| Marc Lafia on Sat, 27 Jul 2002 16:37:52 +0200 (CEST) |
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| <nettime> In search of a Poetics of The Spatialization of the Moving Image (part 2) |
Thanks to those of you who've posted me. In search of a Poetics of the Spatialization of the Moving Image Marc Lafia (part 2) Two other organizing principles that are spatial and temporal at the same time would be Lorna Simpson¹s piece where there are 27 flat screen 13 inch monitors on a wall, 6 columns by 4 rows, and in the last 3 rows 3 additional monitors on the top row. A woman¹s 24 hour day is presented to us, in blocks of 6 hours, each screen playing an edited or condensed version of 15 minutes then moving on to the next six hours until it progresses through the 24 hour day, from wake to sleep this way we see the simultaneity of past present and future as we see the young woman simultaneously presented along a continuum of seemingly continuous or real time in consistent actions or contiguous action. This is someone¹s life over the course of 24 hours, brushing teeth, putting on make-up, getting on the train, at the work place, lunch, evening and so forth. Here we are not inside the event of time but time stands outside the events and frames them. Another work is by the artist, Kutlog Ataman organizing 4 screens, each set in the middle of a room facing the other, in a sort of circle, each screen showing us the personal story of a woman, during a period of the 4 seasons, and much of the subject matter dealing with gardening. Time here is circular; time is spatially distributed but not by diurnal rhythm as the work above but sidereal time, calendrical time. It is time that organizes the space here time is distributed in space, horizontally, laterally, time is again a presence, it is the being in time we are seeing or in Ataman¹s work, time is a space, a particular duration. In Eija-Lisa Ahtila¹s 3 screen film she uses 3 screens to show us a traditional narrative, with a voice over, about a woman in a country house who feels she is hearing sounds and her car has driven off on its own. This ghost story is shown where a wide shot is on screen A, a closer shot on Screen B and a cut away on Screen C there is a uniform temporal dimension going on in the film this is distinct from the distribution of varied times in the different spaces of the image in the Lorna Simpson work. Here montage is lateral, with elision, compression and the traditional grammar of filmic montage. The work could easily have been a single screen work. Isaac Julian in a way weds three screens together in a high production post cinema scope look, and like Ahtila shows us simultaneous actions from a shared moment in time, at times going from close-up to wide shots, from 1 or simultaneous shots of shared time he is not pushing time forwards or back perhaps in one moment in the close-up of the young man who is spanked by his father, while there is a dance party at the house, we have a traditional filmic flashback, more a psychological moment than a structured temporal moment that complicates the time in the distribution of space. Like Eija-Lisa Ahtila, Julien's work is more the distribution of shots over a wider surface of image his work comes closest to the composite of three becoming one, from one image filling the very wide screen to individual shots of a scene distributed over 3 screens. But like Attila¹s work this is about the distribution of image in space not the distribution of time in space In fact Delueze¹s distinction between the movement image and the time image can be used here to understand this distinction the distribution of movement over space or the distribution of time or presentation of time itself becoming. A number of distributed dispersed cinema pieces such as Chantal Ackerman¹s and Pascale Marthine Tayou¹s are not tightly organized by time, but are various portraits placed simultaneously next to each other. Ackerman's has a preface or beginning shot in LA displayed on one monitor in one room and then a dispersal of images from varied locations in Mexico on a great many monitors one can walk by and through in another room. These works are simply loops assigned to various screens, running from 4 to 6 to 10 to 20 minutes, all in synch and then start again these are static fixed works. I say that to distinguish them from algorithmic work which I will get into in the next dispatch. Fiona Tan¹s work is also very interesting presenting an indexing of people from the former East Berlin she narrates her struggle with ordering the index what is the sense of it, she asks but her formal style, very systematic, is in the Becher school, the objectivist school, where the recorded subject expresses themselves to a neutral camera, to a mechanical instrument each subject accorded the same photographic treatment, the same lighting, the same non context camera is locked down, always head on, where subjects present themselves to camera, dead pan, not inflected by camera, by angle, or as little as possible the aesthetic here is additive, is the consistency of repetition, repetition and difference, which renders the subject as one of many, one of the self same, yet different, in fact the photographic is indexical. This is database cinema but a flat file database. So let¹s take a step back, one we have the grammar of how things are organized in space as opposed to time which we can say traditional one screen cinema concerns itself with that is, the ordering of time. As image is organized in space each time element becomes an object in space. It has a certain mass in the sense that Robert Smithson talks about Donald Judd. Kinda of, but not quite. In fact an entire aesthetic lies in the notion of video as mass complicating time and fixity, we¹ll get to this soon. The next thing then is, what¹s the organizing grammar of the various objects in space? In Fiona Tan¹s work, it is simply the index, the inventory of people recorded and presented the same way, people from East Berlin from varied professions, prostitutes to mothers, cooks to scientists, hairdressers, one group after another she never tells us anything about these people, she just shows us these people and talks about the difficulty she is having presenting and organizing them. The point here is that the camera, her camera eye purports to be used objectively and interestingly such objectivity¹ reveals an obstinate subjectivity where as the piece by Marthine on Africa is an expressive camera and as such the class of objects presented on various screens have to be read from their representations and not from how they are represented or from both aspects. In Marthine¹s work, the arrangement of monitors at first gives off an impression of disparate streams of video as the camera recording is expressive as well the materials diverse, as well as the varied size and stackings of monitors in space as they have a disorderly semblance as such, parsing the relationships is more difficult but then again in some sense more open, more improvisational in keeping with the way the work was recorded in the first instance. Here is time as a set of particulars. But the particulars are an organizing schema that involves geography, place is the organizing motif in the materials presented. Just as in Fiona Tan¹s work, place stands outside the work and frames it. What we find in this new spatial cinema or spatial imaging is the evisceration of the impact of the cut, the cut is not incisive, particular the cut, the elemental instantiation or building block of montage seems to be of general interest to many of these works (too general of a statement, yes, but it is somewhat appropriate). Sequencing is the addition of shots, of informational material. (Sherin Neshat, of course, is keen on montage but much of the other works not.) Much of this work is about individual loops running and operating in and to their own time. And many of them not even loops but sequences. Montage¹s keen elaboration of the cut is diffused and what we have is varied durations of time, each distinct, more a sequence with out privileging or harnessing the impact of the cut - we have movements, durations, becomings of time and movements on screens. In many instances the movement of shots, their alterations as they occur on individual screens may or need not be seen as montage or as privileged or concentrated, as opposed to image following image in sequences, in which one may see collisions, coincidence or just chance operations held together by an organizational frame work of an exterior time or place moving images as they appear in screens or screen to screen is another kind of logic or an additional schema within which traditional decoupage is subsumed. But this logic or system is often imposed from an outside. And so the works relegate them selves to another criteria perhaps. That is they work on other terms. This is further complicated such works as Joan Jonas, where props or sculptural elements are involved, in which video figures as an element in an environment or theatrical setting. The logic of camera, of style of camera, of shots is not as much a concern or an element investigated to a heightened degree in these works (contrast this with Doug Aitkens work electric earth¹ with the exception of Isaac Julien) nor projection as it defines space (see Chrissie Iles essay referred to in part 1) but rather the distribution of images in space and the relationship or not between the spaces can might read these images as dispersed in contiguous space, while at the same time distinct, metabolizing their own time, in a sense as single channels, or do they come into dialogue with each other or is it both here in is a much more specific and very interesting area that has been written about at length and in very precise terms (see Peter Weibel¹s excellent essay, Narrated Theory: Multiple Projection and Multiple Narration (Past and Future)¹ in New Screen Media, Cinema/Art/Narrative¹ published by BFI¹. I will get into this later on. Movement in the cinema or imaging from one screen to two or more screens radically changes the way we can talk about cinema, narrative, imaging, representation - because two or more images in space constantly put in tension, in dialogue (or not) the other (because in some sense there are not others, but multiples, multiplicities, assemblages, machines more below) This two or more at the same time takes away from the privileging of one to the simultaneity (or not) of the two, in turn where the authority undisputed in one track of image now becomes problemitized and must be read spatially as much as temporally which is quite new (of course Abel Gance¹s early film, Napoleon¹ and all the 60¹s films where here first see Weibel¹s essay, and much other writings on experimental cinema including. Expanded Cinema¹) Multiple screens, spatially distributed (and how wide is this distribution, where does it end and begin) pushes time based media into something much more than arranging time as we know it. It is time using the strategies of space were we saw a number of art pieces that were indexical, hierarchical systems with or without out various kinds of ordering other than, all these things are in this space which was most characteristic of Documenta 11 -. Indeed, for some time artists have delighted in giving us volumes of information, volumes of things (Jason Rhoades) databases splayed out and we the audience are given the task of ordering this voluminous ness in space. In this sense time-based media have become time-based objects in space, flickerings of light, dispersed here and there. Rather than scattering papers or objects on the floor we now have so many monitors and video materials as time based objects in space objects that are durations of time in their purest sense, time objects that occupy space and as loops may never end this proliferation of the object ness of time creates a new mise-en-scene, one no longer needing to resolve or organize itself in the one space of one film strip or projection but rather as the organization of elements in space. Whereas cross cutting once added a certain tension to cinema, the alternating between shots of things apart getting closer, the alternation of shots of disparate scenes at some point colliding or coming together in the same space this rhythm often used in suspense, mystery, action sequences is altered in the spatial display of images where the tension of occupying one space, one screen evaporates this one screen over taken and occupied by two actions coming together - this tension of scenes happening subsequent to each other now happens in parallel (just as we zap channels) that is what was once off-screen space is now on one or more screens as such the collision of space let¹s say in a western gun fight or action scene where cross cutting leads to the eventuality of all action collapsing into one space a space where the resolution of who controls that space is answered in a paroxysm of violence this new spatial imaging is not montage or cinema but is something else. In the space of digital imaging this new sense of duration in space takes us away from montage. Duration and space times and spaces. Duration as a particularity of a unit as opposed to the over all envelope or structure in which time base images can be looked at. When cinema (I use cinema and not time-based media here, as much of the work at Documenta 11 was informed by cinema) becomes practiced in multiple screens, multiple windows, a new level of discourse moves us from time as considered in montage to the notion of duration and event. Perhaps all this work can be seen as the metabolism of time. Time being particular to its own event. Not the time of montage, not cinema time but something else. Not the sequencing of shots but the being time of image. Where there is no limit to the amount of screens, all things can be shown, and perhaps all duration. For those of you who didn¹t see this work, imagine all camera shots of Dancer in the Dark¹ being displayed on their own monitors. During the filming of certain sequences we have been told that Von Triers shot with over a hundred and sixty different cameras. Or imagine, Run Lola Run¹, as three films playing side by side, or Citizen Kane, each interview candidates sequence playing on separate monitors. Or a film of pure behaviors such as, Julian Donkey-Boy¹ by Harmony Korine distributed on multiple screens. To see beyond montage, temporal or spatial, we can in a sense return to cinema¹s beginning, as imaging returns or emerges again as a machine of recording, as an instrument of visioning, but now with numerous strategies of ordering and projection or display - as an instrument of recording, which is now electronic, computational, ubiquitous, constant and everywhere, and as an instrument of display, constant and everywhere, it proliferates and mutates any kind of single syntactical regime, exceeding montage. Such new and emerging orderings and readings are inexhaustible and full of reserves. Perhaps it¹s a move from montage to optics, from syntax to pervasive imaging, from a particular order, to the potentialities of orderings, re-orderings, un-orderings, traversings, interpenetrations, molecular units, becomings - event-centered rather than structural. Perhaps it is Deleuze, whose notion of the stammering, a foreign language, the middle, deterritorilization, heterogeneous assemblages, who best puts forward the beginnings (or middle) of a conceptual language for the afterbirth of the instrument of moving images and its history as cinema - the now pervasive synthetic pan visioning of tele-optics in which we live. It might be said that the regime of recording and playback constituent of the cinema, of film (shooting frames per second, the chemical processing of film and the language of montage), has for a long time already been dispersed and exceeded by the pervasive instruments of imaging, from inside the body, from distant places, instant and ubiquitous (Virilio, the panoptical and tele-technologies, over exposure, the purely mediatic trans-appearance of the real space of living beings¹) where the image of the world has become the imaging of the world as such the whole concept and project of montage or cinema as the place from which to speak of these new forms, new regimes of image is wholly inadequate and a looking at the moment in a backwards fashion. The pervasiveness of tele-optics, telematics, computation, and the digital have so amplified and saturated what it is to be imaged, imaging, recording and playback, that montage as a very notion, as a logics of ordering, might seem as writing in verse a particular stylistic, a repertoire of tropes now exceeded by so many traversings and overlays montage might better be seen as strata, a remnant, like the Latin of the middle ages that has long been superceded by an argot, a patois so common, we can¹t find a name for it. It is so everywhere we can¹t even see it as we move between and amongst it and even speak it, as it speaks us this plateau, these plateaus, these fields these becomings Deleuze¹s lines and circuits, leaps rather than constructing axiomatics¹. Deleuze seems to me to offer us a way to see possible languages of image in space-time. Deleuze writes about states of things¹ and utterances¹. There are states of things, states of bodies (bodies interpenetrate, mix together, transmit affects to one another), but also utterances¹, regimes of utterances: signs are organized in a new way, new formulations appear, a new style for new gestures (the emblems which individualize the knight, the formulas of oaths, the system of declarations¹, even of love, etc.). Utterances no less than states of things are components and cog-wheels in assemblages.¹ ³Event which stretches out or contract, a becoming in the infinitive¹. There are so many visual regimes now interspersed in varied durations, military as Jordan Crandal has so well visualized, surveillance (Julia Scherr), home video, projections and recordings everywhere (so many artists, technical applications here to mention, medical, military, tele-com, etc.) Two things we can say with certainty of the cinema One, its outstanding characteristic has been one screen, one fixed playback system. Hence montage. The delivery vehicle of the cinema, of moving pictures, became characteristically different when first shown on television with commercials and then through video tape and DVD with the VCR a screening takes on a very different characteristic, in some sense it already constitutes sampling one can stop at any moment, watch over the course of days, replay scenes, play different audio over the film as backdrop and so forth (so many artists have re-enacted, spliced themselves into films, played them back with different scores, etc.) Many DVD¹s show directors cuts, expanded versions, storyboards, interviews and so forth. All of these things changed the experience of viewing film, changed montage, situating films under another regime that led to sampling, remixing, appropriation, looping, resequencing, restaging (Christian Marclay¹s recent musical piece, Sampling¹, Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon, Marc Lafia, Antonioni¹ piece and many many more works can be cited here.) Two, cinema allowed us to recognize ourselves. As Godard states and is quoted in, The Cinema Alone¹ the essay, Introduction to the Mysteries of Cinema¹, 1985-2000 (Michael Temple and James Williams), There¹s a desire for images, to the extent that they¹re the only things that satisfied the notion of identity which must have become fundamental towards the end of the nineteenth century. [] There is, I think, a need for identity, a need to be recognized. [] We are grateful to the world for recognizing us and for allowing us to recognize ourselves, and I think that, precisely, until the camps, cinema constituted the identities of nations and peoples (who were more or less organized into nations), and then afterwards the feeling faded away. [] For a long time, cinema represented the possibility of belonging to a nation, yet remaining oneself in that nation. All that has disappeared.¹ Identification now becomes identifying, the machine of vision, an invasive instrument. As Virilio has written, The much-vaunted globalization requires that we all observe each other and compare ourselves with one another on a continual basis.¹ Just see the films, Videodrome¹, Virtue¹ and The Matrix¹ to sense that we live on beyond film, beyond montage and in recording and it¹s not confined to one screen. The most beautiful reflection and enactment is the exquisite scene in David Lynch¹s Muholland Drive¹ SILENCIO. As Mcluhan has well stated every new media, restates, replays the one it supercedes (cinema, the theatre television, the cinema, the web, computation and telematics - everything) and so we read the new media through the one that preceded it. And in some sense the same might be said of video being read as sculpture, as being conceived as sculpture or being a response to television and the televisual or even cinema. Below I briefly, too briefly put forward some of the characteristics of this new imaging, some possibilities to read and author in the space. Many of the following are not or need not be particular to multiple screens or distributed images. A couple of things there is a distinction between the bounded ness of multiple windows in a single frame and multiple projections or monitors or displays separate in space, each framed singularly. Multiple windows and multiple screens may share characteristics but they are already something different and are perceived and operate differently because of this distinction. The distinctions and the affects therein become more and more apparent in enumerating the following. Part three forthcoming algorithmic imaging and grammars or tropes of distributed time-based media. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net