Reflections on The Time Machine
Last night (September 18th, 2009) The Nightingale hosted Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat’s multi-media performance The Time Machine as part of the Chicago Underground Film Festival. It was hard to be one of the only people in the room that had a negative reaction to this piece.
There was much celebration and heavily lauded enthusiasm for this work for it’s apparent novelty and ingenuity. I, on the other hand, had trouble reconciling the “uniqueness” of this piece with the rich history of live interactive audio-visual work that has existed in Chicago for several years. Many stylistic traits of the piece seemed to be offered to the audience as singular inventions of the makers, without recognizing, or engaging with, the legacy of real-time performance. The piece begins with an electronically stylistic (if not campy) reading of the tools being used to conduct the experience; tools all too familiar to a new media or experimental audio performer (MaxMSP, oscillators mounted on CDs, an analog video mixer, joysticks). And although these tools were familiar to me (and perhaps to some others in the room), I felt that the majority of the audience, at the request/proposition of the performers, were received as unrecognizable devices that contained exotic possibilities to the experimental film community. In other words, the filmmakers had “found” the world of analog/digital image-making/manipulation and had decided it was an otherwise uncharted territory for experimentation.
This conceit resulted in a rehashing of film rhetoric into fetish technology. The preoccupation with the tools outweighed the limited range of their execution. Combined with what I thought to be ill-prepared, and lackluster staging of it’s chapters, the work seemed more reminiscent of a road-trip than a time warp; meandering through thoughts of spaces and places, recognizing it’s own transience only to reinforce the presence of the stage, and the spectacle of screen. After guiding us through suburban deserts and highway hotel wastelands, an interactive beach-ball (generating sound and image based on sensors) gets tossed into the audience, solidifying the extravaganza with a high-school graduation bravado that unravels the pseudo-philosophical rhetoric of digital narratives moments before.
The proposition of these tools being “custom” or outfitted specifically to the task of the piece (which some devices certainly were) seemed to pay only lip-service to performers like I <3 Presets (who performed at CUFF last year), and LoVid who have set a stage/standard of a new(ish) generation of audio-influenced video, and experimental time art. However, this history is not limited to makers of the last decade. The thread can easily be traced much further back to early video experiments and analog image processes developed/performed by Dan Sandin and Phil Morton (to just keep it local). The novelty of sound-image relationships can be observed as being typified by the 1972 Rutt-Etra synthesizer, used by the likes of the Valsulka’s, Nam June Paik, and Gary Hill.
This is not to say the new insights cannot be made into this medium/mode from fresh perspectives. I’m not convinced however that Bill and Sabine accomplished this, and in turn might have taken a step backward instead of forward (not to suggest that this history need an overarching progression/linearity). What was successful, and perhaps a harsh lesson to learn, was the willingness of audience members to receive work like this when framed within a film context. It has been a long-term project of mine to bridge the gap between New Media and Experimental Film/Video (part of the main goal of the Screen.Grab series), and to have Bill and Sabine accomplish this in their way was rewarding to see but hard to swallow.
I kept thinking, “what if this was somewhere else?” In other words, the mere fact that this piece took place in a cinema, located it within the vocabulary of it’s respective mediums. In doing so, the piece automatically gains credit where it might otherwise not be due. Perhaps when considering how to approach the future of this dialog, myself and collaborators might think about how to properly frame the discourse of our work through the lens (no pun intended) of the Experimental/Underground Film/Video community.
I realize that in some ways I’m being a party pooper, and I should be excited by what Bill and Sabine have hopefully initiated with this piece. I’d happily invite others to comment with their thoughts of the evening. I know I’m not in the majority with this critique, and I’d be very interested to hear how others received the work to continue this conversation.
Disintegrating Lands pt.1
Using Vue 7 and AE lo-res lossy rendering. Part of an ongoing series of animations using Vue7 landscape presets.
I’m currently thinking that this project might exist as a multi-part/multi-channel installation, but I haven’t thought further on this, plus I want to start considering sound (if any).
Temper Tantrum (or 24 Dancing Children)
Made with annoying sidebar flash advertisements in response to Tom Moody.
New-Old Formalism
Paul Sharits films, video recorded for television, archived to tape, converted to jw player, screen captured, exported to DV, uploaded to Youtube.
Video source via Interview with Paul Sharits by Gerald O’Grady (1976)(which is really quite fantastic).
8.21.09 Video
Made during a brief storm at night,
in an empty house,
with poorly painted walls.
8.14.09 8PM @ Nightingale:: ScreenGrab.1
Screen Grab.1
August 14th, 8PM
Nightingale Cinema
1084 North Milwaukee
Chicago IL, 60622
Screen Grab.1
Artists Included ::
Petra Cortright
Dennis Knopf
Oliver Laric
Guthrie Lonergan
Travess Smalley
Rick Silva
Organized by ::
Nicholas O’Brien
Screen Grab, a new series curated by jonCates and Nicholas O’Brien for Nightingale Cinema, aims to bring New Media Art to experimental cinema audiences in order to create dialog. Although the language doesn’t differ greatly between these camps, there still remains a dislocation. Screen Grab hopes that this process will create more overlap in the continuing discourse of moving image arts.
Some works in this program need little help with this process. Oliver Laric’s Versions, for instance, is as much a nod towards Chris Marker as it to 4chan (a message board that serves as a meme breeding ground). Travess Smalley’s Liquify can certainly be connected to durational films without much hesitation, not to mention its direct like with psychedelic cinema of the 60s and 70s; Photoshop is the new overhead projector. Petra Cortright’s Dragon_Ball_P also fuses the psychedelic with technological. In utilizing the campy preset effects of webcam software, Cortright creates a lo-fi dance that seems like a Skype ritual ceremony. Dennis Knopf’s Office Party borrows from flicker films and the superimposition that occurs through the use of this cinema device. However, Knopf’s work shows what was once sensational (i.e. Paul Sherit’s T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G), might have become bland (corporate office portraits). Guthrie Lenrgan’s 3 Notes, on the other hand, references the emerging hybridity that is found in digital environments. The youtube collage of sound in this piece exemplifies the subtle juxtapositions that can occur through online communities. Likewise, Rick Silva (releasing previous projects under the pseudonym Abe Linkoln) uses glitch aesthetics in AntlersWifi to contemplate the abundance of blog culture. He uses these spaces as a medium for calculated data dumping, noise compacting, and saturation zones where he crafts a new cinema dialog of image corruption and sonic dissonance.
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Screen Grab.1 as well as being the inaugural show for the series, will also raise funds for an upcoming collaborative project called Expressive Media Express that will occur during Chicago Artists Month in October. This initiative is designed to encourage creative use of digital tools and simultaneously showcase Chicago’s energetic New Media community to youth in the city. By creating a weekend-long interactive slate of programs – including workshops, a screening, and a historical timeline installation of Digital Media Arts in Chicago and abroad – organizers Jon Cates, Christy LeMaster, and Nicholas O’Brien hope to provide software and hardware skills that put the basic tools of digital media in the hands of kids at an early stage and reposition the conversation away from technophobic fear and into playful discovery.
nowarez v.01
Collaboration software project with Mark Beasley called nowarez. The software aims to implement GUI gestures that complicate user interface and complacent point-and-click culture. Made w/ wxPython for OSX (but technically should work on any OS)
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