Experimental and Expanded Animation New Perspectives and Practices

Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image

Edited by Vicky Smith & Nicky Hamlyn Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image

Series Editors Kim Knowles Aberystwyth University Aberystwyth, UK

Jonathan Walley Department of Cinema Denison University Granville, OH, USA Existing outside the boundaries of mainstream cinema, the feld of experimental flm and artists’ moving image presents a radical challenge not only to the conventions of that cinema but also to the social and cultural norms it represents. In offering alternative ways of seeing and experiencing the world, it brings to the fore different visions and dissenting voices. In recent years, scholarship in this area has moved from a marginal to a more central position as it comes to bear upon critical topics such as medium specifcity, ontology, the future of cinema, changes in cinematic exhibition and the complex interrelationships between moving image technology, aesthetics, discourses, and institutions. This book series stakes out exciting new directions for the study of alternative flm practice—from the black box to the white cube, from flm to digital, crossing continents and disciplines, and developing fresh theoretical insights and revised histories. Although employing the terms ‘experimental flm’ and ‘artists moving image’, we see these as interconnected practices and seek to interrogate the crossovers and spaces between different kinds of oppositional flmmaking. We invite proposals on any aspect of non-mainstream moving image practice, which may take the form of monographs, edited collections, and artists’ writings both historical and contemporary. We are interested in expanding the scope of scholarship in this area, and therefore welcome proposals with an interdisciplinary and intermedial focus, as well as studies of female and minority voices. We also particularly welcome proposals that move beyond the West, opening up space for the discussion of Latin American, African and Asian perspectives.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15817 Vicky Smith · Nicky Hamlyn Editors Experimental and Expanded Animation

New Perspectives and Practices Editors Vicky Smith Nicky Hamlyn University for the Creative Arts University for the Creative Arts Farnham, Canterbury, UK Canterbury, UK

and

School of Communication Royal College of Art London, UK

ISSN 2523-7527 ISSN 2523-7535 (electronic) Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image ISBN 978-3-319-73872-7 ISBN 978-3-319-73873-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73873-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018937877

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

Cover credit: ‘33 Frames Per Foot’ (2013) by Vicky Smith

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Foreword

On Animation This book makes its appearance at a time when, more than ever before, it is possible to question what exactly is animation? The employment of CGI in many Hollywood feature flms has irrevocably blurred the boundary between animation and live action. This, in a way, returns us to cinema’s frst decades, when there were no defnitions to concern us; the attraction of the medium was ‘things in motion’, be it Louis Lumière’s wall being demolished and rebuilding itself, or Georges Méliès’s multiple self-portraits singing on a musical stave, or Émil Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) of white-lines-on-black seamlessly morphing from one image to another. In the following decades, animation largely took its own path, and became a branch of cinema generally subservient to the live-action mainstream, no longer ‘the main attraction’, but with the compensation of being more open to individual expression. The early animators (Cohl and Winsor McKay) would have appre- ciated the French term for animation, Le Dessin Animé, the animated drawing. Better than bald ‘animation’, it captures the sense that the drawn-image should be totally and constantly in motion; no ‘dead’ inanimate parts. After his frst fully animated Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), McKay himself struggled to maintain this dynamic, and invented many of the tricks that would be used by later animators to minimize the labour involved, (cels, cycles of drawings, etc.)—in effect, accepting the ‘killing’ of part of the image. Hollywood animators largely accepted

v vi Foreword these compromises; the story’s the thing, although there are moments in early Disney and Fleischer where gloriously the whole image is involved in motion. But these are rare. To see the ‘struggle for full animation’ (for ‘life’) continued, one turns to the parallel history of experimental animation and the work of artist animators Walter Ruttmann, Len Lye, Lotte Reiniger, Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker, Robert Breer, Caroline Leaf, et al. These animators demonstrated that anything material could be animated—wet paint, the flmstrip, silhouettes, a screen of pins, postcards, sand; and so began the process of medium-expansion. Such animation is labour intensive. It takes time, but ‘time’ can add its own enrichments. The tortuously long process of Yuriy Norshteyn making his (unfnished) The Overcoat (1981–) comes to mind, or the digressive reverie of Susan Pitt’s Asparagus (1979), which must have taken years of labour, or Fischli and Weiss’s live-action-as-animation Der Lauf der Dinge (1987), the latter two of which are discussed here. All beneft from ideas developed en route … originating in the intellectual curiosity that is every artist’s starting-point. Once questions are asked, boundaries fall away and the imagination expands. So, as this anthology put together by two outstanding practitioners clearly demonstrates, animation continues to sustain the excitement of cinema’s frst decades.

London, UK David Curtis

David Curtis was Film Offcer at the Arts Council of Great Britain, then established the British Artists Film & Video Study Collection at Central St Martins. He founded the ANIMATE funding programme. He is author of Experimental Cinema (1970) and A History of Artists Film & Video in Britain (2007). Contents

Introduction 1 Vicky Smith and Nicky Hamlyn

Lines and Interruptions in Experimental Film and Video 19 Simon Payne

Performing the Margins of the New 37 Dirk de Bruyn

Twenty-First Century Flicker: Jodie Mack, Benedict Drew and Sebastian Buerkner 61 Barnaby Dicker

Experimental Time-Lapse Animation and the Manifestation of Change and Agency in Objects 79 Vicky Smith

Analogon: Of a World Already Animated 103 Sean Cubitt

Emptiness Is Not ‘Nothing’: Space and Experimental 3D CGI Animation 119 Alex Jukes

vii viii Contents

Inanimation: The Film Loop Performances of Bruce McClure 145 Nicky Hamlyn

Re-splitting, De-synchronizing, Re-animating: (E)motion, Neo-spectacle and Innocence in the Film Works of John Stezaker 163 Paul Wells

Cut to Cute: Fact, Form, and Feeling in Digital Animation 183 Johanna Gosse

The Animated Female Body, Feminism(s) and ‘Mushi’ 203 Suzanne Buchan

“Coming to Life” and Intermediality in the Tableaux Vivants in Magic Mirror (Pucill, 2013) and Confessions to the Mirror (Pucill, 2016) 231 Sarah Pucill

Siting Animation: The Affect of Place 257 Birgitta Hosea

Index 279 Notes on Contributors

Prof. Dr. Suzanne Buchan is Professor of Animation Aesthetics at Middlesex University London in the Faculty of Arts and Creative Media. Her research addresses a notably wide concept of ‘pure’ and digital animation as a pervasive moving image form across a range of platforms, media and disciplines. Editor of animation: an interdisciplinary journal (Sage), her publications include many chapters and essays, Pervasive Animation (ed, 2013) and The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom (2011). Also active as a curator, most recently ‘Animated Wonderworlds/Animierte Wunderwelten’ (Museum of Design Zurich 2015–16). Prof. Sean Cubitt is Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London and Honorary Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne. His publications include The Cinema Effect, Ecomedia, The Practice of Light: Genealogies of Visual Media and Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technology. Dr. Dirk de Bruyn is Associate Professor of Screen and Design at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. He has made numerous experimental, documentary and animation flms, videos and performance and installation work over the last 45 years and written and curated extensively in these areas of practice. His experimental flm work and performances have screened internationally, with retrospectives at Punto Y Raya and Melbourne International Animation Festivals in 2016.

ix x Notes on Contributors

Dr. Barnaby Dicker is a researcher, lecturer, artist-flmmaker and curator. His research revolves around conceptual and material innovations in and through graphic technologies and arts, including cinematography and photography, with particular emphasis on avant-guard practices. He sits on the editorial board of Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal and is a member of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded International Research Network ‘Film and the Other Arts: Intermediality, Medium Specifcity, Creativity.’ Barnaby has taught at the Royal College of Art, University of South Wales, University for the Creative Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London, Kingston School of Art, and Cardiff School of Art and Design. He is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College, London. Dr. Johanna Gosse is a historian of modern & contemporary art spe- cializing in experimental flm and media. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In 2016, she received an Arts Writers Grant for her book project on the artist Ray Johnson. Her writing has been published in journals such as Camera Obscura, Radical History Review, Art Journal, Art and the Public Sphere, Moving Image Review & Art Journal, and the Journal of Black Mountain College Studies, exhibition catalogues such as Bruce Conner: It’s All True (SFMoMA and MoMA, 2016), and edited collections including Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015) and Artists’ Moving Image in Britain since 1989 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). Prof. Nicky Hamlyn is professor of Experimental Film at University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury, UK, and lecturer in Communication at the RCA, London. His flm and video work is available on three DVD compilations from LUX, RGB and Film Gallery, Paris. His books include Film Art Phenomena (BFI, 2003) and Kurt Kren: Structural Films (Intellect, 2016), co-edited with Al Rees and Simon Payne. Dr. Birgitta Hosea is a London-based artist and Reader in Moving Image at the University for the Creative Arts. Her work, which has been collected for the Tate Britain’s archive (2012) and Centre d’Art Contemporain, Paris (2014), explores presence, time, affect and digital materiality and ranges from short flm to video installation and animated performance art through to drawing on paper. Most recently (2017), her Notes on CONTRIBUTORS xi projects have been shown in the Venice Biennale, the Karachi Biennale and the Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art. She has also taught in Azerbaijan, USA, China, Romania, Austria and Sweden, was Head of Animation at the Royal College of Art and MA Character Animation at Central Saint Martins. Dr. Alex Jukes’ animation concerns fne art and experimental image making. His practice research challenges what might be considered a dominant, largely commercial aesthetic relating to the feld of 3D computer generated (CG) animation and seeks to develop alternative approaches to its creation and presentation. His Ph.D. at the Royal College of Art concerned the study of ‘space’ as material within the production of 3-D CGI. Alex is Programme Leader for BA Animation at Edge Hill University. Dr. Simon Payne is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. His video work has been shown at Tate Modern, Tate Britain, The Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, the Serpentine and Whitechapel Galleries, Anthology Film Archives and various flm festivals including Edinburgh, London and Rotterdam. He also programmes flms and has written widely on experimental flm and video, most recently editing the book Kurt Kren: Structural Films with Al Rees and Nicky Hamlyn. Dr. Sarah Pucill’s 16mm flms, which stretch nearly three decades, have received public funding, have shown in galleries, museums and cinemas world-wide and won awards at Festivals internationally. Her frst feature length flm Magic Mirror (2013), premiered at Tate Modern, toured internationally with LUX and was exhibited with photographs from the flm at The Nunnery Gallery 2014. The sequel flm Confessions To the Mirror (2016) premiered at London Film Festival and has screened at leading museum and gallery venues in London (National Portrait Gallery, White Cube Gallery) and internationally (Creteil International Film Festival, Alchemy Film Festival). Her work is archived and distributed through leading international distributors including LUX, The British Film Institute (BFI), and Light Cone Paris. She is a Reader in Fine Art Film at University of Westminster and is an active member of the Research Centre CREAM. Dr. Vicky Smith is an experimental animator and writer. Her flms have screened at international festivals and galleries including Antimatter, xii Notes on Contributors

Canada; SF MoMA; Anthology, NY; Tates’ Britain and Modern; The Nunnery Gallery, London; Animate! Parts and Labour touring and on C4 TV. Smith co-edited ‘boiling’: journal of experimental animation (1996), and has written widely on animation, including in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Sequence, Artist Film and Video Studies 2.0. online. She lectures in the School of Fine Art & Photography at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. Prof. Paul Wells is Director of the Animation Academy, Loughborough University, and Chair of the Association of British Animation Collections. He has published widely in Animation Studies and is an established screenwriter and director in Film, TV, Radio and Theatre. He is completing a book on Screenwriting For Animation and has curated a major exhibition of flm and art, The Beautiful Frame: Animation and Sport, opening at the National Football Museum, Manchester UK, and touring. List of Figures

Lines and Interruptions in Experimental Film and Video Fig. 1 LIA, Fly Us to the Moons (2017) 24 Fig. 2 Anthony McCall, Between You and I (2006). Commissioned by PEER. Installation at the Round Chapel, London (Photo Hugo Glendenning) 26 Fig. 3 Documentation of Jennifer Nightingale making Crocheting a Line (2017) (Photo Simon Payne) 32 Fig. 4 Juliana Borinski and Pierre-Laurent Cassière, Sine (digital/analog converter) (2006) 35 Performing the Margins of the New Fig. 1 AFW Members Group, Film Baton (2013) 41 Fig. 2 Richard Tuohy, Dot Matrix (2013) 41 Fig. 3 Paul Rodgers, Dome (2001) 55 Twenty-First Century Flicker: Jodie Mack, Benedict Drew and Sebastian Buerkner Fig. 1 Jodie Mack, Phenakistoscopes for Round and Round— Phenakistoscope Phun (2012) 68 Fig. 2 Benedict Drew, a sequence of consecutive frames from NOT HAPPY (2014) 70 Fig. 3 Sebastian Buerkner, frames from Album Matter (2010) 70 Experimental Time-Lapse Animation and the Manifestation of Change and Agency in Objects Fig. 1 The ground warps and seems to touch the lens (Inger Lise Hansen, Proximity (2006). Photo Inger Lise Hansen) 88

xiii xiv List of Figures

Fig. 2 The camera tracking device that controls the division of space and time in Proximity (Production still. Photo Morten Barker) 90 Fig. 3 Lens fare and rain produce a sequin effect (Nicky Hamlyn, Gasometers 3 (2015). Photo Nicky Hamlyn) 96 Fig. 4 From a close view the structure flls the frame, appearing to be fattened against the lens (Gasometers 3. Photo Nicky Hamlyn) 97 Emptiness Is Not ‘Nothing’: Space and Experimental 3D CGI Animation Fig. 1 Ryoichi Kurokawa, unfold (2016) 129 Fig. 2 Alex Jukes, Thelwall-1 (2016): The flm introduces ideas relating to the diffuse edge and indistinct boundaries—The stills here show a transition within the flm from defned detail with clear spatial cues to an image with dissolved spatial references 135 Fig. 3 Alex Jukes, Thelwall-2 (2016) 136 Inanimation: The Film Loop Performances of Bruce McClure Fig. 1 Guy Sherwin, Cycles #3 (1972–2003) (Photo Guy Sherwin) 148 Fig. 2 Bruce McClure, Effects pedals and rheostats set-up (Photo Robin Martin) 153 Fig. 3 Filmstrips and projector gate inserts (Photo Bruce McClure) 158 Fig. 4 Superimposed gate projection. Bruce McClure, Unnamed Complement (2007) (Photo Robin Martin) 159 Cut to Cute: Fact, Form, and Feeling in Digital Animation Fig. 1 Peggy Ahwesh, The Lessons of War (2015) 192 Fig. 2 Peggy Ahwesh, The Lessons of War (2015) 196 The Animated Female Body, Feminism(s) and ‘Mushi’ Fig. 1 Installation view displaying intimacy of human scale and proximity of a gallery visitor in the space. Tabaimo, Public ConVENience (2006). The Parasol Unit, London, 2010. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York 214 Fig. 2 Composite image of installation view with a passer-by watching and detail of one of the projections (lower right). Rose Bond, Intra Muros (2008), Utrecht Stadhuis, Holland. Courtesy of Rose Bond 217 Fig. 3 Apocalyptic fow of rubbish, destruction and human and animal forms. Marina Zurkow, Slurb (2009). Courtesy of bitforms gallery and the artist 220 Fig. 4 Miwa Matreyek in silhouette interacting with projected animation as she performs Dreaming of Lucid Living (2007) on a stage in front of a seated audience. Image provided by artist 224 List of FIGURES xv

“Coming to Life” and Intermediality in the Tableaux Vivants in Magic Mirror (Pucill, 2013) and Confessions to the Mirror (Pucill, 2016) Fig. 1 ‘Still Life: Twigs and Snow’, flm still from Sarah Pucill, Confessions to the Mirror (2016) 240 Fig. 2 ‘Two Bald Heads’, flm still from Sarah Pucill, Magic Mirror (2013) 241 Fig. 3 ‘Bluebeard’s Wife’, flm still from Magic Mirror 245 Fig. 4 ‘Multi-Masked Magician’, flm still from Magic Mirror 248 Siting Animation: The Affect of Place Fig. 1 Rose Bond, CCBA (2016). Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, Portland, OR. Private collection: Rose Bond 261 Fig. 2 Xue Yuwen, Mountain Daily (2015). Itoshima village, Japan. Private collection: Xue Yuwen 264 Fig. 3 Birgitta Hosea, Out There in the Dark (2008). Lethaby Gallery, London. Private collection: Birgitta Hosea 268 Introduction

Vicky Smith and Nicky Hamlyn

This project began partly with the realization that although the feld of experimental animation has received attention through exhibitions, festivals, symposia, funding schemes, projects and journals, there hadn’t been a book devoted to the area since Robert Russett and Cecile Starr’s 1976 Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art. Solely dedicated to the subject, their publication provided a starting point for our own project. Where a catalyst for Russett and Starr was their perception that the feld of experimental animation had widened during the late twentieth century (Russett and Starr 1976, 17), we discovered that a growth area of twenty-frst century experimental animation is one which crosses over into the domain of Expanded Cinema, hence the title and focus of our project.

V. Smith (*) School of Fine Art and Photography, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK e-mail: [email protected] N. Hamlyn University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury, UK e-mail: [email protected] N. Hamlyn School of Communication, Royal College of Art, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 1 V. Smith and N. Hamlyn (eds.), Experimental and Expanded Animation, Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73873-4_1 2 V. SMITH AND N. HAMLYN

We defne experimental animation as forms of animation that are as far from conventional cartoons as possible. While elliptical narrative and fgurative animation might also be highly experimental, our emphasis is on non-generic, non-narrative animation. Our enquiry is concerned with practice that relates to the single frame and the single screen, alongside the expanding potential of animation practices no longer confned either to the screen or the frame. Much of the expanded animation discussed here dispenses entirely with the frame, and that leads to the question— what of animation remains? Perhaps at this level, animation refers more strongly to a making process such as that used by Bruce McClure, whose work is discussed in this volume and whose flmstrips are made simply by bleaching away the emulsion from selected frames to create rhythmic patterns of black and white. In this sense, his work is far from generic, mostly narrative forms of animation, even though his making processes overlap with the frame-by-frame procedures of conventional animation. The notion of expanded animation applies in numerous further ways, from the combination of animation with installation and multi-screen live ‘making’, sound-generating visuals for instance, to the work of artists who combine animation techniques with performance, using both the body and/or multi-projector set-ups. This work is often exhibited as installation, in locations such as music venues, project and artist-run spaces, temporarily vacant buildings, etc., which can give the site of the work greater signifcance. Our project asks how animation can be re- defned when it is no longer articulated through the single screen alone, and what quality of perceptual engagement is called for. Finally, animation is understood to be expanded when traditional or commercial practices are exposed to new critical methodologies and re-workings—ones that are with increasing frequency referring to broader questions around performance, the social, political-documentary and so on. We editors are ourselves practitioners of forms of expanded experimental practice: Vicky Smith in her scratched rotoscoped flms, and performances in which she creates animated flmstrips that are immediately projected for their audience, and in which the sound is synaesthetic or live; and Nicky Hamlyn in his ongoing series of four-projector 16 mm loop performance works and his use of stop-motion techniques. We both work in arts universities (UCA Canterbury and Farnham) and to some extent this book is an extension of our respective PhD research and practice, and teaching work. Possibly a category that was not recognized prior to 1976, this volume includes contributions from several research-active animator pedagogues, who theorize their own and INTRODUCTION 3 others’ practices, employing new methodological frameworks and offering insider perspectives on the subject. It had been our intention to bring matters up to date, to trace developments and continuities since the 1970s and provide some kind of survey. Things have turned out rather differently in the end, and perhaps inevitably, given the incalculable explosion of all kinds of animation everywhere. While this proliferation of practice has not been matched by theory, a few titles do exist, including: Undercut: Animation, Issue 13 (LFMC 1984–1985); Smith’s Boiling: Experimental Animation journal (LFMC 1996) and The Animate! Book: Rethinking Animation (Lux 2006). Since 2007, the UK agency Animate Projects has continued to nurture practice and discourse in the feld, and includes many essays on the subject on its website and in exhibition catalogues, such as Animate OPEN: Parts and Labour, Experiments in Animation (2015). Lily Husbands’ essay in this catalogue is important in developing an understanding of current directions of experimental animation as forming common ground between experimental animation and craft, in that both pursue a fercely independent enquiry that is not compromised by the industrial practices of mainstream production, but where the visibility of labour testifes to the close authorial connection between artist and artefact (Husbands 2015, 66–67). Edwin Rostron began Edge of Frame in 2013 as an online blog, addressing his concern that experimental animation is typically seen or discussed within the context of industrial animation. This enquiry developed into an eclectic screening series, extending to a London- based seminar and screening weekend, Edges: An Animation Seminar (2016). The problem raised by Rostron is indicative of divisions existing not merely between art and commerce (an ever-changing situation, with animation as an increasing presence in the gallery) but also between art and academia. This defcit of discussion on the subject at an academic level is evident in an examination of the papers and themes at the main international scholarly forum for animation: the Society for Animation Studies. In 2015, the SAS annual conference theme Beyond the Frame suggested a high level of analysis of expanded models of animation. Yet only one out of the thirty-six panels focused solely around experimental, abstract or expanded animation, a pau- city that does not indicate a bias on the part of conference organiz- ers, but rather refects the sense that scholars are not encouraged to research this topic. 4 V. SMITH AND N. HAMLYN

In the USA, Chris Gehman and Steve Reinke’s The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema (2005), an anthology of perspectives from artists using animation, had less of a focus on expanded experimental forms. The USA also hosts the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation, run by Alexander Stewart and Lilli Carré, the only festival devoted exclusively to the area. The pervasiveness of animated phenomena, and the impossibility of capturing or summarizing its multifarious forms and manifestations were addressed in Suzanne Buchan’s important conference (Tate Modern, 2004) and subsequent book Pervasive Animation (2013). This volume contains a similarly wide-ranging set of essays—indeed, some of the authors are common to Buchan’s project and our own—but this new anthology, while similarly not attempting to be a chronological or otherwise systematic approach to developments over the last forty years, is different in that the focus is more on specifc aspects of practice, in which philosophical and aesthetic issues are teased out and considered. Our method was to invite a number of authors—current key international researchers, scholars, practitioners, curators and animation advocates—who we felt could contribute something interesting, to write about who or what they wanted, but with the brief to address expanded forms of experimental animation. This is a niche area, but diverse in its range of practices, and so the scope of the book refects this in terms of its historical and critical perspectives and the inter-discipli- nary approaches that are employed. Fundamental questions concerning drawing and the line are addressed, broadening out to topics such as the inter-medial, post-humanism, the real, fakeness and fabrication, causa- tion, new forms of synthetic space, ecology, critical re-workings of cartoons, process as narrative and how experimental, expanded animation speaks to and is informed by other disciplines such as aesthetics, phenomenology, feminism and critical theory.

A Context for Experimental Animation Russett and Starr’s project was catalysed by what they considered to be a proliferation of experimental animation during the 1970s and their intention to foster greater understanding and appreciation of this feld. As they found, several conditions led to this burgeoning, including wider socio-cultural developments such as the women’s liberation movement, the inclusion of animation in the art school curriculum and INTRODUCTION 5 the fourishing of conditions for exhibiting such work in small art venues, such as Cinema 16 (Russett and Starr 1976, 100). Animated flm is ‘experimental’ when it pursues aesthetic enquiry, is creatively daring, innovative and original and where artists are dedicated to their practice or have personalized and customized their equipment and techniques (9). Russett fnds that the possibility to manipulate time and space in animation has particular relevance in 1976 because of the multi-faceted character of reality of this period (24). Throughout, experimental animation is identifed as a single-frame practice; that aspects of flm material and cinema technology are privileged over discussion of narrative aspects of animation points to the commonality of enquiry between experimental animation and experimental flm. Russett and Starr propose the 1920s pioneering European abstract animators, and their shared concerns with the abstract art forms of music, poetry and painting, to be a major historical precedent of 1970s experimental animation. In works such as these, concerns with rhythm, motion and form are common to those found in the wider arts, and these formal concerns are discussed in relation to contemporary animators in this volume (Dicker, Payne). Russett observes that work of this latter period ranges from the basic and minimal, manually made animated imagery by, for example, Robert Breer and Larry Jordan, through to that being infuenced by highly complex devices and new computer imaging, such as work by the Whitney brothers and Lillian Schwartz (Russett and Starr 1976, 31). It is also the case in our book, forty years on, that experimental animation practice ranges from a minimal use of technology through to high-end 3D CG and internet animation. As an example of these extremes of technological engagement, the method of montaging and collaging of found materials appears as part of the discussion of two artists in our book, yet while the method is shared, one works with old found flms (John Stezaker, whose works are analysed by Paul Wells), while the other (Peggy Ahwesh, who is interviewed by Johanna Gosse) rips and collages from 3D CG popular imaging. Russett also speculates on directions that future experimental animation will take and how new technologies such as 3D, high defnition and holograms will emerge and shape the creative process. With the ‘long term interest in simulation of real space and volumetric phenomena, it is reasonable to assume that some kind of artistic three- dimensional medium will eventually be developed’ (Russett and Starr 1976, 30). Russett is prescient in identifying the drive to realism that 6 V. SMITH AND N. HAMLYN has determined the direction of the animation industry and in which he anticipates the construction of 3D CG volume as creating more realistic digital renderings of the world. He forecasts many technologies that are commonplace in animation production today, and that are discussed in our book. But where Russett focuses on what is technically possible with digital animation, contributors here, including Alex Jukes, shift the enquiry in a philosophical direction by questioning how our encounter with the non-naturalistic spaces fabricated with 3D CGI programmes, by artists such as Chris Cornish and Ryoichi Kurokawa, prompts us to reconsider our apprehension of the actual world.

A Context for Expanded Cinema Some claim that the Expanded Cinema movement originated with Gene Youngblood’s eponymously titled book, a vision that has been inter- preted across time frames of 1967 to 2007 as embracing two core sensibilities. Both invested in a utopian vision, that of a global public and collective ownership of the earth (Marchessault and Lord 2007) and the notion that an expansion of consciousness would be reached through the broadening of cinematic technologies (Renan 1967, 227). Youngblood’s objective was to raise the motion picture to the stature of the wider arts, using flm in expanded ways as a means to reject the fxities of industry standardization. Through the use of multiple projectors, flms made in the live event and/or in combination with other media, Expanded Cinema made it possible to overthrow the manner of serial production typical of single-screen cinema, such that artwork differed with every exhibition (Renan 1967). In our book, the promise that art can deliver a utopian ideal is raised in Sean Cubitt’s analysis of Fischli and Weiss’s Der Lauf der Dinge (1987) and Blu’s Muto (2008), which he reads as animated analogies of a longing to reunite with nature and to copy its agencies. In these flms, objects exist in an absurd and unpredictable relationship with one another, seemingly ungoverned by human intervention and indifferent to human witness. Youngblood sought to balance technology, mind and nature at the level of the cosmic, and in this respect indicated a key difference between the utopian expectations of Expanded Cinema in the 1960s and the more recent hopes invested in technology. For Cubitt and others writing in our book, problems of human/ nature/technology relations are brought to the terrestrial level, as expression of a yearning to achieve ecology on the material plane, while INTRODUCTION 7

Simon Payne’s discussion of a forward-looking momentum in the lines of vector graphics cautions against what he sees as its idealistic trajectory. Renan identifes the gravitation towards inter-media practice, whereby art crosses different media, as a response to image proliferation (Renan 1967, 228) and in which mixed-media versions of onstage actions with their flmed counterparts might be ‘interlocked’ (236). Andrew V. Uroskie illuminates this aesthetic as one in which discrete media forms are enhanced through their operation with others. With reference to Stan VanDerBeek’s 1965 Movie Mural and Move Movies, Uroskie recounts how slowed down, close-up flmic imagery of dancers’ feet and hands projected across the stage crosses the paths of the onstage performers, creating an ‘interpenetration’ of live and mediated activity (Uroskie 2014, 165–168). It seems that the radical breakthrough that VanDerBeek’s conjoining of different media achieved is the disruption of a hierarchy. Whereas flm was previously seen as a mere backdrop to the main dance event, in Move Movies it gains equal stature to accompanying art forms. Uroskie suggests that what drew VanDerBeek to work across forms of animation and Expanded Cinema was his fascination with movement generally (as is also the case for Len Lye’s preoccupation with kinetics). Indeed, VanDerBeek’s techniques in single-screen animation are particularly fuid, employing free-form drawing directly under the camera and collaging of found imagery to describe themes of acceleration—the arms race, the cold war and ‘media saturation as bombard- ment’ (Bartlett 2011)—and these concerns with movement carry across to his work in Expanded Cinema. In this respect, VanDerBeek bridges experimental animation and Expanded Cinema, and to some he is its founder with his work in ‘intermedia’, ‘stressing rather than subverting the specifc differential qualities of the media combined’ (Bartlett 2011, 50). Intermedia practice and theory continue to be a central facet of Expanded Cinema and experimental animation. Where VanDerBeek’s methods are thought to be groundbreaking in the interlocking of differential qualities of flm/dance and flm/theatre (Renan 1967; Bartlett 2011), in our book Sarah Pucill elaborates on the aesthetic possibilities for the inter-medial. She argues that, counter to the tendencies of the post-medium digital era whereby medium specifcities are subsumed into one, inter-media theory and practice emphasize the relationship between media, stressing the individual qualities of each. Pucill discusses her inter-medial approach to re-staging and re-animating Claude Cahun’s 8 V. SMITH AND N. HAMLYN portrait photography in her flms Confessions to the Mirror (2016) and Magic Mirror (2013), arguing that the interlocking of media in the tableau vivant effects a crossing between live action and animation, between the media of photography and flm, and also between time zones of past and present. As with VanDerBeek’s projection of the past of the flmed dance movement onto the present of the live event, the collapsing of the past of the static photographic space with the present of its live re- enactment is a metaphor for the coming to movement and into life that is animation: the tableau vivant enhances the distinction between these states. Uroskie explains that Youngblood’s publication on Expanded Cinema also coincided with the novelty of early computer imaging and because Youngblood’s notion of expansion was poorly defned, a misconception that Expanded Cinema was primarily one of technological innovation developed (Uroskie 2014). With reference to Jonas Mekas’s 1965 Movie Journal reviews, Al Rees (2011) casts a wider net on our understanding of Expanded Cinema as a practice that is often technically quite rudimentary. As Rees observes, by including direct-on-flmstrip works such as Mothlight, Mekas posits Expanded Cinema actually as one of reduction, in the sense that by removing components of the cine apparatus, flm is freed from its condition of reproduction and brought closer to the sin- gularity of painting. With this, a further understanding of the embrace of Expanded Cinema comes into view: with the handmade flm original, the projected flm is never the same twice—it changes with each screening, especially in examples where original material is projected, as in the case of Emma Hart’s Skin Film (three versions, 2005–2007), in which skin, which was transferred to clear celluloid using adhesive tape, is gradually eaten by the microbes contained within it, so that the image eventually disappears, and James Holcombe’s Hair in the Gate (n.d.), briefy discussed in this volume by Nicky Hamlyn. Such variation with each exhibition overthrows serial production in ways that Renan (1967) characterized as Expanded Cinema. Furthermore, the cultivation of live matter on the flmstrip constitutes an extremely direct, Povera-like and technically minimalist approach to cinema. Elwes elaborates on Expanded Cinema’s ‘minimalist aesthetic’, citing a contradiction pointed out by Chrissie Iles, that cinema is expanded through its contraction (Elwes 2015). One further understanding of Expanded Cinema as a technically contracted practice is manifested in the rapid single-frame experiments of Gregory Markopolous and Robert Breer, in which ficker and motion are located in the physiology of the viewer, INTRODUCTION 9 produced through the act of spectatorship (Rees 2011, 12). In this regard, Mekas’s understanding of a contracted Expanded Cinema reso- nates with sensibilities articulated in our book whereby the phenomenon of ficker is foregrounded in much contemporary practice. Flicker is intan- gible, existing therefore only in the present moment of its apprehension, and specifc to a time and place: in this regard, it is a prime example of the locatable historical context that is central to the experience of Expanded Cinema. Reading contemporary experimental ficker animation through Rosalind Krauss’s argument that throbbing movement exists outside of and destabilizes form, posing a threat to the modernist art canon, Barnaby Dicker relates the ficker’s perceptual limits to a libidinal economy and links it to other cinematic phenomena that work on the nervous symptom, such as the pulse that is generated by early optical toys. Through the analysis of manifestations of ficker as it is occurring today in experimental single-screen flms by Jodie Mack, Benedict Drew and Sebastian Buerkner, Dicker is able to claim that proto-cinematography endures in the cinematic forms of the present day.

Bridging Experimental Animation and Expanded Cinema We have roughly mapped the situation of early Expanded Cinema in the USA. In the meantime, a great deal of 1970s UK Expanded Cinema had different priorities, employing relatively low technology and veering away from the notion of an altered consciousness that might be brought about through new and multiple technologies, aiming instead towards Expanded Cinema as an analytic event. The collective Filmaktion (Lis Rhodes, Malcolm Le Grice, Gill Eatherley, Annabel Nicolson, William Raban), for example, worked with the flm projector in relation to simple actions and commonplace tools to provoke questions about time, space, distance, duration, materials, arbitrary systems (flm stock) and givens (concrete space). The differently nuanced Expanded Cinema of the UK is acknowledged by Mekas, who suggests that VanDerBeek’s use of multi-screen collage imagery is gratuitous in contrast to the two screen works of Gill Eatherley, whose use of both screens to compare different stages in flm production is essential in bringing the act of making into the present of the viewing (Mekas 2011, 72). Further out- lining core differences between the psychedelically orientated Expanded Cinema of the USA and the analytic method of the UK version, Malcolm Le Grice discusses the signifcance of projection as the primary area of 10 V. SMITH AND N. HAMLYN flm reality. Where commercial flm presents illusions of time and space that do not relate to the one that the audience occupy while watching it, Expanded Cinema seeks to collapse that distance by combining production and exhibition into one event (Le Grice 1977, 143). What is apparent through works by Filmaktion and Le Grice is that Expanded Cinema is an extension of the broader materialist aims pursued by experimental flmmakers, only taking expanded forms (Elwes 2015). A further area of common ground that unites Expanded Cinema and experimental animation is that of abstraction. In the same overall context of abstract flm, Le Grice analyses tendencies in works by those who are primarily animators (Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye) and those working primarily with live action, such as Stan Brakhage. Film is abstract in the sense that the imagery might carry no real-world referent (Viking Eggeling through to US West Coast computer-generated work by Jordan Belson and the Whitneys) but also extends to imagery that does capture the trace of the concrete, albeit in ways that obliterate or set at a remove the plastic referent through processes of, for example, reproduction. This abstracting process is evident in flms such as his own Little Dog for Roger (1967), a flm that explores the possibilities for image transformation through printing techniques (Le Grice 1977). Overall then, many crossover areas exist between Expanded Cinema, experimental animation and flm and the wider arts. These form the foundations of our own project.

The Growth in Expanded Cinema and the Themes Explored Here Possibly one of the most signifcant developments in experimental animation from 1976 to the present is Russett and Starr’s ambition that animation be ranked alongside the visual arts. Today, this has been real- ized, with animation installation proliferating in the context of Expanded Cinema, performance and live ‘making’, exhibited in galleries, public sites and online. Al Rees provides some explanation for the growth of Expanded Cinema during the twenty-frst century. The structurally informed expanded flm by Filmaktion and others during the 1970s was followed by a resurgence in expanded work in the late 1990s by the Young British Artists, whose work often engaged with narrative cinema, differing therefore from the Expanded Cinema of the 1970s. Relocated INTRODUCTION 11 to the space of the more popular galleries, this new work came to dominate the perception of Expanded Cinema (Rees 2011). The move away from the confnes of cinema and the increased exposure of Expanded Cinema to a wider audience, including what would be the next generation of experimental flmmakers, mobilized younger makers of structural flm to rediscover the continuing Expanded Cinema practices of artists such as Bruce McClure, Sylvie Simon, Guy Sherwin and Lyn Loo. This has included the recent practice of re-performing original works by Sherwin and others by the Australian flmmaking group Teaching and Learning Cinema. In this volume, Dirk de Bruyn, also based in Australia, draws on a wide range of ideas, including colour theories and the writings of P. Adams Sitney, to consider questions of the specifcity of a medium that was and continues to be important to the expanded live cinema of Sally Golding, Guy Sherwin, Ken Jacobs and others. With reference to Vilem Flusser’s ‘technical’ image, in which digital forms have lost all historical context, de Bruyn proposes that the Expanded Cinema of Sherwin et al. restores the specifcity of the origins of the imagery they use. Hamlyn also references Expanded Cinema that has carried across earlier and more recent times in his study of the performances of Bruce McClure. He fnds that, through paring it down to its barest essentials, McClure is able to question cinema’s foundations with an analytic rigour that is distinctive amidst the current proliferation of work where arsenals of projectors are used to quite sensational effect. McClure’s minimalist practice is one instance of the so-called contracted cinema that Elwes remarked upon (Elwes 2015). Theodor Adorno observed that the technological basis of cinema condemns it to a mere mute recording function, thereby ruling it out as an art medium. Hamlyn suggests that it is through actually adapting and in some respects extending cinema’s technical capacity that McClure is able to build a meta-cinematic language, so transforming the status of flm into one that is also art, thereby complicating Adorno’s position. Our current period is yet more technologically divergent than it was in 1976, when Russett and Starr remarked upon the then breadth of means for creating experimental animation. It is worth referring briefy once more to Russett’s understanding that in 1976, experimental single-frame practice is ideally suited for communicating the multi-faceted character of reality of this period. His view is usefully paralleled by those who point to the diversifcation of political and media landscapes 12 V. SMITH AND N. HAMLYN as drivers of Expanded Cinema today. Marchessault observes that, currently, media are becoming more ubiquitous, yet are owned by fewer and fewer proprietors, pressing a greater urgency to situate such ‘fuid’ media in histories and political economies (Marchessault and Lord 2007). The impact of media diversifcation as a growth factor of animation is refected upon in this volume. Johanna Gosse’s interview with Peggy Ahwesh opens up precisely this area, as to how animation engages in the politics of fuid media. Ahwesh is a flmmaker who has recently taken up animation because of the capacities it offers to invent and manipulate the extant world in ways that resonate with our current political landscape and its post-truth agenda. Gosse delivers insights into the artist’s ration- ale for using 3D CG animation material drawn from Taiwanese news agencies, in an attempt to tackle how such footage can deal adequately with complex political events. Ahwesh is one among several flmmaker-artists turning towards appropriation of industry cartoons (another example is The Pure Necessity [2016] by David Claerbout, who has frequently used found photographs in his work) and indicating a trend that paradoxically inverts the common practice whereby commerce has raided the avant-garde. Gosse locates in Ahwesh’s work several issues that have long been pertinent to animation, chiefy how its association with ‘cuteness’ and its failure to point to a trace has given it less authority as an index and less credibility than live-action flm. Yet, as Gosse and Ahwesh point out, CGI seems uniquely suited for the purposes of propaganda and misinformation. It is becoming less improbable in this climate of so-called fake news that animation as an art of invention is recruited to the service of reporting facts. Alex Jukes also engages with the implication of media proliferation in terms of how VR and CG shape our experience and expectations of space. Ultimately, animated images have always been fantasized and fabricated, yet have often related to objects that exist within the world more than the space that surrounds them. The particular conundrum of how space itself must become objectifed by the 3D CG animator pertains to Jukes’s enquiry into the way CGI software has been used by Karl Sims, Chris Cornish and others to create new kinds of animated environments, in which space is not a neutral setting or background, but is actively shaped as a palpable material component of the flm. Duncan White reiterates the idea that Expanded Cinema has developed in response to the diversifcation of media and its increased role in everyday life (White 2011). White and others delineate two main tracks INTRODUCTION 13 along which media diversify and proliferate—the more recent creative engagement with interactive technologies and the ongoing practice with analogue flm. Such tendencies also divide debate in our book, as evi- denced in the Jukes and Gosse chapters on digital media and the debate on matters relating to the analogical, as discussed by Payne and Smith. Scholars have sought explanations as to why artists continue to work with flm during this period, when digital is easy to use and offers high-defnition imagery (Elwes 2015). Several chapters here analyse how analogue media continue to best meet the ‘requirements of the project’, most suited to represent the ideas that are under investigation. The specifc use of analogue media is crucial to the aesthetic—for example, in Hamlyn’s Gasometers, where the interaction between grain movement and the liveness generated by the physical movement of flm through the projector, juxtaposed with areas of stillness and movement within the image, are crucial to the experience. Smith engages a ‘New Materialist’ methodology to refect upon analogue and animation’s capacity to make visible the energies in objects that otherwise appear to be inert. She fnds that through his hand processing of celluloid, Hamlyn draws analogies between analogue media and nineteenth and twentieth-century sources of fuel, in that both possess great mass and bulk and both are now being replaced with less visible technologies of storage and distribution. Hamlyn’s time-lapse flm itself refuses to conceal and bears on its surface the once common industrial processes of wetness and chemical traces entailed in its own production: the flmic plasticity makes this contact with matter possible in ways that the digital does not. The cutting and joining together of pieces of celluloid in editing uses the same tools—a blade and glue—as are required for the technique of collage assembled from paper. Mekas found that while VanDerBeek collaged materials across a number of screens, it would have been equally effective had he combined all these fragments into one (Mekas 2011, 72). Paul Wells considers the process of the artist John Stezaker, who is mostly well known for his disturbing photographic collages made from found postcards. Stezaker has made a number of short flms using the collage method of combining images from different sources, but instead of joining these parts into one whole single image, he uses the speed of the projected single frame to simulate a collage effect. The rapid cutting together of single frames, each bearing different images, creates the impression that they are collaged together. Yet this impression is actually occurring merely at the optical and not the physical level, the quick 14 V. SMITH AND N. HAMLYN cutting causing persistence of vision and a fusion of imagery from one frame to the next, locating the notion of the expanded at the level of the eye and chiming with Jonas Mekas’s ideas of cinema, outlined in his 1964 essay On the Expanding Eye. As Wells argues, the editing together of things not ordinarily seen to be in relationship produces associations that border on narrative, albeit in an extremely condensed form. Wells demonstrates that experimental animation does not have to be exclusive of storytelling, and that the very processes the artist deploys are a part of such narratives. Simon Payne also presents a case for the specifcity of celluloid practice and its unique relationship to physical contact in his study of artists who work with the flmic possibilities for recording traces. Payne produces a kind of mini-history of the line as it is foundational to animation, from Eggeling to Lye to the present day, drawing on Brownian Motion, Bergson’s theories of time and Tim Ingold’s important book Lines (2007), among other writings. He fnds examples of Expanded Cinema that rethink flm’s condition as a divisible series of frames, approaching it rather as a strip or thread of continuous movement. While Bergson disapproved of cinema’s capacity to replicate movement, due to the constant breaking of time into discrete moments in the form of frames, when flm is treated as a strip it is restored to a constant fow. Perversely, the absolute of animation, its frame-by-frame stop-motion structure, is defed by the frameless flm. While both methods may be accepted as animation, the latter, while achieving continuous, genuine, as opposed to illusionistic movement, does so at the cost of the loss of stable, perspectival representation, as in the case of Jennifer Nightingale’s pinhole flms. Regarding the voice and practice of women, there were fewer female animators in 1976 than there are today, although Russett and Starr endeavoured to frame this work ‘about being female’ (Russett and Starr 1976, 19) through the inclusion of now canonical animators Lotte Reiniger, Mary Ellen Bute and also Rose Bond, whose practice spans the period from 1976 to 2018 and ranges from single screen to her more recent expanded animation installation. The consensus during the 1980s was that women were attracted to work with animation because the rostrum table offered a refuge of sorts from the glare of production, easing the diffculty of expressing personal—and therefore political—often troubling issues (Pilling 1992). This mode of private practice was in contrast to women working in Expanded Cinema during a slightly earlier period, such as Filmaktion member Nicolson, who was so animated in INTRODUCTION 15 her live onstage performance of creative-destructive processes of projection and sewing that her piece Reel Time can be considered as an expanded animation. Today, as our contributors discuss, female animators continue to explore interiority and concerns relating to the female experience of the domestic, sexuality, the body and rights over reproduction, but are emboldened to translate this work into expanded models of animation, exhibited often on a large and highly public scale. As Birgitta Hosea indicates in her analysis of how such work positions and activates its audience, Bond’s extension into expanded animation poses an interesting development and levelling across Expanded Cinema and experimental animation. Having practised on a small scale through to huge and historically signifcant public sites internationally, Bond’s work testifes to the developing confdence of women working with animation, as well as the currently enhanced visibility of the form and the greater acceptance of the seriousness and socio/political relevance of this once lesser art. Suzanne Buchan turns to post-feminist theory to further the line of thought that female animators are working with mechanisms of expanded animation as a means of enlarging the personal into the political. Mapping shifting animated representations of inside/outside space, from women’s 1970s animation to the present, she refutes the claim, made by McRobbie et al., that post-feminism has abandoned feminist issues, arguing that contemporary female animators continue to negoti- ate feminist issues, but on a larger scale. The shift from a personal-as- political standpoint to that of a post-feminist politics of the everyday is equated by Buchan to the shift away from the cinema and towards the typically public spaces of installation.

Summary In bringing experimental animation and Expanded Cinema together, we hope, through the writings in this collection, to develop understanding of this crossover area. Certain of the fndings were to be expected, such as the many continuities existing between experimental animation of 1976 and the present: the ongoing inter-media engagement with wider art forms; the continued attraction to live drawing/performance; the crossovers between experimental flm and animation; and the enquiry into discovering new possibilities with old media as well as pushing forth investigation into the digital realm. 16 V. SMITH AND N. HAMLYN

The breadth of responses by contributors has also resulted in some unforeseen fndings—for instance, that female artists today, though eco- nomical in their means and working, for example, with found footage, are highly ambitious in their translation of animation into Expanded Cinema/installation. Ahwesh is one such, in her re-working of found cartoons that were not originally intended for contemplation by an art audience. By enlarging this material, which would ordinarily be viewed on handheld devices, into huge foor-to-ceiling projections, she holds up the banality and tragedy of the everyday to critical and aesthetic scrutiny. As animation expands, it also proves to be a medium through which to engage with certain challenges of our times. Always a medium of invention, today animated fabrications are of a piece with the farcical and unthinkable absurdities of our age. Animation expands when put to the task of giving form to otherwise invisible entities, forces and mutations, when it imagines places outside of the human senses but not beyond our reach, such as the seabed and a planet void of human activity. Animators also fnd possibilities for expanding the form through a creative resistance to media acceleration. By approaching animation as contracted, using methods of media re-invention and the re-invigoration of decayed and obsolete things, a reversal of the trend towards proliferation is effected. The more utopian understanding of Expanded Cinema hailed by Youngblood as refecting an altering of consciousness is today informing a particular, ethically driven relationship to making, through explicitly reduced means and negligible dependency on industry. This approach can be regarded with reference to craft theory as increasingly political, because the strong connection between artist and artefact ensures that the effort of labour remains visible and that materials are varied, thus instantiating alternatives to industry standardization and homogenization (Husbands 2015, 66–67).

References Bartlett, Mark. 2011. Socialimagestics and the Visual Acupuncture of Stan Vanderbeek’s Expanded Cinema. In Expanded Cinema: Art Performance and Film, ed. S. Ball, D. Curtis, A. L. Rees, and D. White, 50–61. London: Tate Publishing. Buchan, Suzanne (ed.). 2013. Pervasive Animation. London: Routledge. Cook, Benjamin, and Gary Thomas (eds.). 2006. The Animate! Book: Rethinking Animation. London: Lux Press. INTRODUCTION 17

Elwes, Catherine. 2015. Installation and the Moving Image. London and New York: Wallfower Press. Gehman, Chris, and Steve Reinke (eds.). 2005. The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema. Canada: Yyz Books. Harcombe, David, and Vicky Smith (eds.). 1996. Boiling: Experimental Animation Journal. London: LFMC. Husbands, Lilly. 2015. Craft’s Critique: Artisanal Animation in the Digital Age. In Parts and Labour Exhibition Catalogue. London: Animate. Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines. London: Routledge. Le Grice, Malcolm. 1977. Abstract Film and Beyond. London: Studio Vista. Marchessault, Janine, and Susan Lord. 2007. Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press. Mekas, Jonas. 2011. Expanded Cinema. Extracts from Village Voice Movie Journal. In Expanded Cinema: Art Performance and Film, ed. S. Ball, D. Curtis, A. L. Rees, and D. White, 72–79. London: Tate Publishing. Pilling, Jayne. 1992. Women and Animation: A Compendium. London: BFI. Rees, A. L. 2011. A History of Experimental Film and Video, 2nd ed. London: BFI. Renan, Sheldon. 1967. The Underground Film: An Introduction to Its Development in America. London: Studio Vista. Russett, Robert, and Cecile Starr (eds.). 1976. Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art. Boston, MA: Da Capo Press Inc. Uroskie, V. Andrew. 2014. Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Post War Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. White, Duncan. 2011. Echoing Beyond Spaces of Gallery Cinema. In Expanded Cinema: Art Performance and Film, ed. S. Ball, D. Curtis, A. L. Rees, and D. White. London: Tate Publishing. Lines and Interruptions in Experimental Film and Video

Simon Payne

As a time-based medium, cinema might be thought of as linear, but also segmented because the time-base involves frames (whether flm frames or digital frames) and the intervals between those frames. It is the medium’s segmentation that allows for incremental differences and the potential impression of movement that defnes the primary cinematic experience, particularly in the case of animation, which is the original moving-image medium. Given that animation often begins with drawing, whether by hand or the manipulation of vector graphics that underpin computer- generated imagery, lines are emblematic. Continuous lines suggest a medium that is conceived as continuous, despite its segmentation; broken lines refer to segmentation as key to the medium and to the underlying technology. This essay is an account of numerous experimental flms and videos—or experimental animations—in which lines and linearity are defning characteristics. The focus is on contemporary works but the essay also lights on a range of historical precedents, offering a critical perspective on various concepts and aspirations associated with linear aesthetics.

S. Payne (*) Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected]

Movement and Vectors In an account of a historic debate between Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein in the early 1920s, Jimena Canales (2015) has described how the philosopher and the physicist saw cinematic time and motion in terms of two wholly different worldviews. Bergson’s philosophy drew on his experience of the ‘movies’, which would have been particularly fickery in the early 1900s, and he found their mechanical reproduction of movement wanting. In contrast, Einstein’s theoretical physics chimed with a branch of scientifc experimental flms that illustrated his account of time as an ‘independent variable’, giving rise to quite counterintuitive deductions. In Creative Evolution, Bergson described the technology of cinema as analogous to the shortcomings in the ‘mechanism of our ordinary knowledge’, including perception, intellection and language (Bergson 1998, 306). Because the impression of movement in flm follows from the succession of separate, individual frames, Bergson argued that the technology failed to represent the continuous nature of movement in reality. As such, the defciency of cinema was a ready metaphor for the defciency of ordinary thought, which Bergson saw as attending to a ‘succession of stable views’ of given forms, qualities or actions. According to Bergson, knowledge and the intellect missed the essence of ‘becoming’, the process of fundamentally indivisible change that defned reality. In contrast to Bergson, Einstein thought movement and time could be defned perfectly well through analogy with cinema. Time could be measured at discrete intervals and according to Einstein it was an objective phenomenon that was subject to the theory of relativity and hence even reversible. Cinema came to the help here, particularly because Einstein could illustrate the idea of reversible time with recourse to a branch of scientifc flms of Brownian motion (Canales 2015, 287). Named after the observations of botanist Robert Brown in 1827, Brownian motion is the lively, random movement of dust-like particles suspended in liquids or gases: pollen on the surface of water or droplets that hover in the steam of a boiling kettle, for example. For Einstein, Brownian motion captured on flm represented a useful illustration of time and movement as potentially reversible:

Imagine that one has flmed the Brownian movement of a particle and kept the images in the correct chronological order with respect to the LINES AND INTERRUPTIONS IN EXPERIMENTAL FILM AND VIDEO 21

neighbouring images; only they forgot to note if the correct temporal order went from A to Z, or, well, from Z to A. The shrewdest man in the world would not be able to fnd the arrow of time from that material. (Canales 2015, 287)

Plenty of flms have rearranged the ordinary temporal fow of events, from the Lumières’ Démolition d’un mur (1896) through to examples in more recent narrative cinema, such as Run Lola Run (1998) or Memento (2000), where incidents are arranged out of sequence as fashbacks or pre- monitions. But the events in these flms are immediately or at least eventually represented as having been reversed or rearranged, whereas Einstein’s thought experiment regarding the Brownian motion flm leaves chronology unresolved. Einstein’s example chimes with a history of other ‘experimental’ flms and videos in which the impression of movement is a feature of abstract cinematic structures, sequences and compositions, which either challenge cinema’s relationship to representation or circumvent it altogether. Coincidentally, a recent exhibition of Nicky Hamlyn’s flms used the title Brownian Motion (The Film Gallery, Paris, 2015) referring to the impression of movement that is visible in the random distribution of grain in a projected flm print. The effect is nothing to do with representation per se but rather the eye’s predisposition towards seeing motion. Gilles Deleuze went back to Bergson’s account of cinema for the purposes of his flm-philosophy books Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. In many respects, Deleuze shares the same aspirations as Bergson, in expressing a vitalist philosophy of becoming, but he brings back cinema as a model for philosophical thought. While Bergson considered cinema as handicapped in its representation of movement, because the technology relies on the segmentation of time, Deleuze put that fact to one side. For the later philosopher, the impression of movement was overriding. Cinema is characterised as the ‘movement-image’: an ‘intermediate image to which movement is not appended or added but an immediate given’ (1992, 2). The insistence on seeing cinema in terms of the ‘movement-image’ represents a dedication to theorising it as a popular medium in given terms, not merely as ‘the perfected apparatus of the oldest illusion but, on the contrary, the organ for perfecting the new reality’ (1992, 8). One might argue that cinema, as popularly conceived, is nothing if not an organ for perfecting reality; the codes and conventions of narrative cinema are broadly premised on realism. The point for Deleuze, however, was that understanding cinema might equate to the conception of reality in general. 22 S. PAYNE

In contrast to Deleuze’s account of cinema, which is premised on live-action flms and the representation of movement, Sean Cubitt fnds the archetypal movement-image in animation. It is exemplifed by the hand-drawn line in Émile Cohl’s imaginative animation Fantasmagorie (1908), in which a series of fgures, objects and scenes continually transform through metamorphosis. The animated line is a manifestation of the ‘vector’ for Cubitt, a feature of cinema that he describes in The Cinema Effect (2004). Here, cinema in the digital age is given a new spin, with its aesthetics characterised in terms of the pixel, the cut and the vector. The pixel is the smallest independent unit of cinema, replac- ing the flm frame; the cut is the interval between those units; while the vector is cinema’s forward momentum. The vector corresponds with the ‘movement-image’ and the path of the arrow of time, and it is Cubitt’s means of designating cinema’s projected potential. Plotted in terms of being and becoming, the pixel, cut and vector are described as follows:

Mathematically, the pixel is perfectly symmetrical: the same in any direction. The cut breaks that symmetry by establishing the principle of being: what has become. The cut is teleological determined by its ending. The vector breaks it on a different axis, treating what is as the beginning of a becoming. The vector is eschatological: its future is open governed only by hope. (Cubitt 2004, 80)

The idea is developed in Cubitt’s The Practice of Light (2014), where the aesthetic associated with the vector is ‘our orientation to the future that already reads the present as sheer motion, sheer change, the fear- ful allure of the unknowable that cannot be eradicated by any machinery of governance’ (263). Cubitt’s account of the vector advocates an optimistic, utopian vision for cinema, but that sentence strikes a more cautionary note it seems, especially in light of the ascendancy of populist right-wing politics. How much one might invest in cinema conceived in such terms is open to question.

Linear Cinema Besides being one of the earliest canonical experimental flms, Viking Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphony (1924) could also be seen as a primary example of vector aesthetics in cinema. In contrast to the flms and flm scores of his contemporaries, Werner Graeff, Hans Richter and Walter LINES AND INTERRUPTIONS IN EXPERIMENTAL FILM AND VIDEO 23

Ruttmann, which explored dynamic permutations of geometric, quadrilateral forms, Diagonal Symphony is wholly linear. The flm is a form of drawing, or better calligraphy, comprising thin arcs, fne-toothed combs, sweeping s-shapes, curved arrows and straight, diagonal lines. None of these vector forms move exactly. Instead, they extend or retract and come together in different combinations, sometimes having been inverted or fipped. In this regard, the flm’s form of expression involves variation rather than evolution. In her account of Eggeling’s aesthetic principles, Louise O’Konor writes about the infuence of Kandinsky’s book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (originally published in 1912). Like Kandinsky, Eggeling sought to outline a theory of harmony on a par with music, with the relationship between art forms underwritten by a ‘spiritual unity’ (O’Konor 1971, 75). Characteristically, his manifesto ‘Theoretical Presentations of the Art of Movement’, published in the Hungarian magazine MA, is shot through with references to developments in art as constituting an ‘inner–necessity’. In addition to this and other manifestos that Eggeling published in the early 1920s, O’Konor (1971, 92–96) makes reference to his collected notes specifcally on flm, which are almost exclusively comprised of quotes from Bergson’s Creative Evolution. Given that Bergson’s philosophy was antithetical to cinema, it might seem strange that Eggeling found so much to quote, but Eggeling’s approach did not come out of flmic thinking so much as drawing and the ‘time-based medium’ of scrolls. As he was not making moving images exactly, his thinking sidestepped dominant assumptions about cinema altogether. For Eggeling, flm was an ‘output medium’ (to borrow a phrase from A. L. Rees) that provided an advanced means of rendering the continuous change and recombination of graphic forms rather than representational images. John Whitney is arguably the flmmaker to have taken linear graphic cinema furthest since Eggeling, not least of all in his early use of computer technologies. In contrast to the Five Film Exercises (1943–1944, made with his brother James), which were produced by manipulating light by way of cut-out masks, creating circular forms, disks, squares and morphing trapezoids, the later works Permutations (1967) and the Matrix flms (1971–1972) involve detailed animated linear designs based on dots, lines, arcs and regular shapes in outline. Harmonic relationships between graphic components come to the fore in these works, perhaps due to the programming potential found in working with computers. 24 S. PAYNE

Particularly crucial in the development of their aesthetics were the IBM residencies and research grants from the late 1960s, which allowed for the precise plotting of points and vertices by way of what we would now call vector graphics. In contrast to a bitmap image, which designates a specifc value to each pixel in the quadrilateral feld that comprises an image, the algorithms of vector-based graphics treat points, lines and planes as a product of abstract co-ordinates. The extending diagonal lines and arcs in Eggeling’s flm are vector graphics avant la lettre, while the algorithms in Whitney’s animated computer flms were prototypes for contemporary vector graphics programs. A contemporary fgure whose work explores vector graphics is the Austrian artist LIA. The design of her work centres on flaments and curvilinear forms in a style that she has used for single-channel video works as well as live visuals. In pieces that span G.S.I.L.VI/almada (2001), which is described in terms of a ‘vortex of linearity’, through to the more recent Fly Us to the Moons (2017) (Fig. 1), her work involves algorithms in which ornamental lines extend from points to make complex layered visual felds that evoke Jugendstil designs and motifs. Often the electronic music that is composed in conjunction with her visuals has a generative role, with rhythmic and instrumental elements effecting additional layers and transformations. In this regard, her work has

Fig. 1 LIA, Fly Us to the Moons (2017) LINES AND INTERRUPTIONS IN EXPERIMENTAL FILM AND VIDEO 25 made a signifcant contribution to the tradition of ‘visual music’ defned by Eggeling, Whitney and numerous other abstract flmmakers. In Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphony, the appeal to music corresponds to the formal counterpoint between elements orchestrated in time. In contrast, the use of music in John Whitney’s computer flms, which are often paired with Baroque or Indian classical music, is more associational, with a view to a focused meditation on harmony or complementarity. In LIA’s work, the shifting lines and planes that she produces accompany ambient, electro-acoustic soundscapes. The connection with music in each instance highlights the different sorts of space in which the lines of the flms operate. In spite of Eggeling’s search for an ‘inner necessity’, the lines in Diagonal Symphony are distinctly two-dimensional; their exten- sions, contractions and combinations assert the fat plane of the screen. In contrast, Whitney’s flms summon a psychological space for contemplation. LIA’s videos conjure a similarly abstract realm, but the lines of her videos fow beyond the edge of the frame and as a consequence the viewer is encompassed in the digital realm. Lines and vectors are the essence of Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone (1973) and the suite of Vertical Works that marked a return to ‘solid light flms’ after a gap of thirty years. Line Describing a Cone could be thought of as a pure form of cinema. It articulates the spatial dimensions of cinema in two respects: frstly, when the point of light that it projects extends to become an arc and thus traces the plane of the screen; and secondly, as the beam highlights the screen’s distance from the projector. The piece also declares cinema to be a fnite temporal medium once the arc closes to become a circle (and the base of the projected cone). In this regard, the flm’s structure is one of perfect suspense because its conclusion is rather inevitable. In contrast, the Vertical Works appeal to sculpture more than cinema. Beaming from silent and invisible digital projectors, the light that descends to the foor from an apex 10 metres or more above, defnes surfaces and planes that have a particular sense of scale. They are also looping works, where lines come together to complete a pattern before becoming undone. Breath (2004) and Between You and I (2006) (Fig. 2) are slowly envel- oping works that stand tall above the viewer like the massive and maze- like, torqued steel sculptures of Richard Serra. Correspondingly, the titles speak to experiences of the spectator rather more than the title Line Describing a Cone or other earlier works such as Long Film for Four Projectors (1974). 26 S. PAYNE

Fig. 2 Anthony McCall, Between You and I (2006). Commissioned by PEER. Installation at the Round Chapel, London (Photo Hugo Glendenning)

Line Describing a Cone and McCall’s later works extend some of the aspirations associated with linear aesthetics discussed above. While the lines in Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphony as well as Whitney’s flms and LIA’s videos declare cinema to be graphic art—they counter the perspectival image that asks the viewer to see through the screen as if it were a window—McCall’s solid light flms also include the space between the source of light and the surface on which it falls; to movement in two LINES AND INTERRUPTIONS IN EXPERIMENTAL FILM AND VIDEO 27 dimensions they add a third. The fact that McCall’s volumes in transition also invite the viewer into the work physically could be seen as the realisation of ideas that Eggeling identifed with respect to Creative Evolution: the aim of Bergson’s philosophy was to put the intellect to one side so as to ‘imagine oneself within becoming’ (Bergson 1998, 342). In a related manner, the linear aesthetics of the pieces discussed here resonate with a mode of abstraction rooted in symbolism. Kandinsky’s association of spiritualism and abstraction, which was potent for Eggeling, carries through in the continuous lines drawn by these other artists.

Traces and Threads In his book Lines (2007), the social anthropologist Tim Ingold presents a history of lines in relation to a host of human endeavours spanning musical notation, drawing, calligraphy and weaving through to genealogy and urban planning. Lines are primarily conceived as either traces or threads. Traces are lines made in or on a surface: a hand-drawn line on paper, for example, or a mark that is scored, etched or scratched in some material or other. Threads are independent of surfaces and could include lines that are strands, strips, fbres, flaments, wires or veins (Ingold 2007, 42). Film and video involve lines that fall into these categories as well. When digital media frst signifcantly impinged on cinema, flm theory often turned to the defnition of the flm image as a trace, bearing the imprint of what it represents. The idea of the flm image as trace (or index) has been commonplace since the adoption of André Bazin’s essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (originally published in 1945). The essence of flmmaking as trace, with respect to lines, was made early on in post-war experimental flm culture with Len Lye’s etched lines in the surface of the flmstrip’s emulsion to create rhythmic patterns in his Free Radicals (1958). Stan Brakhage followed suit, etching lines into flm to make titles and credits that attest to the hand of the artist. Several flms by contemporary flmmakers—including David Gatten (What the Water Said, 1998–2007), Cathy Rogers (Rosemary Again and Again, 2013), Karel Doing (Wilderness Series, 2016), Emma Hart (Skin Film, 2005) and Vicky Smith (Noisy, Licking, Dribbling and Spitting 2014)—stand out as approaching the medium in ways that emphasise flmmaking as a means of recording traces. These flms (which involve direct exposure to water, photograms of plants, the trans- fer of sellotaped skin and the application of bodily fuids) are grounded 28 S. PAYNE in organic, corporeal or base material and amplify the chemistry of flm. Editing, which speaks to construction after the fact, is kept to a mini- mum, or dispelled altogether, so that the bond between image and referent is kept whole. As a consequence, these flms often take the form of continuous (unedited) threads as well as traces. An uncut flmstrip could be thought of as a thread, especially as one threads a flmstrip through a projector. Hans Scheugl’s ZZZ Hamburg Special (1968) is a piece that plays on the analogy:

The ‘flm’ consists of a strand of thread, which is run through the projector instead of celluloid, the shadow of which wanders back and forth on the screen in the form of dark stripes on the white-beamed screen by the projectionist. (Export 2003)

Two canonical flm works that appeal to the medium of flm as a thread are William Raban’s Take Measure (1973) and Annabel Nicolson’s infuential but little seen Reel Time (1973). More recent pieces that explore the affnity between flm and thread include Vicky Smith’s mem- orable performance of Bicycle Tyre Track (2014) at Tate Britain, which involved riding a bicycle’s painted tyre along a flmstrip and projecting the result; Mary Stark’s textile-oriented performance Film as Fabric, Lace and Thread (2014); Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder’s Light Spill (2005), in which a 16 mm projector, minus a take-up spool, spews found footage onto the foor; and Rosa Barba’s Stating the Real Sublime (2009–2011), a series of working 16 mm projectors suspended by clear acetate. The tenor of these examples spans witty, Fluxus-like high jinks, expanded flm practices that look to other crafts, and rhetorical, deadpan statements on the role of flm in the world of the gallery. In Ingold’s catalogue of lines, the trace has a subset related to lines that are not incised in a surface (as in an etching or lines drawn in sand) nor added to a surface (as in a pencil drawing on paper) but instead create a surface or geometrical plane, as in the guidelines or plotlines of a graph or graphic image (Ingold 2007, 160). The video signal is that sort of trace. The video signal produces a scanned video line that creates and refreshes the image plane from the top left corner of the picture to the bottom right at the rate of 1/25th of a second or so. Ordinarily, the scan lines of a video signal are imperceptible, especially in a high- defnition image. However, several video artists, including Nam June Paik, Woody and Steina Vasulka, and David Larcher, have either made LINES AND INTERRUPTIONS IN EXPERIMENTAL FILM AND VIDEO 29 the lines of the video signal manifest or a distinctive motif. Paik’s TV Clock (1963/1989), which is shown across several monitors, isolates the line of the video signal and makes it synonymous with the image. Woody Vasulka’s C-Trend (1974) and Steina Vasulka’s Violin Power (1978) keep the full array of video lines, but defect them to render an image with additional three-dimensional contours. Larcher’s Videøvoid (1993) has several sections that represent the scan line as an image. One particular sequence freezes and isolates a dash of analogue ‘drop out’ and then fres it like an arrow across the screen in different directions, accompanied by a voice that riffs on ‘zero’ and ‘Zeno’ (the Eleatic philosopher whose infamous paradox of the arrow in fight fgures in Bergson’s defence of movement as indivisible). While the video signal is described in terms of lines, the lines in a video image are never actually continuous because they are the product of the warp and weft of the grid of pixels that comprise a screen. It has become increasingly diffcult to see the gaps with the increase in resolution of screens and projectors, but lines in a video image are always essentially the product of an ordered system of differences between pixels. Ingold’s description of the pattern of lines in a Navajo blanket would serve to describe the look of lines in a video image (and echoes an analogy that Stephen Beck made with his early digital video work Video Weavings, in 1976): ‘When we look for the line in the blanket, however closely, we fnd only differences’ (Ingold 2007, 65). The aim of Ingold’s Lines is to show that ‘throughout history the line has gradually been shorn of the movement that gave rise to it’ and that something has been lost in the process (Ingold 2007, 77). Several examples, from calligraphy to the wandering paths of wayfarers, are shown to have been increasingly instrumentalised, in these cases by technologies of printing and mapmaking. More specifcally, he argues that movement, fow and continuity have been sectioned and segmented in ways that are epitomised by digitisation: ‘The line is no longer the trace of a gesture but a chain of point-to-point connections. In these connections there is neither life nor movement’ (Ingold 2007, 155). The argument is for an ecology that might be represented by open-ended, continuous lines rather than lines that are fragmented and artifcially terminated. In this respect, his defence of lines that speak to movement and life are connected to the philosophy of Bergson/Deleuze and the new media theory of Cubitt. Compare the fowing, unbroken line favoured by Ingold with Cubitt’s account of the vector: ‘The vector’s particular future-directed 30 S. PAYNE temporality addresses us no longer as termini but as media: as people who make sense, but only as nodes in interweaving trajectories of signifcation’ (Cubitt 2004, 91). The problem associated with seeing cinema primarily in terms of the vector is that it does not offer grounds for interruption, refection or critique. For that one has to go elsewhere. In a recent essay entitled ‘Routes to Physical Optics’ (2016), A. L. Rees looked to ways in which associated ideas and expressions found in Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin’s conversations might be co-opted for an account of experimental flm and video. In the two versions of Benjamin’s article ‘What is Epic Theatre?’ (written in the 1930s), Rees fnds numerous instances of the critical devices in Brecht’s theatre that are expressed as ‘interruptions’ and linked to the sequence of frames and intervals that comprise the technology of flm. The ‘damming of the stream of real life’ is, in Benjamin’s words, the aim of Brecht’s aesthetics. In a different context, Brecht identifed with the stream rather than obstacles in it. In a commentary on Brecht’s poems, Benjamin picks out the following line from ‘Legend of the Origin of the Book Tao Te Ching on Lao Tzu’s Way into Exile’:

… That yielding water in motion Gets the better in the end of granite and porphyry.

The lesson that Benjamin draws from this line is ‘never to forget about the inconstancy and changeability of things, and to align oneself with those things which are inconspicuous and sober and inexhaustible, like water’ (Benjamin 1983, 74). Identifying alternately with a dam in the stream, or the water that overcomes obstacles, was perhaps a matter of political expediency for Brecht and Benjamin—the Lao Tzu poem can be read as an expression of means by which to weather the dangers of Stalinism and the strict decrees of Socialist Realism (Parker 2014, 385)— but a dialetic that involves breaks in the fow is key either way.

Vector and Modular Paul Sharits has described flm as a medium that is both vector-based and modular (1978). The flmstrip, as it threads its way through the projector, is a vector, whereas the projector’s intermittent shutter imposes the discontinuous modular form of serial frames. Several of LINES AND INTERRUPTIONS IN EXPERIMENTAL FILM AND VIDEO 31

Sharits’ flms draw on the dialectical relationship between the vector and the modular. Ray Gun Virus (1966), for example, has sections that are structured around dissolves and fades (indices of continuity) that are interspersed with single frames of complementary (modular) colours. The flm’s soundtrack is also modular, in that one plays the sprocket holes. A tension between vector and modular also exists in S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED (1968–1971), which involves superimposed footage of water currents, fowing in different directions, interrupted by horizontal tape splices. The fuid imagery of the flm and the addition of layered vertical scratches are a metaphor for the flm’s momentum through the projector, while the cuts mark intervals in that fow. The combination makes for a Brechtian flm (though a thoroughly unorthodox one) that could well have been added to Rees’ list of flms in the ‘Physical Optics’ essay and an earlier piece on ‘Liquid Cinema’ (2010). Steve Farrer’s 10 Drawings (1976) is another work where continuous lines are set against the regular interval of the horizontal frame line. The basis of the flm is drawing, as with Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphony, but it is the flmstrip, rather than the flm frame, that constitutes the canvas. For each of the short flms that comprise 10 Drawings, ffty 18-inch strips of clear flm were laid out side by side to make a rectangle meas- uring 18 inches by 36 inches. Patterns of lines in geometrical arrangements, including arcs, grids, stripes and fan shapes, were drawn across the rectangle of flmstrips in formation. The flmstrips were then joined, head to tail, to make the flm. (Given that the drawings span each flmstrip, they also produce an optical soundtrack, representative of a strain in the tradition of visual-music flms that involves a concrete, graphic relationship between sound and vision). One can barely read the patterns of the original drawings when watching the flm, but that is hardly the point, because the flm itself is something else: a product of the tension between the vector form of the bare flmstrip and its subsequent projection which imposes the modular aspect of cinema. In a recent exhibition entitled Film in Space, curated by Guy Sherwin (Camden Arts Centre, London, 2012), the flm was projected alongside a display of the prints, allowing the viewer to see some of the connections between the flm print and its projection. Contemporary flmmakers, including Rose Lowder, Nicky Hamlyn and Jennifer Nightingale, have also explored tensions between vector and modular forms. In Lowder’s Bouquet flms (2001–2009), single 32 S. PAYNE frames are exposed out of sequence, capturing felds of fowers, landscapes and close-up views of natural phenomena. With the ‘persistence of vision’, fickering, impressionistic documentary flms of place come together. The title of the flms (Bouquets) refers to the fact that the whole is made of parts, both in terms of the individual flms that comprise the series and the separate frames that make up each flm. A number of Nicky Hamlyn’s flms have also involved single-frame sequences, often exploring a variety of systems within one flm. In his recent Gasometers series (2015), passages shot in real time cut against time-lapse footage and sequences of individuated single frames to produce an interrogative mode of representation. While the ficker effect in Lowder’s flms combines stunning colours and vistas, Hamlyn’s flms tend to encompass contrasting compositional elements that produce dynamic conficts. The subject of Jennifer Nightingale’s Knitting Films literalises the idea of the flmstrip as an interrupted thread (and a combined modular/vector form). Knitting Pattern No. 1 (2013) through to the series of Cornish Knitting Pattern flms (2017) derive shooting strategies from knitting patterns. The former involves balls of coloured wool shot in a sequence determined by a knitting pattern; the wool seems to unfurl and

Fig. 3 Documentation of Jennifer Nightingale making Crocheting a Line (2017) (Photo Simon Payne) LINES AND INTERRUPTIONS IN EXPERIMENTAL FILM AND VIDEO 33 combine as if being knitted together by the flm. The flms of the recent series take shooting strategies from Cornish knitting patterns and depict the towns and ports from where they derive. Two performance flms, Knitting a Frame (2006) and Crocheting a Line (2017) (Fig. 3), show Nightingale in front of the camera with the wool on her needles having been wrapped round the camera’s shutter release; every stitch triggers the shutter. In different ways, each of the flmmakers mentioned here take flm to be a modular and vector-based medium from the outset. The flms they make are equally fast—of course, all flm passes by at 24 frames per second—but in certain instances their modularity effects a halt in the fow and interruption occurs.

Segmentation in Video As has already been observed, the lines in a video image are not continuous, but nor is the video signal itself. Interruption is inherent in the medium because the signal is measured and marked off at the pixels and intervals along the lines that comprise its frames. In contrast to flm, the video signal might best be thought of as segmented rather than modular. Several contemporary European artists have sought to break down and recompose the video signal by accessing its segments, interfering with technology at the level of the line and the pixel. Since the early 2000s, Bas van Koolwijk’s work has focused on har- nessing distorted video signals. He has used home-made synthesisers that process audio signals as video (and vice versa) in a move that exploits the malleable nature of electronic media. The Synchronator devices that he has produced with Gert-Jan Prins, since 2009, allow for live processing and the manipulation of three channels that constitute a component video signal. Aside from the manipulation of the video signal to produce an affnity between sound, rhythm, colour and form, as a form of digital visual music, there is also a critical intent in van Koolwijk’s work. The Delay Line Memory pieces (2014–2016), for example, are an attempt to ‘expose patterns that otherwise would have remained hidden’ (van Koolwijk). Typically, these patterns involve broken horizontal bands of colour and pixelated forms that cycle down and across the screen in synch with glitched electronic pitches and percussive riffs. Digital abstraction (or digital aberration) in this vein came to prom- inence in Europe during the early 2000s with artists associated with the ‘Austrian Abstracts’, including Tina Frank, Maia Gusberti, Tina 34 S. PAYNE

Hochkogler, Annja Krautgasser, LIA, Norman Pfaffenbichler and Billy Roisz. The characteristics of their work in this period often included auto-generative script, rolling and overwritten lines, stacked grids, mod- ulated sine waves and granular synthesis. Occasionally, some of these artists broach the terrain of wider representation—Krautgasser’s Horizon/1 (2005), for example, is a city-flm in which abstracted horizontal stripes derive from lines in a cityscape that a camera has tracked across— but for the most part, their work has been intent on signal manipulation and processing, mixing audio and video signals in ways that are by turns rhythmic and disruptive. The pinnacle of contemporary digital abstraction in this vein is characterised by the immersive installations and spectacular projection-cum-techno performances of Ryoji Ikeda. Segmentation of the video signal in pieces such as the test pattern events (since 2008) is taken to excess with ultra-rapid frame rates and data overload displayed on large-scale projection together with a loud sound system to overwhelming or rapturous effect. In many respects, the aesthetic chimes with the superabundant sensory 16 mm projector performances of Sally Golding, Bruce McClure and Greg Pope, in which the materiality of flm is played up. In the digital video work discussed here, materiality is a more notional phenomenon: the intervals that disrupted linear or pixelated forms allude to are extraordinarily fne-grained technological processes. Either way, signposting the technological characteristics of one’s medium is not necessarily a critical manoeuvre. One question that has been asked implicitly throughout this essay is to do with the degree to which a work might produce intervals for refection. On the one hand, the vectors of continuity, movement and fow often carry the viewer along without interruption and militate against moments for refection. As a viewer subjected to the vector aesthetics that Cubitt propounds, all one can hope is that the direction is benign. At the same time, it is not necessarily the case that modularity and segmentation give rise to grounds for productive interruption. Free- reining ficker, glitches and amped-up noise just as easily counter refection; constant interruption can become affect. One recent experimental cinema work that sets the argument of this essay in context is Sine (digital/analog converter) by Juliana Borinski and Pierre-Laurent Cassière (Fig. 4), which was exhibited at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2006. The piece involved a long length of free-fowing videotape, a fan, a projector and a contact microphone. Installed in a large gallery, the fan kept the videotape in mid-air above head height for the length of the space. A projector beaming along the same axis as LINES AND INTERRUPTIONS IN EXPERIMENTAL FILM AND VIDEO 35

Fig. 4 Juliana Borinski and Pierre-Laurent Cassière, Sine (digital/analog converter) (2006) the fan cast the shadow of the dancing videotape on the far wall and a contact microphone picked up and amplifed the vibrations caused by its fapping. As the title suggests, the piece is a canny meditation on analogue to digital conversion. The videotape futtering in the breeze, and the shadow it casts, are in a constant state of fux, an analogue ideal. The object and its shadow image are infnitely variable waveforms that digitisation will never quite be able to reproduce. Despite its use of projection, videotape and sound, Borinski and Cassière’s piece is more akin to kinetic sculpture than flm, video or moving-image art. It avoids aspects of flm and video technology that are defnitive, for animation especially, and thus sidesteps the dialectical relationship between linearity and segmentation that rest on the sequence of frames and intervals. The motion of the videotape is the pure movement of an untrammelled, aleatory and entropic line. Given that videotape has been superseded as a medium, its animation in the piece spoke of imminent demise, like the last leaves of autumn buffeted by a breeze. 36 S. PAYNE

These qualities disassociate it from the idealism attached to vector aesthetics that point confdently towards the future, privileging continuity, evolution and fulflment. They distinguish its critical attitude too, but given that Sine (digital/analog converter) is not a flm/video work per se, it is an evocative rather than practical example.

References Bazin, André. 1967. The Ontology of the Photographic Image. In What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray, 9–17. Berkeley: University of California Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1983. Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock. London: Verso. Bergson, Henri. 1998. Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Dover. Canales, Jimena. 2015. The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cubitt, Sean. 2004. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cubitt, Sean. 2014. The Practice of Light: A Geneology of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson. London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson. London: Continuum. Export, Valie. 2003. Expanded Cinema as Expanded Reality. Senses of Cinema Issue 28 (October). Accessed May 2017. http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/ peter-tscherkassky-the-austrian-avant-garde/expanded_cinema/. Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines. London: Routledge. Kandinsky, Wassily. 1977. Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M.T.H. Sadler. New York: Dover. O’Konor, Louise. 1971. Viking Eggeling 1880–1925 Artist and Film-Maker, Life and Work. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell. Parker, Stephen. 2014. Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life. London: Bloomsbury. Rees, A. L. 2010. Liquid Cinema and the Watery Substance of Vision. Iconics 10: 57–75. Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences. Rees, A. L. 2016. Routes to Physical Optics. Sequence 4: 51–55. Sharits, Paul. 1978. Words Per Page. Film Culture 65/66: 29–42. van Koolwijk, Bas. n.d. Basvankoolwijk > Projects. Accessed May 2017. http:// basvankoolwijk.com/projects+.html#more. Performing the Margins of the New

Dirk de Bruyn

Enabled by hand-held devices, the digital image has now attained a level of mobility reminiscent of the impact of the transistor radio on popular music in the 1960s. Screens now dominate multiple levels of public and personal space. Light shows, hefty screens and Vjing as real-time performance defne popular music events. This pervasive mobility has also regenerated activity in public, multi-screen performances of formalist, graphic imagery by flm artists and delivered a renewed interest in a subjugated history that itself formed in 1960s youth culture. The computer’s domestication of avant-garde technique has elicited a response by this avant-garde’s contemporary successors through their continued use of flm in performance, foregrounding the ‘perceptual as political’. Internationally, artists such as Guy Sherwin, Bruce McClure and Greg Pope working in celluloid are the focus of this analogue response. In Australia the performances by Sally Golding, Marcia Jane, Hanna Chetwin and Richard Tuohy working in celluloid fortify this rejoinder. These forms of audiovisual performance frst emerged in the 1960s, when artists such as Paul Sharits and Ken Jacobs began to work with 16 mm, Super 8 flm and slide projection, predicated on the low-cost

D. de Bruyn (*) Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 37 V. Smith and N. Hamlyn (eds.), Experimental and Expanded Animation, Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73873-4_3 38 D. de BRUYN availability of secondhand equipment. Through an emergent digital VJ culture and ‘live cinema’, other recent Australian-based artists such as Paul Rodgers and Paul Fletcher also connect into this resurgence and its histories. This historic form of flm performance’s resurgence is framed through media theorist Vilém Flusser’s refections on the technical image. Historical context, otherwise understood as un-locatable in this new technological digital situation by Flusser, remains retrievable through such performances. Flusser understands the ability of digital images to manufacture a historic amnesia. Images are everywhere, while their origins remain problematic or hidden. This un-locatability is countered by the work discussed here through the material use of the body, the material presence of flm and its projection apparatus and also through a directed focus on location as content. As a way of bringing work often inaccessible to an international audience into debate and into view, I have also enlisted a number of Australian examples to outline these strategies.

Recent Australian Analogue Practice Real-time forms of image manipulation often developed through sonic communities, through sound artists with an originating focus on experimental music. Such communities often embraced a rekindled interest in the performative aspects of analogue media and were attracted to work that was speaking critically to the new digital proliferations. In Australia this was particularly evident within the Brisbane-based OtherFilm Collective, consisting of Joel Stern, Sally Golding and Danni Zuvela, whose festivals in 2004, 2007 and 2012 showcased historic flm performances by Corinne and Arthur Cantrill and my own two-screen Experiments (1980) amongst new flm and sound-based work by Marcia Jane, Richard Tuohy, Audrey Lam and others.

OtherFilm has willfully resisted the unambiguous boosterism surrounding new media. Troubled by the self-congratulation, repressiveness, and historical amnesia of art’s ‘technocratic turn’, we preferred to see Australian experimental art as a longstanding tradition, which we could be part of. We favoured flm art—avant-garde experimental and expanded cinema. (OtherFilm Festival Catalogue 2012) PERFORMING THE MARGINS OF THE NEW 39

OtherFilm’s take resonated with renewed activity and international interest in public, multi-screen performances of formalist, graphic imagery by flm artists such as Guy Sherwin, Greg Pope and Bruce McClure. Practising in Sydney as Teaching and Learning Cinema (TLC), Louise Curham and Lucas Ihlein’s respond to Expanded Cinema’s subjugated history through re-enactment: ‘The Teaching and Learning Cinema re-enacts Expanded Cinema performances from the 1960 and 1970s. As artists we have discovered that direct access of our aesthetic precur- sors is essential to understanding and building upon the work of the past’ (Curham and Ihlein 2013). TLC frames this work in terms of oral history, tradition and art-action-research. Their ‘user’s manual’ for re-creating Guy Sherwin’s Man with Mirror performance, itself discussed later in this essay, strategically coupled Australian to British Expanded Cinema practice. Sally Golding, part of the OtherFilm’s three-pronged curato- rial engine, is a highly productive and committed multimedia and flm artist in her own right. Golding utilizes found flms, animation and direct-on-flm techniques within her process-based 16 mm flm and sound performances. Since 2011 she has re-located to London, where she curates the Unconscious Archives Project and develops and performs her own Expanded Cinema works. In Australia, as the duo Abject Leader, Golding and Stern have collaborated on a series of live audiovisual performances. For example, in Face of an Other, performed at Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in 2009, Golding places herself in front of her audience, as screen-possessed cadaver. A 16 mm flm projector beams ghost images onto her body frame. These found footage faces, skeletal and internal organ graphics are plun- dered horror images that travel through an unsettling register of contemplation and shock. Strobing light heightens Golding’s possession, and a Foley library of vintage sound effects, orchestrated by Stern, further envelops the audience and performance space. Part of the power and mortal fragility of these performances is the precise, yet hesitant method by which Golding incorporates the technical set-up into her performances. The gesture of threading material flm loops into a 16 mm projector becomes an integral timing device inside her performance. In this way the technical history of her images is revealed. Golding makes explicit the image’s inner workings. An image is shaped and defned by the technologies and locations used to create it. It is a register of such ‘accents’ that can unpack an image’s history, but this a process that for Flusser has become increasingly diffcult in the seamless and malleable digital realm. 40 D. de BRUYN

The relationship between sound and light are core in Golding’s live presentations. The image plays as an elusive trace, fashioned by rubrics imposed by idiosyncratic sonic machines. Story arrives directly to the senses, tempered by the unpredictability of analogue instrumentation and live performance. System collapse plays out differently in analogue form, not as complete, instantaneous digital erasure. The analogue offers up stages of corruption, visible felds and amalgams of decomposition, which Golding marks up and re-constitutes. Golding’s professional skills, initially developed as a conservator of archival flm, are deconstructed here, performed meticulously in subversive reverse. Her darkroom compositions are further shaped through DIY photochemical processing and contact printing of the optical sound strip next to the image in 16 mm flm. This darkroom and home processing is also a critical space in the work of artists emerging out of Melbourne’s Artist Film Workshop (AFW), founded by Richard Tuohy and Dianne Barrie and resident at Goodtime Studios in Carlton from 2012. This group has recently found a new and more fnancially sustainable home at the Arena project space in Fitzroy. Arena is a publishing organization in the realms of culture, politics and social theory. (Both Fitzroy and Carlton are inner suburbs of Melbourne.) Tuohy’s own recent work moved from Super 8 narrative-based work in the 1980s, made while he was training as an audio- visual technician, into contemporary 16 mm experimental flm. In 2005, with partner Dianne Barrie, Tuohy had founded Nanolab to process Super 8 original professionally in regional Victoria, servicing small-gauge flmmakers in the Southern Hemisphere. For the AFW performance Film Baton (2013) (Fig. 1), ten AFW members shot in sequence one roll of black-and-white flm on the group’s Bolex. The camera passed from one artist to the other, with the flm-roll subsequently processed in the group’s darkroom facilities. In performance this singular strip was looped like a daisy chain through four 16 mm projectors to project four screens side by side, reiterating the loop’s ‘Chinese Whispers’ shooting protocols. Hanna Chetwin, a member of this artist-run group, performed her dual-projector, single-screen Detail (2015) at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2016. Hand-processed, masked black-and-white images shift over each other, confounding and challenging the viewer to decipher and construct the originating, partially revealed image from memory. More peepholes proliferate and cross over each other, playfully creating double exposures. PERFORMING THE MARGINS OF THE NEW 41

Fig. 1 AFW Members Group, Film Baton (2013)

Fig. 2 Richard Tuohy, Dot Matrix (2013) 42 D. de BRUYN

This moving mask dance further multiplies using diffraction flters, which bleed the dot-grid off the screen onto the cinema walls. The most impressive of Tuohy’s own performances centres on his two 16 mm projector Dot Matrix (2013) screenings (Fig. 2). This work is the result of sustained experimentation with ficker, moiré and half-tone effects to propagate both image and optical soundtrack. Dot Matrix impacts its audience on a neurological level. The intense ficker and dot dance fuctuates in frequency, creating residual visual artifacts and substantial movements that are a direct result of the body’s retinal system. This builds on the work of Sharits’ ficker flms and Jacobs’ Nervous System performances. What one sees performed on the screen is not available by a scroll-through of the flmstrip over a light-table. This flm-based form of audiovisual performance emerged internationally in the 1960s, when artists such as William Raban, Gill Eatherley, Annabel Nicholson and Malcolm Le Grice in Britain, and Paul Sharits and Ken Jacobs in North America, began to work with 16 mm, Super 8 flm and slide projection, when such secondhand equipment became available at low cost. This work was further connected by its practitioners to the most rig- orous elements of the 1920s European avant-garde cinema of Fernand Léger, Hans Richter, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp through the critical writings of Peter Gidal in Materialist Film (1989) and Le Grice in Abstract Film and Beyond (1977). I will return to discuss some relevant Australian digital practice towards the end of this discussion in the work of Paul Rodgers and Paul Fletcher.

The Technical Image Flusser’s concept of the technical image productively marks the shift from analogue to digital technologies through which recent Expanded Cinema work can be read. This digital shift favours the visual feld ahead of the text as a communication tool. For Flusser, technical images are meaningful surfaces ‘created by programmes, they are dependent on the laws of technology and the natural sciences’ (Ströhl 2004, xxiii). Flusser’s technical images, benefting from the digital’s painterly hyper-malleability, foreground concepts ahead of phenomena: ‘Ontologically traditional images mean phenomena, while technical images mean concepts’ (Flusser 2000, 14). Traditional images record PERFORMING THE MARGINS OF THE NEW 43 an event, while the digital graphic and textual manipulation of an image allows a concept or idea to be expressed visually. This emphasis alters the relationship between structure and content, signifer and signifed. It is important to grasp that what Flusser describes as the technical image is not exclusively digital. It can be analogue. It is the current digital pervasiveness of such imagery that marks the usefulness of Flusser’s thinking. I make a connection here between Flusser’s theorizing and Peter Gidal’s work on Materialist Film. Both stress structure over content. ‘The subject of the work is not the invisible artist symbol- ically inferred through the work’s presence, but rather the whole foregrounded fabric of the complex system of markings itself’ (Gidal 1976, 7). Gidal also describes this content-to-structure re-emphasis in his own work: ‘I would like to make a flm that is one and the same time a flm in its own right and as explication of the mechanisms of its own making’ (Gidal 1973, 1). This content-to-structure shift is evident in Paul Sharits’ early ficker flms and Ken Jacobs’ Nervous System performances. Essentially, the refexive emphasis of Materialist Film on structure predicts the conceptual emphasis of Flusser’s technical image and provides a strategy for locating its origins. It is in the contemporary work of Gidal’s 1960s generation’s successors that I locate this critical and productive response to Flusser’s call to locate the technical image. For Lev Manovich, the practice and tradition of the ‘avant-garde became materialized in a computer’ (Manovich 2001, 307). In the digital, the formal editing strategies used to create the technical image within analogue image construction—traditionally taking place in the studios of artists such as Sharits and Jacobs, and within the camera and optical printer—are now executed inside the computer, migrating from the production into the post-production process. Images can now be malleably constructed inside computers, rather than being records of light processed via photochemical means. For Flusser, the process of constructing such meaningful surfaces is rendered invisible, creating a form of historical amnesia in their reception.

The technical images currently all around us are in the process of magically restructuring our ‘reality’ and turning it into a ‘global image scenario’. Essentially this is a question of ‘amnesia’. Human beings forget that they created the images in order to orientate themselves in the world. Since they are no longer able to decode them, their lives become a function of their own images: Imagination has turned to hallucination. (Flusser 2000, 10) 44 D. de BRUYN

… any criticism of technical images must be aimed at an elucidation of their inner workings. As long as there is no way of engaging in such criticism of technical images, we shall remain illiterate. (Flusser 2000, 16)

Where do these technical images come from? What are their limits? Flusser’s technical image reiterates Martin Heidegger’s concept of Weltbilt articulated in The Age of the World-Picture (Heidegger 1977). There, Heidegger identifes a calculative rather than meditative thinking, predicting the rise in the kind of techno-scientifc thinking unleashed through, for example, the expanded use of image-scanning technologies in neurological research. Like Flusser’s allusions to illiteracy and amnesia, Heidegger speculates ‘whether thinking will come to an end in a bus- tle of information’ (Heidegger 1998). By making physically available the methods of image production, works like Golding’s critically address the new invisibility of Flusser’s ‘amnesia’ and Heidegger’s ‘calculative turn’. The recent international formalist, multi-screen, 16 mm moving-image performances by the contemporary flm artists already identifed can be read as directly responding to the new immediacy and speed perme- ating digital technologies, the rise of Vilém Flusser’s technical image and a consequent disappearance of refective space. These performances are a contemporary line of investigation into perceptual processes to which the previously noted Australian work also subscribes.

Origins In the 1960s, under Abstract Expressionism’s infuence and Minimalism’s rise in painting and sculpture, flm artists in Europe and North America, including Sharits, Gidal, Jacobs and Michael Snow, interrogated the flm apparatus itself, emphasizing structure over content to produce what became known as Structuralist or Structural-Materialist Film. As P. Adams Sitney states: ‘the structural flm insists on its shape, and what content it has is minimal and subsidiary to the outline’ (Sitney 2002, 348). Rosalind Krauss describes Paul Sharits’ four-projector Sound Strip/ Film Strip (four screens, 8 minutes, 1971–1972), installed at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, in 1976:

Right away, then, we realize that we are not in the middle of the flmic illusion, as we are when seated in the theater, oblivious to the hidden PERFORMING THE MARGINS OF THE NEW 45

machinery in the projection booth mounted behind us. We are, instead, at a tangent to the illusion, forcibly aware of the generative pair: projector/ projected; aware, that is, of the mechanisms that are closer to the birth of the illusion. (Krauss 1978, 91)

This ‘tangential’ position is retained in contemporary Expanded Cinema work, now brought to critically interrogate the digital’s perceptual limits through performance. I submit that such performance lays bare the mechanics of technical image construction. Paul Sharits’ ficker flms are exact, single-frame focused, graphic animations, with frame-to-frame shifts in image, text or colour to create fickering afterimages and retinal effects. Images seem to foat in front of the screen, their repetition building tension and trance effects. Such creative image pulse and ficker work occurred contemporaneously with Edwin Land’s research into colour constancy. Land’s use of related visual artifacts in the design of his scientifc experiments is later discussed in relation to Bruce McClure’s contemporary performances. In Sharits’ two-screen flms such as Razor Blades (1965–1968) and Vertical Contiguity (1974), subtle shifts in a flm’s registration as it slides through the projector gate, and slight differences in projector speed, also become apparent when the two screens are butted next to each other—this adding further movement to these works, and bringing further attention to the projection apparatus itself.

I wish to abandon imitation and illusion and enter directly into the higher drama of: celluloid, two dimensional strips; individual rectangular frames; the nature of sprockets and emulsion; projector operations; the three dimensional refective screen surface; the retinal screen; optic nerve and individual psycho-physical subjectivities of consciousness. (Sharits 1969, 13)

Bruce Elder notes about Sharits’ T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968), in François Miron’s documentary Paul Sharits (2015), that ‘you start seeing (or hearing) things that are not there’. I have discussed similar visual artifacts in relation to Richard Tuohy’s Dot Matrix. These additions operate in relation to T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G’s fash frames but also aurally via the incessant repetition of the syllables ‘de-’ and ‘stroy’ (i.e. destroy) which morph over time and are then heard as ‘his straw’, ‘this stroke’, ‘his story’, ‘its dry’, ‘its stoked’, and so on. Related perceptual shifts are now programmed into digital texts through spell-check, for example. Such 46 D. de BRUYN glitches have migrated out of the viewer or listener’s perceptual apparatus into a computer’s programming language. Sharits’ approach also predicts the neurologically based abstract visual- izations of MRI brain scans which locate and animate neurological activity related to real perceptual events. In an interview with Steina Vasulka (1977), Sharits talks of the similarities between the patterning of one of his meticulous scores and ‘migraine fortifcation illusion patterns’. Sharits stresses, ‘This got me rather excited where part of your nervous system starts getting projected up through and out. Like your brain is flm or something’ (Vasulka 1977). Likewise, moving to Ken Jacobs’ Nervous System performances, he performs his thinking directly, ‘rorschaching’ his audience (Pierson et al. 2011, 30). Jacobs’ Nervous System machine has what looks like a large fan in front of its two bulky slide projectors. This fan works as a shutter for projecting alternative frames as the flmstrips are inched through two projector gates. Lewis Klar describes this method as a practice that uses the found single frame to communicate with history (Pierson et al. 2011, 214), precisely the effect that Flusser fnds missing in contemporary digital surfaces. Paul Arthur describes the machine as:

a two headed cinematic apparatus liberated from its linear shackles of 24 frames per second in order to stop and start, jump backward and forward at will. In turn, the movements of human shadows and other natural forms fed through the machine are blasted apart. (Pierson et al. 2011, 30)

In his discussion of Jacobs’ more recent New York Ghetto Fishmarket 1903 (2006), Pierson’s reference to the use of visual effect as part of a salvage operation on history describes a method for re-claiming history (Pierson et al. 2011, 204). Again, I submit that Jacobs’ method here addresses the illiteracy Flusser identifes in the technical image’s surface characteristics.

Subjugated History’s Return Techniques or camera-based effects such as dust, flm scratches, the blur, fash frames, lens and exposure fares, reticulation, processing mistakes and light leaks—all qualities signifying the limits and nature of celluloid-based flmmaking—are transported into menus and buttons as simulations in flm editing software such as I-Movie, Adobe Premiere or PERFORMING THE MARGINS OF THE NEW 47

Final Cut Pro. For Lev Manovich this incorporation marks the domestication of the avant-garde through the ascendancy of digital media. The avant-garde’s politics and context are lost and/or hidden where previously these effects are performed ‘live’ in Expanded Cinema events as artifact and gesture. Such in-camera residue, camera-based effects and optical printer manipulations, like masking, travelling mattes, double exposure, time- lapse, subtitling, under- and over-exposure, have all migrated from the flmic event and been rendered invisible in the digital post-production process. There is a shift here from fnancial resources, refective of the politics of access, class and social position to matters of aesthetic choice. While originating in alternative moving-image production processes that politically marked the glitch as no-budget flmmaking’s badge of hon- our, such artifacts are now positioned as afterthought inside digital editing programs, to be aesthetically spun and nuanced as ornamentation in post-production. The computer’s subjugation of avant-garde technique in flter menus as aesthetic gesture is countered by the perceptual impact of these techniques in the elusive realm of live performance by this avant-garde’s successors. I focus particularly on examples of such perceptual effects in Guy Sherwin and Bruce McClure’s contemporary performances. Nicky Hamlyn’s essay in this volume situating McClure’s work is also of value in this regard. Their continued use of 16 mm flm addresses this disappearance and subjugation, to set the limits and outline the perceptual margins of the ‘New’. Greg Pope’s contribution and the work of Australian-based artists Paul Rodgers and Paul Fletcher is also relevant. Fletcher provides an example of an artist who makes the argument for the importance of location while working entirely in the digital realm, whereas Rodgers straddles both analogue and digital presentation. In contrast to the digital’s ubiquitous cloning, the elusive quality of Sherwin’s and McClure’s flm performances value-adds to its Fine Art World caché. Yet, as Andréa Picard notes in relation to McClure’s work, its collectability remains elusive:

His pieces are unique, but not in the sense of an objet d’art, rather as an ephemeral experience. This can be diffcult for a museum to grapple with for many reasons, including archiving, storage, display, fear of obsolescence, immeasurable value, and so on. In short, what would they collect and how would they show it? (Picard 2007, 64) 48 D. de BRUYN

Guy Sherwin Sherwin’s multiple projector performances mine perceptual ambiguity. These works focus on the perceptual gap between what is perceived and what is physically present. Phase Loop (1971) explores the shifting synchrony between sound and image, while Cycles #3 (1972/2003) plays with image and afterimage. His Man with Mirror performances (1976– present) couple the dimensions of memory and history to these perceptual effects. Sherwin’s sustained flmmaking straddles the initiating period that contains Sharits’ practice and the present. In Phase Loop, Sherwin punched holes into a loop of black leader in the centre of the image every twenty-four frames, while placing a scratch on the soundtrack area every twenty-six frames. The fash of light and ‘tapping’ sounds created when this loop is projected consequently drift in and out of sync in an unending animated dance of perceptual play, exercising the audience’s eye and ear co-ordination, endlessly looping ‘a micro- cosm of flm’s temporal experience’ (Sherwin 2007, 10). The viewer/ listener has to work hard to keep the image/sound in phase, which then repeatedly collapses. Further, the self-contained simplicity and mathematical foundation of Phase Loop predicts the characteristics of numerical representation and modularity that Lev Manovich placed at the heart of digital media, three decades later (Manovich 2001, 27–48). For Manovich, New Media’s secondary characteristics of automation and variability arise from this core—characteristics that are also locatable in Sherwin’s work via a loop’s interminable repetitions, the phasing of its essentialist ‘pixels’ of image and sound, the variation of a projector’s speed, and the repeatability of the loop’s construction. This moving image/sound form is now in any web grazing by computer or mobile. Sherwin’s practice sits inside a dialectic of ‘material simplicity/perceptual complexity. The fascination is in seeing and knowing how something is made, but being surprised by how it appears’ (Sherwin 2007, 17). In Cycles #3, for example, Sherwin’s method of experimenting with and presenting perceptual effects is reminiscent of Goethe’s method in his 1810 Theory of Colours. Goethe observed such visual phenomena as afterimages and recorded their effect. For Goethe, this work responded to Newton’s more objective scientifc research on colour, which did not PERFORMING THE MARGINS OF THE NEW 49 account for the phenomena he had observed. His subjective yet repeata- ble observations included:

Let a black object be held before a grey surface, and let the spectator, after looking steadfastly at it, keep his eyes unmoved while it is taken away: the space it occupies appears much lighter. Let a white object be held up in the same manner: on taking it away the space it occupied will appear much darker than the rest of the surface. Let the spectator in both cases turn his eyes this way and that on the surface, the visionary images will move in like manner. (Goethe 1967, 14)

When projected, the multi-screen Cycles #3 presents fashes of circles in varying rhythm, creating afterimages, perceptual traces, artifacts that are not physically present on the flm, but nevertheless are directly experienced by the eye. The viewer is asked to observe as Goethe once observed, to refect on the experience he or she encounters, to underline that gap between what is perceived and what is physically and materially present on the flm stock. We learn and encounter how the eye acts in the world in a different register to when we read and graze images on a computer screen. It is clear from the way Sherwin presents this work that he is aware of such perceptual effects, and has incorporated their experience into the timing and structure. In its fnest moments, we become disoriented as to whether we are watching an image or an afterimage. We consciously bear the ambiguity. Where a fash of light creates an afterimage, Sherwin mis- chievously, physically places this same effect on the flm, while at other times he does not. We are never sure if what we see is physically present or merely a byproduct of the way our retina works. The operation of the viewer’s sensory cluster is Cycles #3’s subject. These are un-recordable, ephemeral, perceptual events, presented feetingly, lying outside the reach of the digital image; they identify a gap between such an image and the body’s perceptual apparatus. Like Goethe’s writing on colour, this subjective play is comprehensible as research into the moving image’s perceptual impact. (Further discussion of Sherwin’s work and images can be found in Nicky Hamlyn’s essay in this volume.) Sherwin’s Man with Mirror performance, originating from 1976, particularly makes the point. The audience becomes disoriented as to whether they are viewing an image or a real, touchable body, an image perceptually loosened from its on-screen moorings. The performance consists of a single projection of a 1970s flm of Sherwin facing the camera in a park, 50 D. de BRUYN holding a white-backed 1 0.75 m mirror, with both hands in front of × him. He slowly rotates the mirror so that, at times, the refection shows the park in front, below or above, depending on the mirror’s angle; and, at other times, an image of a young Sherwin staring into the originating camera (and thus directly at the audience). This is the flm’s content, but also the performance’s structure: the flm is projected onto Sherwin standing in the performance space holding and rotating a similar mirror. Like the gap between the projected and perceived afterimage of Cycles #3, in Man with Mirror Sherwin sets up a dialogue between the projected image and his physical presence in the performance space. This situation produces an ephemeral experience onto the bodies of the audience. As the performance proceeds, a constant movement occurs between the real Sherwin and the projected Sherwin, and the difference in age between the old and the new becomes instantly palpable. In a moment like this—and it seems to happen for all observers simultaneously—the moving image becomes unhinged, begins to foat. The new and old merge in a single, perceptual event. The eye loses its bearings. Are we watching a projection or a real presence? This gap is experienced directly, viscerally. This is a palpable experience of that un-locatability identifed in Flusser’s description of his amnesic technical image. Sherwin presents the physical history of his ageing body as a singular compacted fash of insight. While in Oscar Wilde’s famous tale, Dorian Gray’s surface looks hide the unscrupulous life history made visible in the painting of him, the relationship between Sherwin’s old and new bodies delivers no such dysfunction. The experience of Sherwin’s performance is not available in any YouTube or Vimeo recording of the event—although the simultaneous ‘oh-ah’ trace of the impact on its audience is palpable on such recordings. As discussed earlier in relation to Australian Expanded Cinema, Louise Curham and Lucas Ihlein, with Sherwin’s blessing, have extended Man with Mirror to a performance by themselves and others. This enabled Sherwin to experience directly the perceptual impact of this piece for the frst time.

Bruce McClure Bruce McClure’s multi-projector flm performances defne the digital image’s outer limits. These performances underscore what is lost moving from one image-producing technology to another. His sonic assaults of ficker and abstraction perform afterimages and optical residue, and PERFORMING THE MARGINS OF THE NEW 51 other un-photographable retinal effects. These effects are only available for the audience in the performance itself. They are lost in digital documentation. McClure’s instrument is a bank of two or three modifed 16 mm projectors. These allow him to subtly shift the focus and intensity of his projected flm loops that, more often than not, are themselves embedded with ficker effects. A hand-made soundboard and sound-effect pedals give him control of the tone, volume, pitch and echo of his sounds— an ability to subtly sculpt his rudimentary soundtracks on the run, in parallel to his manipulations of the projected image. The sonic rhythms, the back-and-forth between the soundtracks of each projector, shift in pitch and volume over time. These thirty-minute-plus performances build up a trance-like interplay between image and sound pulse, re-materializing and multiplying Sherwin’s earlier template of Phase Loop into a constantly changing feld of audiovisuality, and the shifts in perception that occur here are reminiscent of the misheard words that Elder identifes in Sharits’ T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G. To be in the audience inside one of McClure’s light and sound concerts viscerally impacts one’s body and breathing, similar to the way sound can immerse the body in dance and movement at a rave or music event. A McClure performance overwhelms the body with sonic excess. McClure forces his imagery to behave sonically. Its complex of ficker, intense light, of multiple projected images moving in and out of phase and focus, produce layered visual artifacts of pulse and afterimage. The pulsing light impacts like a visual bruise on the eye. As with Sherwin, there is a gap between what exists on his flm loops—what you can see McClure doing as he plays his instrument—and what the eye experiences. This is highlighted by the available images of these performances shot by audience members. As a blur or static, abstract shape, these images bear limited resemblance to the experience of being inside the overwhelming sonic encounter. Unlike the avant-garde palette that Manovich re-locates inside the computer, McClure’s performances resist containment or defnition in digital visual form. A digital video record of one of McClure’s performances lacks the presence and physicality of the originating event. Such documentation is unable to address the senses in the same way. Through their body-centred physicality, delivered via visual perceptual effects and importantly their overwhelming sonic volume, each performance is experienced as different. On the repeatability of these performances, McClure refers to the failures of his own archaic archive system, so rudimentary in 52 D. de BRUYN comparison to the digital archive, from which the contemporary technical image ‘magically’ and seamlessly arises. McClure’s archive is not magical, but riddled with uncertainty.

I use boxes and plastic bags as my archiving system and what seem to be precise notes to the future. In label boxes I store materials and try to identify the original flm loop sources to distinguish them from prints. I do this because I look forward to the opportunity to exhume the remains, but in the end it’s always like trying to decipher last month’s bills. Recent work constantly brings me to a retracing of worn paths causing me to note that I can never put my foot in it the same way. (Picard 2007, 65)

Although McClure’s technical images remain elusive, they are re-trace- able through their performance and in this way comment critically on the ahistorical nature of contemporary computer-produced digital images. McClure’s shoulder-to-shoulder battery of projectors and the fickering streams of light they emit is comparable to Edwin Land’s experimental set-up with projectors and pulses of light for his 1960s experiments into colour constancy. Both arrangements exhibit refned control over the light pulses they emit. Both explore the impact of perceptual effects. Land used his array to test his Retinex Theory of Colour (Land 1964). In the phenomena of colour constancy, an object remains perceived as the same colour irrespective of the light that illuminates it. A banana is perceived as the same yellow irrespective of the red light used to view it, because the coloured objects in its vicinity ground its perceived hue. Land’s experimental design contains two identical, Mondrian-like patterns (referred to as ‘Mondrians’ in the research) separately illuminated by varied combinations of red, green and blue light for very short and longer intervals. Shooting different packets of light at each ‘Mondrian’, the experimental subject is asked to identify any differences in the two physically identical images. This procedure isolates perceptual artifacts such as persistence and shifts in colour, shape and luminosity. Such subjective effects are also present in McClure’s performances. As with Land’s experimentation, these performances demonstrate the gaps between what is perceived and what is materially present. PERFORMING THE MARGINS OF THE NEW 53

Land’s Retinex Theory adds scientifc credibility to Goethe’s subjective ‘research’, which further rests on insights that artists since Leonardo Da Vinci have intuited. Abstract painting both intuitively and explicitly pushes such colour rules to their limits. Kandinsky actively sought out research into colour’s psychological impact (Gage 1993, 207), incorporating this knowledge into his creative practice: ‘It is often the case that to improve the bottom left hand corner, one needs to improve something on the right’ (Kandinsky 1982, 387). Land’s Retinex model incorporates both Goethe’s and Newton’s approaches, integrating their subjective and objective theories of colour into the one gestalt. John McCann places these objective-subjective views in relation:

The interesting paradox of the past is the confict between physics and psychology. The physics of colorimetry has produced a robust quantitative model of quanta catch in the retina. The psychology of color sensation has pointed out that human biological processes use spatial comparisons. (McCann 1998)

Land’s experiments indicate that colour constancy is the result of complex, referential, perceptual processes hard-wired into the body’s neural physiology. His model demonstrates how the colour one sees depends on how the eye ‘processes’ the whole feld of view. This model supports Gestalt Psychology’s understanding that the whole is a perceptually primary phenomenon. Land’s experiments demonstrate that such hard- wiring is evaluative, comparative and referential, producing paradoxical visual artifacts that may not be materially present. Such perceptual artifacts are the meat in McClure’s performances. In colour perception, there is thus a gap between scientifcally measurable ‘quanta catch in the retina’ and what is perceived and experienced. In McClure’s or Sherwin’s performances, this gap is demonstrated in the incongruity between, for example, viewing the projected flm and inspecting the same material over a light box. This gap between what is perceived and what exists as real in such cases as Goethe’s afterimages, wrongly illuminated bananas or yellows in a Mondrian painting, all demonstrate such perceptual gaps. Importantly, although our eyes register a banana illuminated with blue light as yellow, a digital camera does not. 54 D. de BRUYN

Pope/Rodgers/Fletcher Film artist Greg Pope integrates this camera-less flm practice directly into his flm performances. With long loops of black leader running through one 16 mm projector or a series of them, the strips of flm pass over a metal plate where he scratches and/or punctures the flm ‘live’. With each pass of the loop over the plate, the abstract patterns are added to, coloured and further layered for the audience to see on its next pass through the projector’s gate. In one of the more complex versions of this intervention process, a number of projectors are directed onto a fog-making machine, not to create images on a two-dimensional screen, but a cloud of kinetic activity, recalling and extending into improvisation Anthony McCall’s seminal 16 mm flm installation Line Describing a Cone (1973). Scratches in the soundtrack area add a further synchro- nous, sonic layer to the dynamic movement created. Pope has also built and used a machine that can inscribe such patterns onto the strip of flm automatically. Such improvisation uncannily recalls a connection between flm and computer-based image production. Konrad Zuse’s Z1, built between 1935 and 1938, was the world’s frst binary calculating machine and is considered the world frst computer. It read its instructions from a perforated strip of 35 mm flm. Pope’s scratch performances unexpectedly re-enact this operation of Zuse’s original computing machine but, like Sherwin and McClure, places it in an immersive body-centred sonic environment that engages the senses in a very different way to sitting in front of a computer screen. The process lays bare something of that activity occurring in the computer’s covered-over circuitry. Pope had been a member of the London Based Loophole Cinema Collective, which operated from 1989 to 1998. The Collective comprised of Greg and Ivan Pope, Bea Haut, Ben Hayman and Paul Rodgers and specialized in large-scale 16 mm installation and performances, infuenced by pre-cinematic light projections, optical toys, shadow puppets and videorama technologies. One member of this group, Paul Rodgers, migrated to Australia in 1996 where he continued his work with hand- made optical devices, re-tooled from video cameras and 16 mm flm projectors. As avant-projectionist and VJ Arnold Eye Irons, Paul Rodgers embedded himself into the local flm art music scene, where his visual and sound performances have punctuated the night’s line-up of acts at such PERFORMING THE MARGINS OF THE NEW 55

Fig. 3 Paul Rodgers, Dome (2001) local Melbourne venues as the Horse Bazaar, Loop Bar, St Jerome’s, Revolver, HiFi bar and Ace Morning. At the Mass Gallery in Melbourne in 2001, Rodgers installed two kinetic Projection Machines, Dome (Fig. 3) and Beacon, both obelisks to a discarded industrial past and their related remnant technologies. The translucent biospheric Dome could be approached from any angle, sampled and circumnavigated, mimicking the syntax and the process of collection inherent in the images themselves, gleaned from desolated locations around the dominant West Gate Bridge, itself a sentinel to mobility. Projected from the inside are dancing and pixelated fragments of spent industrial landscapes that rotate and sweep across its surface. The Beacon is entered like a private projection booth in which loop 16 mm images of local industrial wastelands. Entering triggers the projection, while stillness, which also can happen when contemplating the grainy loop, halts the machine. In these ‘interactive shadow engines’, Rodgers seeds and extends his earlier collaborations as part of Loophole 56 D. de BRUYN

Cinema. ‘When I was with Loophole we used to do a lot of flming with Bolex cameras for site specifc installations and performances which we did around Europe and where we met a lot of people with kinetic machines and expanded cinema’ (Rodgers in Dzenis 2001). Rodgers’ Australian work refexively locates the technologies from which he constructs his installations in relation to the industrial sites that served their originating economic purpose. He further matches their discarded aesthetic back into the wastelands in which these industrial sites have now devolved. These images and sculptures are all about the historic context that Flusser insists has become un-locatable. Paul Fletcher is another Australian artist whose practice responds to the technological shifts triggered by digital media and the result- ant emergence of VJ Culture. He has framed his cinema performances through Mia Makela’s term ‘Live Cinema’, which sources the history of video performance such as the Vasulkas and emphasizes contemporary digital-based works. Though his work is delivered digitally, Fletcher’s practice has been formed through his 1980s stop-motion Super 8 flms and a parallel involvement in the decade’s minimalist music scene in Melbourne. Paul Fletcher played drums from 1980 to 1983 in the post- punk minimalist band Essendon Airport with David Chesworth, Robert Goodge and Ian Cox, where slides and visuals intermittently supple- mented live performance. His early Super 8 flms, including Mr Tsuzuki Comes to Australia (1981, 19 minutes) and Dolls (1981, 10 minutes), are quirky no-budget stop-motion narratives that re-animate trivial discarded objects and ornaments from an evolving collection of found materials. In 2006 Fletcher re-purposed a series of home vacuum cleaners as midi control panels. He cobbled together a ‘gestural instrument to make sounds and “perform” a flm in a semi-improvised mode. This set up used an intense bank of image and sound loops, triggered by mechanical devices and acoustically made sounds’ (Fletcher 2013, 31). The twin-aerial on these re-purposed domestic devices was playable like a theremin. This instrument can be understood as an extension of the performative elements of the jerry-built drum machines Fletcher played and constructed as part of Essendon Airport. Fletcher describes his ‘all-embracing’ ongoing art project Hidden Creatures as a ‘live cinema environment’. It is moving image, installation, outdoor exhibition and amusement park in a public garden setting. PERFORMING THE MARGINS OF THE NEW 57

Installed periodically in regional Victoria (Bendigo) and built like an expanded Easter Egg Hunt, visitors of all ages move through the Hidden Creatures garden space linking embedded objects and screens to build personalized narratives. We are inside the feld, a landscape rather than a stream of images. What binds these installation and performance works together has to do with the abstracted layered imagery that often provides the content for these projects, particularly his cinema and screening events. Fletcher’s abstractions have evolved to an understanding and expression of how one moves visually through a vegetated landscape or garden, a visual feld particular to his home environment in Bendigo. In these situations, the patterning of leaves, trees, shrubs and dirt form clusters that move over and in relation to each other. Imagery and movement operate differently in the rural landscape to the way our eyes move through the city, where the labyrinth, the cut, the refection, the window and the pervasive screen have neurologically hard-wired and shaped our viewing strategies. Fletcher’s artisanal practice physically arises out of his perceptual relationship with his environment and the self-constructed tools he builds to express this relationship. Having built and physically experimented with the technologies used in his performance and installation work, Fletcher’s technical images are both locatable in his community and the home-built aesthetic in which his images are framed intrinsically expresses a knowledge of their history.

Conclusion This discussion has reviewed the recent re-emergence of Expanded Cinema practice and placed it into a historical context, with a special emphasis on contemporary work originating in Australia, where such work is often consequently absent in international critical discourse. In the fnal analysis I have singled out the internationally profled work of Sherwin and McClure to make the point that contemporary Expanded Cinema practice can productively answer Flusser’s call for an ‘elucidation of the technical image’s inner workings’ (Flusser 2000, 16) and the technical image’s history and location. The perceptual events resident in the visual performance practices of Sherwin and McClure in particular offer insights into digital technology’s limits, and point to divergent perceptual events that impact the 58 D. de BRUYN body directly, speaking to and illuminating the body’s sensory apparatus. This work identifes those image-making strategies viable in analogue form, but lost to the new technologies that replace them. Their method sources the strategies of 1970s Materialist Film as outlined in Malcolm Le Grice’s writing, which itself reiterates and resources a 1920s European avant-garde cinema also briefy mentioned here. Materialist Film has evolved as a practice preoccupied with laying bare such technological architectures as an implicitly political project. Sherwin’s and McClure’s method links back to Goethe’s subjective experiments with seeing, and Land’s work on the perception of colour as a form of practice-based research. By returning us to our senses, these proto-cinema performance practices mark the boundaries of Flusser’s technical image in digital form. There is a difference between the way our perceptual apparatus operates and how the new technologies perform. Sherwin’s and McClure’s practice is productive in locating this ambiguity. The technical image is no longer photographic, nor is it grounded in its sonic impact on the body. With the shrinking of refective, critical space that the technical image’s proliferation has produced, there is a need to better utilize such body-centred knowing to overcome the new emphasis on pattern recognition that speed-up brings to everyday life. This is a practice whose focus on the structure of moving-image/ sound production articulates an emphasis also critical to digital media, according to Manovich and Flusser. What better way to uncover the hidden or amnesic vistas of the digital realm and its malleable surfaces than a practice that—despite its affnities with the digital arts—is itself largely un-recognized and subjugated within the contemporary discourse of digital image production.

References Curham, L., and L. Ihlein. 2013. (Wo)man With Mirror, User’s Manual. Sydney: Big Fag Press, n.p. Dzenis, Anna. 2001. Confounding Projections. Real Time Arts 43, June/July. Fletcher, Paul. 2013. Is Live Cinema Dead? https://www.academia.edu/29580398/ Is_Live_Cinema_Dead. Flusser, Vilém. 2000. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion. Gage, John. 1993. Colour and Culture. London: Thames & Hudson. PERFORMING THE MARGINS OF THE NEW 59

Gidal, Peter. 1973. Proposal for Room Film submitted to BFI October 1973, lodged in the British Film and Video Artist’s Study Collection, St. Martin’s School of Art, London. Gidal, Peter. 1976. Structural Film Anthology. London: British Film Institute. Gidal, Peter. 1989. Materialist Film. London: Routledge. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 1967. Theory of Colours. Cambridge: MIT Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Age of the World-Picture. In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper. Heidegger, Martin. 1998. Pathmarks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kandinsky, Wassily. 1982. Complete Writings in Art. London: Faber. Krauss, Rosalind. 1978. Paul Sharits. Film Culture 89–102. Land, Edwin. 1964. The Retinex. Scientifc American 52 (2): 247–264. Le Grice, Malcolm. 1977. Abstract Film and Beyond. Cambridge: MIT Press. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. McCann, John J. 1998. Color Theory and Color Imaging Systems: Past, Present and Future. Journal of Imaging Science and Technology 42 (1): 70–78. Picard, Andrea. 2007. Reading Between the Lines with Bruce McClure. CinemaScope 32. http://cinemascope.com/columns/columns-flmart-reading- between-the-lines-with-bruce-mcclure/. Pierson, Michele James, E. David, and Paul Arthur, eds. 2011. Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sharits, Paul. 1969. Notes on Films/1966–1968. Film Culture 47 (Summer): 13–16. Sherwin, Guy. 2007. Optical Sound Films 1971–2007. London: Lux Publishing. Sitney, P. Adams. 2002. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ströhl, Andreas, ed. 2004. Vilém Flusser: Writings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vasulka, Steina. 1977. Paul Sharits Interview. https://vimeo.com/12607672. Twenty-First Century Flicker: Jodie Mack, Benedict Drew and Sebastian Buerkner

Barnaby Dicker

Introduction By defnition, an experimental work should ‘test’ something. Within an artistic—rather than scientifc—context, quite what is being tested at any given point is open to debate. Stroboscopic ficker effects, which by nature expose the intermittent frame-structure of cinematography, readily test two things when used in experimental flms: the perceptual and cognitive faculties of viewers and certain limits of cinematographic technologies and methodologies. Consequently, the viewer’s phenomenological experiences of such ficker can vary, while wider meanings are signposted in a distinctive and refexive ‘atomised’ way through the precise orchestration of frame-by-frame articulations. To generate ficker effects, one must push beyond the techniques that result in disjunctive, ‘jittery’ animation on screen by maximising frame-based differences in luminance, effectively exacerbating the intermittent rhythm of cinematography (traditionally, a light/dark opposition; in digital media,

B. Dicker (*) King’s College, London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 61 V. Smith and N. Hamlyn (eds.), Experimental and Expanded Animation, Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73873-4_4 62 B. DICKER binary shifts). If cinematographic displays and dominant modes of cinematography are fxated on the threshold of critical ficker fusion—where moving images appear smooth and seamless—experimental ficker effects, by contrast, seek to expose and work with the stroboscopic potential of cinematography. This quality invites sculptural analogies: each frame and each cut operating like fxed, yet temporalised incisions or distinct micro-surfaces. The flms or sequences that run in this vein tend to be visually demanding and high tempo, conveying a sense of intensity, often with an austerity that some might consider aggressive. As we shall see, there are also opportunities for playfulness and humour here. My argument in this chapter is that any encounter with ficker effects in experimental animation realigns our relationship with other forms of moving imagery. In contrast to homogenous, unifed moving images (however fragmentary), ficker effects force a direct awareness of the intermittence of cinematography, its intervals, its ‘pulse’. Confronted with the stroboscopic visibility of these minimal graphic units, we encounter the underlying economy of cinematography, its intensely grouped images—i.e. frames. Flicker thus works ‘homeopathically’— that is to say, very well even in small doses. Of course, further questions remain: how have any given ficker effects been cohered and what specifc visual and conceptual interventions might they be seen to make? In this chapter, I consider recent work by Jodie Mack, Benedict Drew and Sebastian Buerkner that, taken together, indicate something of the current range of application for ficker effects. In my view, each artist has made signifcant use of ficker as a means to trigger an awareness in the viewer of his or her status as a social subject. To set the scene, let us imagine ourselves positioned as subjects within and across the increasingly blurred zones of cinema, television/broadcasting, online, advertising and art installation spectatorship that make up our pervasive screen culture and its heavy image fow. And let us imagine that it is within and in response to this circumstance that our experimental animators make their interventions; and that they do so with us, the spectator, in mind.

Flicker Films and Flicker Effects In the history of avant-garde and experimental flm, the canonical account of the ficker flm bestows it an explosive zenith in the 1960s and ascribes it the purpose of identifying or reaching a particular TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY FLICKER … 63 cinematographic minimalism and abstraction aligned with human perception and consciousness. For good reason, Tony Conrad and Paul Sharits are frequently championed as its principal exponents (for recent, thorough surveys, see Joseph 2011, 279–365; Pfeffer 2015). While this account is not inaccurate, we must be careful not to fx the ficker flm within a particular time and with a particular purpose. Instead, we should recognise that use of ficker predates the 1960s and remains an ongoing practice that deserves to be grasped more gently as a distinctive mode that can be utilised in an abundance of ways. Maureen Turim usefully distinguishes between ficker effects that may be embedded within flms that contain continuous moving images and ficker flms per se that are more or less exclusively committed to a stroboscopic structure (Turim 1985, 93–94). As I suggested above, ficker may be taken to function ‘homeopathically’. This means there is no demand for ficker to be treated in isolation. Casting our net wide to include ficker effects that might be utilised more subtly and sporadically than in flms dedicated to ficker allows us to do this. Indeed, one of the central purposes of this chapter is to emphasise ways in which contemporary experimental animators are fnding and advancing often complex ways to integrate ficker into the fabric of their flms. To better grasp the stakes of ficker effects within experimental animation, let us briefy consider the normative, mainstream position regarding the foregrounding of cinematography’s frame-structure. David Bordwell (2002) characterises mainstream use of fast cutting as ‘intensifed continuity’ that, for all its heightened stimuli and cues, nevertheless reinforces classical continuity models. Bordwell (2002, 23) reports that such practice is called ‘frame fucking’ within commercial circles. In contrast to this crude and somewhat derogatory designation, the avant-garde and experimental feld has long recognised frame-based practice as exploring, in Peter Kubelka’s words, the ‘strong side of the medium’ through its engagement with the ‘ground rhythm’ of cinematography (Mekas 2000, 291). Following his experiments with ficker effects in Arnulf Rainer (1960) and Schwechater (1957), Kubelka stated ‘my economy is [the] single frame and every part of the screen. […] I have [–with analogue flm–] twenty-four communication possibilities per second, and I don’t want to waste one’ (Mekas 2000, 287, 288). From this perspective, a standard, continuous shot is simply ‘a roll of very weak collisions between frames’ (Mekas 2000, 292). To state the inverse: ficker effects are predicated precisely on strong collisions between or within frames. 64 B. DICKER

Pulse Rosalind Krauss fnds a subversive pulse—erotic, libidinal, Lacanian—at work not only in ficker flms and the very technology of cinematography but also further afeld, within the canon of modern art, through the work of Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp (see Krauss 1988, 1994, 197–236) and across quotidian environs, in the form of neon lights, amusement arcades and rock music (Bois and Krauss 1997, 164). Krauss has in mind,

a rhythm, or beat, or pulse—a kind of throb of on/off on/off on/off— which, in itself, acts against the stability of visual space in a way that is destructive and devolutionary […] [and] has the power to decompose and dissolve the very coherence of form on which visuality may be thought to depend. (Krauss 1988, 51)

This is an exciting, yet daunting charge for any use of ficker. The home- opathic model followed here renders the devolutionary potential of ficker identifed by Krauss more practicable; less grand and extreme. Here, ficker serves to unpick but a few threads of the fabric of expectations held for cinematography. Luke Smythe (2013, 81) has applied Gilles Deleuze’s notion of ‘signaletic material’ to thinking about experimental animation—specifcally, Len Lye and, before him, Arnaldo and Bruno Ginanni-Corradini (who would join the Italian Futurists shortly after their frst foray into flmmaking). The signaletic is particularly apt when considering ficker effects. Under this term, Deleuze groups, in relation to cinema,

all kinds of modulation features, sensory (visual and sound), kinetic, intensive, affective, rhythmic, tonal, and even verbal (oral and written). […] But, even with its verbal elements, this is neither a language system nor a language. It is a plastic mass, an a-signifying and a-syntaxic material, a material not formed linguistically even though it is not amorphous, and is formed semiotically, aesthetically, and pragmatically. (Deleuze 1989, 29)

Deleuze seems to have in mind some primal stratum or dimension in the encounter between screen and viewer. This readily accords with Krauss’s pulse, both in terms of primacy and temporalised form. We have then— potentially—a subversive mode brimming with sensorial appeal. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY FLICKER … 65

Proto-Cinematography In tracing the roots of the subversive pulse, Krauss looks to nineteenth century proto-cinematographic devices, the Zoetrope in particular. Underlining such media archaeological connections is of enduring signifcance, for as we cycle through new media we establish new relations with past practices. Turim, who, like Krauss, links ficker and pulse, offers an account of Kubelka’s Schwechater that imaginatively links it with proto-cinematography. She writes,

[Kubelka’s frame-based ficker] system constructs a flm in which the image of an action is used as an indicator in a visual game of motion abstraction, bringing to mind […] the various image machines which served as precur- sors to the cinema [and] created the illusion of an imperfect, jumpy and charming continuity of action. In Schwechater the linearity is renounced in favour of a play which would jump all over the spinning circle of the zoe- trobe [sic] in a geometric confguration, taking pleasure in the careering reassemblage of disjointed parts as a new force. (Turim 1985, 96)

While this formulation might lack clarity, it is highly thought-provoking in terms of unravelling fxed conceptions of cinematography. Here, Turim casts cinematography as proto-cinematography—that is to say, casting each one as latent within the other; precisely how depending on one’s personal position and elected direction of historical sequence (chronological, reverse chronological or a-chronological). She also invokes a non-linear proto-cinematography premised on the principles of assemblage, play and abstraction. In my view, the distinctive feature of cinematography is its harness- ing of stroboscopic principles for use with graphic displays. This was decisively and actively grasped, almost simultaneously, by two scien- tists, Simon Ritter von Stampfer and Joseph Plateau, in the winter of 1832 (for translations of their founding statements, see Plateau 2016; Stampfer 2016). This was only superfcially coincidental, as both were informed by antecedent research into optics and drew on existing cultural practices. Their disc-based devices, named the Stroboscope and the Phenakistoscope, respectively, were very similar. Drawn and painted images provided the basis for printers to mass (re)produce the discs. From this perspective, what we now commonly understand as animation occupies a position within our account of cinematography that 66 B. DICKER is historically, historiographically and ontologically prior to the photographic live-action cinematography of the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, in the frst discs of both Stampfer and Plateau we fnd abstract animations exploring shifts in shape, colour and depth illusion. Thus, from the outset, abstraction and fguration rub shoul- ders (see Robinson 1991, 14 and throughout). Even more signifcant: ficker is there too—on Stampfer’s fully abstract Stroboscopic Wheel No. 2, where we fnd a circle of triangles fickering between yellow and blue. Experimental animation as a platform for the exploration of abstraction and ficker effects, then, is nothing new and may be traced at least as far back as 1832. Far from undermining recent work, this heritage only reinforces its enduring potential and myriad permutations.

Jodie Mack Jodie Mack’s experimental animations, often shot and presented on analogue flm, are vibrant in rhythm and colour. A major concern in her work is the exploration of the textures and patterns of fabrics, printed matter and other materials. To this end, she gave herself a ‘new man- tra, not “medium is the message” but instead “the material is the message”’ (Rostron 2015). This McLuhanesque stance manifests itself in the way Mack uses photography (that is to say, cinematography) to quote or reference the materials she works with. This documentary aspect complicates any characterisation of her work as being predominantly ‘abstract’. Mack’s concern with materials thus seems to be double: with the materials photographed and with photography/cinematography as material medium. One of Mack’s specialities are what she calls ‘fabric ficker flms’ (Stob 2015). Based, initially, on her own textile collections, she considers these flms to be ‘temporal archives’—i.e. ‘recording[s] of a collection played out stroboscopically’ (Rostron 2015). Once again, Mack under- lines the act of photographic documentation of materials in-the-world. Crucially, for our purposes, she links this strategy with the use of stroboscopic ficker effects, inviting viewers to comparatively link different fabrics through this pulsing, high-tempo mode. Mack has also noted, ‘the power of declaration was what I was working on in these ficker TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY FLICKER … 67 flms’ (Stob 2015). These works, then, are not simply reports, they are also statements; statements Mack explicitly links with abstraction understood as a ‘declarative device’.1 This might be a nod to Paul Sharits’s ficker-based body of work Declarative Mode (1976–1977), a single- or dual-screen flm and a display of the flms’ frames supported by a suite of carefully rendered shooting scores, directly, but subtly inspired by Beethoven’s 7th Symphony (Lebensztejn 2015, 261). According to Sharits, ‘Declarative Mode is declaring something, as if the color of the ficker is directly addressing the viewer’ (Lebensztejn 2015, 265). If Sharits was moved by Beethoven, Mack would seem to be taken with the fabrics she collected, concerning herself not only with the ‘color of the ficker’, but with the fabric patterns too. Mack’s fabric ficker flm Rad Plaid (2010) is premised on a playful, simple interaction with its cinema audience. One half of the auditorium must shout ‘rad’ when they see vertical lines on screen, while the other half must shout ‘plaid’ when they see horizontal lines. The oscillation between rad and plaid starts slowly enough, but very quickly gains in speed, until Mack is able to create ficker rhythms. Inevitably, the audience’s shouting of rad and plaid descends into chaos and absurdity, the fickering frame alterations negating the possibility of succeeding with the aim of the game, and with occasional frames showing diagonal lines that undermine the vertical–horizontal premise. In doing so, Mack confronts her viewers with the frame-structure of cinematography and raises their awareness of the speed of their perception in relation to the lag in their response time. This is not a cold technical exercise that stands at a remove from the viewer. Rather, it offers viewers an energetic and ludic reminder of their agency and raises questions about the relationship between viewer, screen and flm. The visual simplicity2 of Mack’s fabric ficker flms invites a comparison with proto-cinematographic animated views in terms of the seemingly narrow range of image forms (fabric patterns), a strategy suggestive of a ‘loop’. The pertinence of this comparison is buoyed by that fact that Mack has made a bike zoetrope, Bike-Cycle (2012), and a fickering phenakistoscopic animation, Round and Round—Phenakistoscope Phun (2012), assembled out of scans of her own Phenakistoscopes (see Fig. 1). Following Turim, we can consider how Mack’s proto-cinematographic sensibility spills out beyond a literal correlation and, furthermore, confrms Krauss’s contention that the stroboscopic pulse can 68 B. DICKER

Fig. 1 Jodie Mack, Phenakistoscopes for Round and Round—Phenakistoscope Phun (2012) dismantle visuality. Mack feeds us an impression of repetition and non- progression—in the case of Rad Plaid, an impression even of oscillation, rather like we fnd with a Thaumatrope, where two images just about reach a point of synthesis. However, these impressions are completely inaccurate: Mack has photographed thousands of different patches of fabric. Likewise, she very precisely controls the visual rhythms of her flms, easing viewers in and out of the ficker experience as she sees ft, in much the same way Conrad and Sharits do. The flms thus carry both a fnite durational structure and the impression of an infnite fow. Mapping this back onto proto-cinematography, it seems perfectly legitimate to see in the prevailing use of repetitious loops not a limited, primitive form (in need of narrative), but something almost crystalline, activated by viewers and potentially infnite in its rotations. The stroboscopic pulse we encounter with proto-cinematographic devices and in experimental ficker work reminds us that while the graphic, plastic and temporal gestalt of any cinematographic display has been formulated in advance of being viewed, it is by no means ‘fnished’; nor does it end with the viewer—its potential endures. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY FLICKER … 69

Benedict Drew Benedict Drew’s moving-image works are often embedded within an installation or ‘expanded’ context. Drew subversively aligns his work with the branded, mass-produced products, logos, slogans, bright colours and eye-catching designs of consumer culture and advertising. This strategy is exemplifed by his incredibly short looping animation de- re-touch that appeared on screens across the London Underground in early 2016, interspersed among commercial animated advertisements. In form and content, Drew offers us a grotesque parody of the (grotesque?) marketing that flls the public sphere. In this way, he joins the company of many artists, from the Dadaists and Fernand Léger to Eduardo Paolozzi and Robert Rauschenburg and beyond, who remind us that art is not necessarily separate from, above, dissimilar to or uninterested in consumerism, be it niche or mainstream. It is precisely through this proximity or similarity that such artists are able to offer and encourage critique of late capitalist norms. While this intervention might be problematic—potentially contradictory or hypocritical, depending on one’s position—it is this very condition that provides the basis for critical fecundity. The institutions and discourses that drive consumer culture have historically attempted to manage and largely sideline the place, visibility and signifcance of its excessive, varied and seemingly unavoidable wastage. Drew takes great interest in this aspect of things, gathering together embodiments and signifers of detritus, waste and non-utility to which he links themes of repetition and redundancy. He seems to strive for an impression of both meaning and absence of meaning, substance and emptiness. Edited with frame-by-frame precision, his flms present repeated images and slogans collaged together. Their dense and nervous visual fabric conveys a sense of ideational distillation through a mode of address akin to animated graphic design experiments. It is here that stroboscopic ficker plays its part. Among the diverse visual modalities and techniques Drew juxtaposes, overlays and combines, ficker is a conspicuous recurrent feature. It might occur as only one element on screen— that is, a ficker fragment—for example, in material for the exhibition The Trickle Down Syndrome (2017) presented at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Conversely, a semi-transparent ficker layer might fll the screen or occupy the background to lend a noticeable devolutionary pulse à la Krauss to more stable imagery, as in NOT HAPPY (2014) (see Fig. 2). (It is worth noting that stroboscopic ficker, for all of its challenge to 70 B. DICKER

Fig. 2 Benedict Drew, a Fig. 3 Sebastian Buerkner, frames sequence of consecutive frames from Album Matter (2010) from NOT HAPPY (2014) TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY FLICKER … 71 continuity, nevertheless offers a certain kind of temporalised visual unity through its pulse. I will return to this later.) Such blanket ficker provides a means for Drew to introduce bursts of more minimalistic, abstract ficker. To put it bluntly, none of the material Drew puts on screen is exempt from the possibility and likely eventuality of being literally shaped or coloured by ficker effects. This is perhaps what generates the visual nervousness mentioned above and fosters an attraction–repulsion tension for the spectator. Drew sees a range of uses for ficker effects.3 Firstly, ficker makes reference to the heritage of avant-garde flm—such historical references, we note, being of equal importance to or, indeed, tied up with any thematic exploration or formal experimentation. Secondly, he sees it providing a means to show multiple images almost simultaneously, without recourse to layering—or rather, in addition to it. For Drew, ficker carries an ‘acidic’ quality that ‘jumps out of the screen’ and ‘cuts through [the visual feld] like a sine tone does in music’. He points out that ficker—as a temporal cinematographic process—‘performs on the viewer in a way that only the strongest of pictorial images do’. In Drew’s assessment, stroboscopic force or charge exists independent of imagery or symbolism. This is no gimmick, but an additional communicative opportunity that, as has been argued above, is fundamental to cinematography. For Drew, ficker is ‘ecstatic’ and generates ‘pure bodily affect’. For some reason, he feels the need to ‘keep trying not to use it’. Does he feel that its power is too easy to exploit? Or that it might be perceived to halt artistic progression? I consider these doubts unnecessary. Drew’s work is premised on utilising such a wide variety of modalities and idioms that I do not see why ficker should be outlawed. After all, ficker is as equally conventional—and potentially affective—as the use of close-ups, long takes or slow motion. Drew’s work demonstrates well how ficker activates the screen and provides a means for material to be rapidly reconfgured and variable juxtapositions to be played out. Drew has added an Appendix to his website (http://www.benedict- drew.com/fiker.html). It consists of a webpage of fickering solid black and white accompanied by stuttering electronic sound. The position of the cursor on the screen infuences the audio-visual confguration; the composition changes with any movement of the cursor, with lines and blocks of black and white subdividing the screen. Here is an endless, ‘pure’ ficker flm, readily available for millions of viewers and infnitely variable for each one, as elegant as it is repulsive. It is too easy to call Drew’s Appendix pointless or meaningless. We grasp its uninviting and 72 B. DICKER repetitious conceptual joke almost immediately. This makes it a perfect example of ficker effects operating homoeopathically. Its purpose is precisely, as Drew makes clear, to be an appendix, presumably both in terms of faux-redundant body organ and supplementary data. In other words, it has made and continues to make its intervention at the periphery. The importance of this ‘work’ (?) lies in the fact that it could so easily not have been made. This returns us to the problematic relationship between art and consumerism. Playful as many websites, Drew’s included, may be, they remain largely utilitarian (and thankfully so, especially for critics). While the commercial ecology of the internet readily assimilates subversive elements—or rather, they are a priori designed for it—the objections they raise remain and cannot be dissolved, only ignored. An inquisitive interest in Drew’s work may well lead to his Appendix…

Sebastian Buerkner Buerkner’s vivid computer-generated animations are often visually driven by puzzling shifts between or combinations of seemingly recognisable worldly forms and those that are purely ideational or virtual. Viewers are left to literally make sense of what they see, informed by enigmatic titles and the verbalised statements and clues with regard to setting that make up the soundtrack. Buerkner is able to explore the slippage between the referential and the non-objective by virtue of the visual idiom he has developed. Using digital animation software in a highly distinctive way (that runs at odds with the vast majority of CG work), Buerkner deals in simple shapes and solid (but gradated) colours that are then made more complex through their combination and animation. On-screen elements are mutable and mobile, both in themselves and in relation to one another. Buerkner has taken his experiments to stereoscopic flmmaking with The Chimera of M. (2013), to spectacular effect. He has also pursued them through the use of ficker effects. Buerkner, like Drew, ascribes ficker a number of sometimes conficting uses.4 It can act as a means to control and withhold information, forcing viewers to make rapid decisions as to what they are seeing and what it might mean. Potentially, this can draw on individuals’ subconscious sensibilities or elicit an emotional response. Buerkner is very aware that ficker can generate, at one end, an overloaded ‘visual fog’, and, at the other, sequences of controlled precision. An anecdote serves well to position ficker in Buerkner’s work. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY FLICKER … 73

Having fnished editing his flm Purple Grey (2006), commissioned by Animate! and to be premiered on British television, Buerkner duly sup- plied broadcaster Channel 4 with the master tape. As is now routine in the UK, the flm was subjected to the Harding Test that essentially meas- ures ficker levels to identify any material that might cause possible epi- leptic attacks in viewers. Buerkner’s flm failed, and so had to be ever so slightly re-edited. Buerkner’s use of ficker is at its most compelling when he corre- lates and interlaces multiple forms across frames. His flm Triband (2009) does this forcefully, demanding that viewers form composite cognitive images not actually contained in the flm itself. Album Matter (2010) is more accessible, cutting between drifting, continuous, grey sequences and brightly coloured ficker sequences (as seen in Fig. 3). This flm neatly demonstrates how cinematography’s frame-structure is always ready to be exposed, and with it, a distinctive semantic mode— disjunctive, rich, seemingly compact. It is interesting to consider Buerkner’s work in relation to Cubism, especially in the light of the long-standing correlations drawn between Cubism and the Cinématographe. While some accounts are less convincing than others, their extent and diversity point to an important bond. In 1911, championing his friends the Cubists, Guillaume Apollinaire wrote that, ‘This art, which can in a sense be called cinematic, aims to show us every facet of plastic reality, without sacrifcing the advantages of perspective’ (Apollinaire 1972, 151). As Denise Fédit and Margit Rowell have noted, the somewhat detached, but infuential Orphic Cubist, František Kupka, left among his papers a late 1890s programme for Émile Reynaud’s Pantomimes Lumineuses (see Rowell 1975a, b). These blockbuster shows took place at the Musée Grévin in Paris and utilised a version of Reynaud’s Praxinoscope à la Projection. Rowell contends that Kupka’s interest in Reynaud’s Praxinoscope, as well as chronopho- tography, contributed to shaping his Orphic work. An ink drawing, The Horsemen, dated to around 1900, appears to signpost this infuence, presenting a hunting party riding through a wood in such a way as to be suggestive of the drum and mirror-column that defne the Praxinoscope. More recently, Bernice Rose (2002, 62 and throughout, and 2007) has put forward the case that the frame-structure of cinematography and its presentation of movement had a formative infuence on the early Cubist work of Picasso and Braque, particularly in terms of their use of grid-like ‘scaffolding’. 74 B. DICKER

In line with terminology for Cubism originated by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, we fnd in Buerkner’s animation the analytic, the fractured planar splaying out of a subject in space, and the synthetic, the combination of diverse elements refecting some kind of experience (see Kahnweiler 1949). Ideas raised in Apollinaire’s The Cubist Painters also chime with Buerkner’s work—the centrality of light, for example (also found in the theories and paintings of Robert Delaunay). Writing of the freedom offered by Cubist methodology, Apollinaire considers it to allow the artist to ‘proportion objects in accordance with the degree of plasticity he desires them to have’ (Apollinaire 1962, 14). Buerkner’s animations explore this possibility almost endlessly, and in far from static ways, frequently toying with scale, proximity and point of view. Apollinaire’s category of Orphic Cubism is also valuable here. Exemplifed by Delaunay, Léger, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp— and, in a shadowy capacity, Kupka—work of this kind is claimed to exclusively present inner visions and experiences through a combination of subject and ‘self-evident structure’ (Apollinaire 1962, 17–18). In the history of animation, Orphic Cubist Léopold Survage’s plans for an abstract flm entitled Coloured Rhythms, developed in the early 1910s, serves as a ready link with the movement. Survage sought pure abstraction, as later non-objective animators would do. Admittedly with a different aim in mind, Buerkner harnesses the potential of this Orphic purity and brings it into contact with a deliberately aloof sense of social presence. In Buerkner’s work, we fnd repeated refection on the tensions between such interior experience and the demands and allures of the phenomenal world. If we accept Rose’s claims for the infuence of cinematography’s flmstrip frame-structure on Cubism, Buerkner may be seen to return the gesture (even if inadvertently), integrating these painterly concerns into the realm of flmmaking in a way hardly glimpsed before, advances in digital techniques doubtless playing a key part in bringing this to fru- ition. Drawing on Rose’s claim, we have the opportunity to understand ficker in Cubist terms and to further align it with the devolutionary pulse identifed by Krauss. A parallel can be drawn between Buerkner’s work and Kubelka’s Schwechater, mentioned above. Regarding the latter, a flm presenting a frame-based deconstruction of live-action footage, Turim astutely claims, ‘The bourgeois nature of the representation within the [flm] (lei- sure and elegance) is violated by the process of reconstruction of that imagery within the ficker mode’ (Turim 1985, 95). Buerkner, too, TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY FLICKER … 75 appears to sample and interlace scenarios born of late capitalism. Three factors mark an advance on Kubelka’s flm. Firstly, Buerkner’s ‘sampling’ is far more extensive, the catalogue growing ever-larger and richer with each flm. Secondly, Buerkner experiments with a computer-generated graphic idiom that lends this form of fickering critique something of the complexity found in the work of Oskar Fischinger. Thirdly, as an animator, Buerkner does not whittle down live action as Kubelka does but, rather, builds his material up from basic graphic elements. This allows for greater control of the juxtapositions and correspondences within and between those twenty-something communication possibilities per second that Kubelka speaks of.

Conclusion Over this brief survey of the role of ficker in the work of Mack, Drew and Buerkner, I have sought to indicate something of each artist’s distinctive approach and output. In drawing this discussion to a close, I would like to fag up those concerns and techniques discussed that are actually shared by our three case studies. Collage: Mack handles the juxtaposition and combination of physical materials with elegance, drawing attention to geometric interactions with an almost Constructivist or Neo-Plasticist sensibility; Drew constrains and compresses a chaotic response to modern life, a jumble of word and image, with a clean, digital (if lo-f) designerly fnish; Buerkner sets his digital images against each other, sometimes bestowing them with similar form, colour, position or movement, suggesting unity in difference and vice versa. ‘Documentary’: all three artists unquestionably make work that is tied strongly to actuality. For Mack, it is materials, including photography/cinematography; for Drew, the world of consumerism; for Buerkner, human relationships, private and public interactions and environments. Loops, cycles and repetitions: Mack’s flms often present a seemingly focused structure or set of parameters, suggestive of a hermetic circle; Drew repeats images, combinations and techniques with slight differences, instilling in the viewer a sense of an uneasy and imperfect ‘eternal return’; Buerkner also uses such strategies, with repeated elements acting as puzzle-pieces for a point of view (flmmaker, spectator, character, ‘camera’) that seeks to grasp an underlying logic. Last, but not least, we return to the issue of the precise sculptural frame-by-frame orchestration of cinematographic fow. With continuous animated motion rejected as a benchmark (but still available 76 B. DICKER for use), our flmmakers can explore micro-articulations unencumbered. The combination of on-screen images is anything but smooth. Flicker marks these flms as hewn, carved, cut, torn, amassed, pasted or welded together. We are drawn into the fabric of these works in a very corporeal way, our perception called upon to be active at all times and at a most primal level. We are bombarded by the pulsatile ficker as a reminder that all moving images always bombard us. And yet, ficker also acts as a unifying principle, its rhythmic pulse matching, if not our cardiovas- cular system, then certainly our perceptual apparatus. This is the fipside to the subversive pulse identifed by Krauss. We might venture that for everything ficker undoes, it substitutes an alternative—temporalised— binding force. The recent ficker work of Mack, Drew and Buerkner reminds us that this ‘pulsatile’ mode is not an exhausted gimmick, but a powerful technique in the experimental animator’s portfolio that remains enduringly rich in potential. These flmmakers demonstrate an advance in ficker form, using it as a means to address the complexity of cinematography’s relation to the wider fabric of culture. All three demand and challenge the viewer’s embodied perception, asking questions about the relationship between subject and screen. In Mack’s fabric ficker flms, the human fgure is radically absent, the viewer, radically present. We are confronted by a stroboscopic materiality. In Drew’s work, the human fgure creeps in, but is always confronted and distorted by phenomenal matter, technological processes and language. Flicker effects seem to trap or impede that notional body, generating a sense of nervous inertia that is refected back onto the distanciated spectator. In Buerkner’s stroboscopic animations, the very idea of a body is continually challenged and unravelled, gender is collapsed and body parts become dislocated. At times, these bodies disintegrate into pure abstraction. Experimental ficker effects stand in stark opposition to screen norms predicated on continuity and legibility. They speak of a different relationship between subject and screen, one in which we have a qualitative sense of the huge numbers of discrete images and the high frame—or ‘pulse’—rate underpinning screen culture. Awareness of this heavy image fow is important to our agency as social subjects. With ficker, we move away from cinematographic realism, diegetic worlds, narrative, even animation as commonly understood. We are presented instead with ‘pulsatile’ temporal confgurations or constellations. The impression might be one of elements scattered, but this misses the precision of the work TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY FLICKER … 77 undertaken. The following description from the great innovator Robert Breer is apt: ‘I think of [my] flms as objects […] rather than continuities […] as blocks of time, in which no time takes place’ (Mekas 1973, 49). This is what invites the sculptural analogy. Working with ficker is a plastic-graphic process, each decision made with regard to each frame, its relation to its neighbours and its place within the ensemble equating to an act of carving or modelling5 that shapes the flm’s totality. Cinematography is no smooth surface; ficker inscribes and weaves meaning.6

Notes 1. Mack’s remark in full reads: ‘Something I think about a lot […] [is] the function of abstraction as a narrative device or a declarative device. The power of declaration was what I was working on in these ficker flms’ (Stob 2015). 2. ‘Visual simplicity’ should not be taken as a judgement on the flmmaker’s process. 3. This summary of Drew’s thoughts on ficker are taken from correspondence and conversation with the author. 4. This summary of Buerkner’s thoughts on ficker are taken from conversations with the author. 5. For a fascinating application of Adrian Stokes’s ideas about carving and modelling to flm, see: O’Pray (2004, 75–91), and throughout. 6. This chapter is based on a presentation given at Edges: An Animation Seminar, held at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, as part of the Edge of Frame Weekend, itself part of the London International Animation Festival, December 2016. I would like to thank the organisers, Edwin Rostron/Edge of Frame and Gary Thomas/Animate Projects, for inviting me to contribute.

References Apollinaire, Guillaume. 1962. The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations. New York: George Wittenborn. ———. 1972. Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews 1902–18. New York: Viking Press. Bois, Yve-Alain, and Rosalind Krauss. 1997. Formless: A User’s Guide. New York: Zone Books. Bordwell, David. 2002. Intensifed Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film. Film Quarterly 55 (3): 16–28. 78 B. DICKER

Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Joseph, Brandon W. 2011. Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage. New York: Zone Books. Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry. 1949. The Rise of Cubism. New York: George Wittenborn. Krauss, Rosalind. 1988. The Im/Pulse to See. In Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster, 51–75. Seattle: Bay Press. ———. 1994. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude. 2015. Interview with Paul Sharits. In Paul Sharits, ed. Susanne Pfeffer, 259–281. London: Koenig Books. Mekas, Jonas. 1973. An Interview with Robert Breer. Film Culture 56–57: 39–55. ———. 2000. Interview with Peter Kubelka. In Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney, 285–299. New York: Cooper Square Press. O’Pray, Michael. 2004. Film, Form and Phantasy: Adrian Stokes and Film Aesthetics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pfeffer, Susanne, ed. 2015. Paul Sharits. London: Koenig Books. Plateau, Joseph. 2016. On a New Type of Optical Illusion (1833). Special Issue: Cinematographic Art. Art in Translation 8 (1): 11–18. Robinson, David. 1991. Masterpieces of Animation 1833–1908 [Griffthiana, No. 43]. Gemona del Friuli: La Cineteca del Friuli. Rose, Bernice B. 2002. Pablo Picasso: The World as Artefact. In Picasso: 200 Masterworks from 1898 to 1972, ed. Bernice B. Rose and Bernard Ruiz Picasso. Boston: Bullfnch Press. ———. 2007. Picasso, Braque, and Early Film in Cubism. In Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism, ed. Bernice B. Rose, 35–147. New York: PaceWildenstein. Rostron, Edwin. 2015. Jodie Mack (Interview). Accessed 1 May 2017. http:// www.edgeofframe.co.uk/jodie-mack/. Rowell, Margit. 1975a. Kupka, Duchamp and Marey. Studio International 189 (973): 48–51. ———. 1975b. František Kupka, 1871–1957: A Retrospective. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Smythe, Luke. 2013. Len Lye: The Vital Body of Cinema. October 144: 73–91. Stampfer, Simon. 2016. Stroboscopic Discs: An Explanation (1833). Special Issue: Cinematographic Art. Art in Translation 8 (1): 19–33. Stob, Jennifer. 2015. Interview with Jodie Mack. Accessed 1 May 2017. http:// www.incite-online.net/mack.html. Turim, Maureen Cheryn. 1985. Abstraction in Avant-Garde Films. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Experimental Time-Lapse Animation and the Manifestation of Change and Agency in Objects

Vicky Smith

Introduction The thesis begins by showing how time-lapse flms in dominant cinema have often sought to engage a largely anthropomorphic experience, dissipating matter’s power into ‘secrets’, for example.1 This chapter suggests that experimental animation, in consideration of matter’s own force and vitality, avoids the anthropocentrism often found in nature documentary or character animation. Beginning with early experimental flm practice and theory, the chapter shows how, through the application of flming systems and structures, the anthropomorphic tendency is broken. Maya Deren recognized the potential of time-lapse footage that, untethered to anthropomorphism, reveals change in objects that is not attributed to human intent and that would otherwise be impossible to experience.

V. Smith (*) University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK e-mail: [email protected]

Moving forward to the 1970s (a period in which experimental landscape time-lapse flmmaking fourished and during which Russett and Starr published on experimental animation as a new art), the article examines the work of the so-called ‘landscape’ flmmakers, who, creating works that situate and implicate the flmmaker as inseparable from their flming environment, continued to break with the anthropomorphic orientation of time-lapse flming. Disciplines of eco-aesthetics and eco-poetics have since recognized the role that experimental uses of technology can play in revealing otherwise imperceptible agencies of matter. The chapter argues that Timothy Morton’s specifc reference to the potential of time-lapse technologies to magnify and reveal natural forces shows that in fact experimental flm shares common ground with eco-philosophy. This bringing together of screen aesthetics with ecology is being researched by Silke Panse. She fnds that experimental flm’s greater concern with the medium excludes its possibilities for engaging with ecology, the exception being flmmaker James Benning, whose specifc use of the video medium reveals disturbance in the ecosystem. Adopting a different position, Michael O’Pray has consistently located a strand within the formal flm whereby natural forces determine flmic representations. Setting the scene for the following case studies, these arguments are briefy outlined here. Having mapped many of the precedents for time-lapse flmic works that make matter’s own vitality available to human perception, the chapter then moves on to specifc contemporary examples. With reference to Inger Lise Hansen’s Proximity (2006) and Talking to a Stone (1993), it is posited that, through the application of system and of techniques of experimental camera operation, unforeseeable and aleatory forces might emerge. New materialist scholar Jane Bennett suggests that random groupings of discarded objects encountered in unexpected combination, whether they be of animal or mineral origin, are all shown to exist, as material. Talking to a Stone’s seemingly random groupings of objects, in combination exert volition and liveliness in ways that demonstrate the signifcance of experimental stop-motion animation practice to new materialist concerns. Finally, Nicky Hamlyn’s Gasometers (2015) unites in a single composition imagery of man-made power structures with naturally occurring energy sources, giving visibility to the possibilities for renewable energy that are preferably concealed (Morton 2013) and pointing to questions of sustainable energy, core to ecological concerns. EXPERIMENTAL TIME-LAPSE ANIMATION AND THE MANIFESTATION … 81

Animated Time-Lapse Time-lapse flmmaking is a branch of animation that does not involve drawing things, or constructing objects specifcally for the purpose of flming them, but rather captures imagery of objects that already exist in the world. This animation technique is different to stop-motion anima tion in that objects are not moved about in front of the camera by the animator, but appear to possess their own agency and are seen to animate themselves.2 Because time-lapse flm is a single-frame practice, it attracts not just animators but also experimental flmmakers whose interest lies with flm as a material system and the possibilities that it holds for ‘reducibility’ and for fragmenting time (Raban 2015, 15) through the isolation and arrest of individual single frames. For time-lapse to be effective, the flmed object has to move itself. It may move at a relatively rapid speed, such as with a seed growing and blossoming, or at an extremely slow rate, such as with the aging of a human being, or a slowly corroding metal. In the case of minute developments in an object’s natural life span, the animator calculates a formula in which frames are taken less frequently. What time-lapse must manifest is change either in position (perpetually moving clouds) or in state (usually aging and decay) in what are very often relatively stable, unchanging objects. Scenes in which multiple objects all move at different rates demonstrate the relativity of change and differing qualities of object agencies. For Thomas Lamarre, if a thing moves, it is seen to possess a life force. Distinguishing between the varying qualities or ‘orders’ of motion achievable through diverse methods of animation, Lamarre identifes the particular quality of time-lapse to ‘capture movements unseen to the human eye’ (Lamarre 2007, 118). This specifcity afforded by the time- lapse method, of bringing otherwise imperceptible phenomena within sensory reach, lies at the heart of my discussion. The method typically used for creating time-lapse animation is to impose a formula on a sequence so that, for example, single frames of flm taken at regular intervals are made to correspond to a span of real time. Minutes, days or even weeks are compressed into fewer than the standard number of flm frames, so that when run together at a continuous rate in projection, change and movement in the flmed scene appear to be dramatically accelerated. Increasingly, time-lapse is deployed 82 V. SMITH in dramatic narratives, as a backdrop to fction, in combination with omniscient angles on city scenes, featuring man-made events such as artifcial lighting in buildings etc. mixed with changes in natural phenomena (weather cycles, passing clouds and natural light). Literally an index of change, rarely is matter in these flms seen to impact on human events.3 Equally, when time-lapse is employed in still life, the accelerated blossoming, ripening and decay of natural objects serves as a metaphor for the human life cycle, and the withering condition of objects is anthropomorphized.4 The genre of landscape time-lapse flm differs because in such works matter appears to act autonomously, the environment ‘acting’ around the camera and animating itself, revealing changing seasons, sequences of weather patterns and life cycles of fora. Yet, even though it is won- derful to behold such a novel perspective on matter’s own powers, time- lapse flms in which land is manifested as the sole agent are rare. Objects flmed using this technique have tended to be rationalized and supple- mented with spoken commentary, dissipating their powers into nature’s ‘secrets’, for example.5 The problem of anthropomorphism, elicited in much animation, is that apparently inanimate objects brought to ‘life’ are dispossessed of their own properties.

New Perspectives: Experimental Film and Animation A less anthropocentric approach to flming matter and things is to work with technology in ways that enable objects to reveal their own properties. Intervention into standardized flm production through attention to procedure and to the manipulation of the mechanical apparatus has been a central concern of experimental flm/animators since the 1920s. Chief among the methods employed is the manipulation of the single-frame function. Time-lapse animation is just one of those single-frame functions through which to stimulate unusual perspectives on objects and to reveal phenomena as self-animating, and as actively causing and determining flmic imagery, authored equally by humans and objects. This technique, through which previously unexplored possibilities of movement can be manifested, was theorized by Maya Deren, who conceived the camera object itself as a ‘living intelligence’, its automatic action resulting in a quality of observation quite different from the normal EXPERIMENTAL TIME-LAPSE ANIMATION AND THE MANIFESTATION … 83 human sensory range (Deren 2005, 100). The exploitation of single and altered frame motion that Deren used extensively in her own flms brought attention to the possibilities of liberating full human physical mobility, while the function of slow motion in particular was equated by her to a ‘microscope of time’.

There is, for example, the photographic acceleration, which, in reality, is so slow as to be indiscernible. The climbing of a vine or the orientation of a plant towards the sun are thus revealed to have fascinating characteristics, qualities, and even a curiously ‘intelligent’ integrity of movement which only the most patient and observant botanist could have previously sus- pected. (Deren 2005, 101)

As Deren observes, using motion effects, previously indiscernible natural phenomena become perceivable, and in so doing reveal their own agency, technology offering instant access to that which is otherwise only available as a specialist knowledge.

1970s Experimental Single-Frame Landscape Film Similar attention to flm’s material condition and to the apparatus informed much English experimental landscape flm during the 1970s in particular (O’Pray 2003, 107–111). Representational traditions of landscape, with scenes framed at a distance and separate from the viewer, were overturned through employment of technological manipulations such as motion effects, along with time-lapse. In this way, matter inscribed its own qualities and powers, thereby minimizing the anthropocentric ordering of time and space.6 Locating the means for nature to actively cause flmic activity was one such approach frequently adopted by experimental flmmakers. Film shape was determined by observing the givens of natural cycles (Dusinberre 1976, 12) and deploying them to organize the overall flm structure. By following the duration of natural laws as a structuring device, the imposition of fctional beginnings and endings was avoided. Other methods for synthesizing the agency of matter with the form of the flm included responding to ‘chance occurrences’, such as rain set- tling on the lens, as inherent factors of flming in the feld. William Raban is a key proponent of landscape flm who not only embraced such contingencies of outdoor flming but who also sought out the means 84 V. SMITH whereby naturally occurring events and laws, such as turning tides, might actively motivate flmic takes. David Curtis explains that Raban’s core concern with time-lapse flming of landscape was to bring movement into otherwise static scenes and that his method for realizing this accelerated change involved using the single-frame mechanism to record one frame of flm every few minutes (Curtis 2006, 96). In his View (1970), the impact of heavy rain on visibility became part of the flming dynamic, providing Raban with the means to ‘draw attention to the processes that enable the recording to take place’ (Fowler 2003–2014). The flm alternates between the real-time recordings of a river in a feld, with time-lapse ‘shots’ of the accumulation of rain as it settles on the camera lens. At the point of saturation, Raban wipes the lens and afterwards runs the flm at regular speed. During the real-time takes, conversation between the flm crew is audible, their intermittent discussion of the flmmaking process alongside commentary on experiencing the cold conditions of the site of production allow the viewer to also feel the damp effects. This exemplifes Raban’s attention to procedure—the interventions made by the flmmaker during the production of the flm confronts the audience with the material conditions of production and is the modus operandi of the work (Raban 2011, 98). For Fowler, the presence of these voices serves to tie the timeless- ness of nature to the specifc period during which the flm was made. He observes that the alternations between real and speeded-up time point to the specifcity of the flmic medium (2003). For Raban, then, copying nature’s appearance is less crucial than the interrogation of the mechanisms and materials through which it is mediated. His use of time-lapse to contrast regular and accelerated movement of clouds and rivers attends to both the materiality of the artistic medium and to properties of matter itself, forming an alternative to naturalism by revealing otherwise hidden aspects of natural motion and energy. Raban’s expan- sive understanding of naturalism in art infuenced a wealth of experimental landscape animation that prioritized material qualities of light, texture and movement over the anthropocentrism of dominant cinema and in which the camera, structure, flmmaker and the landscape are all inseparable. Following Raban, John Woodman’s Time Flow (1977) presents two- screen imagery of a river: the left screen in constant motion is the control, the right is a time-lapse in which a single frame corresponds to increasingly longer lapses of time, up to 1 frame every 10 seconds. EXPERIMENTAL TIME-LAPSE ANIMATION AND THE MANIFESTATION … 85

The comparison shows not just what is expected—that in the right screen, particles foat more rapidly across the water’s surface—but also reveal that while the weeds under the murky lake appear static in the left screen, in the right they agitate vigorously. As Malcolm Le Grice observes, the subject matter of water was outside Woodman’s control (2012). Likewise, present-day experimental time-lapse that reveals the impact of time on matter includes Emily Richardson’s study of planet revolutions Redshift (2001), in which a wide lens on the night sky shows stars that no longer appear as single points of light but as arcing streaks describing the outline of the hemisphere. Both Woodman and Richardson show that movement in objects typically goes unobserved by us and that when time-lapse footage is not limited by anthropomorphism, it can reveal dimensions of objects that would otherwise be impossible to experience. The so-called ‘landscape’ flmmakers, as discussed above, are arguably less concerned with landscape as subject matter, or with making the vibrancy of objects apparent, and more with how natural phenomena present opportunities for analysis of appearance and perception, thus offering possibilities for flmic experimentation. This mode of enquiry into the medium and process of flmmaking is in line with a modernist orientation (Curtis 2006, 96). At the same time, by making the procedure, materials and apparatus of flm transparent, the agency of objects themselves also becomes rendered visible.

Eco-Aesthetics and Hyper-Objects Eco-philosopher Timothy Morton observes that ‘Environmentalism seems to be talking about something that can’t be seen or touched’ (Morton 2013, 100). It is the case with time-lapse flmmaking that, in its playback of compressed time, things that cannot be ordinarily seen are brought into the human sensory apparatus. Prior to recording the scene of the river at an accelerated time-lapse rate, Woodman could not have known how invisible underwater currents would animate the river vegetation, and equally Richardson would not have been able to wholly anticipate traces of movement in the night sky, neither flmmaker being able to predict the extent of change in naturally occurring phenomena. The arbitrariness and uncontrollabil- ity of natural phenomena also impacts live-action location flmmaking, yet the high level of change and the rapid rate at which it occurs is far greater in time-lapse flm. Though 1970s structural materialist landscape 86 V. SMITH flmmakers imposed systems such as regular shooting intervals to mar- shal these wild natural elements, to incorporate ‘both the “content” of the landscape as aleatory with the “shape” of the flm as rigid’, as is observed in relation to Raban’s flming of tidal changes (Dusinberre 1976, 13), the outcome is never wholly predictable. Through application of system, the opposite, unpredictable, random and non-human can be manifested. Many readings of experimental time-lapse flms acknowledge that the differing materialities of, for example, gravity and fora are seen to have force equal to that of the flmmaker. In Richardson’s Aspect (2004), for example, it has been observed that the landscape ‘pushes forward’ and ‘assumes’ agency (Fowler 2003–2014), and in her Redshift, Hamlyn writes that the moving elements of the image are relative to the earth’s rotation, with the flm ‘animated by the earth’s movements’ (Hamlyn 2003, 113). In a recent programme of flms that directly addresses the topic of matter’s powers, acknowledged explicitly in the title Environmental Agency: A Landscape Film Programme (2013), matter is seen to be a ‘terraforming power’ that ‘determines’ the shape and structure of several flms.7 All the time-lapse works discussed so far have established the means, such as the creation of systems or camera manipulations, by which natural elements dynamically shape their own representation. Forging continuity between the flm frame and the world, they anticipate an eco-poetics. Founded in 2009 by Jonathan Skinner in relation to written poetry, the term emphasizes a relationship between creativity and holistic consciousness. Silke Panse, Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway (2013) extend the term into the context of representations of nature in flm. Avoiding the rationalist separation between world and image commonly found in much eco-cinema and formalist flm alike, the ‘eco-aesthetic’ instead actively links ecology and aesthetics and also manifests ‘that which cannot be perceived directly’ (Panse 2013, 37). Sidestepping English landscape experimental flm concerns, Panse focuses instead on US flmmaker James Benning. Structure is central in most of Benning’s work and is evident through, for example, his use of long takes made with static cameras and his series of shots of the same length. As Panse fnds, this static camera manifests the visibility of the otherwise undetectable trace of human industry on the ‘eco-system’. His use of flm materials and technologies is central in bringing about EXPERIMENTAL TIME-LAPSE ANIMATION AND THE MANIFESTATION … 87 this dynamic, qualifying his work therefore as eco-aesthetic (Panse 2013, 37). Ruhr (2009) exploits the extreme steadiness of HD digital video to amplify the complete stillness in its subject of a forest, such that the smallest movement in the trees becomes highly apparent in this otherwise static scene. A fight path is located nearby so planes cross the frame on a frequent basis, causing a wind to stir the trees with every passing. It is the medium, then, that reveals how cumulative man-made pressures impact the environment. However, as Panse points out, any movement in this scene of the trees that is pronounced through the steadiness of the medium nevertheless is ultimately of human making. Although Panse describes the land as ‘protagonist’ in the flm, what Ruhr actually shows is that objects manufactured by humans ultimately cause the wind that stirs the trees. The scene exposes that humans are not directly moving the leaves, neither do they move on their own, but that human actions impact upon weather patterns and that previously seemingly naturally occurring events have today mutated into that which Timothy Morton refers to as hyper-objects (I will come to this shortly). My main interest here with Benning and Panse’s deliberation on the affnities between digital technology and the stillness of certain geolog- ical atmospheres is how moving-image time-lapse manipulations make perceptible that which otherwise exists outside of the human senso- rium. While Benning and Panse fnd that digital stillness is highly suited to revealing subtle perturbations in nature, the time-lapse pieces that I am discussing here work with the opposite dimension of vigorous movement. Though shifts in earth, clouds and water might be a consequence of man-made events, in the flms of my study, these natural forces are seen to be the main catalyst of change and movement. Panse fnds that many structural materialist flms are refexive of their own flmic structure alone. Setting Benning’s practice apart from this tendency, she observes that the refexive structure in his work brings out what is not human (Panse 2013, 44). Benning allows the movement inherent in natural forces to motivate flmic events, and with this profound response to the vitality of matter, an engagement with ecological issues can be read. Michael O’Pray, a key voice in the identifcation of the sensual and the personal in structural materialist flm, rejects the perception that experimental flm exists as formal exercise alone. Commenting on Raban’s work, he observes that natural forces generate the flmic form and, as such, formal rigour is not exclusive of content or aesthetics. 88 V. SMITH

Landscape, on such account, is never the contingent imagery of a formal exercise, rather the landscape imagery absorbs the flmic work through which it is constructed as and in the flm, ensuring that formal experiment is invested with emotional and aesthetic affect. (O’Pray 2003, 105)

As O’Pray understands it, these works locate forces in nature to drive the flm, thus directorial intent comes together with natural agency in a dynamic synthesis (2003, 108). Many key theorists have understood 1970s time-lapse flm, then, as a practice in which matter is shown to be a protagonist in the flmmaking procedure. I will now examine how time-lapse and experimental techniques in contemporary work allow matter to articulate its vibrancy and to act as causal factor.

Space-Lapse in Proximity Moving on to the more contemporary animated flms that manifest eco-aesthetic concerns, I will frstly consider Inger Lise Hansen’s Proximity. This is a piece in which time-lapse reveals extraordinary shifts and movement in the earth. The flm opens onto a landscape divided into equal halves of land and sky. Initially dark, the scene grows lighter,

Fig. 1 The ground warps and seems to touch the lens (Inger Lise Hansen, Proximity (2006). Photo Inger Lise Hansen) EXPERIMENTAL TIME-LAPSE ANIMATION AND THE MANIFESTATION … 89 signaling daybreak. Yet the sun does not rise up from a horizontal point, but sinks down through the frame, alerting us to the strangeness of this otherwise daily phenomenon: here it is the lower half of the scene— where the land should be—that flls with daylight. Any written account of the strangeness of this sensation whereby the ‘ground’ is seen as a fuid body, while the new ‘sky’ is solid and heavy, falls short of the experience of viewing it. The commonplace of clouds passing across the sky, now the ground, becomes strange in appearance and they seem to move in the wrong direction. This reversal of elemental properties is achieved through a simple operation of rotating the camera 180 degrees. As if we are standing on our heads, the whole world is turned upside down such that elemental givens of gravity, solidity, mass, liquid and air are displaced. The possibilities offered by the inversion of the 16 mm handheld camera were exploited by Deren, who maintained that alternative technological perspectives on familiar scenes—the reverse flming of the ebb and fow of waves, for example, because they reveal new qualities of motion— possessed revolutionary capacities.

By simply holding the camera upside-down … one can photograph the waves of the ocean and they will, in projection, travel in reverse. Such flm footage not only reveals a new quality of the motion of the waves, but creates, to put it mildly, a most revolutionary quality. (Deren 2005, 103)

In Proximity, the uncanny perspective achieved through the camera rotation is compounded because Hansen combines the inversion with two animation techniques: time-lapse and the incremental repositioning— or animation of—the camera itself as it crosses the landscape. This is a complex manoeuvre in which the method of condensing time is simultaneously applied to the compression of space in what could be termed as ‘space lapse’. Whereas typically in time-lapse, the subject develops in front of a stationary camera, here both the subject and the camera move in tandem such that space, as well as time, are covered at an accelerated rate. The complexity of this manoeuvre is actually one that is familiar to animators who have used the rostrum table to minutely calculate and enact multi-directional movements by, for example, combining an east/west pan with a north/south tilt. It makes an extra demand on the viewer because, as observed in relation to a movement of similar complexity in Richardson’s Cobra Mist, we are asked to process two registers 90 V. SMITH

Fig. 2 The camera tracking device that controls the division of space and time in Proximity (Production still. Photo Morten Barker) of ‘time passing and point of focus moving’ (Kotting 2008). Figure 2 shows how the camera, mounted on a tracking system, allows for space, as well as time, to be divided up into increments. In Proximity, the landscape, ordinarily stable but now experienced at a compressed time rate, and with a moving point of focus, reveals otherwise unseen motion in the earth. The slow and imperceptible change in the solid ground is accelerated and, appearing to animate itself, challenges what we have previously experienced as fxity. While for Deren this revelation of matter’s intelligence through cinema was revolutionary in that it stimulated new perspectives, in current philosophy the manifestation of object agency carries ecological weight, for very similar reasons. We are accustomed to travelling across land at speed in cars, and from this perspective objects in the distance remain relatively stable, while those closest to us in the rapidly moving foreground become blurred. But in Proximity, this is all seen from an upside-down position and the inverted camera captures a novel experience of the land such that the ground appears to be a rotational effect and a warping, slanting and stretching toward the camera in ways that are unfamiliar. Phenomenology suggests that we draw conclusions about objects by being physically amidst them and that it is our regular embodied EXPERIMENTAL TIME-LAPSE ANIMATION AND THE MANIFESTATION … 91 movement on the earth’s surface that informs our assessment of the appearances of things (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 50–51). The flm’s title references this phenomenon of familiarity arrived at through physical closeness and this sensibility translates into how Hansen’s flm works on the viewer. We are not accustomed to viewing the earth from an upside- down perspective; it brings our eyes so close to the ground that the earth seems to touch them. The inverted camera creates the impression that the land closest to the lens is volatile, and the machine becomes impli- cated as an agent in proximity to the space. Time-lapse combined with inverted camera brings about altered awareness of our surroundings and the otherwise unseen activity of the landscape. The sensation of closeness to the ground is reiterated when, accompanied by the sound of plopping water, perhaps from a nearby puddle, drops of rain fall on the lens and are allowed to remain there to be seen as an active protagonist in the image-making process. The precedent for responding to the arbitrariness of nature lies with structural materialist landscape flmmakers Raban et al., who, with their emphasis on procedure, embraced contingencies of weather as opportunities to interrupt the view and to cancel out perspectival conventions, shifting attention instead to the optical surface. Proximity uses the inverted camera to create the illusory sensation that the ground is touching the eye. It also collapses together the view with actual matter that sticks to the lens, bringing the inseparability, closeness and proximity of things into visibility. To describe the force of matter, Morton employs uncompromising and dramatic terms such as objects ‘taking revenge’ for human idealism (Morton 2013, 115). He emphasizes the inseparability of mind and matter, conceiving objects as sticky and viscous, such that, while we are occupied with thinking about things, those things are also touching and ‘sticking’ to us and to each other (Morton 2013, 1). He posits this and other imagery, such as the fgure of the hyper-object, through which to refect upon how human/object entanglements have led to the unprec- edented phenomena of global warming. Hyper-objects are not separate, determinable quantities, but are huge systems that engulf us. They are composed of all things that exist on this earth and operate at different temporalities, phases and scales than we are used to, which results in their invisibility. Morton fnds that art can imagine the hyper-object, and can bring us into closer consideration of objects whose scale/dimension is unavailable to perception, and he locates several examples from 92 V. SMITH cartoons, installations, musical compositions and sound art that depict ways in which human and object temporalities intersect. While the speeding up of time and space in Proximity is specifc to flmic imagery, Morton describes the equivalent compression of time in an audio register:

Felix Hess’s Air Pressure Fluctuations is a sound art piece that employs a massively accelerated time, enabling us to hear sounds that are not usually accessible. Hess puts contact mikes on the window of his apartment in New York. They can record sounds for fve days and nights. Then he speeds up the recording by 360 times. Traffc begins to sound like the tinkling of tiny insects. A slow, periodic hum begins to become audible … a gigantic entity has been channeled into a sound recording audible to humans. (Morton 2013, 56)

As Morton explains, this audio artwork exploits technology as a means to capture and accelerate man-made sounds. Both experimental time- lapse sound art and experimental animation use technologies to manifest the subtle alterations and accumulations of motion in matter, describing the impact that humans have on objects, and conversely the force that objects exert on us. Returning to the context of flm technologies, it is suggested that artist Marcus Coates’ slowing down of birdsong so that humans might mimic their tunes is characteristic of how the heav- ily mediated quality of time-lapse creates an altered version of the world (Sloane 2011). Morton is one of an increasing number of scholars who are gravitating to eco-philosophy and new materialist discourse to stress the intelligence of matter—hyper and otherwise, and of which humans are part. Challenging the Cartesian conception of matter as inert and passive, they propose interactions between human and non-human as interconnected. But pre-dating these schools of thought, Deren recognized the capacity of technology to reveal the intelligence of natural phenomena invisible to the naked eye, with time-lapse accelerated photography of plant growth enabling imagery of nature’s own integrity and volition. Her early insight into object intelligence anticipates the concept of the ‘vibrancy’ of matter. Philosopher Jane Bennett proposes that things are lively as a way to challenge the human conceit that we have full control over objects (Bennett 2004, 349). This power of things, as Bennett conceives it, has a different quality than the intelligence of individual plants acting alone, EXPERIMENTAL TIME-LAPSE ANIMATION AND THE MANIFESTATION … 93 and growing with a degree of predictability as Deren observed. Rather, it occurs when disparate objects chance into one location and, resonating together, enact unpredictable change. Bennett describes how she was struck one day by a miscellany of discarded objects on the pavement such as one frequently encounters in twenty-frst century urban environments due to the accumulation and spread of manufactured detritus merging with raw materials. This group of otherwise unrelated stuff in that moment and in combination was suf- fciently powerful to be conceived of as ‘characters’ (Bennett 2010, 6). Following Deleuze and Guattari, Bennett theorizes such ad hoc groupings as an assemblage: here, diverse energies—including elements that have become so background (such as the sunlight and the street) that they escape our attention—combine without hierarchy to form new types of forces. Freed from their use value, the material properties of these objects come to the fore, allowing them to ‘appear more vividly as things’ (Bennett 2004, 351). By communicating the power of things through the written language, Bennett evokes a vivid mental picture. Audiences of stop-motion animation are familiar with the flmic effects that are produced when objects in improbable combination or unusual alliances do not comply with their designated roles.8 Such scenes of assorted trashed objects form the basis of Hansen’s early flm Talking to a Stone, stop-motion bringing strange movement to seemingly inert, stable things, their motion accelerated through time-lapse.9 We witness the decomposition of various manufactured objects arranged together in a studio: household goods, clothes, furniture and also a bust of a human head are animated in ways that correspond to their design, each following its own logic: round things roll, sofa springs bounce and then scatter off, sludge oozes, viscous properties of rubber and oil are enhanced by dousing one with the other. Objects also rebel against their own properties: in an attempt to force itself down a plughole, a sheepskin glove bursts open to expose impossible inhabitants of congealing cement, fbres and cellophane, held in a fst-shaped clump. A leather skirt unfolds itself, holding shelving brackets and metal nuts. A brick resides inside a leather football, and the human head bursts open, releasing the same brackets, crystal lumps and cement. The time- lapse treatment of these objects renders them all equal: all move jerkily, all have interchangeable insides and all are ultimately reducible to tiny parts and perishable. 94 V. SMITH

In this realm, objects are also presented in alliance with one another, a ‘confederation’ of effectivity and liveliness (Bennett 2010, 36). A collapsed synthetic Christmas tree unpacks itself and, in direct mimicry of a real pine Christmas tree that also lies among the discarded objects, stretches out its branches. This scene is an assemblage, and here objects act not alone but in relation to one another. For Bennett, objects are vital when they refuse to be used by humans, when they ‘impede or block the will and design of humans’ and when they also ‘act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories … of their own’ (Bennett 2010, viii). Hansen’s flm shows consumables rejecting their functional designations: the sofa, refusing to be sat on, instead liberates itself, its vinyl covering detaching in long strips and feeing into the distance. This combination of stuff is a direct flmic counterpart to the quality of imagery that Bennett describes as thing power, stop-motion object animation lend- ing itself wholly to the depiction of ‘tendencies’ latent in things. The flm, described as a scene of ‘decay’ in which objects become fragile and extinct (Hudson 1993), can also be understood as a site of renewal: here, stuff refusing to be used and exploited undoes its commodifcation, returning instead to a state of raw material. While the American mate- rialistic culture, too hasty to dispose of goods, is in fact an expression of anti-materiality (Bennett 2010, 351), Hansen’s flm can be seen to revalue the qualities of things.10

Nicky Hamlyn’s Gasometers The different single-frame animation methods of time-lapse and stop-motion in both Proximity and Talking to a Stone bring to percep- tibility the energies that lie within the earth and the vitality of objects, both advancing therefore the current eco-aesthetic debate. Talking to a Stone reanimates and recovers objects that have been discarded, and likewise Nicky Hamlyn’s series of three flms, Gasometers (2014–2015), takes obsolete industrial objects as subject matter using time-lapse to point to questions of power and agency, therefore indirectly addressing ecological concerns. Employing single-frame and continuous flming during different times of the day and night, Hamlyn shows how movement in light, changes in perspective and differential use of flm materials and technologies radically alter the appearance of an abandoned gas container. In several short scenes, multiple flming methods effect imagery of visible sources of EXPERIMENTAL TIME-LAPSE ANIMATION AND THE MANIFESTATION … 95 power: fre, water, sun, clouds, glass, metal and human labour, alongside invisible forces of the wind and gas power. Shots and techniques are chosen to emphasize contrasts between the scale and fxity of the container and the time-lapse rapid movement of the sky surrounding it. While certain angles show the tank as imposing and dominating the frame, other scenes capture skies whose volatile cloud movement is so accelerated that the man-made structure becomes dwarfed and fimsy-looking relative to the turmoil overhead, establishing questions of power, energy, material and ecology that thematize this work. Single-frame sequences of a hydraulic platform carrying a solitary workman rapidly ascending and descending the structure trace and reit- erate its vertical lines, the labourer observed as he dismantles that which has been a long-term fxture of urban environments since the Victorian era. Where much time-lapse and land flm today employs the latest technology, affording sweeping, omniscient feasts for the eyes, Gasometers rather, with its emphasis on labour and function, is quite anti-spectacular. Yet, as with Raban’s ironically titled View in which the scene is in fact rather murky (Fowler 2003–2014), the very uneventfulness of human labour of both the generation of power and of the manufacture of the flmic image forms the central dynamic of the flm. Visual pleasure in Gasometers derives from the sensual fullness and vibrancy of the elements, such as the shower of magical golden sparks that spread from the workman’s tool, a small pouch of warmth in the otherwise cool tones of the sky. As with Talking to a Stone, there is an attraction toward the animation of raw materials. O’Pray remarks that for 1970s experimental landscape flmmakers, imagery of the land provided material through which to explore thresholds between representation and abstraction: likewise in Gasometers, shifts in weather create opportunities to abstract the image. The weather is highly changeable: rain falls and is allowed to remain on the camera lens, transparent elements coming together and implicating the camera inside the scene. During a night-time sequence, a security lamp switches itself on and causes the moisture on the lens to fare out. The drops become abstracted and appear like golden circles in the foreground that foat upon the squares of the grid in the background (as can be seen in Fig. 3). Through this exploration of qualities of light and perspective, the scene is abstracted even further. When strongly backlit and silhouetted by the sun, at certain times of day the volume of the cylindrical container is reduced to a mesh of vertical and diagonal lines. Its appearance of 96 V. SMITH

Fig. 3 Lens fare and rain produce a sequin effect (Nicky Hamlyn, Gasometers 3 (2015). Photo Nicky Hamlyn) fatness is so absolute (see Fig. 4), the distance between it and the lens so collapsed, that the grid-like structure seems to be inside the optical system itself, a through-the-lens viewfnder. The signifcance of this level of abstraction to my reading is that, at one level, the flm’s exploration of compositional aids in bringing about image construction fts the refexive questioning of the flm apparatus typical of experimental flm. At another level, as with Proximity, the embedded-ness of the lens with the flmed object emphasizes the role of technology in the image-making process. Certain shots employ low camera angles, flling the entire frame with the metal structure and frmly establishing the flmmaker’s perspective. As with Raban’s emphasis on procedure, the flmmaker is very much part of the scene and responding to events in the feld. Panse posits that material economies are foundational for the immanent basis of eco-aesthetic flmmaking, such that the image, the EXPERIMENTAL TIME-LAPSE ANIMATION AND THE MANIFESTATION … 97

Fig. 4 From a close view the structure flls the frame, appearing to be fattened against the lens (Gasometers 3. Photo Nicky Hamlyn) environment and the flmmaker are all of a piece. The eco-aesthetic is achieved, not through the dramatizing of nature as spectacle but rather through an emphasis on objects in the feld, however mundane they may be (2013, 44). She gives as an example flmmaker Helga Fanderl, who, by remaining in her one flming spot, insists on the inseparability of the human and the environment (Panse 2013, 51–52). With his focus on the mundane task of a workman dismantling an object designed for its function more than for its elegance, Hamlyn’s emphasis also lies with procedure, of being there on site, experiencing the outdoors in all weathers and also flming through the night-time darkness. The focus on the materiality is core to Hamlyn’s process and is amplifed by his palette of different flming speeds, stock types and processing methods, as he appears to use the camera in whichever way best suits the changing conditions. We are at all times reminded of flm as material, and the ‘flmstrip’s reducibility down to the single frame’ (Raban 2015, 15). 98 V. SMITH

A section of the flm is palpably hand processed, its damaged surface of drip marks, debris and scratches underscoring a transparency of process. Along with the refexive amplifcation of using tools with the hands, it also suggests Hamlyn’s identifcation with the gas labourer, drawing affnities between energies and elements involved in processing flm material and the labour of dismantling the container. The method of hand developing flm—a wet and cumbersome process, its traces frequently visible on the flm itself—has now been replaced by seemingly cleaner invisible digital technologies.

Eco-Aesthetics and Visibility The wind itself is invisible, its force registered through the motion of objects such as clouds, trees and weather vanes that lie in its path. Time- lapse animation accelerates this movement, making the strength of the wind yet more apparent. In Gasometers, time-lapse imagery contrasts the high velocity rolling clouds with the fxity of the gas storage unit; the scene of endless renewable energy is juxtaposed with that of a fnite fossil fuel (gas from coal) source. Through this consideration of the qualities of different energy sources, the flm brings to visibility the relativity of power. Gas manufacture and storage architecture was gradually replaced from the 1960s by North Sea gas and less obtrusive systems of underground pipes, also destined for obsolescence when fossil fuels are depleted (predicted 2052).11 The gasometers are today recognized for their industrial heritage, even integrated into luxury housing developments.12 Objections that renewable energy farms will spoil traditional landscapes are raised against their construction. Morton suggests that the preferred concealment of energy generation and consumption has little to do with aesthetics and rather that highly visible sites of sustainable energy are candid statements of a refusal to consume dirty fuels (Morton 2013, 105–106). Much industry keeps activities that are harmful to the environment out of sight, and conversely the lack of visibility of global warming is just one of the factors that makes it hard for humans to accept its existence (Morton 2013, 100). A key task for ecological thinking, then, is to bring about imagery that manifests those features of our environment that are ordinarily unperceivable to the human senses.13 Here then, to different ends, objectives are shared by time-lapse animators and ecologists alike: to create imagery that brings otherwise invisible phenomena to visibility, the former to stimulate new perspectives EXPERIMENTAL TIME-LAPSE ANIMATION AND THE MANIFESTATION … 99 by breaking with habits of the usage of the medium (Le Grice 2001, 164), the latter to communicate the gravity of ecological imbalances that would otherwise remain outside of our senses.

Conclusion Following 1970s avant-garde landscape flm, contemporary experimental time-lapse animation of landscape and objects foregrounds procedure along with the scrutiny of the flmic apparatus as material system. Visibility is emphasized at the level of transparency of the flming process, material and mechanics as well as in matter’s own vibrancy. Accelerated time rates and radical camera positions are employed to reveal perspectives on the world that would otherwise be inaccessible to the naked eye. The function of time-lapse single-frame animation ampli- fes the motion of natural phenomena, making movement strange and pronounced and revealing the power and agency of entities that possess differential rates of movement, or dimensions too huge or too small to be ordinarily assimilated. The anthropomorphism found in much object animation is avoided, reversed even in these works, and because they locate systems by which nature might participate in shaping the flm content, they also manifest concepts key to current ecology. With their emphasis on the materiality and sensuality, not only of the medium but also of objects, they are both experimental and eco-aesthetical.

Notes 1. The accompanying booklet to the Secrets of Nature DVD makes numerous references to nature as anthropomorphized, an assumption that appears directly in the title of the DVD as ‘Secrets’. Secrets of Nature DVD (2010), London: British Film Institute. 2. There exist at least two animation methods in which matter of earth, water, rain and other elements assumes agency in the image-making process: time-lapse flm and direct onto celluloid flmmaking. In this chapter, I have focused on matter’s agency as it manifests in time-lapse animation, as this area has received less critical attention than the genre of marks made directly onto celluloid. In flm that is buried, hung in trees or drowned, the elements inscribe themselves directly onto the flm surface. I programmed a flm screening, The Animated Ground Meets the Filmstrip (2016, St Ives, Cornwall: Lux), to suggest that agency in these flms occurs as much by the earth gravitating toward the analogue flmstrip, 100 V. SMITH

as it does by the flmmaker who creates the conditions for this force to manifest. This union is made possible by the quality of flm as a plastic object and the materiality of flm and soil, stones and the ground. For Tess Takahashi, celluloid’s origin as wood gives it shared affnities with the natural world; because analogue flm has substance, nature is able to write itself directly onto the flm surface. This type of work is described by her as a collaboration (Takahashi 2008). 3. Nature is seen as a spectacle (not as an agent) in many time-lapse sequences in, for example, Disney-produced nature documentaries. Time-lapse to denote time passing within a flmic fction is equally ubiquitous, evident recently in, for example, Hunt for the Wilder People (2016). Today, Google Earth satellite imagery enables extreme long patchwork-like shots of the planet, revealing the impact of humans over the last twenty years, with brown as the increasingly dominant colour, advance technology perversely enabling humans to witness the destructive impact of industry. 4. Animators including Vera Neubauer and artists such as Sam Taylor Wood have employed the still-life genre, with the accelerated corruption of fruit as a metaphor for aging, decay and/or the withering of family relations. 5. Briony Dixon writes in BFI Screen-online about anthropomorphism in early natural history flms: for example, in relation to Magic Myxies (1931), which attributes mood to slime and mould, ‘the flm met with criticism for … its anthropomorphic description of its “bad tempered” mood’, while Percy Smith’s The Strangler (1930) ‘attributed villainous intent’ to nature. www.screenonline.org.uk/flm/id/1272207/index. html. Accessed 15 September 2017. 6. In the context of the wider visual arts feld, artists were rejecting the pictorial tradition. Robert Morris and Donald Judd, for example, prioritized a relationship with the real stuff of matter, such that mud was seen to be a more real brown than that of paint. Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art (Themes and Movements) (2010). 7. Environmental Agency: A Landscape Film Programme (2013) at the BFI on 5 March 2013. Proximity was screened in this programme. Gary Beydler’s Hand Held Day (1975) is a further notable example of experimental time-lapse animation where representation of the inseparability between flmmaker and matter is conceived through the imagery. 8. Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers have combined miscellaneous objects to good effect, although here they are typically fashioned to resemble human fgures. 9. In one of Hansen’s previous object animations, Static (1993), to suggest that the domestic utensils and trash featured in this flm had their own volition, I described them as ‘migrating’ across landscapes. ‘Describing a Space’, in No Cel Animation, screenings held at LFMC, October 1995. EXPERIMENTAL TIME-LAPSE ANIMATION AND THE MANIFESTATION … 101

10. The expression ‘conversation with a stone’ was conceived by 1962 Nobel Prize-winner Wisłava Szymborska to describe an imaginary dialogue between a poet and a stone and the self in relation to the external world. It is likely that Hansen’s flm of the same title was infuenced by this notion. 11. https://www.ecotricity.co.uk/our-green-energy/energy-independence/ the-end-of-fossil-fuels. Accessed 28 March 2018. 12. https://www.kingscross.co.uk/gasholders-london. Accessed 28 March 2018. The gasholders, once industrial powerhouses rather than pent- houses, sit upon ‘canalside’, another former industrial power fashioned into lifestyle commodity living. 13. http://www.e-ir.info/2016/06/13/refusing-to-acknowledge-the-problem-of-climate-change-denial/. Accessed 28 March 2018. A central factor shaping denial of climate change is the lack of precedent of a hotter planet. This makes it hard for the human brain to fathom.

References Bennett, Jane. 2004. The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter. Political Theory 32 (3): 347–372. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Curtis, David. 2006. A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain. London: British Film Institute Publishing. Deren, Maya. 2005. Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film. New York: Kingston Press. Dusinberre, Deke. 1976. St George in the Forest: The English Avant-Garde. Simon Field, ed. Afterimage 6 (Summer): 4–20. Fowler, William. 2003–2014. BFI Screen-online: Raban, William View (1970). http://www.screenonline.org.uk/flm/id/1329894/index.html. Accessed 27 February 2017. Hamlyn, Nicky. 2003. Film, Art, Phenomena. London: British Film Institute Publishing. Hudson, Laura. 1993. Luxonline. https://lux.org.uk/work/talking-to-a-stone. Accessed 8 May 2017. Kotting, Andrew. 2008. Cobra Mist. http://animateprojectsarchive.org/writing/essay_archive/a_kotting. Accessed 6 May 2017. Lamarre, Thomas. 2007. Coming to Life: Cartoon Animals and Natural Philosophy. In Animated ‘Worlds’, ed. Suzanne Buchan, 118–130. London: John Libbey Publishing. Le Grice, Malcolm. 2001. Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age. London: BFI Film Classics. 102 V. SMITH

Le Grice, Malcolm. 2012. In Booklet to Accompany DVD Woodman’s Landscape Films 1977–1982. London: Lux Publishing. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962. The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans C. Smith. London: Routledge Press. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. O’Pray, Michael. 2003. Avant-Garde Film: Forms Themes and Passions. London: Columbia Wallfower Press. Panse, Silke. 2013. Ten Skies, 13 Lakes, 15 Pools—Structure, Immanence and Eco-Aesthetics in the Swimmer and James Benning’s Land Films. In Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human, ed. A. Pick and G. Narraway, 37–59. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Raban, William. 2011. Refexivity and Expanded Cinema: A Cinema of Transgression? In Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film, ed. S. Ball, D. Curtis, A. L. Rees, and D. White, 98–107. London: Tate Publishing. Raban, William. 2015. ‘The Materiality of Time’ UAL Professorial Platform Lecture, UAL Research Online. http://ualresearchonline.arts. ac.uk/7856/6/raban_A5_draft13_copy.pdf. Accessed 15 September 2017. Sloane, Helen. 2011. Lapse. http://animateprojectsarchive.org/writing/ essays/h_sloan. Accessed 15 August 2017. Takahashi, Tess. 2008. After the Death of Film: Writing the Natural World in the Digital Age. Visible Language 42: 44–69. Analogon: Of a World Already Animated

Sean Cubitt

Films, and perhaps especially animated flms, are ways of thinking. In their own ways, and beyond any intention of human flmmakers, flms think. Animations think especially hard about movement, time and, unsurpris- ingly, animation: what motivates something to move. In their remarka- bly different ways, Muto (2007–2008) and Der Lauf der Dinge (1987) undertake a radical thinking-through of change, respectively as mutation and its constituents, and the capacities of flm generally and animation specifcally to unhinge and rearticulate classifcations of human, environmental and technological life. Muto is a 7-minute graphic by Italian street artist Blu flmed in stop-motion on location in Buenos Aires as the artist and his team paint, erase and redraw a series of evolving fgures on the walls of the city. Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go) is a 30-minute flm by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss which documents in a succession of long takes (with carefully concealed edits) a series of home- made devices which variously decompose, fall, crash and burn to produce a chain reaction of events. The two are comparable because both

S. Cubitt (*) Film and Television, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. Cubitt University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

© The Author(s) 2018 103 V. Smith and N. Hamlyn (eds.), Experimental and Expanded Animation, Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73873-4_6 104 S. CUBITT photograph the real world—suitably amended. Both are in this sense pro- flmic animations—that is, made with a camera shooting things placed in front of it; one using traditional stop-motion to capture change; the other setting up a series of animated events to flm in real time. Many animators, from Norman MacLaren’s pixilations in Neighbours (1952) to John Ryan’s Captain Pugwash live-action puppet animations, produced for the BBC by Gordon Murray between 1957 and 1966— and including Blu’s more recent Big Bang Big Boom (2010)—enrich the traditions of animating by shooting more than single stop-frames. Nonetheless, there may be some controversy about including Der Lauf Der Dinge as an animated flm. Rule 19 of the 2017 Academy Awards of Merit states, somewhat equivocally, ‘An animated flm is defned as a motion picture in which movement and characters’ performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique … Motion capture and real- time puppetry are not by themselves animation techniques’ (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 2017). The Academy clearly wants to protect the craft of animators from rival cinematographic techniques, even when they ‘photograph’ only movements, not appearance. Here, I will hold to the principle that animating events in order to photograph them is equivalent to other forms of animation. Let us leave aside the venerable history of motion and performance capture, dating back to Marey’s chronophotographic experiments in the 1880s (Dagognet 1992), through the Gilbreths’ time-and-motion studies between 1907 and 1924 (Price 1989) to contemporary effects movies whose hybrid- ity must give the Academy judges sleepless nights (see, for example, Freedman 2012). If instead of restricting animation to a named family of techniques like the Academy, we take as principle that animation gives cinematic life to the inanimate, or re-animates the already animate differently (as in Neighbours), then flmed puppetry not only fts the defnition but connects cinema to the ancient shadow puppets of the frelit cave and the marionettes and toys that feature so deeply in folk tales and folk theatres. That history, if we peer into it, suggests not only the uncanny of statues springing to life but a dim and twisted memory of panpsychism, the belief in the universal mind that animates the oldest reli- gions, contests with mathematics the foundations of modern science and underpins Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis (1979) and Naess’s deep ecology (1990). The comparison between Muto and Der Lauf der Dinge can tell us more about the nature of both animation and experiment than def- nitional exclusion ever could. Perhaps equally signifcantly, it may offer a ANALOGON: OF A WORLD ALREADY ANIMATED 105 way to address, again, how animation thinks the historical divagations of panpsychism. At times anthropocentric, at others devoted to the unhuman intelligence that tells a cherry stone to grow into a cherry tree, the history of panpsychism writes the history of the utopian (and at times exploit- ative) yearning for a union with nature. Its principle of a commonality between human and natural includes the faith that the human is, in potential if not actuality, itself a natural process. The implication must be that ecological thinking cannot stop at the human, that the non- human (including animated flms) also thinks, and that ecological thinking about art and culture cannot stop short when there are no explicit themes or motifs in the work in front of us, any more than feminism stopped at flms ‘about’ women. The intricate and historically miserable relations between human and non-human—frst expressed in that baleful separation of the two—do not permit such wilful silence. Popular animation has constantly thought through human–animal metamorphoses and through permutations of the landscape tradition. Experimental animation, like experimental flm more generally, has an equally robust history of engagement with animals and environments; and both have a deep engagement in the non-human animation of flm technologies. The two short flms that occupy this chapter, differently animated, inhabit again, in profound and passionate as well as charming ways, the uncanny hinterland between human, technological and natural, and, in inhabiting, alter the porosity, polarity and expanse of their borders and thresholds. Art as experiment is utopian: it seeks something other and better. As utopia, art is a will to transcendence. Whether as negation (Adorno 1997) or as project (Brecht 1964), art wants to realise the human elsewhere than in the mundane world. Since the Renaissance, a key aspect of this transcendent aspiration has been the realisation that the transcendence of subjectivity, of the subject, must include the transcendence of its object, a legacy perhaps of the Cabbalistic tiqqun, the belief that with the arrival of the Messiah, the whole world, not just the humans in it, will be redeemed. For Classicism, this object of transcendence is the artwork itself; for Romanticism, it is the world transfgured in art. The two works considered here are in this sense Romantic. They are prepared to sacrifce perfection of form to the task of transfguring everything they picture. As philosophy of nature, Romanticism seeks transcendence with and in the transformation of the world, a theme that reaches its height in landscape art on the one hand, and in the cinema on the other. In the former, the 106 S. CUBITT soul seeks in nature an escape from its alienation from nature; while in the latter, it struggles to overthrow the isolation that formal classical per- fectionism imposes, in which nature was constantly framed as object of knowledge and exploitation, to try instead to bring it into the domain of a no-longer alienated ego through contemplation, empathy and identifcation. These are the contradictory tools that such animations take up. Even though animation also has its classicists, especially in digital animation, from James Blinn to Universal Everything, they too arrive at the following dilemma. The fight of transcendence, whether inward or out- ward, whether into fantasy or into reality, whether forming or informed, is always the product of a devastating desire for settlement (Glissant 1997, 16–17). The will to transcendence, classical or romantic, is at once a cause of and a form of mourning for a loss of settlement. What drives Renaissance transcendence is the same desire that drove Renaissance colonialism (Mignolo 2003, 219ff.): what lies ahead. But to achieve that future, one has to leave home. In that loss, and the overwhelming need to create a new home, lies the tragedy and absurdity of art, as well as its glory. When we speak of ‘home’, we mean a place where we ft. The place left behind is the place where the distinction between human and environment, the precursor of the subject–object relation, has not yet come about. The transcendental search for home cannot be a return to the scene of the primal, mutual ejection of living beings and environments, subjects and objects from one another. It must be a creation, and one that recognises the tragic loss which is the condition for its existence as transcendental yearning. Muto and Der Lauf share a practice of recording an actual but artifcial pro-flmic that is unsettled in two ways: by fantasy and by absurd plan. Muto opens with a time-lapse of dawn over the city, the camera then panning over to a wall where the frst painted animation will begin, as the soundtrack moves from the actual sounds of the city to the fctional sound of the animation. A brick, singled out by paint, becomes a fctional brick tumbling to reveal a fctional hole through which frst one arm then half a dozen emerge, pull themselves through the gap and set off along the wall. A rubbery, rhythmic music track accompanies its walk until it grows an eye and meets another of its kind with a high-pitched jabber of ‘dialogue’. Entangled, they fall over, become the brain of a bigger head whose teeth fall out and, changing from vertical to horizontal, scatter along the pavement. We follow one as it creeps up the wall again, turning into a ox from which a man emerges whose lightbulb-shaped ANALOGON: OF A WORLD ALREADY ANIMATED 107 head shatters to be replaced by geometric ‘heads’, each of which smashes with a sneeze and a tinkle of glass, leaving him with a cube head from which other cubes tumble until the topmost opens and a infantile fgure emerges made of feet and head. As it hops along the wall with sync boings, the drawing and erasures cover over pre-existing street art. Its mouth becomes a birth canal from which successive mouths emerge, the last giving birth to a fat naked man who crawls along until two hands open his body and take out a jewel that grows robot limbs, scuttling along and kicking over in the process a real log propped against the wall before condensing once again into the jewel form. A headless naked man triggers the jewel into a series of geometric permutations before placing it, still fickering from shape to shape, on the top of his neck, where it takes over his whole body, which adds more and more and more facets until it too shatters to allow a man, this time with a head, to emerge from it. He arrives before two monumental legs as cars fash by in the street beyond the corner of the wall. He offers his head to the hand that descends, as the whole fgure squeezes into the wall, popping the head into its mouth like a sweetie. The motif of geometric fgures and head begins again, and the cycle of heads emerging from heads, until a house resolves, from which a multi-limbed fgure escapes, passing through a tunnel into an interior, where it hangs itself up from a real peg in the wall; its spawn recreate themselves by releasing homunculi from doors in their chests until the last eats real sheets of paper, traverses a ceiling and knocks over some real bricks, fnally metamorphosing into a chrysalis that returns through the tunnel to the exterior, becomes a man with but- terfy wings, which he eats before vomiting fies that consume another head, leaving nothing but a grinning skeleton. Aside from the clearly fantastic mutations, and the legacy of the fantastic free invention of Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) and Ryan Larkin’s Street Musique (1972), some motifs return: the male fgures that, in various extravagant ways, give birth to their like without any sexual differentiation; an oscillation between anthropomorphic forms, however bizarre, and geometric; the multiple ways that heads are missing or transformed, suggesting an acephalic aesthetic that might evoke Bataille’s Acéphale, the review he ran from 1936 to 1939 in protest against the triumph of reason and of humanity as head of the universe. It might be too that the geometric/anthropomorphic mutations suggest a struggle between semantic and cybernetic conceptions of the human, and especially of men, since no female forms appear at all. But the iconography 108 S. CUBITT of Muto is not all that keeps us watching, or attracted nearly 12-million views on YouTube. It is the invention of a technique for making street art come alive; to make the walls, pavements and abandoned interiors of the city places of fantasy and strangeness. The mutations of these language-less creatures provide an alternative to the logic of urbanism. They match the particular attraction of YouTube videos, as attractions in Gunning’s sense (Gunning 1990), because in their very carefully articulated mindlessness, they create the possibility for a simultaneous display of potential meaning and its failure to realise itself in any concrete thought. The acephalic produces—in the heart of the city, which is the most extreme of human environments—the possibility of a humanity that no longer carries the burden of signifying: and that is in this sense, but also in the sense of the endless mutations of evolutionary process that do not end up as successful new species, insignifcant. Where the site of Muto is the street as a kind of hinterland between the rational city and its acephalic underworld, in Der Lauf der Dinge Fischli and Weiss’s studio has the same relationship to the laboratory as privileged site of reason. The flm fades in from black on a scarcely decipherable swirl of greys and blacks that resolves, as the camera pulls back, into a plastic sack turning on a rope, slowly unwinding until it strikes a discarded tyre that rolls slowly, to knock a weight hung from a shelf that tilts up and around to nudge the tyre on to knock a stick which dislodges a weighted stepladder on an inclined plane to hit another inclined plane, loosing a table to slip down and trigger a weight suspended from a pole to swivel round its axis and start the next stage of the process. Along the way, discarded items drop to the studio’s concrete foor and roll off screen: a steel weight, a yellow plastic bottle. Everything is old, used, scruffy: the antithesis of the antiseptic lab. After a reprise of the plastic sack/tyre gambit, we see the frst chemical reaction. From here on, various foams eat through barriers, overfow boundaries and are set alight by waiting nightlight fames. Chemical and mechanical, like the 16 mm flm that it is recorded on, the onward linkage of reactions returns over and over to scenes of perilous equilibrium: a chair balanced on two legs by a table, on which a jug stands asymmetrically on a block of wood; a candle on a board we know will rock when a plastic cup full of some brown weight tips onto it, and will roll down towards a waiting chemical device. We learn to anticipate the tricks, or are baffed by a particular step and are delighted when a collar slips from a defating balloon. In a sudden furry, a tabletop becomes the arena where a swift succession of ANALOGON: OF A WORLD ALREADY ANIMATED 109 chemical-mechanical tricks race us on before another slower passage of a rolling oil drum. For a moment we think a stunt has failed when a rolling tyre’s frework propellant seems to have refused to light, or a swinging bag fails at frst to hit the glass of water in front of it; and then we are off again: metals, woods, plastics and projectiles, liquids, gases, fames, fuses, foams, freworks and fulcrums. The swinging ball trick reprises but this time in fames. An orrery of fre-blackened plastic bottles and tin cans powered by some steaming reaction inside. A pair of shoes appear to walk through eccentric motion driven by a rolling can, eccentric motion picked up a moment later by a mismatched pair of oval wooden wheels. Knives appear: on a roller skate, fred from a boiling kettle. The camera closes in on clouds of smoke, on faring pyroclastics, on off- white and grey-black foams, and as it does we can inspect the textures of fnger-moulded plasticine or metal guides that channel the fuids, or the worn or aged offcuts of wood or abandoned metal trays. The sound persuades us of the actuality of what we are watching: fzzing, bubbling, crashing, thumping, with the unmistakable properties of woods, metals, rubber and liquid. Even the edits are only half-disguised, several occurring in plain sight, almost as interludes—etymologically ‘spaces between games’. Twice wheels or tyres bump their way up ladders, a continuity apparently in defance of gravity. Some actions seem to be at the limit of achievable, as when a falling sheet of wood creates just enough wind to propel a cardboard box into the next obstacle. Our last view is of fumes drifting in close up. Under the closing credits there runs a series of the sounds that we have been listening to: whizzes, gluggings, whistles. As if the games things play without us carry on when the camera is gone. The striking dialectic of Fischli and Weiss’s flm is between the untidy scrapyard aesthetic of the things they use and the extreme precision of the stunts. The dialectic is perhaps most easily voiced as the oscillation between entropy and information that David Weiss described as ‘this energy of never-ending collapse’ (Millar 2012). Though the steplad- ders are only a step away from stepping, the only truly anthropomorphic moment involves the shoes, and there they are entirely removed from human action save only as another example of eccentric motion, the human gait reduced to the laws of physics. We might infer at a couple of moments that the artists had to intervene in their engineering of equilibrium and chaos, but they are there as ghosts, poltergeists, the servants of a machinery that only requires them, if at all, to adjust its autonomous collisions. The animation of Der Lauf belongs to a world without 110 S. CUBITT people. It was shown on British TV under the title Chain Reaction, with all the apocalyptic inferences of nuclear engineering gone wrong, suggesting perhaps not ‘without’ but after humanity: a world in which the debris of human habitation continues to react with the environment. At the same time, the studio itself fgures throughout, even if only as background: the screened windows, the heating pipes, the stained concrete fooring. This constant background keeps us aware that these accidents are the product of careful organisation, even if that organisation serves only entropy. Placed together, the two flms present two poles of entropy: constant becoming as a form of insignifcance in Muto, and precision as precursor to the random instance in Der Lauf. The dualities of these two flms open onto an intellectual history of anima, the soul and the mind, that begins with the Indo-European word for ‘breath’, the puff of life that animates the clay. Muto becomes, where Der Lauf falls apart. At the same time, Der Lauf der Dinge is obviously planned, for all its messy execution. Its accidents then appear, as in the mediaeval distinction between essence and accidence, as only one of many possible outcomes of its design. Muto’s autonomy is equally clearly not that of a plan but its fan- tasía recalls the experimentation of Cohl’s Fantasmagorie, undertaken with no model to follow, the part-random outcome of a plan of work whose expression on flm is guessed at but not utterly under control. But looked at from a third perspective, though both share the motivated camera and ambient available light of documentary, Muto’s perpetual edit (a cut for every frame) constrains as it enables the fantastical becoming of its mutations, while the long takes in Lauf ascribe autonomy not to the imagination of the artist but to the things (Dinge) and the way they run, their race, or, in another translation, the course of things (as in ‘the course of the year’). Muto starts with an escape from the walls of the city and ends with a skull. In Der Lauf, we are already in a realm beyond life, where something other than life animates: or where the raw processes of life (chemical, mechanical) operate in the absence of any living creature—a posthumous world. Even the soundtracks separate the two. Muto—whose title might also suggest that its creatures are mute—adds a designed soundtrack, with elements pointing towards music and dialogue, those characteristic forms of organic life. In Der Lauf, we encounter only the scraping and sputtering of inanimate processes, like the imagined soundscape of Duchamp’s The Large Glass (1915–1923) that ANALOGON: OF A WORLD ALREADY ANIMATED 111

Richard Hamilton imagines in the closing lines of his translation of the Green Box (Duchamp 1960). The a-signifying of evolving (and perhaps evolutionary) fantasy as acephalic déraison in Muto and the a-human entropic energies of Der Lauf suggest that the animated is not human in any easily reparable form; yet in both, the presence of the street—as metonym of the city—and the studio—as homologue of the laboratory—place the unseating of reason and the unleashing of entropy, two ways of negating the triumph of information, in relation with the human world. Just as entropy has a semantic function in the conduct of life, from the mathematical theory of communication to post-Deleuzian ontologies, so insignifcance, and even more so the a-signifying, underpin both semantics and epistemology. Once again, however, the ontological and epistemological dimensions of these works do not explain their appeal. These types of irrationality are at once negatives, unpicking the solidity of the world and our relations with it, and positive liberations of the autonomy of both the mind and the world of things. If it is the case that their iconography is only part of their charm, and that their philosophical dimensions contribute to but do not exhaust it, we are left with the hypothesis that they call up, in the imagination, something about inhabiting the world, something about our environmental status as beings in the world. The hypothesis, then, is that they act as analogies for something about what it is to be alive: ana- logues of social and natural processes. Street art as cultural process is a contest for urban space. Animating the cultural work of graffti in Muto then sets up an analogon of social process, which may well also be allegorised in the fantastic evolution of the drawing—cannibalism, for instance, as a metaphor for the relations between graffti artists and corporate interests in the neo-liberal city. In Der Lauf, the analogon is of natural processes, even though, and precisely because, the natural is wholly excluded from the mise en scène. In both instances, the analogy concerns animating what is already animate, a secret animation, the secret of the soul, life, mind, breath. In the former, however, animating the cultural praxis of street art is an expansion of the existing life, so that the analogy is between things of a similar kind; whereas in Der Lauf, the natural processes of combustion and the laws of motion are stripped back from their instantiations in biology to the rudiments of physics and chemistry, so that the analogy is that much more distant. 112 S. CUBITT

I argued above that art is a pursuit of utopia, and that these flms are examples of utopia imagined through transcendence. The question of analogy is always a question about transcendence because the analogon—the material into which the existing is transformed in the process of metaphor—is by defnition of a different order, apart from the mundane existence of the actual. At the beginning of his philosophical career, Jean-Paul Sartre in The Imaginary (1940) set out to establish ‘whether the necessary conditions for realizing an imaginative consciousness are the same as or different from the conditions of possibility of a consciousness in general’ (Sartre 2004, 180; original emphasis). Among the analytic tools he develops is the idea that the phenomenological encounter with an object is always a matter of perspective, and that only a relation over time allows the object in the round to give itself to knowledge. In imagination—and we could add, in 3D digital animation—the facets and dimensions of the thing can be present all at once. But as image, the imaginary is restricted to a single perspective. Moreover, the image cannot foat free but must appear, and therefore has to have some material bearer, which Sartre calls the analogon. The imagined image has no actuality; by realising it in material form, as analogon, the ‘concept’ of a musical score or theatre script becomes real, and in so doing realises not only the image itself but potentials that, as unrealised idea, it had no way of exploring. In Sartre, the contemplative ‘imaging attitude’ of consciousness lacks reality, so invoking the ‘realising attitude’, in which, by realising its images and concepts in the material of the analogon, consciousness returns itself to the real world. Speaking of the mental image, Sartre writes, ‘the imaginary object can be posited as nonexistent or as absent or as existing elsewhere or not be posited as existent. We notice that the common characteristic of these four theses is that they include the entire category of negation, though in different degrees. Thus the negative act is constitutive of the image’ (Sartre 2004, 183), an observation which he then clarifes by arguing that ‘an image is not purely and simply the world denied, but is always the world denied from a certain point of view’ (Sartre 2004, 184). To negate the world absolutely is a philosophical act of pure reason: it is in the imagination that the world is denied from a specifc place. We displace the world by imaging it, since, Sartre argues, every image refers to something absent. But the image itself is still present; indeed, ‘the analogon is presence. Hence these contradictory syntheses’ (Sartre 2004, 91; original emphasis): the image is a present absence. His major preoccupation is with images as they appear ANALOGON: OF A WORLD ALREADY ANIMATED 113 in consciousness. But his identifcation of the analogon helps us trace the work of these animations as they picture for consciousness something which is not present, as the makers of both are made signifcantly absent by the traces of their orchestration of the events on screen. Equally, the foregrounding of the animated elements—the drawings in Muto, the machines in Der Lauf—draws our attention to the present-absence of the street and the studio, as both in turn point towards the absent- presences of the city and the laboratory. In the central passage of Der Lauf where we watch the ‘orrery’ of bottles and cans, our view is constantly obstructed by smoke from burning iron flings. That smoke, like the stop-motion edits in Muto, is both visible and invisible. The dialectic of entropy and order, of insignifcance and becoming, is played out at the same formal level where makers and environments both appear and dis- appear. It is in this interplay that, as Sartre has it, consciousness returns itself to the real world beyond the realia that are pictured for us in the flms, analogons, in their turn, of the events staged in front of their cameras. This might be a simple enough argument to make about live- action flms, but in animation, there are some subtleties which create more complex relations of analogy. Digital animation is more immediately ‘imaginary’ in Sartre’s sense because it plays across the distinction between the real, which gives itself to knowledge in a time-based manner, showing itself from different aspects, and the image, which has only one aspect to show. On the other hand, the image in consciousness outlives the destruction of the physical analogon, the material support (Muto erases each drawing in order to create the next, yet we recall the predecessor when we see the image in motion; Der Lauf establishes precarious equilibria in order to destroy them, but we recall the previous state when we relish its destruction). The moving image has a different relation to the reality it stands in for, and the animated image a different one again, since it allows us not only to hold the instant, whole and entire, but to play with both the variety of perspectives we can see it from, and the time it takes both to look differently and for the object to change. In these flms, Muto exposes what is not there in the frst instance, or the last—the potential that the walls have to become other than they are; while Der Lauf exposes the roundness of the time-based activities of these mechano-chemical agents. The question—a question at least—is then where the agency lies and where the subjectivity: in the artist (of course), the apparatus (house paint, detritus of a workshop) and 114 S. CUBITT the camera. Both flms demand an inevitably impossible (or inevitably incomplete) identifcation by the viewer with all three that comes across as awe and laughter. This unfnished quality divides these works from the perfected form of Classicism. It also shapes their Romanticism, typically related to the necessarily unfnished task of changing the world, by emphasising that the world they encounter is itself radically uncertain, radically capable of different evolutions from the start points imaged and imagined in their production processes. The production of moving images in these flms is not a reduced imitation but an act, the realisation of an imagining which parallels visions of the world and the process of inhabiting it, not as actual (the indexical relation) but as potential. Neither flm can ever completely or fnally make the defnitive version of the potentialities it unleashes, in the same way that a performance of a musical score never exhausts its possible reworkings. The capacity to be otherwise is intrinsic even in the ‘fnished’ object that we see on screen. At the same time, however, the ‘fnished’ image as analogon, as material substrate, is itself real, a really realised realisation in material form which thus guarantees the existence of an otherwise imperceptible (inaudible, invisible) intui- tion, premonition, design or concept without its own proper physical form. Neither ‘street culture’ nor ‘the laws of physics’ can be pictured in other than metonymic ways: we can use a mural or an apple falling from a tree as emblems of each, but the pictures are only parts of a whole to which they pay homage, but which is inevitably incomplete. But we are not here in the realm of documentary: we do not hope to see the soci- ology of urban culture or the laws of motion given holistic and realistic form. Instead, the concept drives the analogon to make concrete, in a series of mutations (Muto) and events (Der Lauf), concepts which have no concrete form of their own. This is not, however, a matter of concep- tualising and fnding the suitable analogon to express the concept. The animation of the world in order to make a moving image of a particularly insignifcant or entropic quality is not simply informed by but in-forms the concept, expanding here, contracting there, determining the material analogon while exposing not simply the conditions but also the contingencies of its existence and therefore its potential to become otherwise than what we have seen reductively as the ostensibly fnished works. Muto was made at the height of the global fnancial crisis in a country already famous for its debt crises; Der Lauf der Dinge at the high-water mark of the neo-liberal seizure of the state in a country famed as a major ANALOGON: OF A WORLD ALREADY ANIMATED 115 holder of the world’s debt and the looted wealth of the Global South. Separated by twenty years, these two flms sit at either end of an economic era whose long posthumous apocalypse we are still living through. To defne either as analogons of neo-liberal political economy would be feasible and illuminating in its way, but reductive if unalloyed with a sense of what else is mediated through their addresses to chaos as energy. It is more likely that these mediations of potential are infected by the mediations of political economy than by political economy itself; and that these mediations may prove to be as informative of their environing political economy as their environments are of them. Animation animates things but also animates modes of knowing things, sometimes as proper names, sometimes as common nouns; sometimes as science, sometimes as magic. Truly indexical cinema is a cinema of the proper name: each image the single unique specifcation of an encounter between camera and event. Perhaps the truest indexical images are those that we make initially not for circulation but as memen- tos: snapshots and family movies. In the mid-1980s, the proliferation of VHS cameras opened the vista onto mass participation in movie-making. By 2007–2008, when Blu was shooting Muto, we were already in the era of mass distribution of these intimate indices. These flms bracket the coming into existence of a new phenomenon: the mass image, created by the mass availability of both production and distribution media, and commercialised on interlinked social media platforms and search engines. Among the many things to say about this new mass image—a database of all uploaded images—is that it is data, and that the data takes the form not of whole individuals but of behaviours and the trends that connect them—as if Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the diagram and the dividual had come back to haunt us in their commodifed form. In con- cluding, let us consider as a hypothesis the possibility that these works are concerned, at the emergence of the mass image, with strategies for creating the next cultural form that will negate and replace it—a version of the familiar hypothesis that, as the antennae of the species, artists seek out possible futures beyond the demands of the contemporary: that they are in deed as well as aspiration utopian transcendentalists. Muto presents the ontological case: the world is not itself, and any image of it is always unstable, since the world cannot be reduced to self-identity. It is instead a boiling cauldron of invention and creativity, an infnite becoming, even if that becoming must start in the forgotten and disavowed interstices of the rational city. 116 S. CUBITT

Muto is ontological: creativity is everywhere and immanent; Der Lauf is historical: creativity is a fnite resource, and history cannot be trusted to be endlessly productive, imaginative and wholesome. Benjamin’s third thesis concerning ‘On the Concept of History’ (2003, 390) demands that human redemption must include the redemption of every act from the past that ‘nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history’. Benjamin was looking forward to redemption of the world and all its things: the kind of redemption that would save not only the ruined human past but also our ruined environments. What he could not foretell was that the mass image would become just such a repository, no longer dedicated to redemption but to the logistical exploitation not only of the living but of the dead. However, it would be wrong to blame this on technology which, like environment, is non-human only by an act of exclusion. In technology we have stored all the wisdom and many of the stupidities of our ancestors, inscribed in metals and textiles, stored in the systems and techniques of ‘dead labour’ (Marx 1973, 693–694). It is then clear that Benjaminian redemption also demands the work of liberating enslaved ancestral technology. In death, the dead lose their potential to act, becoming wholly actual. But as actual, they are the coiled springs of potential. To redeem therefore frst requires revealing the potential of these ancestors ‘congealed’, as Marx has it, in technology. Kant (1952, §65) and Hegel (1969, §1543) agree that their external teleology distinguishes machines from living creatures, whose teleology is internal (a duck lives in order to live; a machine works in order to serve the living). What then if we were to build machines with autonomous teleologies? What if, put otherwise, we were to remove the determi- nants that stop machines writing their own evolution? The myth of the anti-human AI belongs to the ideology that our ancestors must be kept in servitude inside the black boxes of machinery; an ideological refection of a justifed fear that they might seek revenge for their millennia of imprisonment. The neo-liberal counter-argument is that autonomous evolution is not only possible, and employed everyday in developing complex systems, not least in logistics, but desirable: a new collaboration between phyla in the interests of a rational, not to say market-rational, delivery of better services, bigger profts. A third possibility is marked in both of our animations: that redeemed, the ancestors may be mad, or at least incomprehensible. Although made much earlier, Der Lauf der Dinge is more tempered in its depiction of creativity, seeing it not as an infnite renewal but as thoroughly dependent on decaying resources and ANALOGON: OF A WORLD ALREADY ANIMATED 117 the fragile arrangement of accidents whose clumsy achievement of their design has the pitiful range of clown gymnastics. In this, it is not only true to environmental principle, as is Muto, that every action, every act of making, has a cost in energy that eventually sums at the perfect equilibrium of collapse, but recognises that liberating the locked potential of the ancestors is not a return to their individuality, still less a lost commu- nalism, but instead a future tailored to the present: a logistical overcom- ing of the logistical management of human, natural and technological existence. In both flms, the world is alive, comes alive, remakes itself as living; but both foreshadow the enormous cost—Muto in its iconography, Der Lauf in its manic marionettes—of breaking free from the man- aged world. Animation has charms; experimental animations also may have terror and violence. Benjamin’s Jetzseit, the narrow gate through which the redeemer can arrive to blast history open, is the time of flm, that time which animation opens up as raw material; the analogon between flm and consciousness goes both ways—what makes one mortal gives the other all of history as its playground.

References Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 2017. 90th Annual Academy Awards of Merit. http://www.oscars.org/oscars/rules-eligibility. Adorno, Theodor W. 1997. Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Athlone Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2003. On the Concept of History. In Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 389–400. Cambridge, MA: Bellknap Press and Harvard University Press. Brecht, Bertolt. 1964. A Short Organum for the Theatre. In Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett, 179–205. New York: Hill and Wang. Dagognet, François. 1992. Etienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace, trans. Robert Galeta with Jeanine Herman. New York: Zone Books. Duchamp, Marcel. 1960. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even (A Typographic Version by Richard Hamilton of Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box), trans. George Heard Hamilton. Stuttgart: Hansjorg Mayer. Freedman, Yacov. 2012. Is It Real … or Is It Motion Capture?: The Battle to Redefne Animation in the Age of Digital Performance. The Velvet Light Trap, 69 (Spring): 38–49. Glissant, Edouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 118 S. CUBITT

Gunning, Tom. 1990. ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.’ In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, 56–62. London: BFI. Hegel, G. W. F. 1969. The Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller. New York: Humanities Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1952. The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lovelock, James. E. 1979. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin and New Left Books. Mignolo, Walter D. 2003. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Millar, Jeremy. 2012. Fischli and Weiss: The Art of Humour. The Guardian, 5 June. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/jun/05/fschli- and-weiss-art-of-humour. Naess, Arne. 1990. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, trans. David Rothenberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Price, Brian. 1989. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and the Manufacture and Marketing of Motion Study, 1908–1924. Business and Economic History, Second Series 18: 1–12. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2004. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber. Introduction by Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre and Jonathan Webber. London: Routledge. Emptiness Is Not ‘Nothing’: Space and Experimental 3D CGI Animation

Alex Jukes

In the 1990s and early 2000s, experiments in computer animation by artists such as Michel Bret, Karl Sims, Nicole Stenger, Manfred Mohr, David Larcher and William Latham produced work that questioned the apparatus, the material and the processes of dimensional art and moving-image creation. The work that these artists created was about objects, and virtual sculptural entities, but it was also about space, the space and the void which their digital objects inhabited (Popper 1993). Their animations, which explored the possibilities of digital image generation, are symbolic of the technology of their time: surreal environments with imagined computer-generated landscapes and fantastic CGI creatures, invented worlds,1 existing within the internal mechanisms of the computer, where the mode of production is grounded in and about a computational, virtual space. It is the idea of space, setting and environment that formed a key component in the composition and narrative of many digital animation works from this period (in Bret’s Automappe [1988], it is the swirling

A. Jukes (*) Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 119 V. Smith and N. Hamlyn (eds.), Experimental and Expanded Animation, Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73873-4_7 120 A. JUKES vortices and organic, amorphous backgrounds that act to contain the characters; in William Latham’s work, it is the inky blackness of the void that foregrounds his Giger-esque creations), a discrete stage within which objects, creatures and Phong-shaded2 characters exist. These are unreal, highly imaginative terrains where strange and evocative storylines often play out against a backdrop of alien or outlandish dramatic landscapes, or at other times a simple void. Emerging from these early works is a sense of a spatial language. A language that evolves from a syntactical difference in the separation between the 3D models, their stylistic manifestations and the environments within which the action takes place—the stage, the background or the surroundings. For example, Karl Sims introduces 3D CGI backgrounds (generated and existing within the computer) as a means to delimit or direct the movement of the creatures that he creates (or alter- natively, as in Sims’ Liquid Selves (1992), the backgrounds evolve to envelope the creatures to become new forms). From this disjunction, questions arise about relationships with space: what is the nature of the digital background? What are the constraints or possibilities of a virtual, potentially infnite, indeterminate computer-generated backspace?

Presentation of Digital Twenty or so years later, as cinema refnes its potential for pictorial illusionism, such rudimentary questions seem to have been largely neglected. Today, onscreen environments and digital panoramas employ 3D CGI as a choice of technology to credibly describe unfeasible landscapes and believable impossibilities. As cinema-goers, we can be transported to alien worlds, visit fantasy locations or become a participant in catastrophic events. The visual treatment is convincing and for a moment believable, yet we recognise the deception, understand the artifce. Perhaps visually impossible spaces have now become naturalised and the collective of spectacle and 3D CGI effects flms of the 1990s, such as Twister (1996), Independence Day (1996) and Titanic (1997), has acted to desensitise our awe of incredible 3D CGI (spatial) cinema screen experiences, delegating the technical process of CGI to be absorbed into a universal cinematic language, an illusionistic device parallel to others. Current trends seek to replace a fascination for superfcial 3D CGI fat-screen experiences with productions and events that celebrate the capacity of the moving image to operate beyond the confnes of the EMPTINESS IS NOT ‘NOTHING’: SPACE AND EXPERIMENTAL … 121 two-dimensional screen. For example, 3D Cinema, projection-mapping and VR promote an intellectual interaction and a physical/perceptual management of image space that functions within a very different dimensional domain. A growing discourse in these areas signals the emergence of new visual, spatial dictionaries, introduces alternative vocabular- ies where the viewer plays an increasingly active role in his or her cinematic experience. Authors such as Elsaesser, who provide a commentary on these developments, claim that digital technologies have speeded up the transition in which we participate with cinema, where it moves from a passive viewing environment to one where the boundaries and the screen’s ‘frame’ are becoming culturally reconfgured, suggesting that

When infected phenomenologically, the window and the frame no longer stand in opposition as classical flm theory argued for Bazin and Eisenstein and their respective conception of the parameters of depth and fatness, representation and fguration: now it is the lived body encountering the window/frame as a ‘container’ in which the dimensions of time and space are held that allows one to distinguish ‘here’ and an ‘I’ from ‘there’ and ‘you’. Thus, the cinema in the new digital environment both modifes the scope and re-energises with new meaning one of our key metaphors, window, frame and paradoxically the one most commonly associated with the photographic image ‘realism’. (Elsaesser 2015, 200)

One key theme surfacing from a potential departure from two- dimensional viewing to multidimensional viewing is the revisiting of an interest in process, a re-evaluation of the techniques and technologies of production as well as the apparatus for generating spatial viewing experiences. This is a concept expanded by Elsaesser, who suggests a separation of process and presentation, inferring that it is the attributes instigated by both the ‘process of digital spaces’ and the ‘presentation of digital spaces’ that can be determined as the traits of digital (visual) evolution. An idea that places 3D CGI (with its potential to form and manipulate an illusion of space) at the forefront of such an evolution.3

Space and Cultural Psyche Alongside a practical, visual understanding of digital space and 3D CGI is the development of a philosophical model of digital space, the idea of a ‘common’ digital language, or the emergence of a ‘central’ vocabulary, where infused within contemporary discourse is the notion of objects in 122 A. JUKES space, a conceptual digital space within which ideas and images are generated, arranged, formed and potentially presented (including 3D CGI). Such a concept points towards (or is perhaps indicative of) an emerging digital ontology, a total environment and a common spatial vocabulary4 within which all digital media ft and radiate from. Some scholars, including Lev Manovich, maintain that such a conceptual shift in the way in which we imagine space (as a digital phenomenon) has already taken place, and that this is evident in the way in which we operate and conceive of visual media. For Manovich, such a position is inspired by the introduction of 3D CGI and processes of digital com- positing, ‘[…] the way 3D computer animation organizes visual data—as objects positioned in a Cartesian space—became the way to work with all moving image media’5 (Manovich 2013, 294). If an ‘objectivity’ of media has infltrated our appreciation and consumption of the moving image, it has similarly dominated the way in which we construct high-level composited worlds (such as video games or 3D stereoscopic cinema), as well as our management, interactions and engagement with these formats as mainstream media: ideas that signal a dependence on spatial environments (and 3D CGI). Moreover, a new horizon is potentially dawning with the re-emergence of virtual-reality cinema, acting to further broaden and reinforce our visual (spatial) expectation, infuence the way in which we converse with the concept of space, to redefne how we ft into an expanding multimedia, multidimensional world. Such thoughts are touched upon by Patrick Power in his essay ‘Animated Expressions: Expressive Style in 3D Computer Graphic Narrative Animation’ (2009). Power explores an inconsistency in the generation and effective expressive capabilities of digital graphic animation, specifcally in relation to 3D CGI, where he brings into the discussion attempts that have been made to garner or develop a language that could be used to support expressive capacity for the user/artist. Topics introduced by Power point towards the intrinsic nature of perspective and photorealism that act as the cornerstones of 3D CGI. These, he claims, are critical pillars within the software, properties that dictate the style and representational values of the image that also operate to inhibit and similarly liberate visual results; issues that are explored but not fully resolved within his debate. If we consider 3D CGI as conceptually concerned with space—it is about space and within space where its construction and manipulation point to relationships that drive and EMPTINESS IS NOT ‘NOTHING’: SPACE AND EXPERIMENTAL … 123 develop its function (Manovich 2001)—then I generally concur with Power’s view that the prominent features of 3D CGI—space, perspective and potential for photorealism—are some of the very things that mark 3D CGI as distinctive as a medium. However, my claim within this discussion is that these traits (i.e. perspective, photorealism) are not the only signifcant ones, and that other spatial mechanisms for describing and working with (the representation of) space exist within 3D CGI production.

Hypothesis for Space Thus, at the heart of the argument presented here is an interrogation of the media-specifc parameters of 3D CGI and their relations to space. This is a quest, therefore, that acts to challenge the concepts of how (in terms of production, image generation and image presentation) we understand 3D CGI within the limits of its inherent possibilities and one that suggests a relationship between 3D CGI and its operation or remit to represent space as a key component in this context. Here, space is not wholly a narrative space, as suggested by authors such as Erwin Panofsky, or a primarily process-driven space, as discussed by Thomas Elsaesser,6 but space that has a material function aligned to an objective/subjective spatial dependency, as mooted by Jack Burnham and his prophetic realisation of changing material/spatial relationships within sculpture.

The characteristics of sculpture can be summarized in the fxed attributes of the classical world; place, position, immobility, parts, proportion, and static homage to the human condition—in a word, the creation of immutable ideals through objects. Sculpture increasingly has forsaken its anthropomorphic ideal to become a continuum of steadily changing ideas about the world. Sculpture’s status as object continues to be decep- tive because it leads us to believe that its substantial attributes—in spite of so many losses—are inert materiality: weight, mass, and form. This too has vanished and the dialectical tension within twentieth-century sculpture remains its steady gravitation toward seeming immateriality (through forms of attenuated and unstable materiality), while at the same time resisting this trend. (Burnham 1987, 167; original emphasis)

Burnham contemplates a dematerialisation of modern (ultimately antic- ipating postmodern) sculpture by opening a course of questioning that concerns the transience of the sculptured form. A review of (his) 124 A. JUKES contemporary sculptural landscape, its function, value, identity and material, predicts a mechanisation of sculpture, an enmeshed relationship with technology. His foretelling is of a scientifc art, one that evolves beyond the traditional and ideological boundaries of form to neatly embrace the opportunities and challenges of the digital. It is unlikely that Burnham could have imagined the heights to which such dematerialisation would reach, the ultimate conclusion for dema- terialised sculpture manifest in 3D CGI digital form. Burnham’s vision, where sculpture would turn to cybernetics and electro-mechanics to sat- isfy a human desire for art—at the time evident in Robert Breer’s Self- Propelled Styrofoam Floats (1965–1966), Nam June Paik’s Robot series (circa 1965) or Alex Hay’s electronic theatre events from 1966—have been left far behind in favour of a predilection of science to support an algorithmic aesthetic. At the time of Burnham’s modernist stance, the linear evolution of sculpture to forge new solutions to the age-old problems, via embodied humanistic expression, can only be hinted at. In the decades that followed, the nurturing of a conceptual approach to art-making and a gradual shift away from notions around sculptural form being linked to mass, as well as a reassessment of art and relationships with space through events such as the 1969 Art without Space symposium (moderated by Seth Siegelaub with Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler and Joseph Kosuth), have paved the way for new methods of practice. Such ideas—questions of material, space and sculpture—have now found new grounds for cultivation: inventive dema- terialised worlds which have fourished in a new digital landscape. It is these ideas (the expressive immaterial evolution of mass and form within 3D CGI and conceptualisations of space linked to material) that are of interest in this essay and from which I propose the basis for an experimental method for addressing the subject of 3D CGI animation. The approach to space presented here represents a considerable departure from both mainstream historical and contemporary practice as well as scholarly thought concerning 3D CGI. Typically in other texts, ideas referring to this area radiate from an emphasis on mathematical structures and systems: Lev Manovich, for example, stresses an importance on software; Aylish Wood advocates code as the basis for understanding 3D CGI. Although cross-overs do exist,

Mohr sees himself as an artist who uses mathematics only as a vehicle to realise a vital philosophy. He leaves it to the observer to fnd an approach EMPTINESS IS NOT ‘NOTHING’: SPACE AND EXPERIMENTAL … 125

to his work, whether as pure aesthetic experience or as a cognitive experiment in discovering and deciphering certain processes and structures. (Popper 1993, 103)

In this discussion, I leave to one side the notion of structures and systems of code or any precondition of mathematics for the realisation of the image.7 In 3D CGI, instead it is through an interrogation of space and the relationship between space and 3D CGI that the chapter aims to establish a critical dialogue.

Conceptualisation and Presentation of Space Within 3D CGI Animation Some writers, such as Wood (2015), Galloway (2012) and Elsaesser (2015), explore ideas of space in relation to 3D CGI where a position for space is embedded within the fabric of 3D CGI technologies. Within this discussion, it is not the idea of space as a homogenised or integrated component within 3D CGI that is progressed, rather that space is deemed as the essential component. Space, or space as a concept within 3D CGI, is thus implied as the material base for working in this visual mode; space that distinguishes 3D CGI from other digital visual formats, allowing 3D CGI to be discussed as unique and independent from other digital processes, digital methods of visual construction, or animation. However, what do we mean when we talk about space within 3D CGI? How might we make a claim for it and its relation to 3D CGI without frst establishing a position in a defnition for space? Previous scholars have in their discussions about 3D CGI frequently circumvented the complex particulars of space within their discourse or have inferred a meaning for space where a defnition is open for interpretation. Getting close to the specifcs, Manovich talks of visual,8 perspectival space, a measured space as a foundation for 3D CGI and its relation to real-world space. Here, he observes technological advances and syner- gies formed via both the replication and control of (virtual, 3D CGI and real-world) environments through accurate digital spatial reproductions. In this instance, the application of an objective, Euclidian space informs varied subjects stretching from the realisation of architectural models in virtual space on the one hand, to the control and delivery of long-range military missiles on the other. Here, space is logical, objective, defned, measured—but at the same time limiting, constraining, monologic. 126 A. JUKES

In contrast, Elsaesser describes a malleability of digital space, a diversity of spatial understanding and application within the current discipline of 3D CGI, noting that relationships between the spatial and the digital (the translation and transformation of space from one form to another) operate on various levels.9 Elsaesser suggests an interactive nature for space, spaces of presentation which instigate not portals of illusion or windows into alternate realities bounded by the limits of their frame, but instead a fusing together of virtual spaces, physical spaces and spaces which the viewer inhabits. Here, there is potential for cinematic experiences to form unions between the digital image, the viewer and the environment of its presentation.10 Offering an additional narrative, Wood draws our focus to ‘alternative representational possibilities of 3D’ (Wood 2015, 87) CGI space, proposing that in the activity of working with and through the experience of viewing synthetic digital 3D CGI imagery, we are required to adopt a different way of conceiving space. The supposition here is that 3D CGI offers opportunities to engage with ‘more-than-representational spaces’,11 spaces unique to 3D CGI, space as distinct within the digital artefacts that 3D CGI produces. In this instance, Wood’s dialogue affrms a central role for space within 3D CGI. She invites us to conceive of space, and the possibilities of space, for delivering a new digital lexi- con. Yet there is a sense that Wood’s work is a pretext for a much larger idea, an idea that not only acknowledges the position of space within 3D CGI but one that also anticipates a plausible method for an investigation of such spaces.

The Investigation of Space Within 3D CGI What then is space when discussed within this realm? How might it be deliberated? What methods can be employed to assist an investigation into space where its relation is with 3D CGI? Adding to the above discussion, the approach presented here forwards the notion of a ‘subjective’ dimension for 3D CGI—that is, the work and the ideas do not rely solely on the foundational or (objective) function of linear perspective to realise an illusion of space. Instead, the dialogue expands the notion of 3D CGI space, adding to the debate a ‘pictorially subjective’ interpretative element (alongside objective spatial representation and viewer engagement), acknowledging that multiple understandings of space exist within the remit of image generation EMPTINESS IS NOT ‘NOTHING’: SPACE AND EXPERIMENTAL … 127

(which, within this context, is 3D CGI).12 As such, the examples given within this text function to open up and illuminate alternative avenues for the practical and theoretical interrogation for space and its relation to 3D CGI animation. One example is the work of artist Chris Cornish, who explores relationships between virtual digital object space, real-world physical space and the role of the viewer, where he offers a review of perspectival illusion in terms of 3D CGI and photorealistic digital image construction. Cornish’s There is Mystery Everywhere (2015) examines concepts and methods associated with working digitally, specifcally technical process to do with digital image-making, where familiar symbols of digital image production such as 3D colour wheels and colour spheres are extracted from their digital environments and placed as physical 3D objects within the real world of a gallery. In There is Mystery Everywhere, Cornish’s fbreglass sphere, coloured in such a way that it represents ‘every colour in the spectrum’, explores an interchange of mathematical data, a point of exchange where integers generated to express colour information can be redirected as spatial values, ‘meaning each colour manifests itself as a directional vector according to the normal direction of the surface of the sphere’—a device often used in the production of 3D CGI model animation. Cornish explains that ‘read in this way the map negates the shape to which it is applied, the sphere becomes either infnite space or a singular point, a black hole’. It is through a playful intellectual approach that Chris Cornish starts to question the underlying structures and processes that are employed to produce computer-generated images and our position in relation to these structures physically, spatially and virtually. As such the re-presentation of graphical symbols and icons associated with the construction of perspectival digital illusion results in a crisp almost clinical investigation into the way in which we manufacture and consume photorealistic pictorial space. In terms of space, Cornish’s work invites the viewer to interpret the objects as either existing perceptually within a physical real-world space, or to be understood as manifestations of real-world objects within digital pictorial space. The artworks highlight these concerns by presenting an interplay between physical and virtual representations of pictorial space and real-world space: two alternative spatial conditions connected by mechanisms associated with perspective-driven photorealism. 128 A. JUKES

Cornish highlights a duality of spatial systems already existing within 3D CGI, where the software has been designed to fuse together differences between actual and imagined worlds, the material and the immaterial, real and perceptual spaces. Space within this mode is understood through polar conceptualisations, presented as a unifed system, with elements interlinked yet fundamentally independent. Revealed here is a dialectic between two polar paradigms, an oft-repeated intellectual dualism between what might be broadly and simplistically regarded as imagined or visual space in opposition (but inextricably linked) to a physical or actual space grounded in perceptually real objects and distances. The point being made (through the above example) is that multiple defnitions of space occur, and are able to co-exist naturally,13 within a single feld of study.14 Here, the supposition is that it is the tensions that exist between spatial theories that act to foster a richness of expression, enabling alternative practical and theoretical possibilities within mediums such as 3D CGI. Put in another way, it is exactly these tensions, formed as a result of the differences between the opposing spatial models, that facilitate in forming a unifed, complete and expanded knowledge of a particular medium, which in the case of the discussion here is 3D CGI.

CGI and Subjective/Objective Space A further spatial model within 3D CGI animation supposes a mode of image-making that is both representationally objective15 (rooted in rational spatial relationships and built upon Cartesian and Euclidean traditions of understanding and representation) and at the same time pictorially subjective (the image received through perceptual mechanisms to form imagined and visual space relationships), thus presenting a potential for a dialectic to exist between the two states. Such tensions exist in Ryoichi Kurokawa’s unfold (2016) (Fig. 1), where a distinct fusion between subjective (in terms of the viewer’s interpretation both pictorially and physically within the presentation space) and objective interpretations of space within the image create holistic visual experiences. Kurokawa, in the construction of the image and in the mode of presentation, manipulates the spatial arena to contain all elements of perceptual and sensory understanding (the animation work, the stage of performance, the audio presentation), where objective and subjective spaces are combined with the ambition to generate new visual experiences and ‘new feelings’. EMPTINESS IS NOT ‘NOTHING’: SPACE AND EXPERIMENTAL … 129

Fig. 1 Ryoichi Kurokawa, unfold (2016)

The philosophical notion of Japanese ‘ma’ (the space between things) further reinforces Kurokawa’s approach to the spatial elements within his work. This concept dynamically informs the design of the animations and the environment within which the work is to be experienced: the distance between visual objects within the exhibition space as well as relationships between the work and the viewer/participant. In this regard, Kurokawa’s animation work, which is rarely presented as a fat single-screen display, often includes or is incorporated into physical objects as a part of a performance. For example, with reference to Oscillating Continuum (2013), Kurokawa refers to the work as a ‘sculpture’, describing it as being as much about the stage for the animation within the presentational space as it is about the animation itself. Unfold similarly works with physical display in mind. Here, the stage, designed specifcally for the gallery setting as an animation installation, is conceived with a dual agenda. Firstly, the animation refers to the theme of space where the viewer is transported visually through the cosmos; 130 A. JUKES secondly, the work is concerned with its own production, a self-refexive comment on the process of the flm’s making where, through strategically emphasising the construction of the animation (i.e. the introduction of wireframe models within the flm, the sudden and apparent physicality of the soundtrack and fashing reminders that we are within a multiscreen exhibition setting), the audio, the image, the gallery and the audience conspire to form a narrative about practice. The work, presented across three vertically positioned screens, is a pixel star-scape, a constructed night sky illuminated within the blackness of the gallery, where it is introduced as a swirling mass of bright points of light. The distance between the points is unknown, indiscriminate, unmeasurable. As the flm unfolds, the subjective distance and imagined sense of depth within a digital cosmos is suddenly collapsed, fattened by a fashing montage of bright red abstract images, which is quickly followed by a waterfall structure where fractals appear to fow from a visible plane. We at the same time are underneath, within and outside the distorted abstracted mass. Unfold represents a complex animated environment where the viewer is taken on a voyage, in which visual spaces shift from being either vast, universal and star-flled to one that is potentially microscopic, detailed and internally observing. Throughout Kurokawa’s unfold, the journey and the landscapes are primarily pictorially subjective, unspecifed, where instead of discernible spatial cues to determine distances, the viewer is invited to intuitively construct visual distances and spatial relationships. Yet within the flm, a perceptual contrast exists where the subjective interplay of dramatic abstract colour, line, form and tactile audio is offset against objective substructures (and) images, and virtual objects appear from nowhere as perspective cages, as graphical planes or wireframe cubes: markers from which we might try to make objective sense of the swirling fractal landscapes. Both Cornish and Kurokawa construct subjective–objective dialogues that operate within and are dependent upon specifc presentational environments. Their work is also a dialogue about 3D CGI and its ability to operate beyond, or playfully distort, the restrictions of Cartesian perspective space. My own work concerns a similar dialogue, in this instance connecting subjective/objective representations of space within a 3D CGI animation environment. The ambition of my animation is to establish methods that foreground the idea of space as material within 3D CGI, in ways that are EMPTINESS IS NOT ‘NOTHING’: SPACE AND EXPERIMENTAL … 131 not reliant on a restricting Cartesian representation of space. To support this ambition, the work borrows from and is infuenced by concepts of space as introduced in Heidegger’s Art and Space (1969), in which he talks of space in relation to sculptural bodies and the notion of borders and edges. The character of 3D CGI for me is fundamentally sculptural (with the processes of manipulating and forming of objects within a spatial environment being essentially linked to sculptural practice), and I have found Heidegger’s articulation of space within a sculptural context helpful in developing my own ideas. In the 1969 text, Heidegger deliberates on the being of space where he suggests its character and refects on its relationship with the sculptural object. ‘Sculptured structures’, he declares, are bodies, defned and formed ‘[…] by demarcation as setting up an inclosing and excluding border’ (Heidegger 1969) where the limit or the notion of the edge is exposed. Here, the limit of a sculptural structure (regarded in this instance as a body16) promotes a separation of body from its surroundings by imposing a barrier.17 Located at the centre of this concept is the notion of bodies; bodies as entities with defning limits, bodies in relation to the space beyond their limits, bodies and the very space within which they exist.

Defining Borders for Gathering Place, and Emptiness and the Void On the subject of sculpture, Heidegger talks of an enclosing and excluding border. In relation to a sculptural 3D CGI space, a question thus arises: what are we excluding and what is it that we are enclosing? Limits and demarcation imply tangibility of form; edges and borders suggest bodies; furthermore, the notion of boundaries leads to ideas of physicality, a material authentication of being and division. Unfolding this thought, it might be argued that for an edge to exist or a border to occur, ‘something’ is required from which a border or edge must mate- rialise. Heidegger proposes that to perceive space, we must frst exclude form, and to receive form, form must occupy (empty) space, a boundless space, space without distraction18: For it appears that behind space, there is nothing more to which it could be traced back. In front of it, there is no evasion to something else. What is proper to space must show itself from space itself’ (Figal 2009, 306). 132 A. JUKES

Heidegger’s depiction of space within this period, it might be argued, pertains to and emerges from the concept of boundaries. It is the role of the boundary in relation to spatial understanding, and the possibilities of boundaries to act as points of interchange or exchange between two (perceptually) different spaces, that forms the basis for the remainder of this discussion about 3D digital space. My investigation into the notion of the boundary in relation to 3D CGI animation arises from two main sources: an investigation into Heidegger’s conception of borders and boundaries in relation to bodies, and an enquiry into the physicality of the edge or border through sculptural entities, as evident in the work of Basque artists Eduardo Chillida and Jorge Oteiza, where space material- ises through framing and creation of a visual void.

The Opposition of the Edge: Enclosing and Excluding Boundaries An exploration of idea of borders leads to the notion of the ‘edge’, which in relation to bodies is an agent that promotes an interplay between one spatial reality and another, an edge as a border (or poten- tial19 border) and the position of that border within a visual space. An edge with the ability to trigger a dichotomy—dimensional opposites where on the one hand we might discuss ideas and possibilities beyond the edge as a condition for creation (a process of exclusion, a void enabling ‘things’ to emerge) and on the other hand examine both noetic and physical boundaries that can operate to disrupt empty (visual) spaces, edges employed as a means to divide frame space: contradictory yet interlocked, a point of spatial exchange. For Heidegger, theses spaces can be described in terms of delimitation and the setting up of enclosing and excluding limits, a space20 that subsists through establishing delimitation and the forming of resistant barriers. Here, delimitation and exclusion are not a means to govern space by division in order to generate a position of stability; instead, the conceptualisation of the limit is of a resistant barrier separating spaces, a border- line between present body (Mitchell 2010, 66) and empty space, the here from the there, the earth from the sky. For Heidegger, then, the function of the limit is extended to operate beyond its role as a divisional boundary, acting instead as the location for separation and change. In this way, the limit is not only a position that initiates stability but also EMPTINESS IS NOT ‘NOTHING’: SPACE AND EXPERIMENTAL … 133 stimulates a position of instability. It is the point where one spatial entity meets and opposes another, a division that engenders depth and distance where near meets far, a border between spaces and a point of exchange and transformation. In short, Heidegger’s limit is a limit that serves to promote interchange and transition. The limit is the edge between things, a marker for the embodiment of alternating spatial difference. Alternating spatial differences discernible through either variable and esoteric boundaries that exist as indistinct thresholds or as contours with more defnition—i.e. edges as ether fuid and in fux or as defnitive and fxed.

Dissolution of Boundaries and the Expansion of Spatial Borders To illustrate the point further, Heidegger notes that a boundary is not the end of a thing but the beginning of a thing (Mitchell 2010, 23). Here, the idea of the edge, or the limitation of form, acts as a device to question both the intent and the position of that edge, the border and its consequence—spatial being. Pictorially, these ideas, expressed signifcantly in the paintings of Paul Cézanne21 and dramatically through the work of Joseph Mallord William Turner22 can be applied to dissolve ‘edges’ within these pictorial worlds, where expressions of light and time evoke an integrated edge that unifes the visual space. Here, clouds become structural, ephemeral mechanisms for compositional defnition, or provide access to an animated pictorial depth. In more recent examples—for instance, Anne Veronica Janssens’ Clouds: About yellowbluepink (2015–2016)—the cloud analogy23 is expanded further. Here, the dissolution of the edge, the separation of physical, non-physical entities and the effects of unresolved borders, achieved through the study of clouds, provide a basis for a complete series of works. Linking this theme, an in-depth discussion by Mieke Bal24 on Janssens’ work states that ‘pictorial space’ remains undetermined without the introduction of clouds (Bal 2013). Reinforcing this thought, Van Alphen’s text Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought (2005) conveys that the representational value of clouds (pictorially) embodies a cultural and spatial signifcance which is accentuated through a compositional manipulation (or the total removal) of clouds 134 A. JUKES in a pictorial sky. Perhaps taking the subject of clouds to its conclusion, the author further suggests that it is the nature of clouds ‘without clear contours, without surface, and without concrete substance’ that evokes a unique relationship between viewer and the edge or border of an artwork (Van Alphen 2005, 6).25 In the relationship between space and 3D CGI, I propose that it is these ideas concerning borders, limits and edges that can function in two primary (contrasting yet complementary) ways to support visual (pictorial) spatial understanding, that move away from a reliance on perspectival space: (1) that the practice of defning and limiting perceptual space through the employment of visual edges can act as a mechanism to conceptually ‘gather space’, for which I propose the defnition for edges in this state as ‘passive’ boundaries (i.e. hard and defned edges); and (2) that via (a potential) edge ambiguity or vagueness of boundaries, it is possible to generate ‘spatial ambivalence’, for which I propose the term ‘active’ boundaries (i.e. blurred, unresolved edges). Ultimately, I posit that it is the nature of the edge to act as a point of exchange, either through ‘passive’ (forming a visual demarcation from which to separate internal/external or positive/negative spaces) or ‘active’ engagement (where an indistinct boundary encourages a subjective evaluation of presented space), that assists our visual understanding of a given pictorial space. Thus, a dialogue is formed between the idea of the ‘edge’ and its associated space, a dialogue which in turn acts to direct our appreciation of a pictorial space, informed by the nature and consistency/inconsistency of the edge or edges within the scene. My own work introduces these concepts to illustrate how such ideas might be applied to modelling and animation within 3D CGI to describe, employ and interact with this form of digital space in ways that deviate from dominant Cartesian, perspective-driven illusionistic approaches. As an example, Thelwall-1 (2016) (Fig. 2) examines ideas of space through the generation of an active edge, dissolved boundaries where the aim is to portray the notion of an instable edge within pictorial space; the subjective edge as a mechanism to access space, recognisable for its impermanent qualities, a subjective variation of implied scale and ambiguous borders. As such, Thelwall-1 invites a gradual shift in the perception of pictorial space. The animation starts from a position where a determinable division between foreground and background is offered to the viewer: for example, visually the distance within the foreground is EMPTINESS IS NOT ‘NOTHING’: SPACE AND EXPERIMENTAL … 135

Fig. 2 Alex Jukes, Thelwall-1 (2016): The flm introduces ideas relating to the diffuse edge and indistinct boundaries—The stills here show a transition within the flm from defned detail with clear spatial cues to an image with dissolved spatial references accessible via the depicted architectural elements of the viaduct (which provide spatial cues to suggest measurable distances—i.e. regularly spaced railings, bridge panels and other ironwork detail), and the background, which is introduced as an unspecifed cloudscape. As the animation progresses, the distinction between foreground becomes less acute, spatial cues are removed and the dissolution of form provides an opportunity for individual interpretation of the pictorial spaces within the flm. Finally, the animation presents a diffused visual horizon where supposed sky drifts into and merges with an unfxed landscape.26

Thelwall-2 A second animation based on the Thelwall viaduct, Thelwall-2 examines ideas of contained space (via notions of borders and limitation—a passive, i.e. defned edge). In Thelwall-2 (2016), the emphasis is on generating images based on Heidegger’s notion of gathering place (and the concept of virtual voids). Intended here is an interplay between (a supposed) mass and a void, a relationship envisioned to illustrate 136 A. JUKES an expanded space, based on experience and a perceptual knowledge extracted from the real-world environment of the Thelwall viaduct in Cheshire. The animation is a representation of the spaces that the bridge both generates and occupies. In Thelwall-2 (Fig. 3), the 3D CGI construction is based on the architectural structure of the Thelwall bridge where it forms a defning (passive) edge that frames a supposed sky-space beyond. The animation, which references Heidegger’s thoughts on space, also draws from the work of Chillida and Oteiza whose sculptures from the 1950s to 1980s focus on the division between void, space and place, as well as the role of the border: the possibilities of the border to engage the viewer with (and manipulate our perception of) space and the qualities of space as potential material for practical application. For both Chillida and Oteiza (contemporary to and, in the case of Chillida, in communication with Heidegger), the main body of their sculptural work deals with the material of the void and the distinctiveness of the empty volume. Their work shapes an investigation concerning the limit of physical bodies, where space and the void are introduced and reimagined as expressive components within a sculptural language. Thelwall-2 builds on these concepts within a virtual environment, refecting Chillida’s ambitions who notes a distinction between volumes and voids.

Fig. 3 Alex Jukes, Thelwall-2 (2016) EMPTINESS IS NOT ‘NOTHING’: SPACE AND EXPERIMENTAL … 137

To defne these interior spaces it is necessary to contain them, thus making them inaccessible to the spectator who is situated on the outside. Interior spaces, which have always been problematic for and interesting to architects, tend to be three-dimensional spaces defned by two-dimensional surfaces. I aspire to defne the three-dimensional (hole) through the three-dimensional (plane) simultaneously establishing a type of correlation and dialogue between them. (Chillida 2009, 69)

In this way, Thelwall-2 is concerned with the contrast between negative and positive spaces and the dynamic power that negative space affords in terms of bringing forth space as an entity. The perception of a virtual void within and framed by a 3D CGI animated form, where a constructed virtual mass encages an imagined void. The work here is about such ideas, the digital representation of spatial structures and the generation of digital voids, which is in turn reliant on defned edges. The discussion within the work is on space, not a perspective-oriented space but one where the viewer is invited to confgure a pictorial spatial arrangement without access to usual distance cues such as a land-based horizon.

Thelwall Animations as Fragmented Fundamentally, both Thelwall-1 and Thelwall-2 illustrate ideas around relationships between distinct and indistinct borders. Additionally, the flms acknowledge the idea that movement is not necessarily best described or inscribed by the narrative or the photorealistic illusion of a succession of images, but can be better represented instead by the frag- mentation of an image, recomposed from pictorial visual space to be rec- reated in the mind. In other words, the actual experience of visiting the Thelwall viaduct in its real-world space imparts a sense of being dwarfed by the signifcance of the structure, consumed by the noise that both engulfs and flls the sculptural spaces beneath the tarmacked surface. An impression that when reimagined cannot be suitably expressed via purely photo-representational means—that is, constructing an accurate 3D CGI scale model of the viaduct within a visual perspective system, architec- turally correct and lit accordingly to represent a real-world environment, is in itself insuffcient to capture and express the experience of being there.27 In this respect, both animations use the concept of the limit as the generator for openness, the representation of space as ‘whole while 138 A. JUKES uncompleted’ (Mitchell 2010, 51), a reference from and at the same time an interpretation of the idea of a visual wholeness as articulated by Merleau-Ponty, where ‘fctive linkages between parts’ (Edie 1964, 185) are imposed to form the whole, in which ‘The picture makes movement visible by its internal discordance’ (Edie 1964, 185).28 Put in another way, the intellectual construction of the viaduct as a ‘place’ can be better or more convincingly understood as series of collected fragments taken from different perspectives and angles, providing the viewer with opportunities to build a perceived encounter that relies on audio, duration and subjective movement, as well as an expressed knowledge of the external world. In Thelwall-1 and Thelwall-2, the image of the viaduct is visually incomplete, its ultimate form unknowable to the viewer via the computer-generated images given. In this respect, the animations themselves only provide partial clues to the mass or structure of the bridge and the spaces that it engenders within the real world: in Thelwall-2, dark- ened fragments of the supporting structure of the viaduct are offered as devices to gather virtual space; in Thelwall-1, the manufactured details and carpentered environment29 of the uniformly separated posts provide clues to a limited localised foreground space. A disjointed view of place and space that aims to offer an incomplete yet complete animated representation of a physical experience, a visual impression which the viewer can build upon and ultimately make their own.

Summary The aim of this chapter has been to present ways in which to view, to engage with and further explore the digital, virtual spaces available when working with 3D CGI. By doing so, I offer a route for a sculptural and philosophical space, a practical mechanism to be considered and applied alongside (and equal to) the normative, pre-packaged perspective, objective (Cartesian) space delivered within in most 3D CGI software packages. The suggestion here is for a practical application of a theoretical model based largely on Heidegger’s determination of space, a model that can be summarised as pertaining to the integration of subjective and objective space; dual mechanisms within the same frame. As a foundational base, the notion of subjective and objective space can be further broken down, with the concept of limitation, EMPTINESS IS NOT ‘NOTHING’: SPACE AND EXPERIMENTAL … 139 central to Heidegger’s theory, providing a container for three themed strands—Borders, Voids and Edges—which I present in the following model:

1. Borders—Borders within this model work to contain visual space, that the notion of place can be gathered, framed or exposed by imposing defnitive boundaries. 2. Voids—The abstract notion of the void from which forms, objects or things emerge. That it is the concept of the void and the implementation of voids within a work that (through access to subjective space) acts to derail perspectival space within a 3D CGI scene. 3. Edges—The function of edges is either through passive, defned states that act as borders to contain space, or active, undefned states that exist to perpetuate interactions between spaces, allowing perceived space to fow—to be in a state of fux.

The above model aims to provide an introduction to how these ideas and ideas about space might be considered within a 3D CGI environment. Undeniably, the practice of 3D CGI concerns space. Space is implied within 3D CGI’s title, its ‘self-evident’ quality. This chapter has argued that 3D CGI is not only concerned with space but that space can be regarded as the media-specifc quality for 3D CGI—a unique characteristic of 3D CGI practice. Moreover, I have suggested that the concept of space within 3D CGI might not be limited to Cartesian models of representation, that a richness and expanded vocabulary for 3D CGI lies beyond rigid interpretations of how space might be represented via perspectival routes, accessed by seeking alternative methods for working within this spatial digital process. As such, Heidegger’s theory of space in relation to sculpture has been introduced as an alternative route to thinking about space and 3D CGI: a combined subjective and objective development that considers new avenues and devices for dealing with space relations through edges, borders and voids. Ultimately, it is hoped that such a move opens up new vistas for 3D CGI practice and the work here attempts to reignite a fascination and curiosity about the nature of working with 3D CGI that echoes and is evident in the exploratory animation work of Bret, Sims, Stenger et al., from the 1990s, who collectively and passionately saw the expressive and creative potential of this unique animation process. 140 A. JUKES

Notes 1. Aylish Wood discusses the capacity of the computer to offer new creative vistas for artists working in the feld of 3-D CGI where their ‘[…] interest was fueled by other capabilities, for instance its ability to allow the artist to be the omnipotent creator of a new universe with its own physical laws’ (Dietrich 1986, cited in Wood 2015, p. 35). 2. Phong shading refers to an early interpolation algorithm developed at the University of Utah by Bui Tuong Phong in 1975 that when applied to the surface of a 3D computer generated model the effect simulates light refection, including specular ambient and diffuse variations. 3. See Barbara Klinger’s, Three-Dimensional Cinema: The New Normal (2013). 4. Manovich talks of a common computer-based vocabulary from which all digital techniques pertain to—see Image Future (2006). 5. As a concept this builds upon cinematic space and mise en scène but within a digital environment the idea of space as a three-dimensional construct more deeply permeates methods of practice. 6. Elsaesser’s phenomenological account of space is not dismissed here but is set to one side at this point as the discussion explores alternative ideas. 7. While code underlies the process of digital image-making, it is ubiquitous within digital media and does not allow opportunities for discussion relating to media specifcity concerning discrete software applications. 8. Manovich, in his essay The Mapping of Space: Perspective, Radar, and 3-D Computer Graphics (1993), discusses the importance and function of perspective in contemporary society and culture stating that the connection between automation and space is determined by the computer noting that this perpetuated ‘the use of vision to capture the identity of individual objects and spaces by recording distances and shapes’ (Manovich 1993, p. 1). Later, he suggests ‘nominalism’ as ‘a method for precisely representing three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface’ (Manovich 1993, p. 2). 9. Indicated via varying screen sizes, presentation methods and manipulation techniques. For example ‘The fact that TOY STORY provides a puppet with a point of view, with feelings and effects, testifes to the new malleability of the cinematic image…’ (Elsaesser 2015, 200–201). 10. Elsaesser talks of a breaking down of the window and frame analogy within digital cinema, instead positing ‘…delimiting a physically plausible space’ (Elsaesser 2015, 200) as a result of digital technologies and presentation methods (such as the internet). As a direct relative of digital, 3D CGI travels and has evolved, along this path. EMPTINESS IS NOT ‘NOTHING’: SPACE AND EXPERIMENTAL … 141

11. Aylish Wood, see the section ‘The Difference Digital Makes,’ in Chapter “Lines and Interruption in Experimental Film and Video”, 85–96 (Wood 2015). 12. Heidegger suggests subjective/objective dichotomy in his essay On the Origin of the Work of Art (1935–1936) where he deals with various spatial appreciations and dilemmas. 13. Bergson provides a useful side note to this dialogue concerning knowledge and understanding in relation to our experience of space: a recognition of a physical, scientifc space against a ‘virtual’ imagined or memorised space (Bergson 2004, 11–18). 14. Whereby one theory appears to contradict or oppose another. For example, the difference, as mooted by Bergson between haptic space and visual space. 15. Here objective space is space that is determined by the mathematical and literal interpretation. It is reliant on and described by distance and measurement. 16. See Mitchell and Raffoul. 17. The overarching proposition here is that edges can be understood as barriers to contain space as well as points of interchange or exchange where there is an ability to present both impermeable or permeable characteristics. 18. Such ideas explored by by Heidegger in his treatises on art The Origin of the Work of Art (1935–1937) and Art and Space (1969) relating to edges, limitation and voids echo thoughts introduced earlier by Friedrich Schiller in the 1790s. In 1935, Heidegger held a tutorial lecture series based on Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) where subjective and objective relations were critiqued against an understanding of aesthetics in terms of artistic practice and artistic reception. See Heidegger and the Work of Art History, ed. Dr Aron Vinegar and Dr Amanda Boetzkes (Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014). Heidegger’s remarks on Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man from the published typescript of the former’s 1936/1937 seminar in Freiburg. 19. Potential borders in this sense refers to the fact that not all borders and boundaries are clear, explicit or defned depending on scale and material substance. 20. Space here is in relation to sculptural dialogues. 21. This is particularly evident in Cézanne’s landscapes at the turn of the twentieth century such as Le Lac d’Annecy (1896). 22. Landscape/seascape paintings circa 1830–1840 depict a dissolution of the edge and an interest in space via an investigation of light for example, Turner’s, A Sailing Boat off Deal (1835). 142 A. JUKES

23. Filmmakers who question the legitimacy of these semiotic constraints or play on our expectation and intimacy with the idea of clouds within a scene provide an interesting adjunct to mainstream visual complacency. For example clouds for Gidal (Clouds, 16mm flm, B&W, silent, 10’, 1969) are the means to question the viewer’s experience of what they are seeing, to impose subjectivity within screen space and to interrogate flm’s physical material. 24. Mieke Bal introduces Janssens in relation to the spatial boundaries within her work and the determining or indeterminate borders. 25. Claiming that clouds provide a reference to a potential horizon, that without clouds orientation to a horizon is lost and scale becomes indeterminate. 26. With respect to the horizon this chapter references similar ideas to Heelan, where ‘Perception always takes place in relation to a horizon that has two components, an outer and an inner horizon. In any individual act of perception, the perceived object has an outer horizon, or boundary, or contour, which separates it from the background against which it appears. Each profle then has naturally a foreground-background structure. The background too belongs to the World, but negatively: it is that which is not part of the structure’ (Heelan 1988, p. 134). 27. In some ways this approach can be seen to echo representations of space and experience as encapsulated by artists such as Rachel Whiteread, Joseph Beuys and to some extent John Gerrard. 28. Merleau-Ponty’s illustration of Rodin and the movement implied and received by the viewer of a piece of sculpture. 29. See Patrick Heelan Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science (1988): […] ‘Such artifacts, I believe, are the simple engineered forms of fxed markers, such as buildings, equally spaced lamp posts, and roads of constant width, as well as mobile markers, such as automobiles, trains—and though not the product of engineering but also of relatively stable size, the human fgure. A name has been coined for this—“the carpentered environment”’ (Heelan 1988, 251).

References Bal, Mieke. 2013. Endless Andness. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Bergson, Henri. 2004. Matter and Memory. London: Dover Press. Burnham, Jack. 1987. Beyond Modern Sculpture. New York: George Braziller. Chillida, Eduardo. 2009. Eduardo Chillida Writings. Dusseldorf: Richter Verlag. Edie, James. 1964. The Primacy of Perception. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. EMPTINESS IS NOT ‘NOTHING’: SPACE AND EXPERIMENTAL … 143

Elsaesser, Thomas. 2015. Film Theory an Introduction Through the Senses. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Figal, Günter, ed. 2009. The Heidegger Reader, trans. J. Veith. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Galloway, Alexander. 2012. The Interface Effect. Cambridge: Polity Press. Heelan, Patrick. 1988. Space, Perception and the Philosophy of Science. Berkeley: University of California Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1936. The Origin of the Work of Art. Martin Heidegger: The Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell (2008). New York: HarperCollins. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Boston: MIT Press. Manovich, Lev. 2013. Software Takes Command. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Mitchell, Andrew. 2010. Heidegger Among the Sculptors: Body, Space, Art and Dwelling. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Popper, Frank. 1993. Art of the Electronic Age. London: Thames and Hudson. Van Alphen, Ernst. 2005. Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Wood, Aylish. 2015. Software, Animation and the Moving Image: What’s in the Box? London: Palgrave.

Journals Dietrich, Frank. 1986. Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art (1965–1975). Leonardo 19 (2):159. Klinger, Barbara. 2013. Three-Dimensional Cinema: The New Normal. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 19 (4): 423–431. Power, Pat. 2009. Animated Expressions: Expressive Style in 3D Computer Graphic Narrative Animation. Animation Interdisciplinary Journal 4: 108–128. Raffoul, F. 2012. Event Space Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 2: 89–106.

Internet Resources Govan. 2011. https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/james-turell. Manovich, Lev. 1993. The Mapping of Space: Perspective, Radar, and 3-D Computer Graphics. http://manovich.net/content/old/03-articles/01-article-1993/01-article-1993.pdf. Manovich, Lev. 1996. Global Algorithm 1.3: The Aesthetics of Virtual Worlds: A Report from Los Angeles, CP Theory.net. https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ ctheory/article/view/14313/5089. 144 A. JUKES

Manovich, Lev. 2006. Image Future. http://manovich.net/index.php/project/ image-future. Manovich, Lev. 2007. Understanding Hybrid Media. http://manovich.net/ content/04-projects/055-understanding-hybrid-media/52_article_2007. Inanimation: The Film Loop Performances of Bruce McClure

Nicky Hamlyn

The imagery in a number of animated multi-projector 16 mm flm- performance works has often consisted of repeating—looped—abstract graphic shapes or ficker patterns that generate quasi-kinetic movement. Prominent in this feld is the Brooklyn-based American flmmaker Bruce McClure, who has been making 16 mm ‘Projector Performances’ that use sound-generating ficker loops as part of an apparatus featuring modifed 16 mm projectors, resulting in work that is very different from its forebears. The flms are composed of simple patterns of black and white, produced by the bleaching of selected frames on strips of black 16 mm spacing, according to a numerical system. As such, they might seem to follow in the footsteps of Peter Kubelka and Tony Conrad, whose respective flms Arnulf Rainer (1960) and The Flicker (1966) are paradigms of the genre. However, whereas the foregoing are, in respect to their means of presentation, wholly conventional, McClure

N. Hamlyn (*) University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury, UK e-mail: [email protected] N. Hamlyn School of Communication, Royal College of Art, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 145 V. Smith and N. Hamlyn (eds.), Experimental and Expanded Animation, Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73873-4_8 146 N. HAMLYN works with flm technologies that are modifed to such an extent that his works are arguably not flms in any of the usual senses. His performances are important for the way in which they probe the necessary and suffcient conditions for something to actually be a flm, through a disruptive questioning of what flm movement is, via image-generated sound relations, which, though mutually dependent in a technical sense, are affectively disjunctive. Actually, McClure rarely works with ‘moving images’ in the usual sense, but his frames do pulsate: there is a kinetic experience to be had. Also considered here as important precur- sors are Guy Sherwin’s optical sound flms, especially Cycles #3 (1972– 2003), in which something inanimate is animated in such a way that the means by which the animation occurs is a feature of the work, at once transparent—didactic almost—yet at the same time continually surprising and mysterious in the experience. The portmanteau word ‘Inanimation’1 is intended to identify a form of quasi-movement, something between conventionally illusionistic animation (@24 or 25fps), and the clearly static sequences of discrete images that form an animatic sequence at eight or fewer images per second. The resurgence of expanded work, involving live elements including performance, has broad parallels with the emergence of the Expanded Cinema of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op in the 1970s. A variety of factors have contributed to this development. The broader context includes resistance to the demise of flm, though at the time of writing, this demise is moving in reverse, at least in some respects. While Tacita Dean notably mounted a high-profle campaign to try to keep 16 mm colour printing available in the UK, there has been a worldwide growth in artist-run flm labs devoted to processing and printing, an activity that was never very proftable for the commercial labs, as the same amount of work was required to produce something which could not be sold for anything like the price of its 35 mm equivalent, whereas the latter continues to be proftable.2 The availability of relatively cheap 16 mm projectors has facilitated the proliferation of multi-projector works, something that was less common in 1970s Expanded Cinema, when projectors were more in current commercial and educational use and hence a lot more expensive to buy.3 While much of the original Expanded Cinema was concerned with materialist interrogations of the nature of temporal and spatial structures, and with exposing the ideological underpinnings of the technology, including the screen surface, a lot of recent work has been more INANIMATION: THE FILM LOOP PERFORMANCES OF BRUCE McCLURE 147 synthetic and audio-visual (to the extent of even resembling son et lumière presentations, though on a much smaller scale), produced by groups like Metamkine, as often as individuals, typically using found footage that acquires a surreal character when appropriated: old industrial, scientifc and, especially, educational flms, projected through colour flters and accompanied by live music. The use of this kind of content arises from there being vast stocks of such flms available cheaply, but equally the use of loops means that works can be made with very small quantities of flm stock, which can be processed and printed easily at home, using a proprietary tank and a camera as a printer, in the manner of early cinema production processes. However, whereas the foregoing uses found footage more or less as content, deployed in the service of image-centred manipulations, McClure extends the original analytical project typifed by the work made at the LFMC—specifcally, in reconfguring the relationships between the various parts of the flm technology, principally the celluloid strip and the projection device—to develop a critical practice that pushes the technical parameters of the medium to the point where the question arises of whether what we are experiencing is still a flm. McClure’s works are tightly structured and are strictly frame-based. Image content, when very occasionally there is any, is de-emphasised, dominated by structure and pattern, in which simple, camera-less flmstrips are used. Repetition is crucial in delimiting the scope of what will be seen, but with the simultaneous expectation that the combination of these limited elements will generate something surprising and unexpected: the visible components are explicitly restricted to very simple forms—often not much more than deformed rectangles of light. However, these are modifed during the running of the work, while the sound, though also simple in its basic constituents, is enhanced by the use of guitar effects pedals, and flls the space, bouncing in and around the ears at high volume. Since 1971, Guy Sherwin has been producing flms in which the image generates the optical soundtrack. This continues today in various recent works such as the Vowels and Consonants (2005–) series of performances, created with Lyn Loo. Sherwin’s Cycles (1972) was made by punching holes into grey leader and sticking paper dots onto it to make a rhythmic sequence in which the one-second intervals between each circular ‘image’ gradually decrease until the holes and dots occupy all the frames of the flm. The optical soundtrack is produced at the same time using segments of paper dots, which were stuck to the soundtrack area 148 N. HAMLYN of the flm. This sequence is then repeated in reverse to make a complete cycle lasting approximately two minutes. In 1977, a secondary rhythmic layer was added to the original flm by printing two of these cycles through a varying aperture so that the static grey ‘background’ is transformed into waves of light and dark. All this work was undertaken by Sherwin himself, using the Debrie contact printer at the London Filmmakers’ Co-op. Cycles #3 (Fig. 1) was made in 2003 by taking two identical prints of Cycles and using two projectors to project them out of phase by about one minute, so that one flm is decelerating while the other is acceler- ating. The projected images are placed one inside the other, with the second projection slightly larger and with an amber cast from a piece of coloured acetate placed over the projector lens. (Adapted from Sherwin’s notes.) In performed versions, live interventions are made by shifting focus on the projectors, or by changing the relative volume and timbre of the two optical soundtracks. This further complicates the work, in which one experiences an unstable rhythmic form, which, though explicitly

Fig. 1 Guy Sherwin, Cycles #3 (1972–2003) (Photo Guy Sherwin) INANIMATION: THE FILM LOOP PERFORMANCES OF BRUCE McCLURE 149 generated by a repeating circular shape, pulsates and seems to expand and contract. Although, as in the aforementioned ficker flms, there are strong contrasts between adjacent frames, the experience is very different, since the rhythms generated by the superimpositions of two projections moving in and out of phase create a pulsating continuity: the kinetic effect is more constant, also because the differences between frames is not maximal, as it is in the classic ficker flms. What one sees appears as something somewhere between ficker and illusory movement. The work waxes and wanes between the two and the degrees of apparent continuity vary depending on the shifting interplay between the two layers. Thus, Cycles #3 generates a more unpredictable experience for the viewer, partly because the work is not fxed but is different every time it is shown, depending on how the two layers interact. This in turn is dependent partly on the time gap between the frst and second flm starting, and partly on the fact that no two projectors run at exactly the same speed, in strong contrast to the fxed structure of the ficker flm. The balance between image and sound, however, is roughly equal regardless, insofar as both are given equal weight, in contrast to much of McClure’s work, where recently sound has come to dominate almost totally, as discussed below.4 Another (non-looping) precursor is Lis Rhodes’ iconic black-and- white, two-projector flm Light Music, created in 1975 and since canonised by its inclusion in a show in The Tanks at Tate Modern in 2012–2013. The imagery consists of arrays of moving horizontal bands of varying widths and thicknesses, which also generate the optical soundtrack. In Light Music, both images cannot really be viewed simultaneously because they are projected facing each other on opposite walls; however, the sound emanating from the two sources mixes in the space and the ear dramatically, generating notable phasing patterns, compounded by the highly refective raw concrete surfaces of the Tanks. There is a sense that what we see in these works by Sherwin and Rhodes is something bolder and more disruptive than in animation, or movies generally, because a movement-effect is generated from what is clearly not conventionally flmed footage, where, in the process of examining a length of celluloid by eye, it can be seen how movement will come to be generated from a series of near-identical frames. At least since Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer, it has been understood that alternating black-and-white frames do not generate illusionistic movement, even though the experience cannot but be described as somehow 150 N. HAMLYN kinetic because it seems to generate something like movement in the eye of the viewer. Insofar as they create a ficker effect, they return us to the early ‘Flicks’, in which, when projected with a single-bladed shutter at around 16fps, there is a pronounced ficker. In Kubelka’s flm, alternating frames of black and white are occasionally fashing at a rate of 12fps, and in Tony Conrad’s The Flicker for much longer periods. Bruce McClure has made over seventy works since 1995 in which the projector forms the irreducible core and motor of the experience, thereby distinguishing them fundamentally from their ficker forebears, which, for all their radicalism, accept a conventional ontology of flm as central to the experience:

When I came to the projector it was already becoming an ageing metaphor; a forlorn morphology receding on a horizon of cinematic impulses. Ignoring its déclassé status, I appreciate its limits, auditioning with it tire- lessly in mock executions.5

McClure’s approach to the technology referred to above was crucially inspired by John Cage’s short essay ‘The Future of Music: Credo’.6 In this manifesto-like critique of the conservative ends to which potentially revolutionary electronic instruments were being put, Cage vigorously criticises, for example: ‘Thereministes (who) did their utmost to make the instrument sound like some old instrument, giving it a sickeningly sweet vibrato, and performing upon it, with diffculty, masterpieces from the past.’7 McClure adapts Cage’s idea to his practice, which makes creative misuse of a technology whose function has almost always been self-effacingly instrumental, to which end, as far as practicable, it should be neither seen nor heard. He is not the only flmmaker to have placed the projector in the auditorium (auditorium—‘hearing place’—is peculiarly appropriate for his presentations, since sound often predominates), nor the only one to amplify its noises, but he has insisted on its primacy, both conceptually and materially, in a way few other flmmakers have. This is achieved in the way the flmstrip’s projection, which requires the presence of the projector, functions increasingly to refer and direct attention back to the latter, so that the flmstrip animates the projector, as it were, rather than the other way round. In some flmmakers’ work, such as Jürgen Reble’s flm-performance Alchemie (1991–), the projector’s motor noise is amplifed, whereas McClure, like Sherwin and Rhodes, only uses INANIMATION: THE FILM LOOP PERFORMANCES OF BRUCE McCLURE 151 the sounds generated by the flmstrip, so that there are precise structural- causal relationships between image and sound, which result, paradoxically, in a formally and experientially disjunctive relationship. This is used productively to focus on the two different technical and sensory modes, a focus which is discussed below in relation to specifc works. McClure maintains that a flmstrip is at least not primary, even if it may be necessary, to there being a ‘movie’, or at least some kind of projected time-based experience. The small number of historic examples where flm has been implicitly asserted as the primary component of a ‘flm’, in which celluloid strips are exhibited as a translucent object sandwiched between sheets of Perspex or otherwise—Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer, Paul Sharits’ various Frozen Film Frame works (1968–1976)— does not disprove this assertion, since these exhibits are arguably not flms, even though they are made of it. On the other hand, anything small enough to ft into a projector gate can be pulled through it to throw an image, or at least a something, as James Holcombe has demonstrated by using a projector to show hairs in the gate by literally placing them therein.8 Like Cycles #3 and Light Music, many of McClure’s projections are made for two projectors, whose images are frequently shown side by side, in contrast to Sherwin’s superimpositions or the more environ- mentally engaged disposition of Rhodes’ machines, which, in facing each other across the space, impel the audience to interact with the light beams. McClure’s flms, by contrast, are made for a more or less conventional cinema arrangement, but they are otherwise quite unconventional, and indeed, in one of his characteristically allusive and densely metaphor- ical programme texts, he describes the work very much in terms of its total environmental effect:

The performances consist of between two and four binary systems: 16 mm projectors, consisting of a primary lamp and exciter transponder interface threaded with flm loops. Burst frequency, amplitude and duration, whether optical or auditory, are the signal parameters that range freely within an auditorium of neuronal excitability modulation provoked by patterned flm strips. Projector headlights, the primary lamp and exciter bulb transfx the machine’s analogue, flm, as potential road kill … Variable transformers wired in the lamp circuits are enlisted in the struggle. They permit the projectionist to alter luminance and the wavelength spectrum, breaking flm’s stranglehold of fdelity and adding nuance to a subversion 152 N. HAMLYN

challenging flmic hegemony. Film’s reign as frst in time and frst in importance is overthrown by primitive impulses.9

The expression ‘Film’s reign as frst in time and frst in importance is overthrown by primitive impulses’ refers, of course, to the projector’s claiming primary position over the flmstrip, but also to its disruptive function, its light pulses that threaten to obliterate the image and its smooth passage from projector to screen. Here, one sees how the ‘misuse’ of projectors is extended to language. McClure applies the same disruptive principle to all aspects of his project: in his writing, the abrupt shifts between anthropomorphic, sporting and political metaphors to scientifc descriptions are both suggestive and dis- concerting, forcing the reader to reconsider the conventional sense that these categories must be mutually exclusive. The idea of flm as ‘road kill’ engages with notions of animation and reanimation: the quickening of the dead, but also its killing off, since in much of his work the flmstrip per se, and its image-bearing function, is minimised, although its sound-generating function is enormously enhanced and augmented. Besides the fact that each frame must ‘die’ in order to give way to its successor, McClure’s loops often contain several black frames, as in the two-projector work This Harmonic Condenser Enginium (2011), in which triple fashes are interspersed with pauses of a second or so of black. Also important to note is the consideration of the work as environmental. It is fashionable to talk about immersiveness, but few artists or flmmakers really address with any level of precision the relationship between technology, performer, environment, experience and effect in this way, in terms, almost, of molecular interactions. The immersiveness comes almost entirely from the very loud sound—the projection itself is often contrastingly small and dim. McClure makes black-and-white loops by bleaching selected frames in a sequence. The two, or sometimes three, projectors each carry one or two loops. Rheostats have been wired in so that the image brightness can be varied. The sound, generated directly from the image as an optical track, is fed through a set of guitar effects pedals (see Fig. 2). Over the years, sound has come to dominate. The rectangles of projected light have got progressively smaller, while the sound has increased in intensity, so much so that earplugs are sometimes distributed to the audience. The flmstrips are vestigial and disposable: insofar as they are made from lengths of black spacing, a resin-coated material INANIMATION: THE FILM LOOP PERFORMANCES OF BRUCE McCLURE 153

Fig. 2 Bruce McClure, Effects pedals and rheostats set-up (Photo Robin Martin) manufactured for the purposes of negative-cutting, they can be remade if they wear out. They are a small but necessary activator, rather than conventional image bearer, something whose presence has been minimised to the point where its quasi-redundancy can be recognised by the viewer. As McClure himself has said:

My standard replies to the flmy things are something like this: “I don’t make flms KODAK does.” “For me, my interest is the limit of flm as x approaches 0.” Some kind of corollary for this would be: ‘I have an asymptotic relation to flm – it’s a symptom.”10 154 N. HAMLYN

The asymptotic ambition—to approach (but not ever quite reach) the point at infnity where flm’s normal function approaches 0—arguably formulates the ambition to minimise the importance of the flmstrip while acknowledging that it must not be eliminated entirely. This point is taken up below. The patterned flmstrips serve to re-present flm as ficker, to bring back the effect of the shutter from the early years of cinema when it was a single-bladed device running at around 16fps. The alternation of black- and-white frames generates a 12fps effect, below critical ficker fusion threshold, though this partly also depends on other factors such as projector and environmental light levels. McClure is aware of the fact that the projected rectangles create a kind of limited Droste effect or mise en abyme, in that the frame’s rectangle projects what could be thought of as an ‘image’ of a rectangle, though it is not an image of anything in the normal sense, but simply a something where an image—a representation in the case of flm, typically—would normally appear, and this serves McClure’s purpose of asserting the primacy of projection per se as opposed to what is projected. Paul Sharits’ Ray Gun Virus (1966) consists of sequences of coloured frames, some of which appear as plain colour-felds, but some of which are flmed surfaces, in conformity with his view that in flm, the ‘phenomenology of the system includes “recording” as a physical fact’. In other words, Sharits’ flm, for all its surface abstraction, explicitly shows those abstract colour frames to be photographic images of coloured surfaces (Sharits 1972, 29). Even the white frames in Conrad’s The Flicker were made using a camera with the lens removed, so that they are indexical at least, because recordings of something, even if only a light source. McClure’s fashing rectangles of light, however, cannot be representational or even visibly indexical: the process by which they were made cannot be inferred from the trace of that process: the frames are created, but not recorded. McClure’s frames are presentational rather than representational. They simulate the opening and closing of the shutter, effectively slowing down the ficker rate until it is perceptible as such, and often beyond this point, to around two pulses or less per second. This effect roughly approximates that of literally slowing down a projector to 12fps, except that in a projector really running at that speed, the inter-frame moments, when the shutter is closed between frames appearing, would be more evident. INANIMATION: THE FILM LOOP PERFORMANCES OF BRUCE McCLURE 155

The bleaching of the flm is achieved by the manual process of attach- ing splicing tape to either side of the frame to be bleached. The almost impossible precision required to align the edge of the tape with the frame line results in variations in the degree of accuracy with which the black coating is removed. Errors, caused by the misalignment of the tape edges, result in erratic unbleached wedge-shaped slivers of black at the top and bottom of the frame. These generate dancing zigzag lines on projection, and this effect distinguishes the sequences from those of Kubelka or Conrad. To this extent, the flm in the projector is essential and irreducible for visual as well as sonic reasons. An empty projector would be less than what an unpainted canvas was for Clement Greenberg, who said that ‘a stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picture—though not necessarily as a successful one’ (Greenberg 1993, 131–132). The flmstrip for McClure is a necessary condition for the work. Were it absent, the projector would still be a flm projector but there would be no projected image/rectangle, and no soundtrack: noise, yes, but not a soundtrack in the flmic sense. The questions aris- ing from what flm projections are and can be, the relationship between the various parts in the technology, the questions around (re) presentation versus simulation etc., would be circumvented, resulting in a lack of conceptual friction and the reduction of the work to a purely technological demonstration or a presentation of moving graphics. Besides all this, the flmstrip is essential to generate the optical soundtrack, whose relationship with the image, or what there is of it, is also important in calling the sound–image relationship into question. Actually, it would be possible to project the loops with the lamp turned off, so that just the sound was generated, though this would over-reduce the presence of the flmstrip, rendering its image, if not the strip itself, invisible. It is important for the work that it shares with conventional flm certain features and mechanisms, upon which it is dependent for its critical distance therefrom. By emphasising the discrepancy between the flm’s projected light and the overwhelming sonic feld generated from it, McClure insists on the distinctiveness and haphazardly related main elements of flm, sound and image. This is not to say that his work engages at all explicitly with issues of cinematic realism, simply that, in its mobilisation of shared, mostly technological features, it stimulates some refection on what are the necessary and suffcient conditions for something to count as a flm or a ‘cinematic’ experience. 156 N. HAMLYN

The invention of sync-sound was the frst step on the path to an ever more detailed realistic image experience that expands towards immersive simulation, a megalomaniacal quest subsequently conducted via super wide-screen formats, surround-sound, IMAX and the kind of simulated ride and 360° projections available at theme parks. McClure takes us back to basics, at least as far as 1927 anyway, by effectively prising apart the sound image synthesis (and ironically, of course, the presence of flm projections in theme parks takes us even further back, to the typical context for flm screenings before dedicated cinemas were developed in the early 1900s). In contrast to Sherwin’s optical sound works, where the causal sound-image relationship is experienced as relatively integrated and mutual, McClure effectively disconnects the two, since it is impossible to see how the image can be seen to be generating the sound because of its out-of-focus, vestigial character. Inside the projector is another much smaller projector, the sound exciter lamp, which projects the image of the soundtrack onto a pho- to-electric cell, which converts the black-white alternations of light into a fuctuating voltage that goes via the amplifer and guitar effects pedals to the loudspeaker. There is a relationship between this function, a small thing generating a very big—loud—thing and the way the dim image refers back to the projector as generator of everything. All this together reinforces McClure’s conception of projection, and, a fortiori, the projector, as primary. The sound is typically an insistent, heavy, almost pon- derous metallic pulsing, which clangs and throbs with a surprisingly wide range of frequencies, including higher tones that one would not somehow expect, although the guitar effects pedals certainly play a key role in complicating and thickening the textures and qualities of the sounds. The pulses shift in and out of phase regularly, disrupting the basic rhythm to generate chaotic periods before shifting into sync with each other. This Harmonic Condenser Enginium is a two-projector work for bi-packed loops (two loops in each projector) as follows:

Projector 1 – Bi-packed. A common loop patterned with one base to three frames of emulsion. (c 200 frames) with a negative print with one emul- = sion removed (c 199 frames). At the cut there is an interval of 6 base = frames. Projector 2 – Bi-packed. A common loop patterned with one base to three frames of emulsion. (c 200 frames) with a negative print with = one base removed (c 199 frames). At the cut there is an interval of 2 base = frames. (McClure’s notes) INANIMATION: THE FILM LOOP PERFORMANCES OF BRUCE McCLURE 157

Because flm projectors run at slightly different speeds from each other, the interplay of the two adjacent projections also shifts in and out of sync, resulting in a continuous variation in patterns of juxtaposition, in a similar way to Sherwin’s Cycles #3. The degree to which the image is defocused also affects the perception of these patterns. When the frame edges are sharp, there is a stronger sense of geometric fickering ‘image’, but as they go out of focus a softer more general and dispersed strobe effect takes over, especially when the brightness is reduced. In many of McClure’s projections, focus is out in the conventional sense; indeed, there is no defnitive point of focus as there is where there’s an image to sharpen: in keeping with his prioritisation of projection per se, the degree of focus becomes unimportant in this respect, but not in others; this notwithstanding the zigzag lines whose effects are still apparent when the image is out of focus to some degree. Extreme defocusing further diminishes the sense that one is watching a projected flmstrip, because the rectangle loses its shape and the resulting uneven distribution of light compounds this, combined with the aforementioned dimness and smallness of the image. All possible aspects of the projected rectangle are reduced. It is only the presence of the projectors in the space that reminds us of what is generating the light-play on the screen, pushing the experience towards the asymptotic trajectory discussed above. This leads on to some other works where focus is more important. In some of these, brass plates are inserted into the projectors’ apertures to modify the standard opening. In Unnamed Complement (2007), each of three projectors has a different brass plate inserted into the gate: one vertical, which blocks the light from all but the vertical edges; one horizontal, similar to the vertical; and one ‘open’, which unblocks but modifes the existing rectangle (see Fig. 3). Focus can be pulled progressively through the gate, the metal plate and the flmstrip. In a flm projection, when the image is in focus, the framing edges are not, because the projector gate—the rectangular cut- out within which the individual pictures are briefy held while light is shone through them onto the screen for 1/50th of a second—is in a different plane to the celluloid strip relative to the lens. If the edges of the metal plate are brought into focus, then the image will be out, and one has more the sense of light shining through an aperture, as opposed to seeing a projected image-shape (McClure has stated that he is not interested in images projected onto surfaces: ‘it isn’t about images as images. 158 N. HAMLYN

Fig. 3 Filmstrips and projector gate inserts (Photo Bruce McClure)

I suppose I am more interested in what happens where the meeting is’11). The screens can be superimposed to generate composite forms that at the same time partially obliterate each other, specifcally when the open aperture is superimposed, since the light shines onto the dark areas masked by the other two plates, so that contrast is reduced, when bleached frames coincide. The open plate is the reverse—negative—of the other two, since it opens the space blocked by the other two and vice versa (see Fig. 4). In this way, the projector gate, which is essential to the projection of anything at all, is itself modifed in relation to its existing edges, so that conceptually and visually a kind of nothing becomes subject to modifcations that are formal, implying a something. Although the plates in the projector form an image on the screen, it is not, in conformity with the aforementioned work, a projected image, certainly not in the sense of a graphically marked—drawn/scratched—or photographically recorded translucent thing held on a transparent medium through which light is shone. The flm loops, similarly, do not so much project an image as allow the passage of light. (One could argue about whether an imageless INANIMATION: THE FILM LOOP PERFORMANCES OF BRUCE McCLURE 159

Fig. 4 Superimposed gate projection. Bruce McClure, Unnamed Complement (2007) (Photo Robin Martin) strip of clear celluloid bears an image, since, if nothing else, light is refracted as it passes through the celluloid, emulsion and binder layers, even if their effect is hard to measure without a ‘control’ for comparison. This fact is shared with all flm, regardless of how much of a photographic image there is.) In Unnamed Complement, focus can be pulled on each projector, creating conjunctions of in- and out-of-focus forms that change in size and shape according to the degree of lack of focus. Thus, it can be seen how a very complex experience is generated permutatively from a combina- tory method, though ‘permutation’ implies a more systematic working- through than is the case in performance. The process can be said to be additive, though addition can also lead to obliteration because of the simple fact that superimposed light projections eventually cancel one another out. 160 N. HAMLYN

Most of McClure’s works push at the limits of what a movie, or movie experience (cinema), can be, what are its necessary and suffcient conditions. Most of the essential parts required for the conventional production and presentation of a movie—camera, lenses, sound recorder, negative, development, print—have been subtracted until just the flmstrip and the projector remain, but it is the projector that is the sine qua non. Sound, the technological late-comer to flm, is prioritised. This distinguishes his work from the aforementioned Frozen Frame works but also from video projection, where the projector is self-effacing and in which the image is generated by the projector through the electri- cal stimulation of pixels, as opposed to being carried fully formed on a discrete medium. Although the flmstrip’s status is minimised, in an image-carrying sense, its importance is reaffrmed in other ways. In his essay Transparencies on Film, Adorno argues: ‘Even where flm dissolves and modifes its objects as much as it can, the disintegration is never complete. Consequently, it does not permit absolute construction: its elements, however abstract, always retain something representational; they are never purely aesthetic values (Adorno 1981–1982, 199–205). Adorno was talking about the cinema, in which the technology’s intrinsic, inescapable realism condemns it to record, thus denying the possibility of true artistic construction/intervention. (Adorno argued that montage could achieve this through flm’s aspiring to the condition of writing.) In McClure’s work, constructive intervention does take place, but as a form of reductive negation, not at all with the aim of developing the kind of fner-grained artistic discourse that could allow flm to overcome its slavish relationship to the recording process that denies it the status of art according to Adorno. Rather, the construction consists in a reconfguration of flm’s technological parts in order to stimulate a refection on the relationship between such art’s technology, medium and form. The work situates itself as far from cinema as it can without becoming something else entirely, and addresses the way that the pecu- liarities of the technology are essential in understanding that something is flm or not. Without this distant critical relationship to cinema, the work would simply exist as a kind of audio-visual experience unrelated to it, where it would risk becoming an empty display of graphic forms and noise, or another kind of son et lumière, a stripped-out version of the work mentioned earlier. It is tempting to criticise McClure’s oeuvre for being too ‘technology- driven’, too dependent for its aesthetic power and effects on the INANIMATION: THE FILM LOOP PERFORMANCES OF BRUCE McCLURE 161 technical capability of the apparatus. However, in modifying and aug- menting the conventional technology of cinema, and by drastically shifting the balance of resources—sound and its dispersal, image, rhythm, the technology—as—medium is effectively retailored, so that the distinction between medium and the technology supporting it, which underpins the very idea of ‘technical media’—media art—is partially eroded, leading to a necessary re-evaluation of what the two terms mean in relation to each other. The reconfguration that McClure under- takes can be seen as a way of adapting technology in the service of new aesthetic possibilities.

Notes 1. Thanks to Joséphine Michel for this expression. 2. Dean’s campaign to ‘save’ flm took her to UNESCO among other places. The trip was made into a story, which was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday, 17 April 2014. Bains Argentiques, an annual meeting of artist-run flm laboratories, was held in Nantes, 4–9 July 2016. On the commercial front, Kodak have revived flm production and in 2017 announced the reintroduction of Ektachrome Super 8 flm and a new high-end Super 8 camera. They have also taken over two existing labs in the UK—iDailies in Park Royal, London, and Cinelab in Slough, west of London. 3. Notable examples include Malcolm Le Grice’s six-projector flms After Matrix and After Leonardo (1973), both of which are performance pieces, but these are exceptional. Most expanded works used between one and three projectors, such as William Raban’s Diagonal (1973) and several of Gill Eatherley’s flms. Although Eatherley’s work, as well as that of Annabel Nicolson and Marilyn Halford, often involved performance, these examples were all of a fnite duration and much more structured than most of their contemporary counterparts. 4. Cycles and numerous other such works are gathered on the DVD Guy Sherwin Optical Sound Films 1971–2007, published by LUX in 2008. 5. Bruce McClure, ‘Know Thy Instrument,’ Atelier Impopulaire, p. 14. 6. John Cage, ‘The Future of Music: Credo,’ in Silence (Wesleyan University Press, 1958), pp. 3–7. 7. Ibid., p. 3. 8. James Holcombe’s Hair in the Gate, was frst performed in October 2013 at the Living Film screening at No.w.here, London. Holcombe animates the hair live, hence another form of animation that also links back to the pre-history of cinema. 162 N. HAMLYN

9. Bruce McClure, Sinossi Completa, unpublished text, 2011. 10. Email to the author, 5 June 2011. 11. Email to the author, 18 April 2017.

References Adorno, T. W. Autumn 1981–Winter 1982. Transparencies on Film. New German Critique 24/25: 199–205, Durham NC: Duke University Press. Greenberg, Clement. 1993. After Abstract Expressionism. In Collected Essays, vol. 4, ed. John O’Brian, 131–132. Chicago: University of Chicago. Sharits, Paul. 1972. Words per Page. After Image 4: 29. Re-splitting, De-synchronizing, Re-animating: (E)motion, Neo-spectacle and Innocence in the Film Works of John Stezaker

Paul Wells

The following discussion seeks to use four short moving-image pieces by artist John Stezaker to address a number of key issues that arise from the complex and increasingly unstable relationship between photography, traditional approaches to flm-making, image-making practice in the digital era and the contested terrain of ‘animation’ as a form. In the frst instance, this may be seen to burden four comparatively brief installation loops—Blind (2010), Horse (2012), Crowd (2013) and Cathedral (2013)—with too much signifying signifcance in the light of these ‘big picture’ issues, but nevertheless, Stezaker’s flm work provides resonant touchstones by which to re-interrogate the function of the image within the context of ‘experimental’ practice. Further, Stezaker’s pieces

P. Wells (*) School of the Arts, English and Drama, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 163 V. Smith and N. Hamlyn (eds.), Experimental and Expanded Animation, Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73873-4_9 164 P. WELLS also speak directly to defnitions of ‘animation’ in the contemporary era. Blazwick has noted that the ‘modest register of scale belies the resonance of a powerful oeuvre which moves between absurdity, poesy and violent disturbance, often sexual. Stezaker’s work is also witty and elegiac’ (Blazwick et al. 2013, 8). In addressing these issues through Stezaker’s process, both in his collage and flm work, there is also scope to touch upon how conventional screenwriting and flm analysis in the contemporary era has been advanced by necessarily embracing more radical constructions of ‘narrative’. As such, I wish to argue, these approaches show a strong resemblance to the ways in which material for animation, experimental flm and experimental animation has been normally devised, and seeks to address its audience on different terms. Ultimately, and as a consequence, I wish to re-introduce the concept of ‘micro-narrative’ as a core constituent of all contemporary moving image when seen through the flter of ‘animation’ as a form (see Wells 2010). Before addressing Stezaker’s flm works, though, it is necessary to explore the context in which experimental flms are usually understood. Here, I wish to re-position experimental flms as a useful pivot for the ways in which contemporary moving-image culture is both a convergent and divergent context for expression, and for the process of theorizing itself. Specifc works very often use the same kinds of visual material to defne and develop different approaches and perspectives. As such, they operate as ‘experiments’, and sometimes work outside common usage and common language. This, then, is to insist upon their lineage not merely as practice but as theory, for as Koch has noted,

to form a theory is to react to the experience of reaching a limit of understanding and wanting to move beyond it … we construct theories where our curiosity runs up against something that escapes the empirical descriptive capabilities of our ordinary consciousness. This is why theories at their core are non-empirical and speculative … (Koch 2014, 132)

Under these conditions, I wish to argue that the very notion of ‘experimentation’ or the ‘experimental flm’ is, in essence, a work in progress that tests creative and critical concepts. An ‘experiment’ might be something which proves or disproves a hypothesis; or something which might validate or invalidate a claim; or something which is executed in the full knowledge that it may have unpredictable outcomes. The latter aspect is often appealing to artists on the basis that it may by default create an RE-SPLITTING, DE-SYNCHRONIZING, RE-ANIMATING … 165 alternative or unique result, but it is usually the case that this apparently unpredictable outcome is as a consequence of challenging known formal properties, or previous conventions and representations. The very idea of the ‘experimental flm’, itself, therefore, is inevitably placed into fux simply because the nature of visual expression and its relationship to technology has developed and varied over time, advancing not merely technically and practically, but through the ways it has been theorized and positioned in the flm canon. It has become customary in much Film Studies scholarship, for example, to locate the notion of ‘experimentation’ or the idea of ‘experimental flm’ in two key contexts. Either, in the evolutionary processes of the emergence of cinema per se, or, as a radical response to the orthodoxies that then came to characterize dominant models of flm practice. On the one hand, then, the seemingly necessary ‘trial and error’ that created and used new technologies to form the cinematic apparatus; on the other, a more customized and resistant use of such technologies in the service of more personal interventions. Gunning has suggested that these perspectives have been thrown into further fux by the theorization of ‘new media’, the valorization of animation as ‘anti-index’ and the overall dislocation this has created in separating animation from photography (Gunning 2014, 37). Consequently, he decides to re-assert animation’s relationship with photography, insisting upon the concept of the ‘manufacture of the instant’ either in the act of ‘recording motion’ or actively ‘producing motion’, citing ‘cameraless animation’ by such luminaries as Lye, McLaren, Brakhage and Smith, as evidence of the ‘moving images that have been artifcially made to move, rather than movement automatically captured through continuous motion picture photography’ (Gunning 2014, 40). This notion of the pre-flmic and pro-flmic as a core condition of animation as a form is hardly new, but Gunning places focus on the nature of temporality in this condition, and the oscillation between stillness and motion that defnes ‘the instant’. Conventional moving-image photography maintains strict temporal order; animation’s reconstitution of movement, however, ‘reproduces motion and displays its origin, its birth, so to speak, the emergence of motion out of stillness, of continuity out of discontinuity’ (Gunning 2014, 49). This will become important in the address of Stezaker’s work later, but here it is worth noting that Gunning’s ‘theoretical’ observation is no surprise to experimental, animation, or experimental animation flm-makers. As master Russian animator Yuriy Norshteyn insists, ‘our advantage lies 166 P. WELLS in the fact that we can control the fow of time at any point within a single frame, in contrast to live action where time fows at a constant rate throughout each shot’ (Felperin Sharman 1994, 20). It is in this, of course, that the digital interventions in contemporary cinema both resemble and use animation as a key principle and application. Gunning concludes that his determination of the ‘instant’ ‘does not resemble a discrete unit of time’ but the embodiment of ‘the potential to move between the regimes of stillness and motion’, so that it both describes ‘the instantaneous photograph, which may murder time but cannot deny it, and the perceptual experience of animation that resurrects time from its grave of immobility (Gunning 2014, 51). Though experimental practice is often preoccupied with issues of the temporal and of form, it is also invested in some way with an idea, concept or statement. Gunning’s account may be extended in my view, then, if ‘the instant’ is not merely seen as an embodiment of an abstract and seemingly unimaginable or amorphous ‘potential’ but as the conduit for content. This moves ‘potential’ forward into the material and illusionist outcomes that once more may disaggregate recording from creation, while pointing up relatedness, difference and sameness. Again, Norshteyn’s thoughts prove helpful here. He stresses the idea of ‘gesture’ as a key aspect of apprehending the ‘instant’:

In animation the rendering of gesture is weightier than in flm or documentary. Gesture in animation can be foregrounded. We can create a feld of gravity around a gesture so that it looks more realistic, has more weight than in live action flm, despite the fact that animation is a construction rather than a recording of an event. (Felperin Sharman 1994, 20)

Norshteyn is essentially suggesting that attention can be drawn to a particular movement, or movement in general, through an implied augmen- tation that comes through the artifce or excess of its construction. I wish to argue that this notion of ‘gesture’ is greater than Norshteyn’s defnition or, indeed, Gunning’s focus on the instant in motion, and is signifcant in what that motion, or whatever it is that moves, actually narrates, means or provokes emotionally. At its most specifc, this might mean the marks and particles of embodiment in a flm like Len Lye’s Free Radicals (NZ, 1958–1979) or the way Violet pushes her hair away from her face in an act of bravura and confdent self-revelation in The Incredibles (Brad Bird, USA, 2004). One simple way of understanding this is to RE-SPLITTING, DE-SYNCHRONIZING, RE-ANIMATING … 167 move beyond the idea that a screenwriter or practitioner is merely using observation—however revealing this may be—and is, in effect, the cho- reographic interpreter of movement. The potential to move between sta- sis and movement Gunning apprehends in the ‘instant’, then, becomes about what has been observed and re-constructed and not merely appre- hended when left to the behest of the recording mechanism. It is in this that the ‘experimental’ properly resides because it places the creator of the ‘instant’ ahead of its manufacture, creatively and technically. It also moves beyond the parameters of ‘the dot’ or ‘the line’ to insist upon the recognition of the perception of motion. Simply, ways of seeing become the important factors in this regime of moving-image practice, both for maker and viewer, subordinating technical and theoretical concerns. Norshteyn stresses,

I scrutinise people shamelessly, staring straight at them … I look at how conductors conduct the orchestra, how they move their arms. I was looking at a documentary on Shostakovich, and watched very closely how he sits, touches his chin, moves his fngers around it, moves his lips … all this builds up in my memory then when I am working a gesture will suddenly suggest itself to me, and I feel I have to use it. (Felperin Sharman 1994, 20)

This vocabulary of expression, then, begins with small, aestheticized details that become ‘gestures’ in discrete units or ‘instants’ in animation. I have suggested elsewhere in the context of writing and devising for animation that such units or instants are ‘micro-narratives’ (Wells 2010, 2017). All instants or units, however small, however particular to the frame, or however suggestive of the relationship to the instant or unit before, or after, are essentially, then, narrations of concept and content, too. Apparatus and form still ultimately narrates—this is not to say that it tells a ‘story’, though, but rather that it negotiates and medi- ates a way of seeing, and a way of thinking. I will return to this idea later when addressing Stezaker’s collages and flm works, but I wish to stress at this juncture that experimental flm, animation and experimental animation flm-making are predicated on this idea specifcally, even though it remains present in other kinds of more mainstream visualization. Experimental work is always as much about how it narrates how a creator or viewer sees, and how a creator or viewer thinks, as it is in the engineering and dissemination of themes and images. Thereafter, moving-image practice is essentially about the degree with which it becomes 168 P. WELLS preoccupied with this model of narration, or diverges into more literate, visual or contextual practices that are determined by other ‘storytelling’ codes and conventions. This principle has had the consequence of creating four distinct ‘experimental’ traditions—frstly, the manifestation of experimental flm in opposition to mainstream classical narrative cinema, often elided with ‘art cinema’ and ‘documentary’ (Rees 1999; Galt and Schoonover 2010); secondly, experimental flm as a practice by artists within arts culture (Campany 2007); thirdly, experimental flm as part of an ongoing and emergent historiography defning animation (Gehman and Reinke 2005; Wells and Hardstaff 2008); and fourthly, experimental flm as a practice outside cinema, and understood as a philosophic endeavor in re-positioning the condition of cinema—what Levi calls ‘cinema by other means’ (Levi 2012). While at one level, experimental animation has been recognized as an aspect of animation production, it does not of course defne animation per se. This remains an ongoing discourse within Animation, and now Film Studies (Beckman 2014), but for the purposes of clarity here, I wish to draw upon Joubert-Laurencin’s insistence upon a demarcation between ‘animation cinema’ and other potential forms of animation (Joubert-Laurencin 2014, 85–96). While it is clear that ‘animated flms’ have been made in production cultures across the world, many as early as the 1910s or before, the notion of an ‘animation cinema’, a term coined by André Martin, may have only been extant since the mid-1950s. ‘Animation’—in either its broad condition of ‘making images move’, or as a consciously made sequential practice—long precedes this, of course, most obviously, in hand-crafted optical toys, but perhaps even in the perceptions of humankind in the fickering shadows and light of the Lascaux caves. Joubert-Laurencin’s observation is helpful, simply because it allows further distinctions— ‘animation’ may also be recognized in data visualization and medical imaging, for example, without it being seen as ‘animation cinema’. ‘Animated flms’ or ‘Animated television series’ or ‘Animated applications’ are not ‘Animation cinema’ but still permit regimes of resemblance and difference. This might also be applied to conventional cinema, in that certain flms may have differing degrees of resemblance and difference to ‘animation cinema’, perhaps related to the extent of its use of visual effects and frame construction. In an era when mainstream cinema itself has the greatest degree of resemblance to animation in its very construction, degrees of difference may be important to articulate. RE-SPLITTING, DE-SYNCHRONIZING, RE-ANIMATING … 169

Indeed, this also helps in suggesting that the ‘gesture’ becomes the primary vehicle by which such interventions are made, at once referring to ‘animation’, but not necessarily defning its primary place in conventional cinematic practice. The notion of the ‘experimental’ also resides in these different feld areas, and explains why practitioners see themselves (consciously or unconsciously) working in different ways. Some use ‘animation’ as a tool of expression and do not in any way see it as making ‘animation cinema’; indeed, in the case of most artists and experimental flmmakers, it is merely part of a possible portfolio of techniques. Some see making ‘animation’ as their central modus operandi, and might work either in ‘animation cinema’ (normally within an industrial model) or in making ‘animated flms’ (normally as an independent endeavour). Equally, some may be engaging with or making ‘animation’ on a daily basis, but never recognize it as such, nor defne it as such, because the ‘visual’ outcomes in their work are not seen as part of a creative process, nor function as a deliberately executed art form, nor exist within an arts culture. This is not to say, though, that there is not ‘animation’ in data visualization or medical imaging, to cite those examples again, but that it must be defned and theorized as such by those from other disciplines. In my own practice, this has been most noticeable, for instance, when working with sports technologists, who do not see their motion capture work with athletes, or their calculations that simulate the motion of footballs, as anything but a visual representation of data, while I see it within the context of animation, choreography and performance. Once this resemblance and difference is recognized and acknowledged, new theorization is possible. Though these points may seem in some sense broad and foundational, they are nevertheless important because the refusal to distinguish these aspects has largely rendered ‘animation’ as absent in debates about moving-image practice, when it is perpetually present—Stezaker’s work provides an important example of this because, in the frst instance, he would not be seen as an animator, nor his work as ‘animation’. This has had consequences theoretically in moving-image culture. Film Studies has largely ignored ‘animation’, ‘animated flms’ and ‘animation cinema’, but has mainly embraced ‘Disney’ or Golden Era cartoons as a way of speaking about all three aspects. Animation Studies, though, has inevitably sought to defne and debate ‘animation’ and ultimately—especially in the digital era—determined its practices as a spectrum between ‘animation cinema’, ‘animated flms’ and ‘animated 170 P. WELLS applications’, where ‘the experimental’ can reside in all three areas. This kind of clarity merely in terminology or taxonomy was in itself compromised for a long time by the problematic term ‘cartoon’, which somehow needed to be expunged from too much theoretical use because it seemed to overburden and misrepresent ‘animation’ as a serious form, and a form to be taken seriously. Many still resist the term, and indeed the term ‘animation’, depending upon the production culture, or market, or the theoretical focus of the constituencies that use it. William Kentridge, for example, initially avoided the term ‘animation’, simply because he believed he lacked the established professional competen- cies of a classical animator, but knew, too, that he was not making ‘cartoons’.1 His work was ‘experimental’, aspired to ‘art’ and used ‘moving image’ as a creative process, but only later was acknowledged both by academics and by its creator as ‘animation’. These distinctions become crucial when looking at contemporary experimental work that addresses these conditions. John Stezaker’s flm work, then, is especially important to consider in these respects. His short flm loops may be viewed as articulating the idea of the ‘experimental’ as a way of seeing and thinking; as an embodiment of the instant or unit as a micro-narrative; and as an interrogative tool that invokes the four traditions cited above, and resides on the ‘animation spectrum’ I have articulated.2 Stezaker’s collages and flm works are principally made up of flm stills and postcards, and found imagery from less canonical or mainstream sources. His collages insist upon an understanding of motion; while his flm works insist upon an understanding of stillness. This tension makes Stezaker’s approach highly pertinent to the issues I have raised thus far in articulating the liminal space between the ‘instant’ as a concept and the ‘micro-narrative’ as the condition that narrates process. The flm still was a photograph posed in situ on set, or in formally conducted promo- tional sessions, and is not a frame drawn from a flm. It is a photograph, though, that implies the dramatic motion of the flm itself, or the performance identity of the actor or actress in the flm. Such stills are deliberately constructed frames that imitate the ‘instant’ of recording, and yet are as constructed and created as any one image, or ‘micro-narrative’ constituted as a frame for an animated flm. This focus on the flm still is highly instructive, in that it is both representative of, and fundamentally about, the flm production process. Crucially, Stezaker seeks to play down the preferred agency of such imagery by rarely including very well-known stars, or identifable flms. Most of the stills in his work are RE-SPLITTING, DE-SYNCHRONIZING, RE-ANIMATING … 171 drawn from 1940s or 1950s British flms, but though there is an identifable milieu or generic suggestion about the images, the model of narration within them remains surprisingly open in both his collage and flm works. It is as if his interventions call into question what constitutes the motion in motion pictures; in my view, this is the fundamental principle informing all potential defnitions of animation as a form. Ultimately, as I will explore, his ‘answer’ is that motion is a construction out of what it is we know, what it is that we feel and what it is that ‘moves’, in both senses of the word. The re-splitting of the image, to de-synchronize antic- ipated notions of ‘narrative’, in order to re-animate it in a way that is suggestive of emotive connections, re-positions ‘spectacle’ in a fashion that invokes the ‘innocence’ of the image afresh. This might be more fully understood by comparing his work with examples from the other traditions of ‘experimental’ flm cited above, currently also extant in contemporary moving-image practice. As moving-image history consolidates into the digital era, all practice disciplines seem increasingly in fux. Boundaries are collapsing; parameters are proving protean, open to fresh models of expression and interpretation. Arguably, experimental traditions are now fowing freely into one another—drawn into the amoeba of discourses between classical cinema, art and animation, and are once more in a productive tension. Though the marketplace may still fnd easy generic and commercial distinctions between mainstream Hollywood flms and all other forms of independent, art or alternative moving-image forms, creators and critics alike are necessarily reviewing what it is to be ‘experimental’ in moving-image practice. In recent years, for example, notions of ‘experimental’ have been partially attached to more complex narratives in mainstream cinema—what Buckland and his colleagues call ‘puzzle’ or post-classical flms (Buckland 2009). These flms are based mainly on more complex plotting, the resistance of traditional notions of mimesis, and deliberate authorial interventions that misdirect and obscure. Elsaesser notes of the ‘mind game’ flm, for example, that there are three challenges to conventional narrative:

one leads toward the rhizome, archive, the database … (where) the literate community has adapted surprisingly quickly to labyrinth pathways and navigational principles behind such architectures. The second way … in upping the ante in terms of convolution and involution, layering and mise-en-abyme … The third direction (reassessing) the present state of and 172 P. WELLS

potential future of the material object and symbolic form … (Elsaesser 2009, 23)

These three challenges to narrative are, of course, instantly recognizable from experimental practices and, ironically, have often rendered the experimental flm tradition as ‘puzzling’. Stezaker’s work speaks readily to all three interventions. His ‘database’—a myriad of found still images—is the material through which he implies new rhizomic architectures of potential narration; his ‘layering’ literally a function of embedding related works; his mise en abyme, a play of mirroring signifers in his images; his material objects the very re-defnition of symbolic form. Stezaker’s ‘Mask’ collages (1982–2007), for example, largely combine a publicity portrait of a flm actor or flm actress with a landscape postcard that is embedded within, and thus appears to replace their face, and implies an access to their mind, their past, or an invocation of nature or the primal. The face then is the ‘mask’ to some greater knowledge or insight about someone rather than its point of revelation. Formally, what is at play here is a lateral montage rather than a linear montage, suggesting juxtaposition and counterpoint in the depth and perspective of the image; in its analogue form, an echo of depth manipulation in digital image-making. In collages like ‘Bridge’ (2007), a combination of a black-and-white flm still—in which a man (possibly a father) appears to talk to a young boy (his son) as he sits on a bed; the man seeming to be demonstrating a portable record player, while the boy holds what looks like a cloth—is embedded with a colour photo of a bridge. There are formal and aesthetic continuities in the combination of the images that draw one into the other, implying relationship, connection, transition, recollection, structure and strength, asking the viewer to imagine what the protagonists in the image might be seeing and thinking, but also asking the viewer to interpret the ‘micro-narratives’ that are embodied and related in both the ‘characters’ and the ‘form’. As such, Stezaker educates the viewer about how his rhizomic layering might underpin his moving-image works. This rhizomic layering is essentially concerned with including ‘the data’ he wishes to include—i.e. a number of images—but to not coerce the imagery into established image relationships, or image construction methods. Horse is composed of hundreds of identically photographed images of horses from The Stallion annual publication, advertising racehorses for stud, which are actually juxtaposed chronologically from images taken in 1984 through to 2001, RE-SPLITTING, DE-SYNCHRONIZING, RE-ANIMATING … 173 when the image specifcations and format for the photographic presentation of the horse changed. Though there is a chronology and a juxtaposition here, for example, there is a resistance to traditional montage. Each image operates as one frame of the flm loop. As such, the loop bears immediate relationship to Muybridge’s motion studies of horses—frequently used as motion templates in sequential animation—in that the fickering stillness of the image suggests something altogether different about animated forms. Most notably, that animation can be the outcome of super-rapid montage (previously used to ‘slower’ effect in animation by Jan Švankmajer, for example, in flms like Virile Games [CZ, 1988] and Death of Stalinism in Bohemia [CZ, 1990]) and perception—the ‘horse’, both a singular and multiple subject in the flm, actually represents a genetic history of the horse over seventeen years, yet an aesthetic and conceptual imprint is prompted in a matter of seconds. Stezaker’s ‘experiment’ here is to narrate the rhizomic architecture—the very presence of the layer, and the insistence that the image animating its very condition, serves as another rendition of image-making that situates it within the dominant and historically resonant paradigm of the ‘cinematic’ horse. It is a direct inverse of the Muybridge sequential photography where one horse is seen across many poses, while Stezaker creates a piece in which many horses are held in one pose. This, then, is a neo-spectacle in both aping yet denying the galloping icon of the Muybridge stallion, drawing attention, too, to a gesture grounded in the platonic. Ironically, though, even within arts culture, where the ‘experimental’ is an expectation and a norm (see works by Ruth Novaczek and Mónica Savirón, for example), there are signs that models of moving-image experimentation may be exhausted or, at the very least, engaging with material that might be seen as a conservative intervention. In my view, this might be best exemplifed in one of the most extended formal exper- imentations in flm, Christian Marclay’s installation The Clock (2010), a real-time, twenty-four-hour compilation of flm extracts based on clock times that operates as seamlessly as a classical narrative, except for its length. There is nothing here of Elsaesser’s three challenges to ‘narrative’ at the level of complexity, nor of Stezaker’s rapid temporal intervention; rather, such tropes are accumulated to insist upon but not reveal the suturing agencies of cinematic motifs and editorial conventions. The Clock is really a tour de force of editing and timing, rendering the image only as a conduit for apprehending and exposing the condition and representation of temporality in mainstream storytelling. Experimentation 174 P. WELLS has essentially been replaced here by cleverness and wit, and, in this instance, may be recognized as a form of ‘collage’ that seeks out seam- lessness and fow. This is not, then, Stezaker’s mode of collage, which, for all its formal visual continuities, still permits a suggestiveness in its juxtaposition, counterpoint and collision that re-invents the image, re-animating its narrational rather than narrative catalysts. Arguably, The Clock seems inherently conservative; the ‘experimental’ in its traditional guises has always sought to avoid such a reactionary goal. The installation’s ‘shock of the new’, though, resides in its extensive appropriation, and works in almost direct opposition to Stezaker’s intentions in appropriating flm imagery through its static minutiae. Marclay’s composition uses imagery to freshen memories, partly about the recognition of certain flms, but more specifcally about the way in which cinema directs our gaze, our attention, our perception and our emotional response. This is a large- scale spectacle of reminder. Stezaker’s neo-spectacle work, however, is specifcally constructed not to prompt recollection, or nostalgia, but to re-direct the gaze to interrogate the conventions that coerce perception, and the generic structures that point to narrative orthodoxies. In this, his work echoes animated flms (mainstream, independent, experimental or otherwise) in offering a rhetorical perspective on the embedded ‘realism’ of the conventional photograph, and the material elements represented within the conventional photograph, and, ultimately, in narrating the ‘instant’. This is best represented in Blind, in which flm stills are re-photographed and again presented as a frame representing one twenty fourth of a second, in a looped sequence. Each still instantaneously moves on to the next, leaving mere impressions for the viewer. Everyone viewing the loop essentially sees a different flm, but what they all witness is the deliberate breakdown of the kind of invisible suture Marclay embraces, and, as such, Stezaker again re-animates the ways in which we have been educated and conditioned to understand narration, both in conventional cinema and cartoons. He forces the spectator to embrace impressions that require the viewer to narrate an emotional reaction and, thereafter, to re-interpret an accumulation of images, rather than story-led scenes and sequences.3 The Clock might be viewed as a companion piece to Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993), which slows Hitchcock’s 109-minute mas- terpiece to the exact length of a day, exaggerating each frame into a RE-SPLITTING, DE-SYNCHRONIZING, RE-ANIMATING … 175 longeuse of suspended animation. I use this term advisedly, of course, but for any observer of the work, it took a great deal of time to recognize motion, even if it was self-evidently present. As Amy Taubin writes, ‘Shown at approximately two frames per second, the flm retains just enough motion to feel how each image is pulled towards the next. No matter how slowly the wheels grind, the end will come. And at the end lies nullifcation, which is worse than death’ (Taubin 1996, 69). Stezaker takes this formal principle into his collages and flm works, but not its outcomes—like Gordon, he draws attention to the visual impact of the still-as-frame and not merely theoretically implies ‘the instant’, but demonstrates it, narrating fresh aesthetic assumptions, and revoking the status of the image. In this, he differs from the work of Eduardo Paolozzi in his ripped and re-composed collages of Hollywood stars, or Paula Rego’s female-focused flm scenes, or even Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1937), which selects and edits together sequences of the actress Rose Hobart from the flm East of Borneo (George Melford, USA, 1931), all of which essentially fetishize the Hollywood image, demanding that it render its implied sensual and sexual subtext. Rather, Stazaker’s attention is directed at de-fetishizing the primary components of the classical Hollywood mise en scène, often echoed in its British flm incarnation, to permit other readings. In many senses, Stezaker’s animated Crowd, a rapid montage of flm crowd scenes, articulates both the presence and the absence of the ‘star’, through the appearance/ disappearance embodied in the micro-narrative of the instant. Crowds of people are rendered an invisible mass and, as such, articulate the metaphor of the invisible mass, and once more ape the conditions of traditional animation in foregrounding a rhetorical condition which begs metaphoric or symbolic reading. To de-fetishize the ‘glamour portrait’, or the star image per se, is to re-animate the background, the environment, the non-human, the material space, again all conditions that distinguish the plurality and specifcity of the animated image. This, then, is the very opposite of suspended animation, operating as accelerated animation, privileging the whole image as a glut of potential signifers in rapid sequence. Ironically, Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho grew out of a fetishized moment in the flm, when Norman gazes upon Marion through a peephole, watching her undress. Gordon believed a TV print had shown more of Marion unhooking her bra, so used a stop-frame button to identify what 176 P. WELLS was shown in each version. Slowing down the flm prompted the idea of extending this premise to its logical degree. He notes,

there were these details that Hitchcock couldn’t have been conscious of and couldn’t have controlled. It was as if the slow motion revealed the unconscious of the flm. In the sequence of Norman watching as the car sinks into the swamp, there’s this incredible tension between him and the car, but it has nothing to do with what comes before or what comes after. The micro-narrative takes over. (Taubin 1996, 70–71)

Though Gordon’s use of the term ‘micro-narrative’ is entirely coincidental, it nevertheless helps in advancing my own use of the term to suggest that it is these very vignettes of action that narrate the principles both of the flm apparatus as a technology, and the flm instant as the content-laden mediator of the space between stillness and motion. If Gordon’s very, very, very slow motion (though some Fluxus artists and fgures like Bill Viola have shot yet slower) in many senses looks to articulate the latency of the still into motion, it is Stezaker’s cuts and compositions, linear and lateral, that advance the latency into agency, and, ultimately, into both an aesthetic and conceptual provocateur. In this, in the same way as his representational approach echoes the rhetorical aspects of animation, his editorial engagement echoes the enunciative nature of animation as a specifc language of narration. Cathedral, for example, is an animated rapid montage of postcards featuring the central aisles of cathedrals, and the latent metaphor called into motion here is the idea of the aisle as a specifcally symbolic space, and offered as an eternal forward-going continuum in the loop. The viewer is drawn into the compulsive animus of the space, and the idea that motion narrates the previously imbued meaning and aesthetic of the micro-narrative this repeated motif apprehends. In many senses, this begins to articulate and visualize Norman Klein’s concept of the ‘scripted space’ in which he suggests:

Scripted Spaces are a walk through or click through an environment (a mall, a church, a casino, a theme park, a computer game). They are designed to emphasise the viewer’s journey – the space between – rather than the gimmicks on the wall. The audience walks into the story. What’s more, this walk should respond to each viewer’s whims, even though each step along the way is pre-scripted (or should I say pre-ordained). RE-SPLITTING, DE-SYNCHRONIZING, RE-ANIMATING … 177

By scripted spaces, I mean primarily a mode of perception, a way of seeing. (Klein 2004, 11–12)

Stezaker reveals the cathedral aisle as a site of a ‘scripted space’ that draws the viewer into it in perpetuity, insisting upon a mode of perception that prompts what Klein calls ‘a slender epiphany’ or a ‘moment of wonder’ (Klein 2004, 12). Ultimately, the concentration on the aisle alone prompts the revelation of its ‘micro-narrative’ as a sacred place. In the fnal part of this discussion, then, I wish to address why Stezaker’s four loops, and his collage pieces, are fundamental to the further understanding of animation as a radical and experimental form. Moritz has claimed that ‘non-objective animation is without doubt the purest and most diffcult form of animation … [it] challenges our artic- ulateness and philosophical assumptions about the nature of being …’, adding, ‘The creation of synthetic reality unique to the particular flm is a hallmark of non-linear animation distinguishing it from the conventional narrative flm that simulates an everyday reality … using a variety of techniques including unexpected transformations, parallel systems, abstraction/symbolism, and refexive devices’ (Moritz 1988, 27–28). Stezaker’s flm works root themselves in the pre-cinematic language of the loop and an extension of the contemporary cinematograph, essentially forcing Moritz’ characteristics of the non-objective and non-linear to their logical yet extreme conclusion. The rapid animated montages are refexive in their use of cinematic imagery; transformative in the juxtaposition of the imagery; both abstract and symbolic in employing the parallel system of perceptual presence and absence. Ironically, though, in situating the notion of reception of such work in the perception of the viewer, and in the signifying agency of the latent image, Stezaker does not abandon the fgurative or everyday reality; rather, he privileges how the animated moving image prompts meaning and affect by insisting upon an accentuated version of how we experience it, rather than through a systemic model of being shown or told about it. To make this point more clearly, his loops draw comparison with Mathias Poledna’s Imitation of Life (2013). Imitation of Life is a three-minute cartoon. It is not named as such, though. It is described in the catalogue for the Venice Biennale of 2013, in which the flm frst appeared, as an ‘installation’ and a ‘flm’. The piece is quite clearly an ‘animation’, and to any eye—tutored or untutored—a ‘cartoon’. 178 P. WELLS

Both terms are not employed, however, as they would only serve to detract from the perception of the work as anything but ‘art’ made by ‘an artist’. This effectively re-positions the cartoon, seeking to draw attention to its Golden Era American antecedents in the 1930s and 1940s as flms that have been neglected, and remain un-recognized as potential works of art. The catalogue is careful to note:

Presented in Venice, Poledna‘s installation allows for a complex cross- reading with other episodes from this period: the relationship between European art and American mass culture; European emigration to the United States and American export to Europe; the presentation of animated flms produced by the Disney Studios at the frst flm festivals in Venice; the late modernism of the Austrian Pavilion, and the period from 1938 to 1942 during which the building remained empty while Austrian artists exhibited in the German Pavilion.

Animation historians have long pointed up the relationship between European arts culture and the American animated cartoon, and the impact of the European émigré on American production culture, and vice versa (Allen 1994; Bendazzi 1994; Halas and Wells 2006; Leslie 2002), but this has never been properly understood as ‘proving’ that the status of the cartoon was once predicated on explicit technical and aesthetic ‘experimentation’, though this was clearly the case in relation to Disney’s Silly Symphonies during the 1930s. Imitation of Life, like The Clock, is an act of appropriation, but one which is disingenuous, in that its imitative qualities, like those, for example, of Gus Van Sant’s 1998 shot-for-shot colour remake of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1960), do little to illuminate the production process and its particular aesthetic outcome, nor crucially to properly vindicate or validate the art of its sources. In offering a quasi-ironic, post-modern veneer to the cartoon, by simply making it in an era that no longer privileges classical animation, and situating it in an arts context, Poledna actually renders animation as a form arrested in its historical past, since the work has no link to its radical relationship to cinema. While Poledna may have succeeded in rendering the art of animation in the gallery, in once more uncoupling it from flm, he succeeds in marginalizing its capacity for experimental intervention. Stezaker’s work, however, does the very opposite; his loops, operating as experiments, experimental flms and experimental animations, engage with the radical and progressive, because they speak to the discourses of the very apparatus from which they emerge. This means his flm works RE-SPLITTING, DE-SYNCHRONIZING, RE-ANIMATING … 179 embrace their historical context and re-animate it; re-discover the latency in the photographic image and re-animate it; and confate flm and animation in a way that re-animates both. By insisting upon re-animating the micro-narrative, Stezaker’s loops move beyond appropriation into catalyzing imagery into vehicles by which to see and think about the representation and signifcation of the world afresh, and in that, he privileges innocence, perception and emotional intelligence as the prevailing contexts of comprehension and understanding. Stezaker thus privileges the gesture as a core component of his ‘animation’, illuminating single-image interventions as complex emotive signifers. As such, and more pres- ciently, his work insists upon the idea that the cinematic image can be re-experienced, and, in this, it embodies why the rhetorical and enunciative qualities of animation befts the ‘experimental’ not merely at the level of questioning the ideological orthodoxies in representations of cinematic reality, but in apprehending the perceptual experience of modern reality as a cacophony of images. His use of animation, therefore, rescues the form from the banality of the post-modern, focusing on its properties as a modern language of expression that negates former codes and conventions of the image as an arbitrator of reality. Stezaker’s methods use animation, then, to assert the view that reality is more than the shapeliness of its mediated forms and only a matter of inchoate cognition and feeling.

Notes 1. Personal conversation with the author at Kovásznai: A Cold War Artist— Animation, Painting, Freedom. ‘Drawing on the Sidelines—Animation and the Avant Garde outside the Western Canon’, lecture/panel discussion with William Kentridge, Sarah Wilson and Andras Szanto, Kenneth Clark Theatre, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, February 2016. 2. This concept is more fully developed in Wells, P. 2017. Screenwriting for Animation. London and Oxford: Bloomsbury. (Forthcoming). 3. In conversation with Dan Coombs, December 2014, on the occasion of the Jerwood Encounters: Suspicion exhibition in London, Stezaker made the point that when a colleague frst saw Blind he noticed a predominance of swastikas. Stezaker was concerned that if other viewers saw this that it would compromise the work and possibly offend, so he had an assistant remove what proved to be fve images of swastikas in over 10,000 images. Another colleague watched the loop a week later, and noticed how nudity seemed to prevail. Stezaker, knowing these images were from the 1940s and 1950s, and that there was no nudity at all, concluded that essentially viewers saw what they either thought they saw, or wanted to see. 180 P. WELLS

References Allen, R. 1994. Walt Disney and Europe. Abingdon: John Libbey. Beckman, K., ed. 2014. Animating Film Theory. London and Durham: Duke University Press. Bendazzi, G. 1994. Cartoons: One Hundred years of Cinema Animation. Abingdon: John Libbey Publishing. Blazwick, Iwona, et al., eds. 2013. John Stezaker. London: Whitechapel Gallery/ Ridinghouse. Buckland, W., ed. 2009. Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. Chichester and Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Campany, D., ed. 2007. The Cinematic. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Elsaesser, T. 2009. The Mind Game Film. In Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, ed. W. Buckland, 13–41. Chichester and Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Felperin Sharman, Leslie. 1994. Down the White Road. Sight & Sound 5 (4): 20–21. Galt, Rosalind, and Karl Schoonover, eds. 2010. Global Art Cinema. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Gehman, Chris, and Steve Reinke, eds. 2005. The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema. Ottawa: YYZ Books. Gunning, Tom. 2014. Animating the Instant: The Secret Symmetry Between Animation and Photography. In Animating Film Theory, ed. K. Beckman, 37–53. London and Durham: Duke University Press. Halas, Vivien, and Paul Wells. 2006. Halas & Batchelor: An Animated History. London: Southbank Publishing. Joubert-Laurencin, Hervé. 2014. André Martin, Inventor of Animation Cinema: Prolegomena for a History of Terms. In Animating Film Theory, ed. K. Beckman, 85–97. London and Durham: Duke University Press. Klein, Norman. 2004. The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects. London and New York: The New Press. Koch, Gertrud. 2014. Film as Experiment in Animation: Are Films Experiments in Human Beings? In Animating Film Theory, ed. K. Beckman, 131–144. London and Durham: Duke University Press. Leslie, Esther. 2002. Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde. London and New York: Verso. Levi, Pavle. 2012. Cinema by Other Means. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Moritz, William. 1988. Some Observations on Non-objective and Non-linear Animation. In Storytelling in Animation: The Art of the Animated Image Vol 2, ed. J. Canemaker, 21–38. Los Angeles: AFI. RE-SPLITTING, DE-SYNCHRONIZING, RE-ANIMATING … 181

Rees. A. L. 1999. A History of Experimental Film and Video. London: BFI. Taubin, Amy. 1996. Douglas Gordon. In Spellbound: Art & Film, ed. P. Dodd and I. Christie, 68–75. London: Whitechapel Gallery/BFI. Wells, Paul. 2010. Boards, Beats, Binaries and Bricolage: Approaches to the Animated Script. In Analysing the Screenplay, ed. J. Nelmes, 89–105. London and New York: Routledge. Wells, Paul. 2017. Screenwriting for Animation. London and Oxford: Bloomsbury. (Forthcoming). Wells, Paul, and Johnny Hardstaff. 2008. Re-imagining Animation: The Changing Face of the Moving Image. Lausanne: AVA Academia. Cut to Cute: Fact, Form, and Feeling in Digital Animation

Johanna Gosse in Conversation with Peggy Ahwesh

Johanna Gosse

This conversation with flm-maker Peggy Ahwesh focuses on three of her recent works, Lessons of War (2015), The Blackest Sea (2016), and The Falling Sky (2017), a trilogy of experimental flms that sit at the intersection of digital animation, found-footage essay, and moving- image installation. The flms are comprised of animated CGI video that Ahwesh sourced from YouTube and then edited into original compilations. Their source material was produced by two Taiwanese news agencies, TomoNews US and News Direct, which specialize in CGI ‘newsreels’ that report on global catastrophes like war, the refugee crisis, and climate change, to more everyday stories like politics, crime, and celebrity gossip.

J. Gosse (*) Art + Design Program, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID, USA

Ahwesh’s appropriation of this curious genre of animated news raises a number of concerns, both aesthetic and political. On the one hand, the CGI depicts a range of complex and often overwhelming real-world problems, yet on the other, they also raise questions about journalistic ethics in our ostensibly ‘post-factual’ era, when the line between reporting, opinion, and entertainment is increasingly blurred by the proliferation of viral memes, clickbait, and ‘fake news’ paranoia. The following conversation between Ahwesh and scholar Johanna Gosse considers the experimental uses (and dystopian mis-uses) of digital animation at a time of political, economic, and ecological instability. Starting with a discussion of her flms’ production and exhibition, the dialogue moves into more conceptual territory, addressing issues of genre, affect, violence, gender, and fnally, the aesthetics and politics of ‘cuteness’, a quality often attributed to animation, but rarely to newsreel or essay flm.

Production Gosse: Let’s start with your source footage. Can you describe how you frst encountered these Taiwanese news agencies? On their YouTube page, TomoNews markets itself, half tongue-in-cheek, as ‘your best source for real news. We cover the funniest, craziest and most talked- about stories on the internet. And because we can animate stories, TomoNews brings you news like you’ve never seen before’ (TomoNews 2017). They play up the zaniness factor and market their brand of cartoon news as an entertaining novelty. Meanwhile, the Reuters-owned News Direct presents itself as a more professional journalistic outlet, claiming that their product ‘flls in the gaps when video footage is missing and provides clear illustrations of news that is highly conceptual or technical in nature’ (News Direct). What do you make of these agencies’ claims for zany entertainment versus evidentiary documentation? Do you have specifc criteria or guidelines in mind as you edit the footage?

Ahwesh: I was researching re-enactment when I frst came across the Taiwanese animators. Of immediate interest was the re-enactment of the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida as it was portrayed as animated news, a literal play-by-play retelling of the event with details that were available from the major news networks, and as reported on the major networks. These details were presented without analysis, irony, or perceived point of view. It was frightening and cold as a story. The attempt to mimic the CUT TO CUTE: FACT, FORM, AND FEELING IN DIGITAL ANIMATION 185 so-called objectivity of the mainstream news was amplifed by the simplicity of the animation, in which the people are depicted with the slight- est ethnic features and generic bodies. Since there were no pictures of the actual event, the clues and the police reports, the harrowing calls to 911 and the forensic crime scene data all had to be compiled in order to determine the sequence of events and how to narrate it. The look of the animation, its aesthetic style, makes it palatable to watch, since it leaves out the gruesome reality of the killing. To watch a story sandwiched between reportage and cartoons is a queasy and disconnected experience—like the uncanny creepiness of a happy clown. At the time, I was teaching a class in documentary and I edited a quick sequence of short bits of video into a timeline. This led to a great class discussion about news, re-enactment, and docudrama, and raised issues about ethics and exploitation. Making animations of news doesn’t eradicate the problem of exploitation that accompanies the recording of real people, but it does somehow sidestep its thorniest aspects. That’s how I initially became interested in the Taiwanese news animations, and since then I have mined their inventory quite obsessively. TomoNews and News Direct are very distinct and their respective ‘philosophies’ as stated on their websites are fairly well refected in the videos themselves. Tomo is ironic and over-the-top satire, with in-jokes and hilarious spoofs on the antics of politicians and movie stars, celebrity fgures who are sitting ducks for that kind of mockery and exaggeration. News Direct copies the style of regular news. It is more straightforward and serious, and totally un-ironic. I mainly work with the more straightforward material, the neutrality of which has been necessary for me to reinvent their meanings for what I am trying to say. One of the game rules I established early on was to limit myself to the News Direct channel and not go trash-picking from all the crazy stuff available on YouTube. Imposing this limitation on my visual vocabulary allowed for a kind of dialogue to emerge between the animators and myself. I feel that we have a relationship on some level. I think of it is an act of complicity between us; if they make artful news, I make newsy art. The Blackest Sea has a sweet poetry about its movement, with a very emotive and dramatic soundtrack, but as it develops through the various themes, I want it to feel strongly connected to current issues that we are dealing with today—the viability of the oceans, the man-made dilemmas of climate change, and the migrants who have cast their fate upon unforgiving waters. The sea, in all its ceaseless fow and uncontrollable 186 J. GOSSE force, is the subject of The Blackest Sea, and that trope is transposed in The Falling Sky to the wind and sky, the airwaves and the man-made data fows, invisible force felds that surround us when we work and are carried along by us in our handbags and coat pockets. As an installation, the two videos are projected at a large scale on opposite walls, in sync with a shared soundtrack. The lyricism between the above and below, sky and sea, becomes clear.

Installation Gosse: This recent installation mirrors your exhibition last year at Brooklyn’s Microscope Gallery, where Lessons of War and The Blackest Sea were shown via three different presentational modes: large-scale, foor-to-ceiling projection, multi-channel monitor installation, and streaming on handheld devices. Your earlier flms have been shown in numerous exhibition contexts and across multiple platforms, from experimental flm festivals, to museums and galleries, and streaming online. Is there something about these most recent animated flms that makes them especially well suited to an expanded installation context?

Ahwesh: It’s so much fun to experiment in the gallery. Different ideas attach to different formats and presentation schemes as appropriate to the room, the light, synced sound, and the other physical factors. Video installations loop and repeat and let the viewer’s attention wander, so there is a play of peripheral vision. Often I include a number of discrete elements in an installation that make a spatial puzzle that a visitor can walk around and examine—like books, found objects, an iPhone, all depending on the themes of the piece. Installation allows the viewer an opportunity to spend some time in the space and perhaps watch different bits of the repeating cycles of the videos, collating the sensations as they go. I make single-channel versions of installation videos and vice versa for different platforms. It’s not a problem but a challenge, and I think it has become a more accepted practice as technologies come and go and people utilize multiple devices in their daily lives. As you mentioned, Lessons of War was originally made for an exhibition at Microscope Gallery in 2014, where it was shown as a ‘video sculpture’, in which the flm played on a stack of fve teetering, off-center TV monitors. The sync would drift over time and the soundtrack was noisy and echoing. The edit of the single-channel and the installation version is the same, but they are strik- ingly different experiences. The single-channel version is more narrative CUT TO CUTE: FACT, FORM, AND FEELING IN DIGITAL ANIMATION 187 in character and more emotionally charged, since the viewer follows it closely as a storyline, and is more attentive from beginning to end. Getting to the end is important for closure. The installation version is more diffuse and associative and the viewer intuitively calculates the formal qualities of the monitor stack as a sculptural object. There really is no end to get to.

Sound Gosse: The Blackest Sea and The Falling Sky are both set to the same haunting orchestral score, Passacaglia, for Organ and Strings, K. 11, by Ellis B. Kohs, which features a rather eerie-sounding electric organ. In Lessons of War, you added a montage of faint ambient sound recordings, which generate their own uncanny effects—like a calm before the storm. Can you explain your approach to sound in these flms, both in terms of selection and exhibition?

Ahwesh: The soundtrack to Lessons of War is mainly foley sound I recorded around the house or took from a sound effects library, so the gestures and movements of the fgures would be more present. The Blackest Sea and The Falling Sky both have the same soundtrack by Kohs, very chromatic with dramatic tonal clusters. I heard the music on the radio one day and knew that it would be great for these flms. Unlike Lessons of War, here I wanted a surging, romantic, and a bit unpredictable sound to propel the flm emotionally. In terms of exhibition, spatializing sound in the gallery is one of the most dynamic elements of installation. On a fundamental level, the gallery space is a box that situates the body of the viewer in terms of scale, personal space, arm’s length, comfort zone, territory, perspective, and so on. Sound directs and locates the body in space. Its seduction operates unconsciously on most people, remaining in the background, second to the visual. The gallery becomes a soundscape that changes your perspective and movement through the space, like choreography.

Complicity and Labour Politics Gosse: Earlier, you spoke about your ‘complicity’ with the Taiwanese animators—a term that casts you as more of an accomplice or co-conspirator than a collaborator or co-author. This idea reminds me of your found-footage flm The Color of Love (1994), which utilizes a decaying, 188 J. GOSSE low-budget pornographic snuff flm in which two women perform various sexual and violent acts on a lifeless male body. By appropriating that footage, you as the flm-maker, and by extension, the viewer also, are framed as witness and accomplice to the illicit acts shown on screen. As an act of complicity, your use of these animations points back to your accomplices—the anonymous crew of digital artists—and their relationship to the global economy. I wonder, is their labour considered high or low-skilled? Are these studios run like digital sweatshops? By appropriating their products, are you actually outsourcing your own artistic labour and further contributing to the workers’ exploitation? What are the political implications of framing appropriation as complicity and col- lusion rather than collaboration and solidarity?

Ahwesh: These are really good questions that always need to be considered when it comes to appropriation. In some way, the kinship I feel to the makers of these videos is similar to how an author uses a quotation in a text. It can be used to bolster the argument that the author is trying to make, it can be an incantation to add levels of meaning, and/or it can be a betrayal or a critical reading of the original. Perhaps there are more uses to quotation, but in my work, I try to hit upon these three. That said, these questions of labour persist, and remain relevant and provocative. My research tells me that Next Studios is like a digital Disney with hundreds of animators cranking out not just newsreels, but also zombie flms, fghting manga features, and commercial work for clients. It is a pretty sophisticated corporate production of the entertainment industry and I would guess that most of the workers are hunched over computers all day, rendering fgures against backgrounds. I am piggybacking on the resources and investment of the company. I don’t take it for granted and it might be useful to compare what I do to a fan edit instead of the more academic trope of appropriation. Our relationship to entertainment media is not unlike our relationship to commodities like a cup and saucer, or a power cable. These are highly designed objects manufactured for the mass marketplace that we often take for granted. I appreciate that the process of making these things should be transparent. Entertainment products operate differently in the culture than domestic goods and electronics, but I think the comparison holds. I hope it’s clear to any viewer of my videos that I am presenting a critique of authorship. CUT TO CUTE: FACT, FORM, AND FEELING IN DIGITAL ANIMATION 189

Animation Without Animators Gosse: Of the three tiers of quotation you describe, I think the notion of a productive or deliberate misreading best describes your work. But I’m also curious about how your critique of authorship operates specifcally in flms of yours that utilize digital animation. Looking back at your earlier work, there are a number of flms that could be included under an expanded defnition of ‘animation’. For instance, I’m thinking of 2001s She Puppet, which follows video game vixen Lara Croft through a virtual landscape, but also of the various techniques associated with direct animation—hand-tinting, optical printing, hand-scratched, and decaying celluloid—seen in The Color of Love. However, it’s also fair to assume that you wouldn’t describe yourself as an animator. What does it mean, then, to be a flm-maker who appropriates from the genre of animation—both as raw material and a set of experimental techniques—but does not identify as an animator? The notion of authorship as a form of complicity, but also as a kind of parasitism, seems key here. We might also consider your recent work as partaking in your ongoing fascination with low-status cultural production, from low-budget, to lowbrow. I’m thinking about the cheap porno in The Color of Love and video game footage from Tomb Raider (1996–2015), which both in some sense anticipate your use of these animated newsreels. The CGI you appropriate is crisp, clean, and high-resolution, not degraded or low-quality ‘poor images’ in the sense described (and defended) by Hito Steyerl as the ‘wretched of the screen’. Yet once we factor in the CGI’s industrial manufacture and uncredited makers, they do qualify as what Steyerl describes as the ‘lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances’ (Steyerl 2012, 32). Is it accurate, then, to say that you feel a certain affnity, even solidarity, with these ‘lumpen’ cultural products? Is there a class politics embedded in your act of appropriation?

Ahwesh: Yes, I agree. You have said it quite well. I embrace the ‘lumpen’, the ephemeral, or oddity, the genre, the illicit, and the home movie. Over the years, I have worked broadly across aesthetic and technical boundaries but have not developed a recognizable signature style like many of my contemporaries have wisely done. But when you look at the overall body of work, the patterns of subject matter I am attracted to are evident, whether it’s a video game or a porn flm. The sources have a genre element, they are themes that impact the social and political lives 190 J. GOSSE of women, and material that no one else has regard for or claims. It’s a political choice to not align myself with dominant media products that are already over-determined. The original 8 mm flm for The Color of Love was an amateur porn flm from the 1970s that had been water damaged, which gave it a really unique decayed emulsion. It was salvaged from the trash—not my frst episode of dumpster-diving to fnd cast-off treasures—and was beautifully abstract and weathered. At the point when I found the reel in the 1990s, it was already completely obsolete, a real obscurity. I loved the magic of how this flm came to me. It is my Perfect Film (this is the title of a 1969 ‘readymade’ flm by Ken Jacobs, comprised of unedited, un-manipulated found footage). What you see on screen is simply the organic process of decay, the effects of time passing, and the cruel fate of our culture of value, or in this case the lack of it. I quote Karl Marx in reference to the flm: ‘In history as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life.’ I did do some surface manipulation, but the prominent visual effects of the accordion motion of the decay and the colorful staining on the flm were there when I found it. I would never describe myself as an animator, with its traditional associations of hand-drawing and single-framing. However, with current technologies and software, basically all video is animated—with special effects, composited layers in post-production, and image-processing. My tools have always been cameras and computers. I start with captured representations of the world and although I am certainly interested in the intuitive and the subjective, my use of the ‘artist’s hand’ is limited to the things you describe in reference to The Color of Love—hand-processing and chemical changes to the surface. The process of making She Puppet did engage my direct physical gestures, since the footage was recorded as I played the video game Tomb Raider and is an index of my physical gestures, decisions, and tricks. I take the opportunity with this video to ponder the meaning of a female game character that is constructed of cones and cylinders, and to wonder about the consequences of our identifcation and ability to fantasize. I learned all the game modifcations and was involved on the online Tomb Raider community. The technique is called machinima, but I made the video before that term was popularized. The video consists of the game footage and the voiceover is all quotation—so nothing is ‘original’ in the old-fashioned sense. The emphasis is on the digital identity of women and on women as fctional CUT TO CUTE: FACT, FORM, AND FEELING IN DIGITAL ANIMATION 191 characters at a particular moment of history (2001). Lara Croft is the virtual girl-doll of the late twentieth century, and in She Puppet she is cast into a persona that portends the crisis in identity that hit around that time and has since escalated. Her condition is defned by an unstable yet powerful triad of outsiders—the alien, the orphan, and the clone.

Gender and Feminism Gosse: So far we’ve talked about labour and class, but I wonder if you can speak further to the feminist impulse in your work, and if it relates to the flms we are discussing here? Not so much in terms of their literal content (especially since the animated human fgures are given only the most basic attributes of gender, such as hairstyle and clothing) but perhaps more in terms of methodology?

Ahwesh: I have a tendency to work with trash, discards, and ‘worthless’ bits of low-status flm. Other flm-makers working with found footage aim to dismantle masterpieces. To appropriate such masterpieces is a privilege that I won’t claim; instead, I adopt the role of the outsider as a position of strength. I’m not sure this is a feminist issue or a class issue, or both. I have pondered the potential feminist implications of the animated flms. In Lessons of War, there is a shot of a woman having a nightmare— she is up in the clouds fying on a mission with drones—in a way, she is a stand-in for me and gives an unsettling perspective on the events that follow. Is this me offering a literal feminist perspective? Perhaps. Another example and one that may be essentializing but comes to mind is this: the Lessons of War appropriates the ‘cuteness’ of the animation in order to reveal an underlying horror, and to render the cute abject—my version thus offers a critical use of cuteness (see Fig. 1).

Irony, Humor, and Fake News Gosse: Before you mentioned the lack of irony in the original animations, but I am similarly struck by the lack of irony in your revisionist versions. One of the ur-texts of experimental found-footage flm, Bruce Conner’s A MOVIE (1958), is often considered a proto-postmodern example of ironic appropriation, but I would argue that this interpretation neutralizes the flm’s intense and highly contingent affect. Rather 192 J. GOSSE

Fig. 1 Peggy Ahwesh, The Lessons of War (2015) than ironic detachment à la Pop Art, A MOVIE is charged with emotion and humor, and its tone oscillates wildly between comedy and tragedy depending on context. I have a similar experience viewing your animated flms—at times, they jolt me with their sense of pathos and existential alienation, and, at others, are laughably bizarre and awkward, hovering on the brink of absurdity.

Ahwesh: I have had some of my most sublime movie moments watching Bruce Conner, and I agree with you that the experience is not ironic. Not ironic, but knowing and deliberate in showing cultural inad- equacy and a breakdown in values. The bittersweet melancholy of the images tug against the soundtrack and the despair of knowing that the images and the world that is idealized in the images is so ephemeral and ungraspable. It’s the history of the American heartland in a time capsule. I have seen his work hundreds of times and each viewing is as powerful as the frst. I feel a particularly deep connection to Conner’s later work such as Valse Triste (1978), with references that are open and dreamy and not tied so directly to heavy, signifcant historical events. I have also been looking to some younger media artists, not necessarily from the experimental flm tradition, who lift images from the data stream—Cécile Evans, Basma Alsharif, and Ian Cheng come to mind. CUT TO CUTE: FACT, FORM, AND FEELING IN DIGITAL ANIMATION 193

They go far into the mash-up world of associations and make well- chosen juxtapositions, using the computer like an instrument. These makers smuggle multiple layers into the frame with superimposition, simultaneous events, and an uncanny emotional depth. In terms of historical avant-garde flms, I am a fan of Harry Smith—I love his flm and collage work, his use of found materials and his deep sense of obligation and prescience in collecting ephemera from the street and the thrift stores. He was singularly eclectic in his practice, interests, and accomplishments, and in tandem with his art-making he was devoted to ethnography and language dialects. His Mirror Animations (1956–1957) are dense, magical cut-up collages that make reference to the occult and alchemy, running forwards and backwards at different intervals.

The Aesthetics of Control Gosse: It’s interesting to hear you bring up Harry Smith, who we associate with hand-made collage and direct animation and thus with the ‘indexical’. The CGI animations you work with have a more ambiguous and fraught relationship to ‘the real’, or at least to notions of cinematic realism that are rooted in an indexical relationship to the world. CGI seems uniquely suited for weaponization—for the purposes of prop aganda, misinformation, or training—and in this sense has a unique relationship to the visual culture of war. Lessons of War, in particular, reminds me of Harun Farocki’s interest in military VR training and therapeutic exercises in Serious Games I–IV (2009–2010), or, even more menac- ing, Colin Powell’s use of animated simulations when he convinced the United Nations to sign off on the Iraq War. Writing on Farocki’s fnal video installation, Parallel I–IV (2012– 2014), scholar Erika Balsom characterizes his use of computer animation as ‘a form of world-making’ that is inextricably linked to ‘a fantasy of governance, rationality, and mastery at a time of crisis, uncertainty, and environmental catastrophe’. Lacking an indexical relation to the ‘real’ world, Farocki’s appropriated CGI offers the seductive possibility of ‘Control over represented worlds […] as a distracting substitute for the impossibility of control over our own’ (Balsom 2015, unpaginated). This description strikes me as equally applicable to your recent flms as Farocki’s. How do you understand the relationship between CGI and control in the animated newsreels you borrow, which, like Farocki’s 194 J. GOSSE flms, address the complex intersections of governmental, economic, existential, and environmental crisis?

Ahwesh: The experience you get from Farocki of contemporary corporate and state control over our private lives is oddly comforting. He is a master teacher, using a woman’s voice in voiceover to calmly explain how things work and the source of our alienation. However, the end result is not immersion into the comfort of the synthetic world; his critical ‘gamesmanship’ ultimately spits the viewer back to reality. Balsom describes Farocki as ‘pursuing an essayistic cinema of thought’. I’d like to think that’s what I do in my work. The Blackest Sea and Lessons of War hang in a gap between the real and the synthetic—not as a substitute but as a supplement to the real world and also a challenge. At the time, I was specifcally addressing ‘fake news’ as an aspect of the animations, but the technique has evolved with frightening consequences since the 2016 presidential election. With the rude wake-up call of our current political dilemma, more people are internalizing the lessons of semiotics and are being more careful about what they believe. My flms examine the classic strategies of the spectacle that we have seen gradually mutate, warp, and intensify over time as information speeds up and goes viral. My hope is that the videos enable an anti-virality, offering a pause for contemplation or a kind of research headspace for poetic verifcation. The beauty of all of this is that truth is not mere facts.

Re-enactment, Forensics, and the ‘Real’ Gosse: To the extent that the CGI newsreels are framed as re- enactments rather than entertainment, they claim a unique evidentiary power, a truth-value that actually serves to highlight the gulf between image and real event. While watching your work, I often sense that my judgment is being solicited, as if I’m a member of a courtroom jury or military tribunal. In an earlier conversation, we discussed how the evaluative criteria of ‘evidence’ has superseded ‘testimony’ within recent human rights discourse, and how the practice of forensics and reconstruction are increasingly popular techniques for recovering the historical ‘real’. How do your flms navigate this fundamental tension between the forensic and the fctional? CUT TO CUTE: FACT, FORM, AND FEELING IN DIGITAL ANIMATION 195

Ahwesh: My intention is to force the source material to point back to itself and lay bare the gap between that sketchy cartoon world and reality. I recut the videos into a confguration that is not reliant on montage like in the Conner flms, but instead is apparently seamless, in order to generate a subtle continuity in the mind of the viewer. I am trying to create a critical dimension, a slippage in the closed system of the synthetic world of CGI, what in video games they call world-making. With these recent works, as was true with She Puppet, it’s diffcult to see where I made the cuts. Forensics is an aspect of police work but recently, different groups, most prominently Forensic Architecture, have developed new techniques, charged by both intellect and politics, that use material evidence to lay out a sequence of events and its consequences by reconstructing them in reverse order. This procedure has superseded the use of testimony in our post-truth era. In my work with cartoon newsreels, my argument is not about fake news per se, but about the theory and effect of the indexical image.

Appropriation v. Animation Gosse: Like Farocki’s, your flms address political and humanitarian concerns like military violence and data surveillance, the migrant and refugee crisis, climate change and ecological collapse. They function like forensic cartoon newsreels depicting large-scale phenomena that are so over- whelmingly complex, ubiquitous, and powerful—like war, displacement, big data, and the Anthropocene—that they threaten to exceed human comprehension. I imagine that the market for these animations emerged not just from the incessant 24-hour news cycle, but also the need for image content that can reach global audiences across language barriers. Yet, I also wonder about the voyeuristic impulse to watch disasters and atrocities unfold, from refugee drownings to dash-cam snuff flms of police brutality. How do your flms avoid both this sense of total despair, as well as the scopo- philia and desensitization that are fueled by media spectacle?

Ahwesh: I made Lessons of War in response to the Israeli confict (or war) with Gaza in the summer of 2014, called Operation Protective 196 J. GOSSE

Edge. I have lived in the West Bank and for a number years went there on a semi-regular basis to teach media class, so I have many friends in the Occupied territories, and am pretty familiar with the obstacles of daily life there. The deaths of many innocent people occurred that summer, the most prominent being the bombing of four boys on the beach. The New York Times frst reported that story with the headline ‘Four Young Boys Killed Playing on Gaza Beach’, which was changed later the same day to ‘Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach, and into Center of Mideast Strife’. There was a terrifying intensity to the descriptions and a horror of detail about things you didn’t want to believe were really happening, but of course they were (Fig. 2) I made the video in part so I could move on and to remember the particulars of the events, to mourn the dead and to stop the deluge of up-to-the-minute news frenzy. Also, to make a point about how memory softens and blurs the details of events, leaving a more generalized outline as they fade with time. I satisfed my own need to make a memory aide while knowing that, at the same time, the animations would do the work of rendering these experiences more palatable. They are in comic book form, several protective layers away from reality. Lessons of War consists of fve short narratives, stories that pervaded every news outlet when they occurred, here repurposed for critique. For example, one vignette

Fig. 2 Peggy Ahwesh, The Lessons of War (2015) CUT TO CUTE: FACT, FORM, AND FEELING IN DIGITAL ANIMATION 197 features the use of the Iron Dome deployed to defect Hamas rockets fred into southern Israel, and another details the underground tunnels dug to transport consumer goods and soldiers to and from Gaza. One of the most direct consequences of war is death. In some sense, animation is an act of bringing to life dead matter, of reanimating the dead. The pageantry of war has a design element—soldiers in formation, movement of troops, the choreography of parades and the deadly precision of weapons—these designs are transcribed into the design of animation as form, as an aestheticization of politics and literally, death.

Contemporary Art and the Animated Turn Gosse: Over the past two decades, with the rise of computer-imaging software, digital animation has emerged as a major genre of contemporary art, especially animation that emphasizes the violent, uncanny, taboo, and grotesque: take, for example, Paul Chan’s Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization—After Henry Darger and Charles Fourier (2000–2003). How would you contextualize your work against Chan’s work and the ‘animated turn’ in contemporary art more broadly?

Ahwesh: There are many things our work has in common, one being the diminutive scale of the characters—the miniaturization of the bodies in their tiny settings. Cartoons imply immaturity, I suppose, but my attraction to them, and I assume that of the artists we are talking about, is as a tactic that suppresses ‘taste’, or at least moves it to the periphery, and opens up a game space of substitutions with avatars and animated fgures. I have a long-standing obsession with puppets, as well as sou- venirs, miniature books, comics; I fnd it deeply satisfying to inhabit my tidy subjective world alongside these miniaturized objects. Chan’s video of Darger’s Vivian girls is a pageant that contrasts scenes of the girls frolicking in bucolic gardens with brutal battle scenes. It’s an intense and dire mash-up of the ‘cute’ with the brutality of war and violence. Chan describes so clearly that cognitive dissonance one experiences when being mesmerized equally by beauty and violence. In She Puppet, our heroine fgure ‘talks’ in voiceover and describes the dilemma of contemporary digital life while trapped inside a video game. This res- caled cartoon world becomes increasingly convincing as we shrink to ft inside it. 198 J. GOSSE

Critical Cuteness // The Cut Gosse: This tension between cuteness and violence in Chan’s work brings me back to your earlier, provocative description of your flms as a critical use of the cute, or perhaps a detourning of cuteness. In her book Our Aesthetic Categories, philosopher Sianne Ngai theorizes cuteness as an aesthetic category that is conventionally applied to objects or creatures that are viewed as dainty, weak, and minor, characteristics that suggest a political dynamic of domination and control. In her chapter on ‘The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde’, Ngai writes:

Realist verisimilitude and formal precision tend to work against or even nullify cuteness, which becomes most pronounced in objects with simple round contours and little or no ornamentation or details. By this logic, the epitome of the cute would be an undifferentiated blob of soft doughy matter. Since cuteness is an aestheticization of powerlessness (‘what we love because it submits to us’), and since soft contours suggest pliancy or responsiveness to the will of others, the less formally articulated the commodity, the cuter. (Ngai 2012, 64)

Ngai points out that the etymology of cute stems from ‘acute’, suggesting that the cute is essentially something lacking sharpness or angular- ity, something soft, malleable, and thus easily dominated or manipulated. Her description of an archetypal cute object as an ‘undifferentiated blob of soft doughy matter’ recalls Sergei Eisenstein’s infuential theories of animation, particularly his concept of plasmaticness, which he defnes as ‘a rejection of once-and-forever allotted form, freedom from ossifcation, the ability to dynamically assume any form’ (Eisenstein 1986, 21). For Eisenstein, plasmaticness enables animation to behave like ‘primal pro- toplasm, not yet possessing a “stable” form, but capable of assuming any form and which, skipping along the rungs of the evolutionary ladder, attaches itself to any and all forms of animal existence’ (Eisenstein 1986, 21). Importantly, though, he frames animation’s plasmaticness as an expression of its freedom from form rather than its domination by external forces. Accordingly, the formlessness and mutability of animation registers a utopian possibility. Thus, Ngai’s cuteness and Eistenstein’s plasmaticness represent two competing understandings of animated form, one framed in terms of domination, the other in terms of freedom. Where do you locate your flms in relation to Ngai and Eisenstein’s theories? CUT TO CUTE: FACT, FORM, AND FEELING IN DIGITAL ANIMATION 199

Ahwesh: Eisenstein’s dialectical montage is a form of ideological cutting that is in direct opposition to ‘cute’. Eisenstein admired Disney animations for their sense of freedom of form and playfulness, and was excited by the instability of those transformations. A different way to think of this aesthetic concept of ‘cuteness’ might be Bataille’s theory of the informe (formless). With my flms, I am scavenging forms and messing with them in a betrayal of their intended logic, shape, and meaning—I take forms and render them informe. I am aware of the limitations of ‘form’ but at the same time I am seduced by the awesome beauty and balance it can attain. My work seeks to upend formal signifcance. By defnition, one aspect of the formless is a base materialism that includes the use of discards, low technologies, found materials, decay, and the marginal. Though generating ‘meaning’ is typically the professed goal of an artist, I fnd that we often want to connect on a more fundamental, irrational level of feeling and process, between the push-pull of revulsion and attraction. This impulse is something we recognize easily in sculpture or while molding shapes out of clay, but I think it is equally operative in moving images.

Cuteness and Agency Gosse: What strikes me about the type of animation that interests you is that in spite of its cuteness, it actually lacks the quality of plasmaticness as Eisenstein describes it. The living creatures that populate these virtual worlds are emphatically not protean or changeable—nor are they remotely social. To the contrary, their shapes, movements, and fates are digitally preordained. Like puppets or mannequins, they utterly lack any sense of agency or interiority, and do not act so much as are acted upon. They do not speak or communicate, and when a thought-bubble pops up, it is flled with picture language and emoji. When living beings are threatened or killed, they don’t resist or appear to suffer, they merely change colors: red indicates dead. Unlike Lara Croft in She Puppet, these fgures don’t rise to the level of individual avatars or characters, just pawns in an overarching algorithmic narrative. In a more dystopian interpretation, these animations provide a glimpse of how computers view humanity, as toys to be manipulated and controlled rather than individual agents endowed with choice and freedom. However, if there is a protean sense of mutability (qua Eisenstein) available here, it is registered not through the fgures themselves but 200 J. GOSSE rather through your editing, which injects unpredictability and unruli- ness, and thus injects some human agency into these virtual worlds. As editor, you reanimate and remobilize these inert digital narratives, opening up new possibilities for historical revision and new horizons of possibility.

Ahwesh: Yes, this word ‘mobilized’ is a really good descriptor—the fgures in the videos are not the totems of so-called primitive culture- animistic fgures of magic with changing temperaments and form. They are almost the opposite, since they are used in the service of representation—confned by the industry of news production. I hope I return to them to a bit of their shape-shifting potential—allowing for irony, distortions of the real and playful and multiple meanings. Mick Taussig’s Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (1993) is a fantastic text that actually relates to Eisenstein’s theory of animation. Taussig describes how native peoples design fetishes and mimetic fgures that adopt the likenesses of the colonizers and their alien utilitarian objects, and then use these objects to invert colonial power in the struggle for independence and control over cultural meaning. To bring something into proximity versus keeping it at a distance— this push-pull constitutes the dynamic of appropriation, in which the original meaning and the revision often move in opposite directions. It creates an eerie friction that gets these multifarious associations all revved up, or in other words, animated.

Cuteness and Control Gosse: Your flms go beyond a critiquing cuteness, they weaponize it. I detect a feminist subtext here that, once again, points back to She Puppet—like animation, in puppetry, cuteness and control are co- constitutive. In what ways do you think that the cuteness of the animated newsreels, and of animation in general, might provide an opportunity for the deployment of feminized forms and aesthetics (such as cuteness) as a political strategy?

Ahwesh: Deep down I have always disparaged the ‘cute’ and have felt it to be a weakness of femininity and sentimentality, a genteel cover-up of strong emotions. Over the years, most of my work has come from an opposing point of view—one that is raw, direct, and improvised. The development CUT TO CUTE: FACT, FORM, AND FEELING IN DIGITAL ANIMATION 201 of video game s in the 1990s was so rapid, their beauty, sophistication, and interactivity so amazing, but what was really cool was the constant mutations by users with mods and cheats—play that breaks the rules of the game. I saw gameplay in line with this kind of rule-breaking and improvisation, and started messing around with Tomb Raider, eventually resulting in She Puppet. It struck me that there was power in inverting my approach, and discovered that using the game was a shortcut to dismantling this power. I could work with and against femaleness as portrayed in Tomb Raider as an imaginary adventure world designed for the female protagonist’s exploits and confrontations. It’s a productive mimesis that detourns the dominant structures of power and control, allowing for a radical subjectivity to sneak through as a form of redemption. Regarding the use of cartoons and computer-generated fgures as imagery, by me and other artists, I think it’s also an attempt to chart the specifc reality of who we are right now, how to communicate the complex, deep substrate that is the texture of our present moment. The formal elements an artist chooses are the codes that activate the work, and relay ideas and feelings to make a gestalt within the viewer. The catalogue of old gestures and styles just doesn’t work in our new machine world. Using the cartoons in a critical way, or ‘weaponizing’ them as you say, makes visible what is already omnipresent but brings it forward with higher defnition. It puts these forms into dialogue with subjective experience in a way that feels real and challenging but also, in some cases, oddly comforting.

References Balsom, Erika. 2015. A World Beyond Control. La Furia Umana, 23. http:// www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php/archives/56-lfu-23. Eisenstein, Sergei. 1986. Eisenstein 3: Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda, 21. Calcutta: Seagull Books. News Direct. YouTube Page. Accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/user/ NMANewsDirect. Ngai, Sianne. 2012. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, 64. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Steyerl, Hito. 2012. In Defense of the Poor Image. The Wretched of the Screen, 32. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London: Routledge. TomoNews. 2017. YouTube Page. Accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/ user/TomoNewsUS. The Animated Female Body, Feminism(s) and ‘Mushi’

Suzanne Buchan

Contemporary animation artists are increasingly engaging with non- traditional cinematic platforms that can offer complex and imaginative experiences to the viewers of these presentation modes. In this chapter, I focus on a growing cohort of women artists working in animation whose flms are not limited to cinema screenings and can be experienced in art galleries, as public installations or during live performance; many of their works are imbued with themes of gender, social relationships and an undercurrent of spatial politics. I introduce a feminist framework to locate these politics, followed by a comparative analysis of the installation and performative animation of fve animation artists. Focusing specifcally on psychoanalytic concepts and the Japanese gendered cultural behaviours of ‘mushi’, I frst undertake a comparative analysis of Suzan Pitt’s seminal feminist work Asparagus (1979) and the young Japanese artist Tabaimo’s recent animation installations. This is followed by exam- inations of Rose Bond and Marina Zurkow’s site-specifc works that demonstrate how the transformation from the cinematic into site-specifc

S. Buchan (*) Middlesex University, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 203 V. Smith and N. Hamlyn (eds.), Experimental and Expanded Animation, Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73873-4_11 204 S. BUCHAN installation recasts feminism as postfeminism by transforming ‘the personal is political’ into a shared politics of the everyday. Then, after discussing Miwa Matreyek’s interactive animation performances, I establish resonances and distinctions between these fve artists, proposing that the trope of inside/outside specifc to their animated and gendered worlds is a postfeminist strategy. I conclude with refections on the viewer’s response to the works and observations about animation curatorship. As a widely used artistic practice that lends itself to the visualis- ation of ideas, intimate personal experience and imagination, animation shares what Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra describe as postfeminism’s ‘increasing ubiquity and political and cultural ambiguity [which means] that a good deal more concerted scholarly work in the feld needs to be undertaken’ (2007, 16). In the media and the public eye and ear, and in most Western societies, postfeminism has abandoned much of feminist politics so central to identity politics since the 1960s; they have become subsumed into what we could call ‘liberal humanism’ or attached to emerging and so-called third-world political agendas. Tasker and Negra suggest: ‘postfeminism broadly encompasses a set of assumptions, widely disseminated within popular media forms, having to do with the “pastness” of feminism, whether that supposed pastness is merely noted, mourned, or celebrated’ (2007, 1). Many of the feminist issues of the 1960s and 1970s have not abated. On the contrary, Tasker and Negra suggest, ‘while feminism is constituted as an unwelcome, implicitly censorious presence, it is precisely feminist concerns that are silenced within postfeminist culture’ (2007, 3; orginal emphasis). This may be the case in specifc postfeminist debates, but embedding feminist debates within postfeminism is effective in removing the ‘pastness’ of feminism. In classes on feminism I have taught over the years, the majority of students living in the current postfeminist environment were unfamiliar with feminism initially. They became enthralled by its histories, activism and achieve- ments, and a good deal of them, men and women, went on to engage in feminist politics later in life. Many students today are aware of feminism, but largely only as a kind of rumour told them by feminists of prior gen- erations, rather than originating in their own experiences or guided readings. Angela McRobbie succinctly describes this condition as the ‘new [postfeminist] female subject [who] is, despite her freedom, called upon to be silent, to withhold critique, to count as a modern sophisticated girl. Indeed this withholding of critique is a condition of her freedom’ (McRobbie 2009, 18). As observed by Jayne Pilling (1992), animation THE ANIMATED FEMALE BODY, FEMINISM(S) AND ‘MUSHI’ 205 made by women has long been an art form of imaginative critique, feminist and otherwise. This chapter explores specifc works of animation that continue this tradition to challenge McRobbie’s condition of the female subject withholding critique within postfeminism. In light of all this, reviving feminist agendas now is more important than ever. I revisit a theoretical framework now often maligned as essentialist: psychoanalytic theory—which was extremely generative for feminist flm studies—to explore issues of creativity, desire and gender, of cultural specifcity, critique and difference. Related to these, one of my emphases is on the depiction of the experience of alienation in the works I discuss. While animation can and has also generated many compelling works that explore these issues that affect men and women, alienation is one of the defning experiences of the human in today’s postindus- trial information age, also an age of postfeminism. It is here that some forms of animation can assuage individual alienation with its fgurative and symbolic depiction of a vast range of subjective, physically impossible fgures, situations and ‘worlds’ that visually express the often inex- pressible: thought, experience and imagination. While I am noting the ‘pastness of feminism’, I will also show how some of psychoanalytic theory’s impact remains implicit, in a new form, in more recent artists’ animations. I now turn to the spatial politics in specifc animation installations of Suzan Pitt and Tabaimo, who challenge the boundaries of representation of sexuality and the perverse, through an application of psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious, abjection1 and libido seen through lenses of cultural difference. My analysis suggests they evoke/provoke abjection and offer visual and thematic challenges and alternatives to this in line with Julia Kristeva’s ‘purifying the abject through art’ (Mey 2007, 36), as well as through generating feelings of cognitive dissonance in their works. I examine abjection as a cultural phenomenon expressed through the opportunities animation presents to artists, in particular women, to engage us visually through animated scenes, narratives and metaphors of abjection, revulsion and illness. Kristeva, who regards the abject as being closely tied to art, writes in Powers of Horror: ‘It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order’ (1982, 4). I demonstrate how these works disturb identity, systems and orders in their evocation and provocation of abjection, through the artistic and expressive art of mainly painted and drawn animation. And since the abject is almost always located in women, the 206 S. BUCHAN animated body is a central performative locus for cultural taboos and their transgressions.

Into the Doll’s House: Libido and Desire in Asparagus Suzan Pitt, who has made over 20 flms since the early 1970s, is an artist of her generation, a second-wave feminist committed to explorations of the human psyche and creativity. Her work is informed by knowledge of psychoanalysis and patriarchy, which she deftly and suggestively questions and undermines. While Pitt is best known for her animation flms, she also makes installation works, was involved in the Expanded Cinema movement, has done performances, had solo exhibitions, and she designed operas that include some of the frst animated projections. Much of Pitt’s visual work originates in a childhood spent with a doll’s house kept in an attic; her narrative ‘worlds’ are notably erotic, meta- phorical and intellectual, and refect upon the inner life of the woman artist and the experience of dreams. In 1979, she completed Asparagus, a 20-minute 16 mm animated flm she had worked on for three years while at Harvard. Although it is mostly screened in cinemas, the flm was initially conceptualised as an installation. Pitt describes its premiere in 1979 at the Whitney Museum, New York, which included the puppet animation set (used in the latter part of the flm) as an integral part of the installation:

The flm was rear-projected through mirrors onto a screen which was placed across the proscenium area of the actual theater which appears in the flm. A full-time projectionist ran the flm for two weeks behind a black screen–in front, looking into the theater, were seats for about 15 people to watch the flm. (Email correspondence with Suzan Pitt, December 2010)

This multiplication of stages allowed visitors to doubly locate themselves as ‘viewers’ in the miniature theatre space while watching the flm that was projected into the set’s proscenium stage, which included animated sequences of this very set with dozens of puppet fgures in a seating area.2 Discussing the flm in 2007, Pitt describes her concept:

Asparagus was the culmination of my childhood and all that I had assembled in terms of a worldview: the nature of the creative process portrayed as psycho-sexual intimacy … the searching for contact and ultimate THE ANIMATED FEMALE BODY, FEMINISM(S) AND ‘MUSHI’ 207

realization of pure existence. … I feel the same about it now as I did when I made it. (Pitt et al. 2007, 30)

Asparagus had a mostly positive but varied critical reception. Laura Kraning suggests that ‘Pitt boldly affrms the sometimes overwhelming power of female creativity. This “visual poem” communicates ideas through images, textures, and gestures that cannot be expressed with the mundane logic of words’ (Pitt et al. 2007, 29). Sharon Couzin under- takes a feminist reading and considers Asparagus, along with Joanna Priestley’s All My Relations (1990), as ‘solid examples of avant-garde feminist flms … embedded with numerous political issues’ (1997, 73). Writing on Asparagus sixteen years earlier than Couzin, Joan Copjec locates her argument in a psychoanalytic framework of Freud’s construction of sexuality as lack, and Ernest Jones’ argument that she summarises as desires that are ‘the naturally different expressions of an essential, a biological difference and penis-envy can then ultimately only be a girl’s revulsion at her sex’ (1980–1981, 239). Copjec regards Jones’ position as ‘politically regressive’ and detrimental to feminism, and critiques Pitt’s flm as articulating this regressive position. She suggests Pitt’s woman fgure’s inside (herself, her garden) and outside (of society) as problematic: ‘[t]o begin by placing her outside society, in nature, is to extract her from, and forever deny her entrance to, the very site of [feminist] struggle’ (239; orginal emphases). This anticipates McRobbie’s postfeminist stance that the female subject’s withholding of critique is a condition of her freedom, and I will show how Pitt transcends both of these exclusions. I begin by briefy describing and interpreting central motifs in the flm’s animated visual surface. A phallic snake—also a sign of the devil and of seduction of the biblical Fall—twines down around a woman’s leg with a red high heel on its foot. The camera takes us to a feminised domestic interior, moving slowly in close-up to explore elements of the furnishings—the spatial layering is a sign of unconscious depths.3 A mirror refects modes of identity construction, and hands hold an object that is a minaturisation of the flm screen—cinematic self-refexivity in the form of a fower-phallus. We then see a woman hovering over a toilet and, after a moment, she defecates asparagus spears; she then leaves the frame and as they begin to fush in a spiral, more spears appear to form the flm title’s letters as they foat upwards from the toilet basin, surrounded by fowers. Rina Arya summarises the ‘ambivalent nature 208 S. BUCHAN of abjection … [as] both compelling and terrifying … Fascination pulls the viewer in, while we remain at arm’s length because of the danger the abject exerts’ (2014, 5). We are both drawn to, and alienated by, an uncomfortable, but not terrifying, cognitive dissonance that arises in the vegetable forms foating in a vessel normally reserved for excrement. Christopher Schmidt suggests that George Bataille considered the anus a liberatory body zone—shit is an element of what he calls the ‘informé … which does not so much subvert the categories of pure and impure, but productively confuse[s] them’ (2014, 19). Pitt’s animated asparagus shit confates fresh organic matter with its digested version of waste, confusing our expectation of shit with the visual beauty of Pitt’s art, and with a rarely seen moment of private pleasure that usually evokes public disgust. The next sequence is of a faceless woman in a domestic interior, and a twine of fowers from the title crosses the frame past a doll’s house, a construction of a girl-woman’s imaginary. She pulls aside a heavy red curtain—Copjec interprets the flm’s use of red on drapes and cush- ions as uterine (1980–1981, 238)—to reveal a plate-glass window that looks onto a phantasmagorical, nocturnal ‘Garden of Eden’. The camera ‘pans’4 very slowly to the right and comes to rest on an apocalyptic, lunar dirt patch of huge, dark green asparagus spears as tall as the still faceless woman voyeur passively observing from inside through the window; then, two enormous bare-footed legs step carefully into the patch and hands sensually caress the spears. This initiates what Couzin calls ‘the basic binary structure Pitt uses throughout: inner/outer’ (1997, 76): Copjec’s outside society, in nature. The next sequence centres on a doll’s house, a miniature version of the woman’s home. Four ‘descents’ into the doll’s house—a combination of animated zoom, pull back and dissolve—bear relation with Lewis Carroll’s Alice going ‘down the rabbit hole’. As the woman leans over the doll’s house, the image begins to scintillate in vivid colours, and she fades out and disappears. An enormous red-fnger-nailed hand reaches into pick up a settee, and in her hand its upholstery changes from lush red velvet (Copec’s uterine colour) to curved asparagus and back to velvet. In the fnal descent, we see the woman leaning into the doll’s house, and a set of masks appears in a revolving circle. The camera then takes us into a different space, and moves slowly through a room of theatrical and grotesque feshy masks and costumes, coming to rest on one mask. The woman covers her unknowable, featureless face with it, flls a handbag with glowing, foating and textured objects, then walks alone through a city street, past THE ANIMATED FEMALE BODY, FEMINISM(S) AND ‘MUSHI’ 209 iconic sexual-pathological scenes: a window display of dildos (masturba- tion and narcissism, suggesting phallic pleasure is the only possibility); the violence of a display window of guns. A window with two naked baby dolls on a bed precedes a neighbouring display of pills in bottles, implying that the only identity option for women—motherhood—causes pain and needs pharmaceutical relief. Pitt confronts her fgure, and us, with the dark sides of patriarchal order, and childbearing, and sex, and with the punishments implied when women step outside of that order. The masked woman stops to look at a poster outside a theatre, then she, and we, are relocated to a theatre. Its interior and audience are created with objects and puppet animation, distinct from the cel animation used up to now. An opulent curtain rises, then another, an unfolding of layers like vaginal labia—peel- ing away every layer only to reveal another. As the woman enters the community of the theatre, blue waves, a waterfall and ice-cream ships foat on and off stage, an orgasmic, liquid deus ex machina, an infnite descent and regress of interiority, but the interiority is empty, the womb barren. After a close-up of her mask, the camera pulls back to show a huge spiralling tube form, a vaginal pulse. She slips backstage, a Brechtian revelation of the exposed set that demystifes patriarchial mechanical workings of the orgasmic, yet barren deus ex machina, where, hidden from the audience, she lets loose the wondrous objects from her bag—foating glowing worm-like ropes, a snake, a toothed insect whose wings unfold the red settee, fowers, toys and dolls that increase in size and drift into the audience and theatre space. This is a release of the childhood feminine made visible and tangible by a creative act of the woman artist, reshaping and reconstructing the status quo public imaginary of the (empty) feminine. The reverse vaginal fow exudes a creative act of sexual power into the theatre, challenging the notion of the feminine as only a receptor, and showing that something other than the phallic child can be produced for the community. The audience marvels at the foating objects, reaching up for them as they drift through the now gender-politicised space. Contrary to Copjec’s assertion, Pitt’s fgure has not remained in nature, outside society. She has imbued the latter—the public theatre space—with graphically reifed feminine creativity as a swarm of animated forms. Returning home to the room full of objects released in the theatre, she removes the mask (which has a woman’s face painted inside it), and her blue coat dissolves to reveal her nakedness. She enters the night 210 S. BUCHAN garden of asparagus, and the remaining minutes of the flm are ‘close- ups’ of a red-lipsticked mouth in her otherwise featureless face, and her lips sensually, erotically envelop and fellate, frst, and last, a spear of asparagus. Discussing George Bataille’s ‘reconfguration of the human body’, Arya notes his argument that the mouth ‘should not be simply thought of as the organ of speech and language that separates us from animals, but as the organ of consumption and violence … [and he] also emphasizes the animalistic aspects of the human mouth, how it communicates violent emotion such as anger or disgust’ (2014, 78). Yet with each upward movement, the phallic form is transformed into a waterfall, fexing metal, pastel-coloured lozenges, sparkling jewels, which fow from, not into, her otherwise faceless, lipsticked mouth. These reverse fows are similar to the objects she released in the theatre, connoting instead of the abject bodily secretion—sperm—the creative imaginary. In performing another ‘animalised’, sometimes violent sexual act—fellatio—with its purpose to pleasure men to the cli- max of ejaculation, again, through a cognitive dissonance, Pitt’s faceless ‘everywoman’ reclaims the cinematic ‘money shot’ as the eroticised red-lipped female mouth pursues her own pleasure. Pitt also exposes and fips how the feminine is socially constructed on an unconscious level. In claiming Pitt’s objectifcation of a woman, Copjec’s critiques are, in my view, not the only ways of understanding Asparagus. The female fgure becomes an active, desiring subject, a faceless imaginary, an imaginary that is the creative source for Pitt’s art when the flm was made.

Tabaimo: Intimacy, Abjection and ‘Mushi’ I now make a cultural and temporal transition from the space, and feminist spatial politics, of Pitt’s 1970s doll’s house to the animation installations of the Japanese artist Tabaimo (one of her recurring themes is also the doll’s house). After Tabaimo’s graduation piece, Japanese Kitchen (1999), was shown at Kyoto City Art Museum in the same year, her animated works have entered the domain of animation as ‘art’; they are rarely screened in cinemas or festivals. Much of her work centres on personal isolation in intimate interiors occupied by women: domestic settings (Japanese Kitchen), a public toilet (public conVENience, 2006), a woman’s home (yudangami, 2009). Others take the body’s fragility as their theme: a man’s body covered with Yakuza tattoo-like designs THE ANIMATED FEMALE BODY, FEMINISM(S) AND ‘MUSHI’ 211

(hanabi-ra, 2003), and wringing hands (guigunorama, 2006). I read her flms in part through what Arya describes as ‘Bataille’s understanding of abjection [that] does not involve psychoanalysis and is rooted in the socio-political where it accounts for the dynamic of rejection and exclusion in relation to the socially disenfranchised’ (2014, 72). There is a shared psychoanalytic theme in Tabaimo’s and Pitt’s works: abjection and libido, or sexual desire. Pitt’s align to Carl Jung’s (also problematic) defnition of libido as the free creative—or psychic—energy an individual has to put towards personal development; for Pitt, this energy is expressed in the erotically informed creativity of the woman artist as an individual. In the ensuing discussion of Tabaimo, I will present libido through a more Freudian lens, as an instinctive energy of force contained within the unconscious, introducing a libido–related concept in Japanese culture of behavioural tradition: ‘mushi’ (虫).5 My focus is on public conVENience, shown as part of Tabaimo. Boundary Layer at Parasol Unit, London, in 2010. It was projected onto three walls in a large, dark rectangular room, with a polished black foor for observers to stand on or walk around. The three-channel installation had a very light, almost ephemeral narrative structure, mostly based in actions and changes of setting, with a subtle soundtrack that under- pinned the disturbing invasion of (male) voyeurism in this public, yet private, women’s space. The viewer experience was of full-sized animated women fgures carrying out private actions centred around their bodies, and their bodies’ expulsions, in a space where the open fourth wall negates their privacy. A number of motifs appear in Tabaimo’s works—for instance, the moth. While butterfies are a popular Western symbol that symbolises emerging beauty and grace, Tabaimo’s choice of the moth carries a much darker meaning in Japan; moths are included in a zoological and sociocultural taxonomy and typology called ‘mushi’ (虫), which is usually translated as the Japanese word for ‘insect’. As described in a semantic analysis by anthropologist Eric Laurent, the ‘“ethnocategory” mushi’ collectively refers to insects, larva and small animals in Japanese culture (Laurent 1995, 61).6 While it has clear zoological and entomologi- cal meanings, the word mushi also means a second soul or heart within one’s heart and is used idiomatically as ‘mysteries of the heart’ (Itonis Humanities 2010). It has a range of cultural meanings in Japan that are much closer to the depths of being and the unconscious, and it has been compared with Freud’s concept of libido (ibid.). 212 S. BUCHAN

Examples of mushi include its reference to a series of illnesses, such as stomach aches or nervous complaints (guigunorama features two hands that fall apart and reassemble with vivid and changing colours, and can be considered autobiographical, as Tabaimo suffered from dermatitis). It is linked to the concepts of mind or spirit and also refers to unconscious- ness in general, to psychological states not fully actualised, or related to hidden or suppressed feelings, and this is relevant when considering some rather strict social rules in Japanese culture. Laurent provides some examples of a variety of expressions that use the word mushi:

‘my mushi are painful’ (mushi ga itai) to signify ‘abdominal pains;’ ‘to calm down one’s mushi’ (mushi ga shizumaru) to mean ‘to appease one’s tem- per;’ ‘my mushi does not like him/her’ (mushi ga sukanai) to mean an instinctive antipathy for someone hardly known; ‘my (his, your …) mushi are in the wrong place’ (mushi no idokoro ga warui) meaning ‘to be in a bad mood;’ and so on. (1995, 64)

Mushi also polices Japanese tendencies of gender difference, and it is a term largely limited to the world of males. Young boys are encouraged to play with tangible forms of mushi—insects, worms, small animals—while young girls are taught they are dirty and disgusting. In Japan, a girl’s fear of mushi is considered sweet, pretty, lovely or delicate. When Laurent questioned Japanese women about mushi, he often got the response ‘I’m a woman, I can’t understand that type of thing’ (67). He describes a fourth semantic level where mushi refers to ‘a person who is passionately fond of something [i.e. someone is ‘mushi about something’], or else to denigrate someone’s habits’ (64). Laurent writes that while ‘[f]unda- mentally, a mushi is a thing that crawls and creeps there are also fying mushi, and when shown a dead mushi, ‘many Japanese will ask whether it fies, crawls, creeps or swims … one of the mushi’s most feared features is its sudden and unpredictable movements. This is true for butterfies and moths’ (69–70). Against this non-Western cultural background, it is crucial to understand symbolic mushi forms in Tabaimo’s public conVENience that appear at different points in the projected animation. The locus of Tabaimo’s subject—a women’s public toilet—clearly associates moth mushi with the Japanese male’s mushi sexual passion for the scatological—that is, the interest in defecation. We see a moth, that fies around a naked woman’s hips, then others being released by four pairs of male THE ANIMATED FEMALE BODY, FEMINISM(S) AND ‘MUSHI’ 213 hands that futter around and fll all three screens; viewers hear the click of a camera and, ‘illuminated’ by the camera fash, a huge moth seems to futter across the illusion of the rectangular central void framed by the triple screens. This is followed by a prone male fgure, in birthing position, apparently defecating, but not quite, as it is a mobile phone that appears from under his left leg—that is also the camera we have heard. This presents a case of mushi in Laurent’s fourth semantic sense, and the passion is voyeurism, a staple of Tabaimo’s works, here specifcally of Japanese male scatological obsession with young girls’ toilet habits. Pitt’s fgure defecates too, but rather than the abject, shameful product of shit, asparagus spears fow from her body to later reappear in the garden, an iterative, circular fecundity of the pleasures of production, creation and return. Mushi also refers to Japanese women’s own unconscious—or perhaps self-suppressed—feelings and desires, and partially actualised psychological states. A sequence in public conVENience depicts the schism between a young woman and her autonomous refection in the mirror, which uses a hammer to break the glass, representing the breaking of the male imposition on the female gaze—and to psychosomatic illness, as the woman stands still, head bowed, as though distraught or perplexed. In another sequence of a young woman behind the closed bathroom stall door, she gives birth through her nose, through the abject fuid of nasal phlegm, and fushes the homunculus down the toilet on the back of a turtle—an unmistakeable example of fauna mushi. An obvious reference to secret abortion, surely some of which are really fushed down such public conveniences, Tabaimo here refers perhaps hopefully to longev- ity, which is what the turtle also symbolises: here is a promise of life for a discarded foetus. Or the reference is bitterly ironic, and signifes the long-lasting memory of the tragedy for women who discarded such foe- tuses. Pitt’s woman escapes both tragedies by avoiding motherhood altogether in favour of her own creative fecundity. These are just a few of many examples of ambivalent and polyvalent abject meanings for the fgures, things and creatures in Tabaimo’s installation works; shame and abjection can be read in her images and cognitive dissonance evoked when watching them. What is simultaneously compelling and unsettling in her works is how she presents the frustra- tion and suppression of sexual desire in her psychosexual explorations of mushi and abjection in wider Japanese social and behavioural systems, where the individual must succumb to the group, and the libido 214 S. BUCHAN is subdued by consciousness, shame and guilt. Front projection and proportions of the life-size female fgures and installation environment implicate the visitor, who oscillates between non-participatory observation and implication as a voyeur/witness to intimate personal events— for instance, when we are ‘standing’ across from a woman in underwear washing herself at a sink (Fig. 1). We experience Arya’s ambivalence here: ‘[f]ascination pulls the viewer in, while we remain at arm’s length because of the danger the abject exerts’ (2014, 5). For Pitt, while there is only one distinct fguration of the ethnocategory of mushi in her flm—a type of bee—her symbolic forms of mushi are a positive, empowering ‘gut feeling’. She creates psychosexual imagery that refects on the individual, and her mushi—not a set of internalised objects of erotic suppression—are defecated asparagus, foating forms and neon lozenges, sparkles, coloured ‘candy’ and writhing mushi ‘fur’ in the woman’s mouth. Besides cognitive dissonance, these

Fig. 1 Installation view displaying intimacy of human scale and proximity of a gallery visitor in the space. Tabaimo, Public ConVENience (2006). The Parasol Unit, London, 2010. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York THE ANIMATED FEMALE BODY, FEMINISM(S) AND ‘MUSHI’ 215 can also evoke a sense of the uncanny: Laurent suggests one of the most salient characteristics of mushi as a category is that it ‘refers to the multi- tude, the undefned, the unnamed, unspecialized, as opposed to the well known, the precisely named’ (1995, 69). Pitt’s mushi symbolise suppressed creativity of the unnamed, faceless woman artist. Couzin interprets these objects as a ‘relation of objects to self’, that effect a shift from narcissism to one of ‘spectacle and power … through unusual objects and bizarre relationships, we are consistently asked to see the protagonist as flmmaker or creator of the flm’ (1997, 76). Yet Pitt shifts this narcissism, also of the woman’s domestic interior, to the outside, by instru- mentalising mushi in the public community in the theatre—distinct from Tabaimo’s intimate ‘public’ toilet—releasing the fying objects from her bag. She joyfully constructs the shared experience of a new unconscious, fowing creative feminine, and not what Copjec describes as ‘a world of feminine interiority … severely distanced from an exterior social world— the clay people at the theatre’ (1980–1981, 241). Pitt also challenges gender’s status quo as the patriarchal iconicity of fellatio and its abjection are reinterpreted and translated into a lingual, tactile self-pleasuring: jewels, colours and liquid gush out from, not into, her mouth. She remains faceless because she has chosen to remain outside the patriarchal constriction of creativity. What Tabaimo’s and Pitt’s works share is that both clearly also intend the second contrary connotation of the fourth semantic meaning of mushi: to denigrate someone’s habit. For Pitt, this is expressed in her critique of the patriarchal, pathosexual exterior world (guns, dildos, pills) that she joyfully undermines by literally (at least graphically) flling the theatre with objects that captivate the (puppet animation) audience. Tabaimo’s more sobering, and unsettling, critique is of voyeuristic, scatological Japanese male toilet fetishism, and she uses a critical voice to visually articulate women’s private fears and abject experiences in a wom- ens’ private, yet public, space, and this animated space is located in the public gallery space of her installations. Pitt and Tabaimo, and the animated styles and techniques they work with, confront the viewers with abject situations where they can engage empathetically and critically with the animated fgures. Abjection in these works is less punitively framed by the flmmakers as they work with the abject strategically, to a wider advantage to women generally, by also undermining stabilities of cultural discourse in the West and East. 216 S. BUCHAN

From the Personal Is Political to the Politics of the Everyday: Rose Bond and Marina Zurkow Moving from the isolation and alienation of the individual as found in Pitt’s and Tabaimo’s works, I now refect on two important fgures working in contemporary non-cinematic exhibition: Rose Bond and Marina Zurkow, whose animated installations play with, challenge and question spatial politics by incorporating site-specifc and urban building exteriors and interiors. I will comparatively describe (post-) feminist and other strategies in their works in thematics of community, social politics and participation. Rose Bond is a highly engaged artist and performer working across a band of moving-image media, and she has been creating installations for close to two decades. While she has made flms since 1982, her more recent work contributes to an emerging recognition of animation as a viable exhibition form for museum and galleries and for a variety of other venues. As with Tabaimo and Pitt, the thematics of the majority of Bond’s creative output originate in personal experience—of the everyday, of struggles during the creative process, of solitude and observation— transmuted into works that are accessible to a wide range of audiences. With affnities to Pitt and echoing second wave feminism’s ‘the personal is political’, her work shows great artistic awareness of the power of the animated image to convey subjective experience and personal interpretation. Bond’s approach and methods are deeply collaborative in nature, and the participatory element of her work often lies in her research process, which includes engagement with people living in and affected by her choice of installation sites. She can be considered a third-wave feminist, in that she celebrates difference, individualism and community, and much of her work draws on autobiographical experience. Her Intra Muros, also presented at the Platform Festival in 2007,7 was installed at the Utrecht Stadhuis in Holland during the 2008 Holland Animation Film Festival. The animated images, created by drawing and painting, are unspectacular: over a series of window frames, a self-portrait moves back and forth, pausing in front of a computer, vacuuming, chasing a chicken (a nod to Norman McLaren) that escapes from a box. The framing shifts from perspectivally correct shots of her form in the window to medium and large close-ups of her face; we see her at a table, bowed over her computer as ideas emerge like white thought bubbles from her head (Fig. 2). Against the proportions of the building’s architecture, these THE ANIMATED FEMALE BODY, FEMINISM(S) AND ‘MUSHI’ 217

Fig. 2 Composite image of installation view with a passer-by watching and detail of one of the projections (lower right). Rose Bond, Intra Muros (2008), Utrecht Stadhuis, Holland. Courtesy of Rose Bond intimate images become gargantuan, simultaneously retaining a communicative, personal appeal, and these scenes are followed with segments of abstract colourful animations. Intra Muros (within [city] walls) ‘delivers a personal and voyeuristic glimpse into an artist’s struggles with creative malaise’ (Intra Muros 2012). Bond is increasingly supported by public art projects, such as the site-specifc Broadsided! (2010) in Exeter Castle in the UK. She suggests the installation, ‘sparked by [her] research in the city archives of Exeter in the County of Devon, takes a tale of petty crime and juxtaposes it against images of power, class and luck to question the very premise of justice’ (Biggs 2010). Almost all of her installations work with an inside/ outside motif and use extant architectural exteriors and interiors, often seen through actual windows. This permits spontaneous engagement with passers-by, who are unexpectedly confronted with disturbing visual narratives in the nine-window installation: the arrest and execution of a sheep thief, a lateral panopticon of jailers with dogs, military parades, a trio of white-wigged judges ‘remind’ observers of the castle’s historical infamy as a jail. An earlier example of this revision of history is Gates of Light (2004), an eight-channel installation on and in the 118-year-old 218 S. BUCHAN

Eldridge Street synagogue on an urban New York Lower East Side street, which also marked the 350th anniversary of Jewish life in the USA. Supported by the non-denominational Eldridge Street Project based in the synagogue and by Bloomberg, Bond herself describes the project as a ‘multi-windowed animated projection that exists at the juncture of history, architecture and public art. It is cinema situated in the neighborhood and referencing the specifc experiences of those who inhabited the site’ (Eldridge Street Project Press Release 2004). The projected flms refect on multicultural and multidenominational residents of the area, including Chinese-language street signs and interplay with the synagogue’s architectural features. The soundtrack, an element of her work to which Bond pays especial attention, is heard on the street and includes a variety of voices and languages that add emphasis and character to the presence of the contemporary population of this part of Manhattan. In this way, Bond’s installation achieves some of her artistic and philosophical aims of celebrating difference, inclusion and observation of the everyday. This range of concerns refects Tasker and Negra’s conception of ‘postfeminist culture [that] works in part to incorporate, assume, or naturalise aspects of feminism; crucially, it also works to commodify feminism via the fgure of woman as empowered consumer’ (2007, 2). Bond’s appropriation of public space for private expression is similar to both Pitt’s and Tabaimo’s, in that all include a public space—animated or otherwise. But Bond’s installations are also a sustainable form of non-conspicuous consumption; the stages for her works require little or no new materials. She usurps highly esteemed public buildings for her art, adding new secular, communal meaning to their original use as sacred places of worship, aristocratic seats or locales of local government and power. Effecting a subtle shift from third wave to a positive form of postfeminism, Bond leaves the confnes of the cinema behind, and with it the powers of curators, programmers and commercial production and distribution hegemonies. Her site-specifc installations are independent artworks, open to all who pass by; no belief system, aristocratic title or party membership required. Marina Zurkow is an artist whose creativity is in part focused on animation and the cartoon, and her installations are often multiscreen, have unusual formats and are sometimes site-specifc.8 Like Bond, she has also made performance pieces that emphasise audience participation and is also an educator.9 Her loose narratives share with Pitt, Tabaimo and Bond a focus on community, but they are signifcantly expanded to thematise human relationships to fora, fauna and environments (Marina THE ANIMATED FEMALE BODY, FEMINISM(S) AND ‘MUSHI’ 219

Zurkow website). Zurkow is also interested in turning the often infan- tilising iconography of (postfeminist) culture—including ‘sophisticated’ girls, fetish objects, labels and cartoony characters—into occasionally grotesque and often beautiful schisms that destabilise viewers. Some of her works could be considered feminist, in that they play with gender- bending and escaping sexualisation: her fgures are often strange yet endearing combinations of animal, vegetable and human. For example, the exhibition of Nicking the Never (2004) at FACT, Liverpool, UK, consisted of a set of seven animations linked by the presence of a young girl in a range of situations, from superhighway fyovers and underwater worlds to bizarre, burlesque barnyards and megalopoli. We see her in various physical and emotional states—headless, a skeleton, clothed, or almost naked, boxing with herself and a shadow: the images ‘luridly and vividly describe the emotional taxonomy of human struggle with need, jealousy, complacence, aggression, desire, and ego’ (Marina Zurkow website). Zurkow’s work is often participatory, in that she offers the visitors opportunities to directly interact and intervene: in a previous version of Nicking the Never, motion sensors on the screens allowed users to collectively ‘play’ them. Slurb (2009) is an 18-minute flm commissioned by the City of Tampa, Georgia, for ‘Lights on Tampa’ 2009 and was later widely screened internationally. Projected on a large exterior wall of the St Pete Times Forum, perspectival layers of fat, cartoon-like stylised fgures and objects foating in semi-opaque water lead the eye to distant, apocalyptic backgrounds of a more sombre, monochrome stylisation. The colourful design and discreet soundtrack is a seductive strategy; it initially belies, then reveals, environmental and social critiques. The slow and persistent passage of the foreground objects—mostly facing left on screen (from the observer’s point of view)—as the camera ‘moves’ slowly but relent- lessly to the left of the frame insinuates an exodus of a disconnected community, foating on murky water full of rubbish and half-sunken cars, from and towards an unknown place (Fig. 3). If the backgrounds can give us any indication, the world of Slurb (a portmanteau word of ‘burb’ (suburb), ‘slum’ and ‘slur’) is a cautionary tale of climate change, mass migration and the dissolution of social groups. Megan Voeller suggests:

In contrast with its tremulous sweetness, Slurb weaves a dystopian narrative about the real possibility of environmental cataclysm … These ‘freaks’ – some social outliers seemingly native to the region (mermaids, a carnie, a ranting evangelist), others truly hybrid creatures with animal 220 S. BUCHAN

Fig. 3 Apocalyptic fow of rubbish, destruction and human and animal forms. Marina Zurkow, Slurb (2009). Courtesy of bitforms gallery and the artist

heads and human bodies – become survivors. In a role reversal that upends conventional power structures, they endure. (Voeller 2009)

Zurkow’s agenda is oriented to humanist and environmental concerns, a signifcant strategy in the postfeminist vacuum that has elided feminist activism, and she is also a playful and ferce advocate of open source politics and of shared knowledge. In an interview with Ruth Ozecki, Zurkow makes sensitive distinctions between ethics, morals and personal interest:

I actually do not think I am making morally responsible work. I may be making personally responsible work, and hope that through exploring some of these questions, I end up offering alternatives to the status quo that is useful to people. I am not a feminist or any other ‘ist’ per se; I am a woman who addresses issues that concern me – independence, body image, social interactions – because they are the questions that can be asked over and over, and when put to oneself make for a more interesting and conscious (though not necessarily conscientious) world. (Ozecki 2008)

Rather than formulating questions of gender, race and privilege, or invoking psychoanalytic or symptomatic meanings, Zurkow manages to force us to formulate our own questions about these and other themes THE ANIMATED FEMALE BODY, FEMINISM(S) AND ‘MUSHI’ 221 her works present us with. Some do critique and refect on highly contemporary issues of global warming, the information society overload and isolation and alienation of the individual. While Slurb’s colourful imagery and its themes are less about the individual and more about collective responsibility for environmental and human Schicksal, it shares with Bond’s work a strategic use of public architecture and local communities: Voeller observes that ‘[t]he conditions of mediated representation surrounding Hurricane Katrina are worth noting here as a particular context for Slurb—and for viewers in Tampa, a city situated, like New Orleans, on the Gulf of Mexico’ (2009). The viewer was invited to consider how the animation relates to the buildings it is projected on and to refect on metaphor-laden relationships to the urban location and other viewers and passers-by: a lit car park, rubbish bins, a neon-topped offce building.10 By incorporating contemporary themes that are not gender-specifc and (will) affect us all, Zurkow further achieves a politics of the everyday by confronting us with environmental research and post-Katrina cautionary imagery. Her flm is less science ‘fction’ than science ‘fact’, notably since the 2017 fooding disasters on the west coast of the USA. Bond’s and Zurkow’s shifts from Tabaimo’s and Pitt’s interior exhibition spaces and screens to exterior, site-specifc installation are strategies in thematics of community, social politics and participation. These strategies can concurrently be regarded as a strategy to shift from feminism to postfeminism by transforming the personal as political—as demonstrated in Pitt’s work—into an encouragement towards a shared politics of the everyday. This is a politics also found in Tabaimo’s unsettling work, but with a focus on the isolation and alienation of the individual; Tabaimo’s and Pitt’s flms are different from Bond’s and Zurkow’s community-building thematics. Yet in Asparagus, women fgures are not abject nor are they objects of voyeurism, and in this way Pitt does bear comparison with Bond and Zurkow, both of whom are working in a postfeminist context that, however, is not concerned with a ‘pastness’ of feminism.

Miwa Matreyek: Performing the Animated Female Body Moving from the community, I now return to the individual, and shift the focus from architectural and urban installation to the (animated) body in contemporary performance.11 Miwa Matreyek is an artist who uses her body to interact on a stage with her animated flms. I had the 222 S. BUCHAN good fortune to see Matreyek’s Myth and Infrastucture (which was performed at the prestigious TED Global 2010 to enthusiastic acclaim) in 2015 at the Museum for Design, Zurich. As it has an especial focus on the body, here I will address Dreaming of Lucid Living (2007), awarded the Student Grand Prize at the Platform Festival. Minimal use of light on the artist’s body, mainly visible as a black silhouette, and meticulous rear and front projection on a central screen result in an illusion of her occupying projected animated interiors and urban architecture and engaging with real forms (a chair, curtains, a milk carton behind the screen that appear as silhouettes) and animated objects (a table, an oven mitt, a microscope, a cat, an egg in a cup). By also positioning herself on either side of the screen (with animated front and/or rear projection), and moving between the light source and screen, the relative size of her body also changes, ‘growing’ larger or smaller. In another scene, Matreyek places a number of knee—and ankle-high box forms on stage. Animations projected on their blank frontal surfaces transform them into an urban cityscape, and the artist into a gentle giantess. At the start, in a kitchen with projected stove, Matreyek is a dark silhouette who then sits on a chair positioned in front of the screen, peering through a microscope that magically emerges and grows into a complex steampunk tel- escope. She ‘places’ her hands on one of the graphically animated tubes, and simultaneously we see what she sees: in a round telescopic portal top left of the frame, coloured forms and biological development at cellular level seethe and fow. By reframing and reconfguring her actual physical position on the stage, Matreyek is embedded in the animated world, a world subordinate to the live performer. In most scenes, the animated world’s actions and changes are instigated and controlled by her in two signifcant ways: the animation is fully a product of single-frame artworks she created, and the timing, proportions, movement and metamorphoses of these spaces and objects are designed to be a choreography with her living body during projection. Like Pitt, Tabaimo and Bond, in Matreyek’s performance the female fgure is central, but it is not a simulacrum or drawn fgurative representation. The artist’s corporeal, real-time presence and actions interact in a careful choreography with projected animated spaces, shapes and forms. With this control she claims, occupies and engages with them in a way not possible in the animated installation works of Bond, Zurkow, Pitt or Tabaimo.12 In one sequence, Matrayek’s physical presence is invaded and covered by projections of a fantasy of animated THE ANIMATED FEMALE BODY, FEMINISM(S) AND ‘MUSHI’ 223 interior body parts: a connected set of lines projected on her torso becomes a construction of laboratory vials and tubes, then a skeleton, frst simple white lines, then colour, then flled with white fowers, a clockwork brain. Motherhood is also a theme shared with Pitt (creativity instead of procreation) and Tabaimo (the ambivalent act of abortion), but here it is less political, more light-hearted and more indicative of (postfeminist) choice. In the same animated sequence, her silhouette torso now flled with a ribcage, fowers and leaves, a blue egg appears in a nest of twigs in the womb’s location, cracks and becomes a fried egg, identical to one we have seen in a previous scene in a kitchen that dropped from a cracked heart into a frying pan; the audience watches as the performer interacts with the animation (Fig. 4). Matreyek articulates ambivalence of female reproduction with a musical soundtrack, specifcally during a segment of a female voice (Anna Oxygen) singing about a ‘biological crush’ that takes the audience through contemporary postfeminist conundrums of motherhood, biology and gender: ‘There’s no difference between me and you, the light falls on us the same. There’s no difference between me and you, you know the sky holds us the same,’ reinforcing the imagery with logos, but not in a patriarchal understanding of the term. This is distinct from Kopjec’s framing of Asparagus as a politically regressive expression of gender-biological essentialism. Matreyek’s playful, beautifully animated works and thematics are close to Zurkow’s Slurb, and both Zurkow’s ‘enduring’ hybrid freaks and Matreyek’s animated biological crush break free of the constraints that McRobbie proposes are imposed upon the (postfeminist) female subject to be silent and ‘withhold critique, to count as a modern, sophisticated girl’ (2009, 18). A trope prevalent in all fve artists’ works—domestic and urban, inside and outside—is played out in Matreyek’s performance via intimate graphic stylisations projected on her body and urban cityscapes located in the same (proscenium and projected) frame. While the performer is ‘located’ mostly in domestic interiors, the collaboration between her physical self and her projected, imagined animated world complicates a feminist reading of her being ‘outside’ society for a number of reasons. It is in front of this very society (the audience) that she performs her works; her animated realms of urbanity, creativity, nature and domesticity, and simultaneously appearing combinations of these, are completely of her making, and she can effortlessly move between them, eliminating inside/ outside boundaries. Matreyek: 224 S. BUCHAN

Fig. 4 Miwa Matreyek in silhouette interacting with projected animation as she performs Dreaming of Lucid Living (2007) on a stage in front of a seated audience. Image provided by artist

with my work, it’s very much about the body being a part of the animation and cinematic experience. Animators are control freaks. We can control every frame, every pixel—and my solo work is sort of an extension of that, where every thing is very choreographed and precise. (quoted in Denny 2010)

Like the other artists discussed in this chapter, Matreyek harnesses the ‘ability’ of animation to visually depict thought, personal experience and THE ANIMATED FEMALE BODY, FEMINISM(S) AND ‘MUSHI’ 225 subjectivity and merges these with the lived phenomenal world. But Matreyek takes this further than the gallery and site-specifc installations of Bond, Tabaimo and Zurkow, because the performative aspect introduces a self-refexive and self-referential interaction between the artist, her animated world and the physical world she is present in. This physical, performative presence connects the disparate world of drawn projection with the palpable world around us. It allows viewers to be in the artist’s physical presence as she experiences a self-created, and controlled, ‘exploration of shadow and animation and themes of domestic spaces, dream-like vignettes, large and small cities, magical powers’ (Matreyek, in Denny 2010): a foating blimp and skyscraper top bill- board proclaim ‘YOU’ in bold red capitals.

Conclusion In the visual surfaces of their flms, animators can have as much, if not more, to say not only about art, media and the moving image, but can also challenge, critique and subvert patriarchal and postfeminist ide- ologies in the narratives that are embedded, obliquely or not, in their works. The fve featured artists are receptive to these opportunities, and some formal and aesthetic convergences and distinctions observed in their works, a set of dichotomies and tensions, relate to observations I made at the start about feminist concerns. In the predominantly disen- franchising current climate of third-wave (post- and pseudo-) feminism, what these works—and some works of other animators, both men and women—maintain of feminism is a commitment to a larger heteroge- neous community. By transforming the second-wave position that the personal is political into a third-wave feminist politics of the everyday, with representations of both strong and sensitive, celebratory and abject animated female fgures, this animated (post-) feminism is less personal, but more embracing and inclusive of the wider audience it addresses. The political aesthetics of the artists I have discussed rely on the tensions between the fgurative and the symbolic. What is really at stake is how the symbolic is used to critique the fgurative’s signifcations. Matreyek, like Bond, Zurkow and Pitt, undermines paternity with its own weapons and celebrates, actively makes and transforms the feminine object into a proactive subject. Bond and Matreyek’s works are less psychoanalytically and negatively loaded than the works of Tabaimo or Pitt, in part because of the formers’ implementation of objects and constellations with the 226 S. BUCHAN self—as animated or living, interacting performer—and also because they are not furtive or would otherwise be hidden from sight. Tabaimo, rely- ing more on the symbolic, and the constrictions, morals and social rules of Japanese society, is postfeminist in Tasker and Negra’s disempower- ing, silencing sense. But by using a strategy of observation rather than self-representation, by animating intimate events to expose and critique voyeuristic behaviours that document her own personal observations, the viewer/visitor position is both unwilling voyeur and silent witness to Japanese women’s abject experiences. Tabaimo presents fgures of feminine abjection to critique patriarchy and Japanese sociocultural norms, but she leaves the uncomfortable questioning to us. For these and other artists, the technique of animation offers an advantage over live-action flm for the interface of personal/public, in that it permits a moving-image representation of otherwise invisible personal experience and subjectivity, and it can give the viewer access to artistically generated and fully controlled animated spaces and places. Perhaps more importantly in terms of this chapter’s underlying feminist concerns, animation offers a creative medium that they can use to visually and critically articulate observations and experiences of others. While we may have left behind what Jayne Pilling describes as the ‘agit-prop impulse of the Leeds Animation Workshop’ (1992, 5), in the 25 years since her Women in Animation was published, what remains unchanged is that

animation can also give voice to the intensely personal – in content as well as in terms of production: unhampered by the constraints of naturalism or the organisational complexities of live action feature flmmaking. The animated short flm can provide, quite literally, a blank page on which to draw forth an imaginative vision which can communicate, and can do so also without words. (Pilling 1992, 6)

The sometimes joyful, occasionally serene and often unsettling works discussed in this chapter also address concerns that have universal contemporary currency, ranging from new modes of perception and cultural commodifcation to issues of the urban and natural environments. Commercial theatrical animation flms mostly do not want to draw attention to the ‘otherness’ of the world they create. They want to engage the audience in familiar rituals and conventions of human behaviour that live-action flm also deploys. I would suggest that animation experienced THE ANIMATED FEMALE BODY, FEMINISM(S) AND ‘MUSHI’ 227 as (site-specifc) installation and performance such as I have described makes viewers collectively conscious of a mediation of the very act of seeing. The artists’ handling of the female subject evades postfeminism’s critique of feminism as ‘past’ and censorious, and offers a mediation of taking into their own hands a positive commodifcation of the female body. The animated fgures in these fve artists’ works not only bear relation to our own through an array of aesthetic, cultural and behavioural schemata, themes and symbols. The spaces they ‘inhabit’ in projection are complicated and enriched by the shared experience of multiple viewers, whether in a lit gallery space, at an installation’s site-specifc location, or in the performative physical presence of the artist on stage. This shared experience is distinct from cinema reception, where the viewer, in a dark room, can engage in isolation with the large-format screen of the flmic world. The spectator must not only fnd the cues that relate to her own experience of the world and of the experienced ‘worlds’ of these works, she must also actively engage with the artists’ animated realms and the architectural spaces they are located in. This is, indeed, one of the great attractions of the form for viewers, as these animated ‘worlds’ can assuage individual alienation and offer a positive, community- building critique of the increasing isolation of the contemporary individual.

Notes 1. I thank Nic Sammond and Maggie Hennefeld for encouraging me to work with the concept of abjection in an (unfulflled) invitation to contribute to their anthology on the subject. 2. Asparagus continues to be exhibited and screened internationally, including at the 2017 Bodymania programme, with Suzan Pitt in discussion at Tate Modern, London. 3. With the exception of some shots of puppet animation, any reference in this chapter to camera movement, lighting and effects are to formal elements created by the design and animation of the artist’s drawings, and not achieved by technical means. 4. As animation is shot with a static rostrum camera, all camera movements are created by movement of or within a series of drawings or puppet animation set. 5. I thank Mark Bartlett for introducing me to this concept. 6. Laurent describes an ethnocategory as ‘a category of thinking bound to a specifc culture or peculiar traits of a given culture, as much as the criteria for an object to belong to this criteria are culture-dependent’ (1995, 62). 228 S. BUCHAN

7. The Platform Festival in Portland (OR) USA, curated and directed by Irene Kotlarz, promoted exhibition and installation to a central event of the festival, including a prize for Best Installation that was awarded to Gregory Barsamian for No Never Alone (1997). A highlight of the festival was the animated installation event in Portland’s Pearl District, which featured works by established and emerging artists. 8. Zurkow is prolifc, creating interactive mobile phone and web works, pop objects and sculptures and icon-based non-animated art; she also designs software and participatory climate and environment workshops. 9. Zurkow teaches at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in the graduate-level Interactive Technology Program, an interdisciplinary programme with a focus on interactivity and art informed by and conferred through technology. 10. For details on the flm and the installation, see http://www.o-matic.com/ play/slurb/. 11. It should be noted that describing performance is complicated by its lack of reproducibility—as in theatre, every performance with living bodies is different and ephemeral, unlike the screening of images captured in photochemical imagery. 12. As I have not seen performances from these artists, they cannot be dealt with in this chapter.

References Arya, Rina. 2014. Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Biggs, Becca. 2010. An Art of Ambiguity, Contradiction and Uncompleted Gestures. http://untitled.pnca.edu/articles/show/656/. Copjec, Joan. 1980–1981. D’Asparagus. Millennium Film Journal 7/8/9 (Fall/ Winter): 238–241. Couzin, Sharon. 1997. An Analysis of Suzan Pitt’s Asparagus and Joanna Priestley’s All My Relations. In A Reader in Animation Studies, ed. Jayne Pilling, 71–81. Sydney: John Libbey. Denny, Drew. 2010. Miwa Matreyek: Illusion and Non-illusion L.A Record, 9 August 2010. http://larecord.com/interviews/2010/08/09/miwa-matreyek- illusion-and-non-illusion. Eldridge Street Project Press Release. 24 March 2004. http://www.eldridge- street.org/about_u_pr.htm#. Intra Muros. 2012. Rose Bond website. http://rosebond.com/work/intra- muros-portland/. Intonis Humanities. 2010. http://itonishumanities.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/ mushi_22.html. THE ANIMATED FEMALE BODY, FEMINISM(S) AND ‘MUSHI’ 229

Jay, Martin. 1994. Force Fields: Abjection Overruled. Salmagundi 103: 234–251. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Laurent, Erick. 1995. Defnition and Cultural Representation of the Category Mushi in Japanese Culture. Society and Animals 3 (1): 61–77. Marina, Zurkow Website. http://www.o-matic.com/play/nicking/. McRobbie, Angela. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage. Mey, Kerstin. 2007. Art and Obscenity. London: I.B. Tauris. Ozecki, Ruth. 2008. Bad(ass) Brains. An Interview with Filmmaker Marina Zurkow, Creator of the Web’s Freaky, Fiesty Cerebelle du Jour, Braingirl. Bitch Media. http://bitchmagazine.org/article/bad-ass-brains. Pilling, Jayne (ed.). 1992. Women in Animation: A Compendium. London: British Film Institute. Pitt, Suzan. Email Correspondence with Suzan Pitt, December 2010. Pitt, Suzan, Laura Kraning, and Blue Kraning. 2007. Spotlight on Suzan Pitt: Independent Animator. Society for Animation Studies Newsletter 20 (1): 28–33. Schmidt, Christopher. 2014. The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tasker, Yvonne, and Diane Negra (eds.). 2007. Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Voeller, Megan. 2009. Marina Zurkow: ‘Slurb’. Catalog Essay for Lights on Tampa 2009 Art Program Catalogue: 1–2. http://o-matic.com/press/ zurkow_slurb_voeller.pdf. “Coming to Life” and Intermediality in the Tableaux Vivants in Magic Mirror (Pucill, 2013) and Confessions to the Mirror (Pucill, 2016)

Sarah Pucill

Prologue The life and work of the French Surrealist photographer and writer Claude Cahun (née Lucy Schwob 1894–1954) and her life partner and collaborator Marcel Moore (née Suzanne Malherbe 1892–1972) is the inspiration for the diptych of flms Magic Mirror (bw, 75 min., Pucill 2013) and Confessions to the Mirror (col., 68 min., Pucill 2016). There has been much debate concerning the question of authorship regarding the photographs that were initially presented to the public as the work of Cahun but more recently are often discussed as a work of collaboration between Cahun and Moore. Cahun’s writing dominates the focus of the authorship of the flms, and in each of the re-staged photographs I discuss here, Cahun’s

S. Pucill (*) University of Westminster, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2018 231 V. Smith and N. Hamlyn (eds.), Experimental and Expanded Animation, Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73873-4_12 232 S. PUCILL writing speaks to directly. Cahun was a member of the Surrealist group and exhibited as an artist with the group and of the photographs that are signed, it is Cahun’s signature. Yet since a questioning of authorship is part of the concern in these flms, I will imagine in some photographs Cahun directing their collaboration and refer variously to the authorship of the photographs. The best-known small black-and-white photographs are of Cahun masquerading in different identities. Both flms comprise an accumulation of tableaux vivants that re-stage many of these photographs alongside voices narrating Cahun’s written text. Shot in a home studio on 16 mm, hand-made life-size and miniature sets animate as tableaux vivants imitations from Cahun’s photographs, many of which she collaborated on with Moore, alongside voices from Cahun’s writing. The text spoken in Magic Mirror is from Cahun’s Aveux non avenus (1930), a Surrealist poetic text that collages poem, essay, monologue, dialogue, dream and letters alongside photogravures that divide the chapters. The writing is a philosophic and psychoanalytic interrogation of self as word and image, published as a collaboration with Moore, who made the photogravures that divide the chapters. Magic Mirror is shot in black and white, and re-enacts many of the self-portrait photographs taken whilst the couple were in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The text used for the voiceover in Confessions to the Mirror is from Cahun’s post-war memoir Confdences au miroir (1945–1946). Mixing colour and black and white, the tableaux vivants and the text in the flm narrate the couple’s war experience in Jersey during the Nazi occupation, their anti-propaganda activity and their imprisonment. Many of the photographs re-enacted are still lives as well as self-portraits taken in their garden, which was next to a church graveyard over- looking the sea. An important inspiration for Magic Mirror and Confessions to the Mirror are two flms I saw shown together and introduced by the flmmakers whilst still studying at the Slade in 1990: Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989), and Sandra Lahire’s Lady Lazarus (1991). Seeing these 16 mm flms at a formative time in my career left a deep impression. Both artists (to use Lahire’s expression) ‘collaborate with a dead artist’. Both collapse time frames through an intense re-working of dead artists’ archives. The use of the word ‘dead’ next to ‘artist’ creates a space to consider what dead or alive means in relation to the life of an artist’s archive. Lahire animated her own rhythms of light and sound to “COMING TO LIFE” AND INTERMEDIALITY IN THE TABLEAUX VIVANTS … 233 dance with Sylvia Plath’s voice reading her poems (Lahire was granted flm rights to use Plath’s voice which to date no Hollywood flms have been accorded since). Like myself, having started her flmmaking with animation, Lahire’s work stitched together her own optically printed superimpositions with Plath’s writing, weaving together still and moving images with a musical soundscape. In a similar way, the flm diptych I will discuss stitches Cahun’s words and photographs, the latter of which I imagine Moore collaborated on. In Looking for Langston, a series of beautifully staged black and white gay men in black and white embrace in frozen tableaux vivants pose, while a camera moves around punctur- ing the illusion of two dimensions. The flm borrows tropes from the photographs of James Van der Zee, George Platt-Lynes from the 1920s and 1930s alongside Julien’s contemporary Robert Mapplethorpe that are woven together with the voice of Langston Hughes. Through the use of tableaux vivants, the flm brings together poetry and jazz music of the Harlem Renaissance with house music of the 1980s. This ‘meeting of joins’ between spoken voice and tableaux vivants, where time periods and media are crossed, is key to what infuenced the use of tableaux vivants in Magic Mirror and Confessions to the Mirror. The seeking of inspiration from a history where black gay narratives within the Harlem Renaissance had been covered over had a political urgency. The release of the flm was followed by a lawsuit because it was seen as a re-writing of history that would expose Langston Hughes’ homosexuality.1 Lahire, who became my partner in the latter half of the 1990s, was concerned with Plath’s critical feminist writing that bears witness to potentially censorious subject matters within mainstream media.2 Her choice to call upon the discipline of literature and to collaborate with a feminist artist of another time was core to the thematic inspiration of Magic Mirror and Confessions to the Mirror. Like the fgures sought by Julien in Looking for Langston, Cahun had been written out of history and discovered by chance several decades after their deaths. Cahun’s status as an independent Jewish feminist les- bian, with communist sympathies and affliation, is likely to have contributed to her lack of visibility within Surrealist circles given the dominating white male heterosexual context of André Breton and his associates. The couple’s invisibility after their deaths, like the omission from legitimised knowledge of Langston Hughes’ sexuality, cuts a stem that would otherwise be nourishing the potential for artists of difference following later. Whilst the photographs are collected in museums worldwide, Cahun’s 234 S. PUCILL writing is much less known and one could argue this work has not been given similar status in comparison to her contemporaries.

Coming to Life It was whilst studying at the Slade in the late 1980s that I was introduced, not only to Lahire and to Julien, but also to Cahun’s work by my tutor Sharon Morris, who was writing a PhD on her work. My long-term interest in psychoanalytic questioning of the self in relation to the world and its objects has framed much of my work and these two most recent flms. Photographs, techniques of animation and the still image are what constituted my early experiments in flm and which have continued as a core element in later work. In what follows I use Thomas Lamarre’s theory of animation and Ágnes Pethő’s writing on intermediality in cinema to situate these ongoing concerns and in particular the way they might contribute to an understanding of my approach to Cahun and Moore’s archive in Confessions to the Mirror and Magic Mirror. I focus on the use of tableaux vivants, in particular examining qualities that highlight what is signifcant in the intersecting between media and authorship in the two flms. In Thomas Lamarre’s text ‘Coming to Life’, he challenges a traditional idea of animation as both adding movement to an object, as well as the idea that movement equates with a ‘coming to life’. There he insists that ‘animation is not a matter of deceiving subjects by skilfully adding movement to non-living objects or images, by imposing active form on passive materials’ (Lamarre 2013, 127). Lamarre’s reading of perception theory, which expands traditional divisions between animation and live action, instead imagines the potential of the prolonging of the image as a crucial element of liveness (Lamarre 2013, 126–130). In the tableaux vivants in Magic Mirror and Confessions to the Mirror, background sets animate whilst, centre stage, the performer remains still. The prolonging of the image as a kind of stillness in flm allows the image to persist through time and so to bring life to archival photographs through a re-enactment as a tableaux vivant. It is possible to consider this ‘coming to life’ of the imitated and mostly inhabited photographs by Cahun as a form of animation. As such, it breaks from the convention of ‘movement-as-life’ at the centre of frame; instead the performer remains still while the background pulsates. In the tableaux vivants I will discuss, the “COMING TO LIFE” AND INTERMEDIALITY IN THE TABLEAUX VIVANTS … 235 stillness is not a literal stillness, since there is movement; it is rather a stillness because the movement is without signifcation. What is added of signifcance to the re-enacting and re–imagining of photographs from Cahun and Moore’s archive, rather than movement, is time.

Intermediality in the Tableaux Vivants In Cinema and Intermediality, Ágnes Pethő describes how, in the past decade, questions of intermediality have been challenged by the growing discussion of the ‘post medium’ condition. Intermediality, she argues needs to be distinguished from an idea of post-medium mixing where specifcity is of no relevance. She quotes David Rodowick: ‘It is impossible to understand multi-mediality without a proper understanding of the individual properties of the media being combined’ (Rodowick 2007, 41). Pethő speculates whether the most debated intermedial image type is the tableau vivant, a site where, she argues, painting and cinema can interact in different ways (Pethő 2011, 44). The question raised here concerns the external reference, or memory, of the painting, which is the crucial element of intermediality in the tableau vivant in Magic Mirror and Confessions to the Mirror, where the memory of a photograph is re-staged. What is very important in a tableau vivant, Pethő explains, is that it ‘does not only mediate between reality and fction or between painting and cinema, but fgurates a more complex intermedial relation’ (Pethő 2011, 44). To elaborate how the tableaux vivants mediate a more complex intermedial relation, Pethő quotes Joachim Paech’s observation:

In a tableau vivant we only have the memory of a painting present and not the painting itself before the camera. The confrontation between cinema and painting unfolds on a third level: the level of the theatre. Such tableaux vivants are actually theatrical scenes, in which the penetration of the camera into the picture means an entrance into a stage-like setting. (Paech 1989, 45)

To borrow Paech’s idea of a confrontation between cinema and painting unfolding on a third level of theatre, the theatrical can be understood in Magic Mirror and Confessions to the Mirror as the physical performance of staging the photograph. The third level Paech describes is where the ambiguity of the original and the imitated photograph is punctuated (the third level) by the opening out of the three and four dimensions 236 S. PUCILL of the theatrical. Cahun performed in an avant-garde theatre group3 and some of her most known images constitute costumes from her performances: Le Diable, Le Monsieur, Barbe Bleu’s wife. But here the theatricality of the flmed tableaux vivants is the performance of re-staging the ‘live’ presence of the performer, where the camera can pierce through the veil of an apparent two-dimensional, but becoming three-dimensional space that is posed in the tableaux. The theatrical is the three-dimensional performance of staging the photograph, of which its physicality is stressed because the moment is both alive and paused at the same time. And this heightened theatricality, where the memory of the photograph from the re-staging arises, is the culminating intermedial moment. In describing the space in between that which is created in the intermedial encounter, Pethő quotes Foucault, who writes of the ‘murmur of the outside’ that borders on the ‘void and “nothingness”’, that is ‘open towards its own infnity’ (Foucault 1998, 147–169; in Pethő 2011, 326). She describes this phenomenon of the intermedial in a cinematic medium as that which remains open to its outside and constantly gravi- tates towards an abysmal collapse into its others—i.e. the other arts. It is ‘something that is in-between, “things stuck in their state of latency,”’ a ‘language about the outside of language, speech about the invisible side of words’ (Foucault 1998, 154; in Pethő 2011, 326). The recall of the original photograph that is prolonged creates an intermedial space of ambiguity between multiple polarities: time period, media and authorship. Indiscernibility occurs between the photograph remembered and the re-enacted image ‘as if’ alongside or overlaying the original image. This interstitial not knowing is the experience of intermediality where the borders between the forementioned categories become indiscernible—for example, to what degree is the experience authored by Cahun, Cahun and Moore or the flmmaker? Am I experiencing a photograph or a performance, a painting or sculpture or text, and which is more prevalent at particular moments? The capacity of a time-based medium to pass between an experience of stillness into movement, or from silence into sound, black and white to colour, etc., increases this capacity to switch between different modes of expression, media or languages. Henk Oosterling compares this experience of intermedial in-between- ness to Barthes’ notion of the ‘punctum’. ‘The spectator is hit: affected and moved by the “punctum”.’4 He considers that this resembles ‘the “COMING TO LIFE” AND INTERMEDIALITY IN THE TABLEAUX VIVANTS … 237 impossible experience of the breaks between two media’ (Oosterling 2003, 37–38). An idea of impossible breaks between media envisages a site of a breaking between the recalled photograph and the flmed re-enactment where ‘what was’ undergoes a remediation. It is a breaking between the authorship of Cahun, of Cahun and Moore and the flmmaker and crew, between time period, and different media, a breaking of what we understand to be impossible and from which something new emerges. The prolonging of the image in the tableaux vivants in Magic Mirror and Confessions to the Mirror emphasises the physical presence as a holding still of the performers. Tactile sensation is heightened because there is time to see and hear the surface textures on screen while stillness is performed and prolonged. The act of holding denies further images appearing on screen and so a space is opened to allow other languages to speak such as the sound, which takes precedence while the pose is held. The accentuation of physicality occurs from a layering between text, sound and screen. The experience of physicality (it is a virtual physicality) is due to the interaction between the senses: the cut between a two-dimensional surface that is punctured into three dimensions, the shock from stillness to movement, black and white to colour, or voices that reinforce or collide with screen and/or aural images. Pethő acknowledges Brigitte Peucker’s writing in The Material Image: Art and Real in Film (2007) in saying that ‘tableaux vivants in cinema are extremely charged instances of intermediality in which, furthermore, the bodily sensation is accentuated, animating the otherwise more abstract image and eliciting a direct, corporeal and emotional response from the viewer’ (Pethő 2011, 44–45). She outlines examples of intermedial cinema in terms of an immediacy through hypermediacy. In the work of Agnes Varda, she sees a personal and tactile language where the flmmaker leaves a trace of her body on the screen, and hails the example of Varda attempting to capture reality within her palm, as if ‘transforming her body into a camera’ (Pethő 2011, 350). In both Magic Mirror and Confessions to the Mirror—more especially in Confessions to the Mirror—there is a strong sense of the flmmaker using her body as a vessel through which to reproduce both the life and work of Cahun and Moore. The body, whether literally or as surrogate, inhabits the performer in the photograph, as well as standing, sitting, lying down in her own space while projections from Jersey equally inhabit the space. The body stands in as a doorway between 1940s Jersey 238 S. PUCILL and London 2015, the body performs the voices and makes the sets and frames the camera. In many of the shots in Confessions to the Mirror, the body appears half in frame, half not, as a wide, point-of-view subjective camera angle, a device which unites the objective observer of camera operator with the body in frame. An intermediality layers the stillness and movement of the tableaux vivants, with a refexive presence that is accessed as much through the body of the flmmaker as it is through the hand-made sets and costumes, using whatever was available in the same way that the original photographs appear to have. And like the ‘desire to reach out and touch the world through hand made pictures’ (Pethő 2011, 350) that Pethő describes in Varda’s flmmaking, likewise such a desire is revealed across the Magic Mirror and Confessions to the Mirror, where literally pictures are fabricated as coloured sets from black- and-white self-portrait and still-life photographs to animate and extend Cahun’s writing. In both flms, the theatrical invents a re-imagining of the moment that the photograph was taken, which extends in some tableaux (they all vary) the moment within the original image, so activating the action already present in the original photograph, such as feathers falling or walking blindfolded and led by the cat on a lead. These performances in the flms alternate with the ‘behind the scenes’ acts of preparation and process of taking the photograph. In the following tableaux vivants sections, I attempt to outline how the tactile and theatrical operate within the re-stagings as part of an experience of intermediality.

The Tableaux Vivants The tactility of the hand-made sets extends equally to the flmmaking process where the roles of camera operation, lighting, set-making and performance are swapped, as is the revealing of the domestic place of flming. These gestures towards the mise en abyme allow a materiality to unfold between the body and space. The flmmaker appears either literally or as surrogate, as arms or legs attending to the set throughout both flms, but also as Cahun near or at the end of both flms: In Magic Mirror, in the wardrobe as she paints her own face and that of the mannequin’s, and in Confessions to the Mirror performing Cahun in one of her last photographic series, Catwalk, where she dances blindfolded being led by a cat.5 “COMING TO LIFE” AND INTERMEDIALITY IN THE TABLEAUX VIVANTS … 239

Both Magic Mirror and Confessions to the Mirror are densely layered, and, by their nature of being constitutive of a series of tableaux vivants, are experienced as much as ‘parts’ as they are as a whole. To quote the artist Greg Pope on Magic Mirror,

From act to act, each self-contained drama proceeds like a series of Noh theatre pieces, the total effect is less that of a present action than of a simile or metaphor made visual, the full comprehension of which stays just out of reach. The images and words remain echoing, refecting and refracting in the mind long after the flm has fnished. (Pope 2014)

In Confessions to the Mirror, the sense of separate fragments is less dominant because the flm composes a trajectory through Cahun’s life from her childhood to her life with Moore.

‘Still Life: Twigs and Snow’ About halfway through Confessions to the Mirror is a re-enactment of one of the miniature still-life photographs made in Paris in 1936, of twigs bearing quill pen nibs. As a miniature still life, it was relatively easy to reproduce a close imitation, as the constituent parts were found and not constructed. Intermedial intensity is created from an actual movement in flm that is already ‘caught’ in the original recalled photograph (see Fig. 1). The action of the recalled photograph is intensifed in the re- enactment as a live moment—the gradual and wavering descent of tiny white feathers onto the bare twigs. The falling is durational, appearing as falling snow. The photograph is overlaid with spoken text of Cahun’s writing of the experience of the freezing prison cell: the fragility of the body and emotional exchange that is felt from the text is set against the recalled photograph. The intermedial layering is between screen, sound and spoken text: sounds of ice crackling in cold wind intensify the recall of the original still life. The ‘coming alive’ in flm is mediated between the flmmaker’s interpretation and imagining. A sense of time as linear is upset through the mixing of different time periods of the couple’s life, as well as the time frame of the homage to Cahun by the flmmaker in 2016. The photograph imitated was published in a book of poems by Lise Deharme, with photographs by Claude Cahun, Le Coeur de Pic, 1937 Chez José Corti. 240 S. PUCILL

Fig. 1 ‘Still Life: Twigs and Snow’, flm still from Sarah Pucill, Confessions to the Mirror (2016)

The Bald Head Tableaux Vivants in Magic Mirror In one of the opening shots of Magic Mirror, a re-enacted photograph of Cahun’s bald head, stretched, is performed to camera. The raw image evokes that which is exposed, bare, covered with hands to protect being seen. The exposure is for eye and shutter; captive, spiritual, criminal. In the photograph, the indexicality of a lens-based photographic process was interfered with during the darkroom process by bending the photographic paper by hand or the bending of the light through a lens possibly held in front of the main lens to achieve the magical elongation. Thus, a metamorphosis is achieved that distorts the head, and is overlaid with voices reinforcing internalised self-image warping. Layers of a bending or stretching of truth, be it one’s image or one’s words, where mask and masquerade endlessly metamorphose, defne much of what is to come in Magic Mirror, where layers of different media fold and split between a morphing body and language. Image and voice in the bald head tableaux vivants unite Cahun’s writing with the photographs of Cahun with shaven head. Two otherwise separated media from the archive come together, and are re-imagined and brought to life as part of a creative cinematic act. The text and image “COMING TO LIFE” AND INTERMEDIALITY IN THE TABLEAUX VIVANTS … 241 relationship in this sequence originates from the same time period and the focus of concern matches. This is also the case in many examples that come from a different period of Cahun’s life where the relationship is more unconscious. In the second sequence (Fig. 2), two bald heads of Cahun appear facing one another. The flmmaker mimics a photograph of Cahun’s two bald heads facing different directions with the caption ‘Que me veux-tu?’ (There is a drawing or photogravure of this image that is signed by Cahun.) This darkroom technique that duplicates an image within a single frame is translated from a stills camera experiment on celluloid (by

Fig. 2 ‘Two Bald Heads’, flm still from Sarah Pucill, Magic Mirror (2013) 242 S. PUCILL

Cahun) to that of cine flm on a 16 mm using a Bolex ‘in-camera’ effect. The Bolex technique involves re-winding the flm and re-flming on the other side of the frame to enable two heads to appear together facing each other. The durational prolonging of the re-enactment opens up what is possible in relation to the original image, which lies in its very impossibility (two heads of the same person looking at each other). The screen image is intensifed through the addition of time to the still image. The Bolex camera technique and Cahun’s ‘trick’ are achieved literally and metaphorically in the dark. In Deleuzian terms, the image is incompossible: two modes of time together are imaginatively and virtually possible, whilst not in the natural material world (Deleuze 2005, 126).6 The re-flming that layers over the frst flming is designed: though the image has left an indexical trace on the flm, the process can be seen as between that which has been ‘designed’ or ‘drawn’ and that which is photographed. Cahun’s distorted head, which is re-enacted as an action in the flm, recalls Eisenstein’s writing in which he introduces a theory of the plasmatic that he sees as the driving force of cartoon animation, as a ‘rejection once and forever of allotted form, freedom from ossifcation, the ability to dynamically assume any form’ (Eisenstein 1988, 54). This plasmaticness is ‘rooted in a phenomenology of our bodily experience, our desire to stretch the fesh and form and reshape matter to the contours of desire’ (Gunning 2013, 54). One is curious about the connection here with Cahun’s ‘bald head’ photographs, which seem to demonstrate precisely a deviant queering of a body and language, along the lines described by Eisenstein: whether pertaining to body or artwork. The movement between body and language, and therein image, is core to Cahun’s play between word and image, already an intermedial concern that both flms draw from. The third bald head tableau in the flm shows Cahun close up in a highly refective, bendable mirror surface. The stretched image that was ‘caught’ in a fash in the original photograph is now ‘held’ and prolonged in flm as we witness the act. The photograph, recalled and re-staged, bears the same shock that baldness stirs, focusing our eyes away from eyes, instead towards the back of the head, so that the heads look less differentiated. The voiceover speaks of the horror of ugliness in a mirror. The experience is an intimate one: literally laid bare, the scalp, the private anxieties, an engagement with one’s physical refection and the inner bubble we fear to expose. The flmmaker’s home studio ‘set’ embraces this intimacy. As Cahun impersonates a prisoner, criminal, Buddha, Jewish vampire,7 so too the performer impersonates Cahun as “COMING TO LIFE” AND INTERMEDIALITY IN THE TABLEAUX VIVANTS … 243 the spectator inhabits this position as well. The stretching of the body suggests it might metamorphose into another body; it is suggestive of a language stretching and thereby transposing into another form. An idea that language and body are separate is undermined.

Animation/Live Action In Magic Mirror, each mini-scene is punctuated with a photo-collage animation that mimic Moore’s original photogravures made under the direction of Cahun that divide the chapters in Aveux non avenus (Cahun 1930). The agitation of the re-enacted photogravures does not signify anything in particular with regard to the signifcation of the movement; instead it serves only to keep us watching, as a pulsating duration. Cahun’s words, ‘the great fairground of human fesh’ (Cahun 1930), are heard as part of the soundscape of early fairground organ music, which heightens the experience of the on-screen layering. The original collage images are, as with all the re-enactments, re-imagined. In this way, a process of intermedial remediation occurs as a consequence of the superim- posing of layers of intensity between Cahun’s writing and photographs, and Moore’s photogravures and between the interpretation and creative collaboration of the flmmaker. Near the end of Confessions to the Mirror, the still lives in the bell jar animate, the mannequin fgures ‘come to life’; frst as a three- dimensional reconstruction in colour copied from the black-and-white photographs, and secondly as animation, as time animates the recalled image. The original photographs offer a sense of a ‘moving scene’, which the animation returns us to, such as the mannequin reading a book or waving a sword. This ‘returning to’ is a heightening of the image. The mannequin reads the book in the photograph and so too in the flm, but in the flm it pulsates. The pulsating as agitation keeps us looking and encapsulates the layers of sound-images and words. The pulsating is accompanied by sounds which carry images, glass ringing, breathing and the found objects bending or scraping, feathers blowing in a breeze, chimes. We can already guess the movement from the photograph, but in the flm we feel it, as an experience of duration, as aliveness. The re- living is experienced as a return. It inverts the relationship between cause and event: between performance as cause and photograph as event. This temporal instability is juxtaposed with other instabilities, contributing to a myriad of intermedial layering; between photograph recalled and re- enacted image, word and sound. 244 S. PUCILL

Lamarre embraces the Deleuzian idea that perception of objects in the world and virtual objects are experienced in the same way, thus rejecting the distinction between natural and artifcial perception. He says, ‘movement in animation is not a matter of illusion or representation. Animation does not represent movement any more than it fakes it. It affords a real experience of movement, of actual movement’ (Lamarre 2013, 127). The prolonging of the image recalled in the flms is considered in light of this observation, that agitation of the animated fgure prolongs an uncertainty that stimulates a desire to prolong our relationship with the magical world of animation. Lamarre says this response to the illusion of agitation, as well as its prolongation, is poised between the perceptual and the physical. ‘What is staged is our wager that is not to verify the reality of animation-objects but how to prolong the relation between us and the animation world’ (Lamarre 2013, 130; emphasis added). In most of the tableaux vivants, the movement of the remembered photograph hovering in its place is active but effectively static, as if casting a spell on the viewer who keeps looking. The movement does not convey aliveness in the sense of deceiving us that the material is alive; instead it feels alive, it holds our attention, while we are open to other media; a soundscape with voices that talk to us. Activity is of a background that agitates around a still centre, whether it is the performer who is still or the still-life subject. In the animation sequences, a sense of aliveness is of a durational materiality that is the entire surface of the screen, having neither centre nor background. In the portrait tableaux vivants, movement is mostly minimal: breathing, eye ficker, pulse of the camera or flm rolling. The movement potential of the flm medium intensifes the sense of stillness of the image recalled. What is most active instead of visual movement is the layering of images produced from the soundscape. Animation is employed as a prolonging which enables the relationship between the re-enactment in flm with the memory of the photograph to take up space.

Magic and Masks in the Tableaux Vivants in Magic Mirror Early cinematic experiments in magic and metamorphosis that frame much of the re-staging of self-portraits in Magic Mirror can be seen in the preceding flm, Phantom Rhapsody (Pucill 2010), which re-stages “COMING TO LIFE” AND INTERMEDIALITY IN THE TABLEAUX VIVANTS … 245 images from Western Art History. The Méliès-inspired disappearance, metamorphosis and duplication of ‘magical’ tricks that appear in Magic Mirror follow some of Cahun’s own ‘trick’ images of duplication— for example, her bald heads and ‘Bluebeard’s Wife’ (see Fig. 3). In an early scene in Magic Mirror, a re-enacted photograph of Cahun dressed as ‘Bluebeard’s wife’ appears in an imagined new setting, at her dressing table before entering the theatre.8 The sequence is typical of many in Magic Mirror where spaces are imagined in three dimensions that expand what is decipherable in the original photograph. The opening out of the remembered original fat photograph into a three- and then four-dimensional space is signifcant in regard to the process of remediation which changes how the original photograph is hereafter re-seen. This is an example of where the original image is expanded and extended through an imagining that adds to the original (while being also entirely separate). In the flm sequence, we see the photographed character of Bluebeard’s wife seated at her dressing table in front of a mirror with lights. From her dressing table she stands up and walks through curtains to the next space, which belong variously to a theatre or living room, pertaining to both original photograph and re-enactment.

Fig. 3 ‘Bluebeard’s Wife’, flm still from Magic Mirror 246 S. PUCILL

The gender politics of the body is important to stress with regard to a fssure within language which is played out in the flm double-fold: the female body in the Western History of Art Canon appears as artwork, as inanimate, not as artist. Bluebeard’s wife as a mannequin walks onto the stage: herein the recalled photograph is overlaid. Where Cahun split the image of Cahun into two through camera technique, this is reproduced through a Bolex camera so that the re-enacted splitting is experienced in time and as movement. The fgure frst doubles then divides so that the lower half of the body is shared as a single body, and from the waist the two fgures divide right and left as if part of a conjuring trick performed to an audience. The actual movement heightens the experience of the suggested movement in the photograph. The moving gesture already understood is here felt and experienced as a movement, which is an experience of duration. We experience the actual superimposition that begins as if an overlay in the same place, then gradually the two fgures separate until the two top halves appear on the right and left side of screen, the lower half still joined.

Intermediality and Inhabiting the Performer— A Masked Nakedness in Magic Mirror The re-enacted self-portraits that imitate Cahun, masked and blinded, invite the spectator to ‘inhabit’ the body of the performer (there is more than one). The liveness of the theatrical that Pethő describes in the tableaux vivants in flm is active here in the process of identifcation as an inhabiting. The potential of artists across time to occupy a virtual space and time together is made real through the flmed performances. This virtual possibility is lived by the actor, who visits the time and place of the original photograph through the re-enactment, which is offered as a virtuality for the spectator through identifcation. There are two photographic tableaux vivants in Magic Mirror where the performer’s mask blinds her vision. In both it seems that the absence of a face and/or sight of the performer increases the potential for the spectator to imaginatively inhabit the performer’s place—one might say this is particularly applicable to female spectators. As without the face, which is the signifer of differentiation, the performer ‘could be’ us, the spectator. “COMING TO LIFE” AND INTERMEDIALITY IN THE TABLEAUX VIVANTS … 247

A Masked Nakedness Tableau Vivant In the frst tableau, the performing Cahun is naked. The imitation of the original image maps a space, which the performer occupies, seated on the foor, sitting on her knees, head up straight, facing the camera. The re-enactment brings awareness of the diffculty of holding this pose. The fgure remains frozen in a position that masks her gender, while voices take us to a sea landscape. The blindfold accentuates the physical sensation of being there, because attention is focused on non-visual and tactile sensation. The cloth beneath one’s legs and feet, the bright light, its heat, the camera waiting, the rustling of the camera operator, her lover’s eyes through the lens—all are felt. As the pose is held still, there is time to notice the suntan matches the tone of the quilt. Is it make-up, ‘real’ colouring from the sun or darkroom manipulation? In this way, the re-enactment extends the imaginative knowledge of the original photograph. The image on screen is re-enforced with voices describing a sexual encounter as a rising sun at dawn on a beach: ‘A troubled dawn. A horizon lost in the mist of the waves. Fragile, sky of glass, blue green. Her eyes become cloudy, paler, her breasts prowl. Their roses of love stand up. Sun impatient beams’ (Cahun 1930). The duality of image and text heightens the experience, which is further developed with sound. From relative darkness to brightness, the click of a shutter sounds as the fgure is clothed in light. A sudden fash of brightness touches the exposed skin as a sheet of paper in a darkroom. The shadow descends slowly back over the body, as a domestic blind pulled or time-lapse of a moving sun. Throughout, sounds of the sea’s waves splash over each other; the body, like the photographic paper in the dark, has been kissed by the sun, then is splashed in water. Original photograph, original performance and re-enactment meet through the elements of light and water. In Greek antiquity, the word ekphrasis was used to describe the phenomenon of the detailed translation of a gallery of paintings or statues into words. In current day, it generally stands for the urge of an artist to express in words alone that which is a visual sense, so there is a crossing over into the domains of the visible (Pethő 2011, 294). An important feature of cinematic ekphrasis is ‘the tendency of one medium opening up the cinematic expression in order to mediate towards the ekphrastic assimilation of another’ (Pethő 2011, 296). In this tableau, in particular, there is an overlay of a journey of a photograph being processed and at the same time a performance of 248 S. PUCILL that process runs parallel, which is further overlaid with a spoken text that for the flmmaker inspires the photograph, or the other way around. In this regard, the mutual translation between photograph, performance and text can be understood as a cinematic ekphrasis, the layers operating separately and in parallel.

Multi-Masked Magician Tableau Vivant The masked photographic tableau vivant in Magic Mirror (Fig. 4), which re-stages a photograph of Cahun dressed in a black cloak with multiple masks hung over her, expands the original image into a performance on screen. Painted eyes strapped around a head stare back from a stage. Half face, half mask, paint and photographic flm layer between the living and the dead. A theatre audience comes alive through the sounds of murmurs and clapping. Background curtains of a domestic space double as those of the theatre. In the original photographs, the

Fig. 4 ‘Multi-Masked Magician’, flm still from Magic Mirror “COMING TO LIFE” AND INTERMEDIALITY IN THE TABLEAUX VIVANTS … 249 domestic curtain suggests a stage. In this intermedial layering that cor- relates the inanimate and live, domestic and stage, photographer and flmmaker, the interstitial of not knowing quite what one is experiencing heightens intermedial intensity. The opening out of the original fat image into not only a three-dimensional space but that of a theatre, complete with audience and the gesture of a performance, enlivens and extends the original image. The blindfold in this tableaux vivants and the earlier example focuses experience within the body, expanding the possibility to imaginatively unite across bodies, a physicality expressed between screen image and words voiced. In this tableau, the underside of mask, make-up, and cos- tume is visibly exposed to us in the moments of a wig and mask being taken off. This revealing of what is underneath the image as it is peeled off invites the spectator into the space of the performer and inhabitor of the remembered or imitated photograph. The ripping of the face as the mask and hair are removed creates a wrenching or rupturing as the screen image appears to split, its illusion is undone. At the same time in this moment in the flm the image and word meet, and through that cause a break in and between language. The image disappears as a voice exclaims, ‘I want to change skin. Tear the old one from me.’ And soon after ‘Why am I unravelled the minute I close my eyes?’ (Cahun 1930). These lines occur as the screen is in darkness. As the screen image returns, a mask is applied to the face of the camera (a point-of-view shot). The performer cannot see in the mask as the eyes are painted. This idea only becomes signifcant when the image is animated as a re-staged performance. The sense of blindness during this sequence is conveyed in the gesturing between hand, mask and feet.

The Prison Drawing Tableau Vivant In Confessions to the Mirror, in a tableaux sequence about halfway through and after the imprisonment and death sentences have been announced, voices describe the couple’s experience in prison. Close-up shots of hands trace with a pencil Moore’s drawing of the prison cell. The body of the flmmaker appears as hands and legs in point-of-view shot, as the drawing is re-enacted on the inside of cigarette wrap- ping. Cahun’s words, Moore’s pencil drawing and the flmmaker’s re- enactment layer over one another. The journey of re-imagining is laid bare. Intermediality occurs between authorship, media and time frame 250 S. PUCILL and in the haptic use of the performer half in frame, half out, who traces the drawing. In a following shot, a flm image of a prison in Jersey is projected onto the wall of a domestic space, which is followed in later shots with projections of their home in Jersey. In this way, the flmmaker attempts to re-live through Cahun’s words by projecting images into the flmmaker’s space, where she is situated so they are projected literally into the flmmaker’s situation. From interpretation to a creative re-imagining, a journey through the flmmaker’s body of digesting and re-visioning the archival material of Cahun’s text and photographs, the latter of which I imagine she collaborated with Moore, becomes an interplay of dialogue with Cahun. The characteristic of ‘making the cinematic image reach beyond its own media boundaries and into the domain of the unnameable’ (Pethő 2011, 306) occurs in the indiscernibility of a travelling subjectivity and author in Confessions to the Mirror, where distinctions of which performer, which author and between interpretation and creativity are in confict. The act of inhabitation duplicates and thereby confuses performer and author. Pethő speaks of ‘the sensual presence of things doubled with the absence of the physical reality that the image represents, or in certain cases, a void in the signifcation that can be pointed out by techniques of intermedial mise-en-abyme’ (Pethő 2011, 306). The exposing of the process of the flmmaker in the tableau vivant in Confessions to the Mirror that traces the original drawing by Moore is layered with voices reading Cahun’s translated text. The projected image of the prison on a domestic wall with the body of the flmmaker both inhabiting the position of lying on the prison bed, while at the same time tracing the drawing, performs an intermedial mise en abyme.

Breton Peasant Woman Tableau Vivant In a key scene in Confessions to the Mirror, a painted portrait is described in the voiceover, which is overlaid with a screen ‘portrait’. The flm creates an important relationship between a self-portrait photograph that is re-staged and remediated from black and white to colour of Cahun dressed in a headscarf with a (hand-made) Nazi insignia in her mouth. Upon Cahun and Moore’s release from prison, their house had been ransacked, valuables stolen and many of their photographs the Nazis had deemed pornographic had been burned. Lines from Cahun “COMING TO LIFE” AND INTERMEDIALITY IN THE TABLEAUX VIVANTS … 251

(1945–1946) describe herself as a ‘Breton Peasant Woman’ (Cahun 1945–1946). A defecting German soldier whom she befriended in prison had given her the Nazi insignia, which, held between her teeth, suggests a cat with a mouse. The sense of victory has much to do with the alliance the couple formed with several German soldiers, which was the aim of their socialist propaganda activity. The flm has the sound of a cat growling or purring. The lead-up to this moment shows a watery blue- green colour applied with a paintbrush onto a glass screen as the flmed portrait fgure behind the glass becomes lit. Following Cahun’s words, which continually refer to painting and sculpture, there is an intertwin- ing of language between the word, photograph and paint, and between the life and artwork of the photographing couple and writer. The signifcance of the biographic detail of the couple in this image in particular is weighted: the toll of the war and imprisonment shortened Cahun’s life. The re-enactment serves more singularly as a homage to the couple. Maybe the element of intermediality in this tableau is especially charged as the work of both the writing and the recalled photograph serves as a homage re-lived through an embodiment performed and preserved in flm 70 years later.

Theatre Operation Tableau Vivant Pethő describes making accessible the sensual complexity that includes artworks as ‘natural objects’ of a multi-medial reality. This tableau vivant visualises Cahun’s text unlike any of those discussed thus far; it is not a photographic re-enactment. Yet it is highly intermedial due to its corporeality and the in-betweeness of uncertainty created. The tableau vivant is a Surrealist literalisation of Cahun’s writing of an open stomach (the insides being symbolic imaginings as opposed to medically true) in Confessions to the Mirror. A Surrealist dream sequence of being awake during an operation is performed on a painted red stomach. Fingers with traces of red make-up touch hand-made ribs of clay that protect a cold blue stone laid upon red-painted skin, while voices illustrating Cahun’s ‘theatre operation’ run alongside. A lit candle placed on the navel of a red stomach is blown as voices from Confdences au miroir (Cahun 1945–1946) narrate a dream in prison. An orange fame fickers between blue and orange, then turns to smoke as the skin it sits on wavers as lungs infate. It is between a painted hand-made set that animates, and 252 S. PUCILL live action. The body is the skin of a background. The foreground is the inanimate hand-made ‘set’. The inside of the body is outside, fngers touch the sculpted individual ribs, a gesture which reaches for the impossible. An orientation of what is live or inanimate, foreground or background, real or plastic is disturbed. The instability of not being able to differentiate body and object, real or fabrication, photographed or drawn causes an anxiety that creates a break in the boundary that had held its difference from its other. It is between language and body, idea and material, living and dead.

Summary The intermedial to and fro between media and authorship, moving perpetually between time frames and space, constitutes the language and experience of Magic Mirror and Confessions to the Mirror. The collaboration between Cahun and Moore is part of the intermedial collaborative background to Cahun’s writing and therein the flms’ questioning of how authorship is categorised and valued. The collaboration between myself and Cahun the writer, and between Cahun the photographer and Cahun and Moore’s collaboration in making photographs and in their anti-Nazi resistance campaign, is core to the engagement of the tableaux vivants, as is the crossing of time and media. The intensity that is created through the use of the recalled photograph as a tableau vivant in flm is one that can bring the archive of an artist alive into the present. It does so because the voices of the two and three artists are shared within differences of language, time and authorship. And the sharing extends to other flm crew, including the actual voices and performers as well as to the spectators. Through a performative inhabiting, a meeting of bodies opens out ideas of authorship. A meeting between literature and photography with flm, and between artists of different time periods, has created a space of tension that might challenge how we perceive, value and differentiate media, art and life, authorship and time. A joining through time, beyond death, creates an exalted moment in flm that has a temporality of its own. There is potential in the disorientation of confused layers of time, media and authorship to catch a glimpse of something that lies outside of our understanding of what orientates our world. Magic Mirror and Confessions to the Mirror are an attempt to reach for this. “COMING TO LIFE” AND INTERMEDIALITY IN THE TABLEAUX VIVANTS … 253

Notes 1. At the New York premiere, parts of the soundtrack were muted, Ruby Rich, New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (London: Duke University Press, 2013), 9). 2. Some of the material Lahire (1950–2001) was studying as part of a PhD with Jacqueline Rose before she died included censorship from Ted Hughes regarding Sylvia Plath’s sexuality. Sylvia Plaths’s writing explored subject matter including suicide, anorexia and the Holocaust. 3. Pierre Albert-Birot was the director of the group, ‘Le Plataeu’ in Paris in which in 1930 Cahun performed as Bluebeard’s wife, and as Le Diable and Le Monsieur, the costumes of which appear in Cahun’s photographs. 4. Roland Barthes ‘punktum’ as that which is subjective, unnameable, and which jumps out of the photograph, Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Falmingo, 1984), 40–60. 5. Cahun’s Catwalk photographic series made shortly before she died suggests the flmic. Each photograph has writing on the back and is sequenced in numerical order. Information from Claude Cahunet ses doubles, ed. Marion Chaigne and Claire Lebosse (Nantes: Editions MeMo, 2015), 71–79. 6. Gilles Deleuze borrows this language of compossible and incompossible from the philosopher Leibniz; it is used in relation to philosophic questions of probability within the context of examining philosophic ideas in cinema. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005), 126. 7. Cahun describes a dream in which she appears with Nosferatu in Claude Cahun, “Confdences au Miroir,” 1992, in Claude Cahun Ecrits, ed. Francois Leperlier (Paris: JeanMichel Place, 1945–1946), 572–624. 8. Cahun performed with Le Plateau theatre company in Paris between 1929 and 1930. Bluebeard is a French fairy-tale where a wealthy violent man repeatedly murders his wives. Information from Don’t Kiss Me: The Art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, ed. Louise Downie (London: Tate Publishing, Jersey Heritage Trust, 2006).

References Cahun, Claude. 1930. Aveux non avenus. In Claude Cahun Ecrits, 1992, ed. Francois Leperlier, 165–431. Paris: JeanMichel Place, trans. Rachel Gomme. In Magic Mirror (16 mm Film, 75 min), Directed by Sarah Pucill, 2013. Cahun, Claude. 1945–1946. Confdences au miroir, 1992. In Claude Cahun Ecrits, ed. Francois Leperlier, 572–624. Paris: JeanMichel Place, trans. Rachel Gomme. In Confessions to the Mirror (16 mm Film, 68 min), Directed by Sarah Pucill, 2016. 254 S. PUCILL

Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: Continuum. Eisenstein, Sergei. 1988. Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Naum Kleinman. New York: Metheun. In Tom Gunning. 2013. The Transforming Image: The Roots of Animation in Metamorphosis and Animation. In Pervasive Animation, ed. Suzanne Buchan. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1998 (1984). Maurice Blanchot: The Thought of the Outside. In Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Volume 2: Aesthetics, ed. James D. Faubion, 147–169. London: Penguin. In Agnes Pethő. 2011 Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars. Gunning, Tom. 2013. The Transforming Image: The Roots of Animation in Metamorphosis and Motion. In Pervasive Animation, ed. Suzanne Buchan. London: Routledge. Lamarre, Thomas. 2013. Coming to Life: Cartoon Animals and Natural Philosophy. In Pervasive Animation, ed. Suzanne Buchan. New York: Routledge. Oosterling, Henk. 2003. Sens(a)ble Intermediality and Interesse. Towards the Ontology of the In-Between. Intermedialities 1 (Printemps): 29–46. In Agnes Pethő. 2011. Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars. Paech, J. 1989. Literatur and Film, Stuttgart: J B Metzler Verlag. 1989. Passions oder die EinBILDdungen des Jet-Luc Godard. Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Filmmuesum. Pope, Greg. 2014. DVD Cover of Magic Mirror, Directed by Sarah Pucill LUX+Arts Council of England. Pucill, Sarah. 2012. At Least I Will Know My Face, Interview Sarah Pucill and Lucy Reynolds, Printed Project 15: Physical Stuff Made Strange, ed. Vivienne Dick. Visual Arts Ireland. Rich, Ruby. 2013. New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut. London: Duke University Press. Rodowick, David N. 2007. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. In Agnes Pethő. 2011. Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars.

Films Confessions to the Mirror. 16 mm, col, 68 min, Directed by Sarah Pucill. 2016. Johnny Panic. 16 mm, col, 46 min, Directed by Sandra Lahire. 1999. Lady Lazarus. 16 mm, col, 25 min, Directed by Sandra Lahire. 1991. Looking For Langston. 16 mm, b/w, 42 min, Directed by Isaac Julien. 1989. “COMING TO LIFE” AND INTERMEDIALITY IN THE TABLEAUX VIVANTS … 255

Magic Mirror. 16 mm, b/w, 75 min, Directed by Sarah Pucill. 2013. Night Dances. 16 mm, col, 21 min, Directed by Sandra Lahire. 1995. Phantom Rhapsody. 16 mm, b/w, 21 min, Directed by Sarah Pucill. 2010.

Website Sarahpucill.co.uk (links to texts on all flms including Magic Mirror, Confessions to the Mirror). Wikipedia Sandra Lahire (links to the Living on Air Trilogy). Siting Animation: The Affect of Place

Birgitta Hosea

With their book Experimental Animation, frst published in 1976, Robert Russett and Cecile Starr collected examples of ‘innovative animation’ that exhibited ‘personal daring’ in order to provide others with ‘a dynamic overview of this brilliant but little-known kinetic art form’ (Russett and Starr 1988, 9). ‘Perhaps one day’, they mused,

… these flms will be marketed through art galleries and ‘hung’ in museums; perhaps they will be collected and played on home projectors and video machines, as long-play records are now heard on hi-f sets; perhaps programmes of these flms will be presented in theaters and television, as recitals and concerts now are viewed with pleasure by mass audiences. (Russett and Starr 1988, 11)

Nowadays, experimental animation is no longer ‘little-known’. Animation artists such as William Kentridge, Tabaimo and Nathalie Djurberg are exhibited in major international biennales, museums and art galleries. In our contemporary world of media proliferation, innovative animations go viral and are passed from user to user through mass

B. Hosea (*) School of Film, Media and Performing Arts, University for the Creative Arts, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 257 V. Smith and N. Hamlyn (eds.), Experimental and Expanded Animation, Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73873-4_13 258 B. HOSEA audiences on the internet. Screens are no longer only to be found in cinemas or living rooms—indeed, our cities are flled with moving images. Animation artists are not restricted to the single, short–flm format and they are using moving images to create spatial experiences as an art form in galleries and other sites. Using examples from installations of animation made by artists including Rose Bond, Birgitta Hosea, Pedro Serrazina and Xue Yuwen, this chapter will consider how being shown in the form of an installation affects the viewing of animation. What are the implications for the spectator’s experience if the work is installed in three-dimensional space as part of an art exhibition, museum display or visitor attraction rather than being seen from a fxed seating position?

Sites of Experimentation Where does experimentation take place when techniques that were once considered the sole province of the avant-garde are now routinely adopted as the aesthetics of mainstream, commercial motion-graphics? As defned in Russett and Starr’s book, in the practice of experimental animation (and this could also be applied to artists’ flm more generally), artists seek generative strategies other than conventional narrative or mere decoration to motivate them to create time-based media. These strategies could arise from formal concerns with technique, technical processes or subject matter. They could be an exploration of materiality—such as sand and paint on glass in the work of Caroline Leaf (Russett and Starr 1988, 15) or the glitches of silent flm in Tezuka Osamu’s Broken Down Film (1985). They could be an exploration of structuring processes—such as taxonomy in the work of Karen Aqua (Rostron 2016), or dream-like structures in Suzan Pitt’s Asparagus (1979), or tropes of animation practice such as cycles, in Jonas Odell’s Revolver (1993), or mathematical principles and Islamic geometry in Zarah Hussain’s Numina (2016). What these works have in common is that they are created with the intention to investigate rather than to entertain or embellish. Displaying experimental animation in a gallery does not, however, automatically confer the status of installation art upon the work. If simply screened in a gallery space, short flms which have been designed for concentrated and intensive viewing in the dark do not necessarily investigate spatial relationships and site. They remain experimental short flms. As Catherine Elwes has said, ‘Many artists, perhaps too many artists, SITING ANIMATION: THE AFFECT OF PLACE 259 simply turn galleries into cinemas, with perfect blackout and uncomfortable or sparse seating, and call the work an installation.’ She goes on to quote Nicky Hamlyn as arguing that a work which absorbs the viewer into the ‘illusionistic space of the flm’ and in which ‘nothing causes the spectator to refect on the relationship between the space of the flm and that in which it is being seen … is not installation, it is cinema’ (Elwes 2015, 4). For Hamlyn, it is problematic when time-based works are exhibited in galleries without investigation of their site or presentation, as he describes in his review of exhibitions by Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon:

The problems arise because the work has not been conceived at the outset to function effectively as installation, in this case because it is not installation: it is cinema. Insofar as the flms are singular or short, and contained in solo shows, some of the awkwardnesses and distractions associated with time-based work in large, multi-roomed shows are inadvertently avoided. However, on a conceptual level there is a problematic mismatch between the flms in themselves and their form of presentation. (Hamlyn 2012, 265)

Through a consideration of works of time-based installation that specif- ically use animation rather than live-action footage, Edwin Carels builds this argument about the relationship between the work and its siting further. He comments that animation sited in the gallery can be ‘derivative’ in character and does not always live up to its potential for being staged in space, for questioning its relationship with the viewer or for the critical investigation of animation as concept rather than being merely adopted as a technical process.

More than purely a flmic practice, animation thus needs to be understood as the staging of an agency: the manipulation and interpretation of intervals, not only between flm frames, but also between images and objects in space. As with the earlier optical toys, the animated image can only occur thanks to physical action and physiological response, always mediated by the observer. (Carels 2013, 293–294)

In response to these observations by Elwes, Hamlyn and Carels, this chapter focuses on animation installations in which the artists’ experimentation does not simply lie with materiality, aesthetics or form, but demonstrates a concern to investigate the space of viewing, the 260 B. HOSEA relationship with an audience and the process of reception itself. The works that will be considered do not recreate a cinematic experience in the space of a gallery, but experiment with location through being shown in non-gallery spaces outside of a strictly institutional context. These works were designed for a specifc spatial and conceptual context—public viewings in historic spaces that are re-animated by the work. Thus, the works all formed part of unique experiences in which the animation would not make the same sense if shown in another space: the geographical location, physical experience and viewing context all contributed to the experience. Considering these examples of animation installation together provides an opportunity to refect on a number of different spectatorial positions that are inhabited by the visitor as well as the notion of being sited. The implications of site as social, experiential, transcendental, subjective, material, spatial and discursive will also be explored.

Communal Sites Since she is featured in the revised edition of Russett and Starr’s book (1988, 19), the work of Rose Bond forms an effective bridge between experimentation with materiality in animated short flms and her more recent work in which she experiments with how that animation is displayed and experienced. Bond’s early cameraless flms, drawn directly onto 35 mm flm, include Gaia’s Dream (1982) and Macha’s Curse (1990) and are now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her frst multi-channel animation, Salish World (1994), was created for the touring exhibition Sacred Encounters, which documented the different perspectives and encounters between the indigenous Salish people and Jesuit missionaries in western Montana. Bond’s looped animations drew upon traditional Salish rock drawings and were displayed across three screens using laser discs. This exhibition made her aware of the active nature of viewing multiple images—the visitors couldn’t take it all in at once, so would choose to stay and watch it all or move on (Bond 2015). The success of Sacred Encounters led to another collaboration between curator Jackie Peterson and Bond for a series of illuminations of buildings in Old Town, Portland—a historic district undergoing re-development (Bond 2015). Illumination #1, frst shown in 2002, featured a series of animations projected from inside the building onto the SITING ANIMATION: THE AFFECT OF PLACE 261 windows of the historic Seamen’s Bethel Building, built in 1881. The animations light up a strip of windows of differing shapes across the two sides of the building that face the corner of the street. The effect is reminiscent of a cartoon strip spread across a number of panels. As if summoning ghosts from the past, the 12-minute animated loop draws upon 120 years of history of the people who once inhabited this site: sailors, labourers, merchants, Chinese, Japanese, Roma. The work had a big impact on the audience, as reported in The Oregonian: ‘Bond turned an Old Town building into a luminous work of art that literally glowed with dancing images…car traffc stopped, crowds assembled in the middle of the street, and rapt silence prevailed on the night it opened’ (Bond 2012). Bond has gone on to create a number of animated installations that are based on extensive research into local history. In these projects, animations are projected from the inside of buildings onto the windows of historic building as if they are haunted from within. These include the stories of a local synagogue and immigrant community in New York for the Museum at Eldridge Street in Gates of Light (2004 and 2007); a refexive comment on the creative process in Intra Muros (Portland, 2007; Utrecht, 2008; Toronto, 2011); Broadsided! (2010)—projections on the windows of Exeter Castle, the former site of Devon Crown Court, based on extensive research into injustice over the ages from the city archives of Exeter; and her most recent animated installation, CCBA (2016), which explores the Chinese community of Portland with memories of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association in the early to mid-twentieth century (see Fig. 1). Representing collective memory, Bond’s architectural projections are created as a communal experience for viewing by both invited audiences

Fig. 1 Rose Bond, CCBA (2016). Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, Portland, OR. Private collection: Rose Bond 262 B. HOSEA and casual passers-by who happen to be in the vicinity. A group of strangers, interconnected through this location, gather together in close proximity to share the experience. For Bond, it is important that these moving images are experienced in a social setting that is located in an urban public space and not on a screen or a phone. The spread of animated fragments assembled across multiple windows gives much more information than is possible to view in one screen and it is necessary to walk around to fully experience the work:

it becomes interesting to consider differences between the fxed and relatively immobile space of the movie house and the freedom or impera- tive to move that is often associated with multi-channel projection. How do mobility and choice fgure into perception of multiple moving-image screens? Be it an animated installation like Illumination No. 1, which wraps around the second storey windows of the Portland Seamen’s Bethel Building or the multiple boxes on a Fox newscast – the viewer is challenged to move head and body. Yet, even with their best attempts, it is seemingly impossible to take it all in. (Bond 2011, 71)

Confronted with multiple images, Catherine Elwes, in her book Installation and the Moving Image, considers the mobile spectator of installation art to have a fragmented and superfcial attention span compared to the concentrated and critical viewer of experimental short flms from the counter-cultural era. She refers to a ‘media-bombed’ viewer ‘raised in a screensaver culture of constantly refreshing images’ who is ‘browsing the work like a cultural faneur’ and whose ‘spectatorial attention defcit’ is a result of ‘desensitisation’ due to a proliferation of moving-image works on screens in galleries, public and domestic spaces (Elwes 2015, 155–156). However, as Bond points out in her article ‘Poetics and Public Space’, information overload is not a new accusation for multi-screen work. Her article considers the multiplication of screens in our culture, from the multi-channel Glimpses of the USA by Ray and Charles Eames, through to contemporary advertising (Bond 2011).1 Created for the Moscow World Fair in 1959, Glimpses of the USA consisted of seven 20 30 foot screens set inside a giant geodesic × dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. Within this spectacular setting, the Eames’s used more than 2200 still and moving images to present a typical day in the USA, albeit freed from pain, dirt, discomfort and inequality. Indeed, it has been described as ‘an image of the good life— without ghettos, poverty, domestic violence or depression’ (Colomina SITING ANIMATION: THE AFFECT OF PLACE 263

2009, 42). Based on the logic of a grid, the structure is like a newspaper or comic strip where the viewer can choose to fit between panels or to focus in on one in depth. According to Beatriz Colomina, the Eames’s were ‘architects of a new kind of space’, one that ‘breaks with the fxed perspectival view of the world’ and ‘where there is no privileged point of view’ (Colomina 2009, 40). Their idea of maximising information through multiple simultaneous screenings was infuenced by the cir- cus, the mass of monitors in the war room and their own experiments in education and communication. Although one contemporary journal- ist described the experience as ‘information overload’ with images coming too fast to comprehend, for the Eames’s this was an experiment in communication and they wanted the audience to make their own non- linear connections between the visual impressions in front of their eyes (Colomina 2009, 43–49). Another such spectacle, Expo 67, was organised by the National Film Board of Canada and staged at the Montreal World Fair in 1967 to celebrate Canada’s centenary. A forerunner of IMAX technology, Labyrinthe featured a chamber with one giant screen mounted on the wall and another on the foor. This room was connected by a maze of mirrored prisms to another chamber with fve screens in a cruciform shape showing perfectly synchronised flms that had been shot on a similarly shaped cruciform rig. The producers of Labyrinthe thought of the communal experience of multi-screen cinema as ‘a new language capable of accessing the unconscious mind and releasing new kinds of associations deeply buried in the human psyche’ (Marchessault 2008, 46).

Sites of Expanded Consciousness Glimpses of the USA and Labyrinthe were both intended to create sites of expanded consciousness. This demonstrates that the communal viewing experience of a moving-image installation need not engender a superfcial and fragmented lack of critically engaged and focused attention. Indeed, in his book Expanded Cinema, Gene Youngblood proposes a synaesthetic cinema that would move away from realism and utilise multiple sensory stimuli to leave space for the individual’s own free associations and thus expand their consciousness. He argues for a paradigm shift in cinematic language to ‘a process of becoming, man’s [sic] ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes’: the ‘synaesthetic mode’ (Youngblood 1970, 264 B. HOSEA

41–42). This aimed to liberate the viewer’s mind from the dulling effects of mainstream narratives that are ‘a relatively closed structure in which free association and conscious participation are restricted’ (Youngblood 1970, 64). In Xue Yuwen’s installation Mountain Daily (Itoshima, Japan, 2015), a private act of meditation is shared with an audience to become a public act that seeks to expand the consciousness of others. In her short flms, such as Last Words (2015), Yuwen seeks to integrate her Buddhism with her work in animation. For her, drawing for animation is an extension of her meditation practice:

For me, it is the experience. When I draw a line – at that moment I am the line itself. You are completely caught up with the time. You and what you draw are expanding together. The feeling is similar to when doing meditation. (Yuwen 2017)

As in her flms, this installation goes beyond a purely personal exploration in seeking to extend this experience to her audience. The animation itself consists of four looped sections representing ordinary, everyday actions: face-washing, eating, combing hair and reading (see Fig. 2). The animation freezes and multiplies at some points to

Fig. 2 Xue Yuwen, Mountain Daily (2015). Itoshima village, Japan. Private collection: Xue Yuwen SITING ANIMATION: THE AFFECT OF PLACE 265 leave a trace of the movement and refect its daily repetitiveness. Created in a Japanese village, the work was inspired by the lives of the villagers and the deep infuence of Zen on each moment of their daily life. When fnished, the animation was projected at night directly onto the mountain, forest and ancient buildings for the villagers to see. Depending on the reactions of the audience, Yuwen moved the position of the projection to play on another part of the landscape approximately every 10–15 minutes. This combination of the repetition of simple daily activities and the projection into the villagers’ everyday lived environment represents the state of living completely in every single moment of the present. The reaction of the audience was very positive. Some local elders expressed their wishes that more young people could come back to the village, to re-feel the traditional way of living, of using the body and senses to live instead of living in the brain (Yuwen 2017). Aside from connecting the audience through a communal, meditative experience that uses animation to portray a heightened sense of the everyday, another aspect of interest in this work is the signifcance of the local, lived environment as projection screen. Integrating humans and nature was intended to convey a Buddhist experience of transcending the limits of individual consciousness and awakening an awareness of the interconnect- edness of all living beings. The site was an integral part of this work. Prior knowledge of the village and the landscape has an effect on how the work is perceived. Mountain Daily would not have had the same impact if screened in a cinema as part of an urban festival. It was a unique experience. The importance of the actual location and its contribution to a work of animated installation is reinforced by Anne Rutherford in her analysis of one specifc version of the installation, I am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine, by William Kentridge at the Sydney Biennale in 2008. In this installation, she points out how:

the materiality of the projection surface drew the viewer into a semi-awareness of the space ‘behind’ the image, an experience of that materiality … the decay of the walls, as it erupted into the image, added a tangible historical resonance, one of obsolescence and degeneration, through the materiality of the surface itself … In a sense, the flm performed the site, gave the site itself a performative resonance. (Rutherford 2014, 87)

Rutherford contends that animated installations cannot be discussed through reference to the content alone, but also to the spatial and 266 B. HOSEA sensory experience they engender. In an ephemeral work ‘the signifcance … only endures if they are written about in ways that can capture the corporeality and intensity of the material encounter they evoke’ (Rutherford 2014, 92). Thus, in a discussion of any installation, there needs to be a consideration of the conditions in which the work was staged and located.

Sites for Peeping Moving on from works designed for public, collective viewing that aim to produce private acts of contemplation and meditation, the next section will consider installations created for spaces that encourage a purely private experience of furtive looking and force the viewer to physically position her body and her gaze into a very specifc place in order to get a clear view of the work. This is another area in which Rose Bond has been pioneering. Her frst flm installation, The Peep Show (1990), at the Name Gallery in Chicago, was a satirical take on a porno booth and featured a three-minute Super 8 cycle of ‘a revolutionary view on female sexual arousal’. The animation drew upon anatomical images from the groundbreaking text about women’s health, A New View of a Woman’s Body: A Fully Illustrated Guide, by the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers (1981). Thus, the viewer was invited to look into the interior of a device to examine the inside of female anatomy: ‘the cycled engorge- ment of an intricate maze of tissues and capillaries; an interior felt but never seen’ (Street 1996). Although it has been shown in other contexts, Birgitta Hosea’s Out There in the Dark was conceived of to be presented under specifc conditions that challenge the voyeurism of the spectator. Hosea’s work is concerned with a conceptual investigation of animation. Rather than using animation to create short flms, she is concerned with deconstructing and deterritorialising conventional ideas about animation. A live performance, Out There in the Dark combines animation and live presence in a refexive work that investigates multiple levels of female performance and the performance of femininity itself. The installation was most suc- cessfully presented in the form of a peep show in spaces that related to the thematics of the work: a former box offce for Act Art 7 (London, 2009); a disused storage space that could be considered a closet, Mix 23 Queer Experimental Film Festival (New York, 2010); and a room used for developing flm, No-w-here Lab (London, 2013). The sensual SITING ANIMATION: THE AFFECT OF PLACE 267 experience of walking through these spaces, being in the context of a cinema box offce or smelling the chemicals used to develop flms all impacted on the viewing experience. The physical set-up of a peep show instils certain expectations in advance. Moving forward to peep through a restricted viewpoint, the viewer anticipates that they will see something titillating, but, in the case of this work, is instead confronted by a vision frequently described as ‘disturbing’—a nightmarish living sculpture in which the artist has become a hybrid being that is half-human and half-animation, at once animator and animated; creator and projection screen; self and other. The artist’s head is hooded by a paper bag, and her face is replaced with a projection of an animated doll which lip-syncs to a sampled version of a few lines of dialogue from the iconic flm Sunset Boulevard (1950). In the section of the flm from which the dialogue has been taken, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) refects on the act of performing for the camera. Tragically, she thinks she is performing a new role for her former director, Cecil B. DeMille, but is actually performing for the cameras of assembled journalists and police who have come to arrest her because she has just killed her lover. This snippet of dialogue is cut into small fragments and repeated, in order to create a rhythmic soundtrack that examines the words in minute detail through repetition. So as to explore notions of spectatorship and voyeurism, a live video camera with a slight time lag projects a view of the scene onto the back wall, which draws attention to the mediation involved in the process of flming. Out There in the Dark was designed to be a refexive comment on the voyeurism involved in the viewing of flm. It was partially inspired by Laura Mulvey’s classic analysis of cinematic voyeurism and women on display, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (Mulvey 1999), and the intention of the artist was to address the role of the female performer in the cinematic apparatus as well as the ideological construction of the viewer. For the viewer, the act of going up to a peephole and looking through it is furtive and personal. Although this is done in private, they can be seen by other visitors to the installation while they are doing it. Towards the end of the performance, the artist approaches the peephole, reaches for the audience with a grasping motion and, although apparently sightless, studies them through mimed binoculars (Hosea 2012, 74–75) (see Fig. 3). Caught in the act of peeping by others, challenged and confronted by the object of their gaze, this disturbs the apparatus of classic cinematic voyeurism that traditionally takes place from a private, 268 B. HOSEA

Fig. 3 Birgitta Hosea, Out There in the Dark (2008). Lethaby Gallery, London. Private collection: Birgitta Hosea fxed seat in the dark with an object of contemplation that does not acknowledge being looking at.

Sites for Moving Around Traditionally, animation has been watched from a seated position in a cinema or on a television or, more recently, on a computer screen. In these situations, the viewer is usually in a fxed position where they remain for the duration and they do not physically move around the images on the screen before them. Vivian Sobchack argues that static metaphors dominate flm theory—for example, the experience of watching a flm is compared to the picture frame, the window and the mirror—and that these metaphors present the viewing experience as stationary and passive (Sobchack 1992, 14). Catherine Elwes contends that viewers of an SITING ANIMATION: THE AFFECT OF PLACE 269 installation default to this familiar viewing pattern: ‘Spectators tend to pause at the ideal viewing position, equivalent to one they would occupy in a cinema, watch a while and then move on’ (Elwes 2015, 155–156). This model of stationary spectatorship is related to the development of one fxed, central viewpoint in Western art. Perspective is described by Erwin Panofsky as emerging from the Renaissance as a modern representational system that creates the impression of a continuous three-dimensional space as if ‘a section cut from an infnite space’ onto a fat surface (Panofsky 1999, 56). However, he argues that what we have learned to consider as realistic representation is a mathematical abstraction with one viewpoint at its centre that does not take into consideration ‘that we do not see through a singular fxed eye, but two constantly moving eyes’ (Panofsky 1999, 31). The implication of this is that the world is measurable and that a stable, monocular, human subject is at the centre of the viewpoint. Panofsky equates this system of representation with the human-centric philosophy of Descartes, humanism and the rise of the Capitalist system, thus marking the beginning of an era of ‘anthropocracy’ or views of the world in which the needs of human beings are given more priority than other living beings (Panofsky 1999, 72), an age that is also known as the ‘anthropocene’. Jean-Louis Baudry extends this discourse on perspective to the development of photographic technology in which perspectival structures position the viewer as the subject and origin of vision, who makes sense of visual information at the ‘active centre and origin of meaning’ (Baudry 1974, 49). Optical instruments such as the camera appear to be scientifc, empirical and neutral, but Baudry questions whether this is actually the case and whether the end product of the cinematic experience is one in which its ideological effect is suppressed and remains unquestioned. In other words, the world presented to us in mainstream cinema appears ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ because of the manner in which it is presented that continues traditions of monocular perspective in simulating the appearance of a three-dimensional and continuous ‘real’ space, rather than being seen as the refection of a particular political worldview that refects the dominant class who funded, created and distributed the flm. In his work, Sergei Eisenstein challenged passivity in the cinematic experience and devised a theory of montage that would activate his audience rather than seeking to entrance them into escapism. In his writings on montage and architecture, he argues that in the cinema, the stationary spectator brings together in their mind a series of audio-visual 270 B. HOSEA stimuli that may range across discontinuous time periods and spatial relations. However, in the pre-cinematic era, it was through moving between ‘carefully disposed phenomena’ that sequences of images were absorbed (Eisenstein 1989, 1). He gives the example of the sequence of paintings of the Stations of the Cross, commonly displayed around the walls in Catholic churches. Sergei Eisenstein considers this form of ecclesiastical sequential imagery as a form of montage in architecture (Eisenstein 1989, 7–9). Split across multiple paintings, it denies the one privileged viewpoint of monocular perspective. The sequence cannot be understood in its totality from one fxed viewing position. The viewer needs to walk around to look at it from different angles to make sense of it. Mobility is an integral part of the process of understanding and connecting the parts that form the sequence. In his essay ‘Walking in the City’, philosopher Michel de Certeau develops Eisenstein’s point about connecting multiple images to suggest that we make sense of the world by moving through it—not by staying still. He argues that a city is not the rational, ordered place intended by planners and architects. The city is a giant text in fux, storied by the interconnected activities of its masses, which are not passive, but practise the spaces in which they live. A city is a system in process that is enacted by its inhabitants rather than a fxed place. It is constantly changing and impossible to defne (de Certeau 1993). Installation art challenges the convention of looking through one static viewpoint. Walking through a space is an important part of the experience of understanding an installation. When there are different routes possible through the work, it is by walking through three-dimensional space that the visitor makes sense of it. An example of this is demonstrated in the installation Visitation (2004) by Birgitta Hosea, which was situated in the medieval crypt below the more recent nineteenth century St Pancras Parish Church building. Upon entering the underground chambers beneath the main building and going down the stone steps, the temperature drops and there is a musty, damp smell. In the frst, dimly lit room, the curator hands out torches and the visitor is pointed towards dark, unfamiliar tunnels. Without a map or any directions and guided only by the dim glimmer of a projection barely glimpsed round the corner, or the haunting soundtrack echoing through the corridors, they explored the tunnels. Different screens were positioned throughout the tunnels and they were all synchronised to show the same flm, London Angel (2004). These screens included full SITING ANIMATION: THE AFFECT OF PLACE 271 projections onto the wall or piles of old TV sets that were malfunction- ing, detuned or incorrectly colour calibrated in order to show different variations of the flm. The flm used a mixture of live action, animated collage and manipulated video to digitally image photographically impossible scenes of the psychogeography of London and its invisible super- natural forces. This spatial and physical experience of visiting an installation brings the body of the viewer back into how they understand the work. Mary Ann Doane points out that:

these works demand that the three-dimensional space of reception is activated, that the spectator/viewer become unfxed, cognisant of that space. This is a return to three-dimensional space, not as a form of realism, but … to re-engage the body of the viewer as measure (of scale, distance, and materiality). And in this sense, they generate a rethinking of the location of the image, and the location of location. (Doane 2009, 164–165)

The physical act of walking through these spaces formed an integral part of the viewer’s experience. Indeed, it is through movement that we understand the world. In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau- Ponty maintains that our knowledge starts with the body and the information about the world that we receive through our senses. The senses do not work in isolation but together in a moving, living body to create information about the world ‘out there’. The space that surrounds us is not ‘some sort of ether in which all things foat’ (Merleau-Ponty 1999, 243). Because we can move around, we can see, hear or feel objects from different angles and, thus, we orient ourselves in the world:

my body is the pivot of the world: I know that objects have several facets because I could make a tour of inspection of them, and in that sense I am conscious of the world through the medium of my body. (Merleau-Ponty 1999, 82)

Perception takes place from an orientated position, which connects (Merleau-Ponty 1999, 243) and anchors (280) the subject in the world. Since birth, we have moved through three dimensions and experienced being at the origin of our own perspectival space (Merleau-Ponty 1999, 253–254). This is a fundamental experience that comes before thought. Our senses are also linked to our motor functions (Merleau-Ponty 1999, 209–210). In the case of an artwork, particularly one that is installed 272 B. HOSEA in a spatial setting, our reception of the work is linked to our physical responses. We experience our body as a unifed system with which we connect to the world outside ourselves (Hosea 2012, 99–100). Intuitive feelings and emotional responses that do not have a directly physiological cause are experienced in the body. Goosebumps, hairs standing on end, a knot in the stomach, an inexplicable feeling of chill or even panic … walking through a strange and unfamiliar place can have a visceral impact on the human subject. The visceral, uncomfortable feeling of unease that Freud has called the uncanny has at its basis a reminder of ‘what was once familiar and then repressed’ (Freud 2003, 153), a trigger for the various psychological complexes that Freud had identifed in his theory of psychoanalysis. For Freud, the uncanny occurs when there is something terrifying hidden behind something that seems ordinary and everyday. It unsettles us, because it questions what we complacently think we know or are familiar with. To return to the discussion of Hosea’s work, walking through the unfamiliar tunnels of the Crypt as part of the Visitation installation was reminiscent of Freud’s description of getting lost in the red-light district of a large city in his essay on the uncanny: an experience is had of being in a strange place, turning a corner and then returning to the same image that you thought you had left behind. In her discussion of Freud’s ‘uncanny’ experience of getting lost, his feeling of having been there before, but not remembering when, Jane Rendell conceptualises his notion of déjà vu while in the act of walking as ‘the spatial structure of unconscious hiding or folded memory’ (Rendell 2012, 155). This notion of the spatialisation of déjà vu was apparent in this installation as, while walking through the space, the experience for the visitor was of being lost, but coming across images or music that had been seen or heard earlier. Also, as the Crypt is an ancient, dark, dank series of brick tunnels housing family tombs and memorials in chambers, the space itself has a palpable presence, a spine-tingling aura lacking from brightly lit, commercial gallery spaces. An appropriate site for a project about the paranormal, the Crypt is a liminal space between the world of the living and the world of the dead; between the past and the present; between the light and the dark; between the seen and the unseen: a portal into the underworld (Hosea 2004). Thus, the physicality and materiality of the location and the experience of getting lost in underground tunnels were important parts of the Visitation installation. SITING ANIMATION: THE AFFECT OF PLACE 273

Sites of Social Relations Our response to space can be emotional, but it is also contextualised by our previous experiences, memories and belief systems. As defned by Miwon Kwon, ‘the site is not simply a geographical location or architectural setting but a network of social relations, a community’ (Kwon 2004, 6). Space can refect community or division; be inclusive or exclusive; be accepted or disputed. Above all, space is discursive. In her work on space, geographer Doreen Massey argues that space is not fxed, essential and eternal, but plural, relational, in a state of fux, always in the process of being produced, subject to the result of interrelationships (Massey 2005, 9). Massey contends that space is an open system, in which layers of co-existing stories coincide by chance (Massey 2005, 111). These notions can be further explored in Pedro Serrazina’s installation Echos d’un Passage (2015).2 Originally trained in architecture before he took up animation, Serrazina’s work demonstrates a concern with space as both social product and form of understanding. His investigation of spatial possibilities occurs both within and without the frame: ‘animation practice … has the potential to offer us alternative spaces—spaces that make us understand the narrative if there is one, spaces that make us dream of imaginary landscapes, spaces that question our perception’ (Serrazina 2016). He argues for a subversive approach to spatial representation that challenges conventional modes of viewing the world and goes beyond the human-centred system of monocular perspective:

animation should remember its roots and how it left behind its original frame (of the comics, the theatre, the illusionism shows), to re-establish itself as an independent art form, ready to challenge our modes of perception, of spatial and even of social organisation. (Serrazina 2016)

Echos d’un Passage was commissioned for Dream City, a public art project that was creatively directed by Selma and Sofane Ouissi with curator Jan Goossens for the Biennale of Contemporary Art in Public Space in the city of Tunis. With a theme of art and the social bond, the organisers aimed to explore ‘art as a cement of a new society, a vector of social and intercultural cohesion’ and chose artists who would engage with the given population. Dream City was an experimental laboratory to re-imagine the relationships between artists and the city, to get away from art in institutional galleries 274 B. HOSEA and to re-appropriate public space for artists and new kinds of audiences. The area chosen to locate the project was the ancient medina at the centre of Tunis—an area that connects past and present (Ouissi and Ouissi 2015a). Building upon his previous experience of collaborating with young Tunisian artists through supervising animation workshops on the ‘perception of democracy’ run by the UN Development Program in Tunis, Serrazina created an installation to connect the centres of two remote cities. The work was sited in central Tunis in a historic building, the Caserne Sidi el Morjani, in a long room with screens at either end. The flms playing on the two screens showed frst-person walks through the souks of the medina and the neighbourhood of Alfama in Lisbon, which was originally built during the period when southern Iberia was ruled by the Muslim Emirate of Cordoba. Thus, connections were made between ancient Muslim civilisations in Europe and contemporary North Africa. Animation was used to create a visual bridge between the two remote locations. One comment on the work was that the animation brought a sense of reverie: like a daydream that interrupts your thoughts while walking, an individual, personal space taken in between the actual geographical space (Serrazina 2017). With a different city being shown at either end of the room, the effect was almost like being in a tunnel between two different countries. The audience could walk between one and the other or sit in the middle and swivel their head. The ensuing sense of confusing spatial and geographical dislocation recalls Freud’s uncanny as previously noted in discussion of Hosea’s Visitation. The similarities between the architecture, local identity and daily routines of the street markets in the two cities ‘reveal a shared and universal approach to the usage of space that is replicated beyond borders and exists above cultural differences’ (Ouissi and Ouissi 2015b). Some local visitors said that they had not realised how similar Lisbon looked to Tunis and they could not tell the difference. Others said the work allowed Tunisians to re-discover their own city through the eyes of a foreigner. Yet others said they felt overwhelmed by the connection with the outside world, as living in post-Arab Spring Tunisia they felt under siege: under siege by the fundamentalists in their own country and under siege by the rise of nationalism and Islamophobia in Europe and the USA (Serrazina 2017). Indeed, there is real poignancy in creating a virtual portal between Lisbon and Tunis at a time when freedom of movement to Europe and the USA is being curtailed in a spirit of irrational panic about refugees and Islamicist terrorists. SITING ANIMATION: THE AFFECT OF PLACE 275

The foregrounding of space as social and yet discursive and potentially contested in this installation can be considered as an example of relational aesthetics. Nicholas Bourriaud identifes a feld of ‘relational art’ in which ‘human relations’ are ‘site for the artwork’. No longer an object created as a commodity for sale as luxury goods, this kind of art has ‘intersubjectivity’ as its basis: the relationship between the viewer and the work and the ‘collective elaboration of meaning’ (Bourriaud 2006, 160–165). At the heart of all this is a move away from modernist strategies of ‘breaks and clashes’ in order to ‘make possible fairer social relations’. He argues that:

the imaginary of our period is concerned with negotiations, links and co-existence. We no longer try to make progress due to conficts and clashes, but by discovering new assemblages, possible relations between distinct units, and by building alliances between different partners. (Bourriaud 2006, 166–167)

Bourriaud sees this as a response to a move from a manufacturing economy to service industries and also as a response to a desire for gathering in public, face-to-face away from the solitary isolation of the internet. In his terms, relational art involves actual presence, social interaction and immediacy. These factors can all be seen as explored in Echos d’un Passage.

Conclusion In this chapter, a number of animated installations have been presented that investigate not the medium of animation per se, but the site of reception and how the viewers themselves animate the work. Refecting on the experience of viewing animation as part of a site-specifc installation demonstrates the importance of movement through the site of reception to the perception of the work, the affect of site and how places themselves can have a visceral impact. It has been argued that a site-specifc installation can re-narrate the space in which it is situated and that the site is re-storied and temporarily estranged from its original purpose. Just as the animation creates a new layer of narrative in the site, so the historic buildings, geographical locations and social networks that form the site permeate and haunt the animation in return: adding a sense of history erupting into the present, adding kinaesthetic and sensory experience. 276 B. HOSEA

Notes 1. Another important precursor of contemporary multi-screen work is Abel Gance’s epic flm Napoléon (1927), which culminates in a spectacular cre- scendo of images spread across three screens—at times to extend the space into a panorama, at others to create a horizontal montage of contrasting images (Cuff 2016). 2. This project was conceived of and directed by Pedro Serrazina. Other credits as follows: Filmed by Eduardo Amaro Silveira with Bejaoui Med Habib. Soundscape by Rita Redshoes and Nuno Aroso. Animated by Raquel Silveira, Márcia Maurício, Gonçalo Encarnação and Mariana Amaral. Edited by Carlos Soares. Produced by Isabel Gaspar/Instituto Camoes, for L’Art Rue/Dream City.

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Eisenstein, Sergei M. 1989. Montage and Architecture. Assemblage 10: 111–131. Elwes, Catherine. 2015. Installation and the Moving Image. London and New York: Wallfower Press. Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock. London: Penguin Classics. Hamlyn, Nicky. 2012. What’s Wrong with Cinema in the Gallery. Moving Image Review & Art Journal 1 (2): 264–269. Hosea, Birgitta. 2004. Visitation. Artist’s Website. http://www.birgittahosea. co.uk/pages/visitation.htm. ———. 2012. Substitutive Bodies and Constructed Actors: A Practice-Based Investigation of Animation as Performance. PhD thesis, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, London. Kwon, Miwon. 2004. One Place After Another: Site-Specifc Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Marchessault, Janine. 2008. Multi-Screens and Future Cinema: The Labyrinth Project at Expo 67. In Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema, ed. Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord, 29–51. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1999. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge. Mulvey, Laura. 1999. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press. Ouissi, Selma, and Sofane Ouissi. 2015a. Dream City—Edition 2015. Project Website. L’Art Rue. http://www.lartrue.com/fr/Dream_City_2015.php. ———. 2015b. Echos D’un Passage. Project Website. L’Art Rue. http://www. lartrue.com/artists/pedro_serrazina.php. Panofsky, Erwin. 1999. Perspective as a Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood. New York: Zone Books. Rendell, Jane. 2012. Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Rostron, Edwin. 2016. Karen Aqua. Edge of Frame: A Blog About Experimental Animation. December 21. http://www.edgeofframe.co.uk/karen-aqua/. Russett, Robert, and Cecile Starr. 1988. Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art. Rev. ed. New York: Da Capo Press. Rutherford, Anne. 2014. Space, Body and Montage in the Hybrid Installation Work of William Kentridge. Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9 (1): 81–101. Serrazina, Pedro. 2016. Spatial Constructions: A Practitioner’s View of Animated Space. Animation Studies—Peer-Reviewed Online Journal for 278 B. HOSEA

Animation History and Theory 11. https://journal.animationstudies.org/ pedro-serrazina-spatial-constructions-a-practitioners-view-of-animated-space/. ———. 2017. Interview with Pedro Serrazina Interview by Birgitta Hosea. Skype. Sobchack, Vivian. 1992. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Street, Rita. 1996. Rose Bond: An Animator’s Profle. Animation World Network. http://www.awn.com/mag/issue1.2/articles1.2/streetbond1.2.html. Youngblood, Gene. 1970. Expanded Cinema. London: Studio Vista. Yuwen, Xue. 2017. Interview by Birgitta Hosea. WeChat. Index

A 218, 225, 228, 236, 245, 246, Abstraction, 10, 27, 33, 34, 50, 57, 252, 257, 258, 260, 261, 262, 63, 65–67, 74, 76, 77, 95, 96, 269, 270, 273, 275 154, 177, 269 Art in Mind: How Contemporary Adobe Premiere, 46 Images Shape Thought, 133 Aesthetic experience, 125 Art Without Space symposium Ahwesh, Peggy, 5, 12, 16, 183, 184, (Siegelaub, Weiner, Barry, 186–189, 191, 192, 194–197, Huebler, Kosuth), 124 199, 200 Arya, Rina, 207, 208, 211, 214 Alphen, Ernst van, 133, 134 Analogon (Sartre), 111–115, 117 Anthropomorphism, 79, 82, 85, 99, B 100 Bal, Mieke, 133, 142 Apparatus, 8, 21, 38, 44–46, 49, 58, Barrie, Dianne, 40 76, 82, 83, 85, 96, 99, 113, 119, Bartlett, Mark, 7, 227 121, 145, 161, 165, 167, 176, Basque, 132 178, 267 Bataille, Georges, 107, 199, 208, 210, Aqua, Karen, 258 211 Art, 2–7, 9–12, 15, 16, 23, 26, 31, Baudry, Jean-Louis, 269 35, 38, 39, 47, 54, 56, 58, 62, Belson, Jordan, 10 64, 69, 72, 73, 80, 84, 91, 92, Benjamin, Walter, 30, 116, 117 100, 104–108, 111, 112, 119, Bennett, Jane, 80, 92–94 124, 141, 160, 161, 168–171, Benning, James, 80, 86, 87 173, 178, 179, 185, 192, 193, Bergson, Henri, 14, 20, 21, 23, 27, 197, 203, 205, 208, 210, 217, 29, 141

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 279 V. Smith and N. Hamlyn (eds.), Experimental and Expanded Animation, Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73873-4 280 Index

Blazwick, Iwona, 164 Celluloid, 8, 13, 14, 28, 37, 45, 46, Black Box, 116 99, 100, 147, 149, 151, 157, Bleaching, 2, 145, 152, 155 159, 189, 241 Blu, 6, 103, 104, 115 Cézanne, Paul, 133, 141 Body, the, 2, 15, 38, 42, 49, 51, 53, Channel 4, 73 57–58, 187, 210, 222, 224, Chetwin, Hanna, 37, 40 237–239, 243, 246, 247, 249, Chillida, Eduardo, 132, 136, 137 250, 252, 265, 271, 272 Choreography, 169, 187, 197, 222 Bond, Rose, 14, 15, 203, 216–218, Cinema, 5, 8–11, 14, 15, 19–23, 221, 222, 225, 258, 260–262, 25–27, 30, 31, 34, 38, 42, 266 56–58, 62, 64, 65, 67, 79, 84, Borders, 14, 105, 131–137, 139, 141, 90, 104, 105, 115, 120–122, 142, 236, 274 140, 147, 151, 154, 160, 161, Bordwell, David, 63 165, 166, 168, 169, 171, 174, Borinski, Juliana, 34, 35 178, 194, 203, 218, 227, 234, Bourriaud, Nicolas, 275 235, 237, 253, 258, 259, 263, Brakhage, Stan, 10, 27, 165 265, 267–269 Brecht, Bertolt, 30, 105 Cinematography, 9, 61–68, 71, 73–77 Breer, Robert, 5, 8, 77, 124 Claerbout, David, 12 Bret, Michael, 119, 139 Clouds: About yellowbluepink, 133 Brownian Motion, 14, 20, 21 Coates, Marcus, 92 Bruyn, Dirk de, 11 Cohl, Émile, 22, 107, 110 Buchan, Suzanne, 4, 15 Collage, 5, 9, 13, 75, 164, 167, Buerkner, Sebastian, 9, 62, 70, 72–75, 170–172, 174, 175, 177, 193, 76, 77 232, 243, 271 Burnham, Jack, 123, 124 Colomina, Beatriz, 262–263 Bute, Mary Ellen, 14 Conrad, Tony, 63, 68, 145, 150, 154, 155 Continuity, 29, 31, 34, 36, 63, 65, C 70–71, 76, 86, 109, 149, 165, Cahun, Claude, 7–8, 231–243, 195 245–253 Copjec, Joan, 207–210, 215 Cameraless flm, 260 Cornish, Chris, 6, 12, 127 Cantrill, Arthur, 38 Couzin, Sharon, 207, 208, 215 Cantrill, Corinne, 38 Cubism, 73, 74 Capitalism, 75 Cubitt, Sean, 6, 22, 29, 30, 34 Carels, Edwin, 259 Curtis, David, 84, 85 Cartesian, 92, 122, 128, 130, 131, 134, 138, 139 Cartoons, 2, 4, 12, 16, 92, 169, 170, D 174, 177, 178, 184, 185, 195, Deleuze, Gilles, 21, 22, 29, 64, 93, 197, 201, 218, 219, 242, 261 115, 242, 253 Cassière, Pierre-Laurent, 34, 35 Deren, Maya, 79, 82, 83, 89, 90, 92, 93 Index 281

Desire, 74, 106, 124, 205, 207, 211, Experimentation, 42, 52, 71, 85, 110, 213, 219, 238, 242, 244, 275 164, 165, 173, 178, 258–260 Dicker, Barnaby, 5, 9 Expo 67, 263 Digital, 6, 7, 11, 13, 15, 19, 22, 25, 27, 29, 33–35, 38–40, 42–48, 50–53, 56–58, 61, 72, 74, 75, F 87, 98, 106, 112, 113, 119–122, Fabrication, 4, 16, 252 124–127, 130, 132, 134, 137– Fakeness, 4 141, 163, 166, 169, 171, 183, Farrer, Steve, 31 184, 188–190, 197, 200 Feminism, 4, 15, 105, 191, 204, 205, Digital image, 37, 38, 49, 50, 52, 58, 207, 216, 218, 221, 225, 227 75, 119, 126, 127, 140, 172 Filmaktion, 9, 10, 14 Djurberg, Nathalie, 257 Film stock (35 mm, 16 mm), 9, 49, Doane, Mary Ann, 271 147 Doing, Karel, 27 Film Studies, 165, 168, 169, 205 Drew, Benedict, 9, 62, 69–72, 75, 76, 77 Final Cut Pro, 47 Duchamp, Marcel, 42, 64, 74, 110, 111 Fischinger, Oskar, 10, 75 Dusinberre, Deke, 83, 86 Fischli, Peter, 6, 103, 108, 109 Flaneur, 262 Fletcher, Paul, 38, 42, 47, 54–57 E Flicker, 8, 9, 32, 34, 42, 43, 45, 50, Eames, Charles, 262 51, 61–69, 71–77, 145, 149, Eames, Ray, 262 150, 154, 244, 251 Eatherley, Gill, 9, 42, 161 Flusser, Vilém, 11, 38, 39, 42–44, 46, Ecology, 4, 6, 29, 72, 80, 86, 95, 99, 50, 56–58 104 Fowler, William, 84, 86, 95 Edges, 25, 77, 131–137, 139, 141, Frame, the, 2, 3, 25, 67, 73, 87, 89, 155, 157, 158, 195–196 95, 97, 121, 147, 154, 155, 157, Eggeling, Viking, 10, 14, 22–27, 31 167, 193, 207, 208, 219, 222, Einstein, Albert, 20, 21 242, 273 Ekphrasis, 247, 248 Frank, Tina, 33 Elder, Bruce, 45, 51 Fuller, Buckminster, 262 Elsaesser, Thomas, 121, 123, 125, 126, 140, 171–173 Elwes, Catherine, 8, 10, 11, 13, 258, G 259, 262, 268, 269 Galloway, Alexander, 125 Emptiness, 69, 131 Gatten, David, 27 Ernst, Max, 64 Gerrard, John, 142 Euclidean, 128 Gibson, Sandra, 28 Expanded Cinema, 1, 6–12, 14–16, Gidal, Peter, 42–44, 142 38, 39, 42, 45, 47, 50, 56, 57, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 48, 49, 146, 206, 263 53, 58 Golding, Sally, 11, 34, 37–40, 44 282 Index

Gordon, Douglas, 174, 259 Internet, 5, 72, 140, 184, 258, 275 Gosse, Johanna, 5, 12, 13, 184, 186, Intervals, 19, 20, 22, 30, 31, 33–35, 187, 189, 191, 193, 194, 195, 52, 62, 81, 86, 147, 156, 193, 197–200 259 Gunning, Tom, 108, 165–167, 242 Gusberti, Maia, 33 J Jacobs, Ken, 11, 37, 42–44, 46, 190 H Jane, Marcia, 37, 38 Hamlyn, Nicky, 2, 8, 11, 13, 21, Janssens, Anne Veronica, 133, 142 31, 32, 47, 49, 52, 80, 86, 94, Jordan, Larry, 5 96–98, 259 Jukes, Alex, 6, 12, 13, 135, 136 Hansen, Inger-Lise, 80, 88, 89, 91, Julien, Isaac, 232–234 93, 94, 100, 101 Hart, Emma, 8, 27 Hay, Alex, 124 K Heidegger, Martin, 44, 131–133, 135, Kentridge, William, 170, 179, 257, 136, 138, 139, 141 265 Hess, Felix, 92 Klar, Lewis, 46 Hochkogler, Tina, 33–34 Koolwijk, Bas van, 33 Holcombe, James, 8, 151, 161 Kraning, Laura, 207 Hosea, Birgitta, 15, 258, 266–268, Krauss, Rosalind, 9, 44, 45, 64, 65, 270, 272, 274 67, 69, 74, 76 Hughes, Langston, 233 Krautgasser, Annja, 34 Kristeva, Julia, 205 Kubelka, Peter, 63, 65, 74, 75, 145, I 149–151, 155 Ikeda, Ryoji, 34 Kwon, Miwon, 273 IMAX, 156, 263 Immaterial/Immateriality, 123, 124, 128 L Independence Day, 120 Lahire, Sandra, 232–234, 253 Indexicality, 240 Lamarre, Thomas, 81, 234, 244 Ingold, Tim, 14, 27–29 Land, Edwin, 45, 52, 53, 58 Installation, 2, 10, 14–16, 26, 34, 54, Landscape, 11, 12, 32, 55, 57, 80, 56, 57, 62, 69, 129, 163, 173, 82–86, 88–91, 95, 99, 100, 105, 174, 177, 178, 183, 186–187, 119, 120, 124, 130, 135, 141, 193, 203, 204, 206, 210, 211, 172, 189, 247, 265, 273 213–218, 221, 222, 225, 227, Larcher, David, 28, 29, 119 228, 258–267, 269–275 Lascaux caves, 168 Intermediality, 234–238, 246, 249, Latham, William, 119, 120 251 Leeds Animation Workshop, 226 Index 283

Léger, Fernand, 42, 69, 74 158, 160, 161, 216, 226, 235, Le Grice, Malcolm, 9, 10, 42, 58, 85, 236, 244, 247, 271, 275 99, 161 Mekas, Jonas, 8, 9, 13, 14, 63, 77 LIA, 24–26, 34 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 91, 138, Linear perspective, 126 142, 271 Lines, 4, 7, 14, 15, 19, 22–31, 33–35, Mitchell, Andrew, 132, 133, 138, 141 44, 67, 71, 74, 85, 95, 111, 130, Mohr, Manfred, 119, 124 155, 157, 184, 201, 205, 223, Morton, Timothy, 80, 85, 87, 91, 92, 242, 249, 250, 267 98 Liveness, 13, 234, 246 Moscow World Fair, 1959, 262 London Filmmakers’ Co-op, The, Movement, 4, 6–9, 13, 14, 19–23, 26, 146, 148 29, 34, 35, 42, 45, 46, 50, 51, Loo, Lynn, 11, 147 54, 57, 71, 73–75, 81–89, 91, Loop, 2, 39, 40, 48, 51, 52, 54, 55, 93–95, 98, 99, 103, 104, 120, 56, 67, 68, 145, 147, 151, 152, 137, 138, 142, 145, 146, 149, 155, 156, 158, 163, 170, 173, 150, 165–167, 185, 187, 197, 174, 17–179, 186, 261 199, 206, 210, 212, 222, 227, Loophole Cinema Collective (Bea 234–239, 242–244, 246, 265, Haut, Ivan Pope, Greg Pope), 54 271, 274, 275 Lowder, Rose, 31, 32 Mulvey, Laura, 267 Lye, Len, 7, 10, 14, 27, 64, 165, 166 Mushi, 203, 210–215 Mutation, 16, 103, 107, 110, 114, 201 M Mack, Jodie, 9, 62, 66–68, 75–77 Maclaren, Norman, 104 N Magic, 115, 190, 200, 244 Negra, Diane, 204, 218, 226 Manovich, Lev, 43, 47, 48, 51, 58, New Materialist, 13, 80, 92 122–125, 140 Nicolson, Annabel, 9, 14, 28, 161 Marchessault, Janine, 6, 12, 263 Nightingale, Jennifer, 14, 31–33 Marclay, Christian, 173, 174 Norshteyn, Yuriy, 165–167 Massey, Doreen, 273 Materialism, 199 Matreyek, Miwa, 204, 221–225 O McCall, Anthony, 25–27, 54 objective space, 138, 141 McClure, Bruce, 2, 11, 34, 37, 39, On the Origin of the Work of Art, 141 45, 47, 50–53, 58, 145, 147, Oosterling, Henk, 236, 237 149–154, 156–162 O’Pray, Michael, 77, 80, 83, 87, 88, McRobbie, Angela, 15, 204, 205, 207 95 Medium, 5, 7, 11, 16, 19, 21, 23, 25, Osamu, Tezuka, 258 27, 28, 30, 33–35, 63, 66, 80, Oteiza, Jorge, 132, 136 84, 85, 87, 99, 123, 128, 147, 284 Index

OtherFilm Collective (Joel Stern, Sally Post-humanism, 4 Golding, Danni Zuvela), 38 Power, Patrick, 122 Prins, Gert-Jan, 33 Projection-mapping, 121 P Psychoanalysis, 206, 211, 272 Paech, Joachim, 235 Pucill, Sarah, 7, 240, 241, 244 Paik, Nam June, 28, 29, 124 Pulse, 9, 45, 51, 52, 62, 64, 65, Panofsky, Erwin, 123, 269 67–69, 71, 74, 76, 152, 154, Panpsychism, 104, 105 156, 209, 244 Panse, Silke, 80, 86, 87, 96, 97 Paolozzi, Eduardo, 69, 175 Parreno, Philippe, 259 R Payne, Simon, 5, 7, 13, 14, 32 Raban, William, 9, 28, 42, 81, 83, 86, Performance, 2, 10, 11, 15, 28, 33, 87, 91, 95–97, 161 34, 37–40, 42–54, 56–58, 104, Real-world, 10, 125, 127, 136, 137, 114, 128, 129, 145–147, 150, 184 159, 161, 169, 170, 203, 204, Recoder, Luis, 28 206, 218, 221–223, 227, 228, Rees, A.L., 8–11, 16, 18, 23, 30, 31, 235, 236, 238, 243, 246–249, 36, 102, 168, 181 266, 267 Reiniger, Lotte, 14 Pervasive Animation (book and con- Renan, Sheldon, 6–8 ference), 4 Rhodes, Lis, 9, 149–151 Pethő, Ágnes, 234–238, 246, 247, Rhythm, 5, 33, 49, 51, 61, 63, 64, 250, 251 66–68, 149, 156, 161, 232 Phenakistoscope, 65, 67, 68 Richardson, Emily, 85, 86, 89 Phong shading, 140 Rodowick, David, 235 Picard, Andréa, 47, 52 Rogers, Cathy, 27 Picasso, Pablo, 64, 73 Rodgers, Paul, 38, 42, 47, 54–56 Pilling, Jayne, 14, 204, 226 Roisz, Billy, 34 Pitt, Suzan, 203, 205–211, 213, 215, Romanticism, 105, 114 216, 218, 221, 227, 258 Rostron, Edwin, 3, 66, 258 Plateau, Joseph, 65, 66 Rotoscoped, 2 Plath, Sylvia, 233, 253 Russett, Robert, 1, 4, 6, 10, 11, 14, Poetry, 5, 86, 185, 233 80, 257, 258, 260 Poledna, Mathias, 177, 178 Politics, 12, 15, 22, 40, 47, 183, 184, 187, 189, 195, 197, 203–205, S 210, 216, 220, 221, 225, 246 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 112, 113 Pope, Greg, 34, 37, 39, 47, 54, 239 Scheugl, Hans, 28 Popper, Frank, 119, 125 Schiller, Friedrich, 141 Postfeminism, 15, 204, 205, 218, 221, Schmidt, Christopher, 208 227 Schwartz, Lillian, 5 Index 285

Sculpture, 25, 35, 44, 56, 123, 124, Systems, 9, 29, 32, 34, 40, 42, 43, 129, 131, 136, 139, 142, 186, 52, 64, 65, 79–81, 86, 90, 91, 199, 228, 236, 251, 267 98, 99, 116, 124, 125, 128, 137, Serrazina, Pedro, 258, 273, 274, 276 145, 151, 154, 177, 195, 205, Sharits, Paul, 30, 37, 42–45, 63, 67, 213, 218, 269, 270, 272, 273 151, 154 Sherwin, Guy, 11, 31, 37, 39, 47, 48, 146–148, 161 T Simon, Sylvie, 11 Tabaimo, 203, 205, 210–216, 218, Sims, Karl, 12, 119, 120, 139 221–223, 225, 226, 257 Sitney, P. Adams, 11, 44 Tableau Vivant, 8, 235, 247–252 Smith, Vicky, 2, 3, 13, 27, 28 Tasker, Yvonne, 204, 218, 226 Sobchack, Vivian, 268 Taubin, Amy, 175, 176 Space, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8–12, 15, 25, 26, Teaching and Learning Cinema 31, 34, 39, 40, 44, 49, 50, 57, (TLC), 11, 39 58, 64, 74, 83, 89–92, 100, 109, Technical Image, the, 38, 42–46, 50, 111, 119–142, 147, 149, 151, 52, 57, 58 157, 158, 170, 175–177, 186, Technology, 5, 6, 9, 19–21, 30, 33, 187, 197, 206, 208–211, 214, 35, 42, 50, 57, 64, 80, 82, 83, 215, 218, 221, 222, 225–227, 87, 92, 95, 96, 100, 116, 119, 232, 236–238, 244–250, 252, 120, 124, 146, 147, 150, 152, 258–260, 262, 263, 265, 266, 155, 160, 161, 165, 176, 228, 269–276 263, 269 Spatial relationships, 122, 123 Teleology (Kant, Hegel), 116 Spectacle, 97, 100, 120, 171, 174, Thaumatrope, 68 194, 195, 215, 263 Thelwall-1, 134, 135, 137, 138 Stampfer, Simon Ritter von, 65, 66 Thelwall-2, 135–138 Stark, Mary, 28 3D, 5, 112, 120–122, 126, 127, 132, Starr, Cecile, 1, 4, 5, 10, 11, 14, 80, 140 257, 258, 260 3D CG, 5, 6, 12, 72 Stenger, Nicole, 119, 139 3D CGI, 6, 120–128, 130–132, 134, Stereoscopic, 72, 122 136–139 Stezaker, John, 5, 13, 163–165, 167, 3D Cinema, 121 169, 170, 172–179 Time-lapse, 32, 47, 79–89, 91–95, Stop-motion, 2, 14, 56, 80, 81, 98–100, 106, 247 93–94, 103, 104, 113 Titanic, 120 Stroboscope, 65 Trace, 3, 10, 12, 27–29, 40, 50, 86, Subjective space, 128, 139 95, 113, 154, 237, 242, 249, 265 Surrealist, 231–233, 251 Tuohy, Richard, 37, 38, 40, 41, 45 Švankmajer, Jan, 100, 173 Turim, Maureen, 63, 65, 67, 74 Synchronator, the, 33 Turner, William, 133, 141 Twister, 120 286 Index

U Whitechapel Gallery, 69, 77, 180, 181 Uroskie, Andrew, 7, 8 White Cube Gallery, xi Utopia, 105, 112 White, Duncan, 12 Whitney, John, 23–26 Wood, Aylish, 124–126, 140, 141 V Woodman, John, 84, 85 VanDerBeek, Stan, 7–9, 13 Vasulka, Steina, 28, 29, 46, 56 Vector graphics, 7, 19, 24 Y Video games, 122, 189, 190, 195, Youngblood, Gene, 6, 8, 16, 263, 264 197, 201 Yuwen, Xue, 258, 264, 265 Virtual-reality, 12, 122, 193 Voids, 16, 119, 120, 131, 132, 135– 137, 139, 141, 213, 236, 250 Z Zoetrope, 65, 67 Zurkow, Marina, 203, 216, 218–223, W 225, 228 Weiss, David, 6, 103, 108, 109 Wells, Paul, 5, 13, 14, 164, 167, 168, 178, 179