jhtml?_DARGS=/hww/results/results_common.jhtml.7 – record_4

Ernie Gehr

“The artifice of the film image stands in stark contrast to the ‘reality’ of the scene-one is highly conscious of the frame outlines-of what’s in and what’s out. The color is almost always ‘unreal’ -some artifact of photographic depiction. The spaces and sounds between, behind, and above the image comes through, we fill out the scene. The mind permeates the space and we become highly aware of the processes used for this inspection. While watching you become aware of your own space, your own patterns of movement. Common ground and individual experience are the poles here, and the active mind shuttles between them in the duration. The recalcitrant world, once it is depicted and articulated, can be peeled back like an onion, revealing constituent layers…”

-Daniel Eisenberg, “Some Notes on the Films of Ernie Gehr”

Gehr has always been unusually reticent about his life, and as a result we don’t know a good deal about how he came to make the earliest of his films currently in distribution; but, by the time he made Morning (1968), he was clearly a sophisticated filmmaker, capable of using the film experience as a means of exposing and considering specific elements of the mechanicall chemical apparatus of cinema. Morning is a brief (4′/-minute) visual interpretation of a portion of Gehr’s apartment at dawn: The end of a bed and the legs of someone presumably still sleeping and a cat are visible – but the personal elements are basically a context for the film’s focus on light. The camera points toward a window that opens onto an alley; by working with the single-framing function of the camera and the aperture, Gehr takes control of the light this window lets into the space: We can see – or seem to see – its actual substance.

-Scott MacdDonald (From UBU)

Peter Campus

In Three Transitions, Campus presents three introspective self-portraits that incorporate his dry humor. He begins with an image created by two cameras facing opposite sides of a paper wall and filming simultaneously. His back to one camera, Campus cuts through the paper. In the double image, it appears as if he is cutting through his back, which is both disconcerting and tongue-in-cheek. Campus then uses the “chroma-key effect” of superimposing one video image onto a similarly colored area of another image. He applies blue paint to his face, and during this process another image of himself is revealed; he then superimposes his image on a piece of blue paper, which he sets afire. As Three Transitions moves between deadpan humor and seeming self-destruction, Campus explores the limits of visual perception as a measure of reality.

Faces and masks have long been subjects in art, but, with the advent of television, these analytical discursive figures intimately entered our daily lives. Campus’s video art is concerned with exploring the subtle balance between remote but penetrating and formal, but unsettling, elements. (From UBU Website)

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Materiality in Immateriality

The Lines Between Us