When Analog Cinema Becomes Digital Memory… Tafler, David

When Analog Cinema Becomes Digital Memory… Tafler, David.

Wide Angle, Volume 21, Number 1, January 1999, pp. 181-204 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wan/summary/v021/21.1tafler.html

Access Provided by University of Florida Libraries at 06/15/11 12:55AM GMT Fig. 1. Ken Jacobs and The Nervous System, performance at the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, October 1994. Photo by Ken Paul Rosenthal.

180 When Analog Cinema Becomes Digital Memory…

by David I. Tafler

Introduction: Memory as Open Territory

For a brief moment in time, film/videomakers may join with empowered spectators and open up the boundaries of the cinema machine. In a unique reflexive environment, film/videomakers and spectators can unravel their own memory/ history. Each, in their own way, may dredge the matrix of their home environment—the country landscape, the urban grid, the tenement clusters, ethnic neighborhoods, farmhouses, barns, and the recorded ghosts of their occupation. The landscape models the intersections in their work, complex networks of intermittent movement, commerce, and ideas. The bonds stretch between the text and the spectator. Memory and technology become inseparable, the effects of each structuring the other. Prodding a living memory, the tools mediate the social experience and the social, political implications of the captured image.

Efforts to explore the relationship between the social and the technical have taken many forms by many artists. Media artist Peter d’Agostino describes a childhood experience of flinching and ducking when the 3D objects came flying out of the cinema screen in the nineteen-fifties. He imagines how Lumière’s

David I. Tafler is Head of the Communication Department of Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He has written extensively on interactive media and new technologies and co-edited a book with Peter d’Agostino titled TRANSMISSION: Toward A Post-Television Culture. He is currently working with the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people in central Australia on the development of their telecom- munication environment.

WIDE ANGLE V OL.21 NO. 1 (JANUARY 1999), pp. 177-200. 181 © OHIO UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF FILM Train Coming Into The Station prompted some discomfort on the part of an audience that realized the illusion but could not break away from reacting to its shocking effects. While the “high tech” of the eighteen-nineties now looks relatively crude, at the turn of the century people ducked and scrambled out of the way of this virtual train reality.

In the nineteen-sixties, Austrian film artist Peter Kubelka designed a cinema theater which enclosed the spectator in a wooden cocoon. Wooden partitions isolated the individual from the other members of the audience in order to minimize the possibility of anything distracting the spectator from his/her relationship with the images projected on the screen. Not surprisingly, an individual experiences the cinema differently when isolated from the audience. For example, laughing patterns change when partitions break up the group.

At times, audiences can lose their restraint. Spectators can lose their individual identity or willingness to process information individually. Group identity prevails. In a commercial venue, teenagers will vocally deride the manipulative conditions of a film by collectively resisting its operation. The audience resists the film’s passion and its emotional engagement by calling attention to it. They scream back at the characters by taunting the walking spectres. In a non-commercial screening, for example at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, adult audiences fresh from their odyssey through galleries of abstract paintings will vent their displeasure at watching an abstract film. When an audience yields to the filmmaker’s temporal control, its expectations narrow.

We continue to invent the cinema. As film becomes video becomes digital, the cinema remains a fluid vehicle, perpetually in process, unstable in its projection and reception, and more difficult to interpret and deconstruct.1 Accompanying each shift, options appear that expand the possibilities for resistance within the text by forming gaps in the flow of the experience. Those intervals provide an opportunity for reconstructing meaning. The forks in the road set up decisionmaking junctures. Each becomes a moment of silence, a negative space. Posi- tioned to maneuver within those gaps, film and video makers and spectators can incrementally break down and gradually rebuild the codes binding them in their experience.

182 Newer interactive work restores temporal freedom, but at what cost? New decisionmaking intervals affect the arrangement of movie fantasies and speculations. At the very least, the maker/spectator pauses and assesses the situation before the text can move on. The prevailing cinema, television, de- parts from the coherence of classical drama. Navigating branches that overlap, intersect, and diverge in different directions, home television spectators channel graze, mute, record, replay, or ignore given sequences. Television commercial interruptions and their offspring MTV (music television) reinforce these interruptive, fragmenting, and often abrasive patterns.

No longer “ceaselessly restoring the illusion of the homogeneous and the continuous,” television, nevertheless, approaches the real by “confirming the spectator in his or her ‘natural’ relationship with the world,” “reduplicating the conditions of his or her ‘spontaneous’ vision and ideology.”2 Only the reality out there has changed. In that revised reality, specific socially motivated rep- resentations trigger programmable memory. Most common, the instant-replay experience, prevalent during the screening of sporting events on commercial television, generates a brief intervalic fascination for a fleeting event. It invests that event with inflated importance, accompanying it with a dramatically charged voice-over that makes the moment into an immediate memory. In the cinema, dramatic, non-diegetic music may have the same effect.

Analog causality creates seminal moments within a play of events. It shapes or choreographs particular gestures and actions within an overall sequence. Seam- less, ephemeral, and manipulable, key events rise and fall with causal regularity, changing gradually, occasionally more dramatically, but always progressively in response to numbers of stimulating factor(s). Within this fabricated encounter, the individual’s experience, feeling, and thought flows with each dramatic wave. Interruptive junctures disrupt the continuity and restore the boundaries between the spectator and the screen.

Decisionmaking presents variables in the formation of a collective memory where makers and viewer-participants hover between recorded events and their after effects. A number of film and video artists have probed this terrain bridging early and late twentieth century techno-social transitions. Filmmakers

183 who continue to work in a post-futuristic niche ruminate on the short-lived world captured and recreated by a mechanical cinema. Videomakers, a half a generation later, mark film’s electronic genesis. Technologically, the positioning of the spectator becomes significant.

Spectator and Screen

The move to digital media marks a site of convergence for so-called “experimental/avant-garde” film and video, the two major exploratory moving image canons of the past thirty years. As both film and tape become technical anach- ronisms, their memory and legacy open the portal for a second reading. D’Agostino’s cybernetic installation VR/RV: a Recreational Vehicle in Virtual Reality explores the video to VR (virtual reality) genesis and the geography of representation inscribed by this transition. Filmmaker Ken Jacobs’s analytical study of an old short Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son reinvents the cinema, revisiting its origins, probing the boundary between fascination and meaning. One hundred years ago, George Melies used the cinema to build his own fantastic narratives, while the Lumière Brothers rooted their films in documenting everyday actualities. Looking at their work today sews together traces of the inscribed events recorded in their fluid encounter with a shifting conceptual and technical environment. That environment threatens to disappear altogether over time.

Digital media anticipates the complete devolution of the screen by building a cinematic experience that “is made to happen in your head.” At the same time, it adheres to the old apparatus and the century old ways of manipulating perception. The “living” factor becomes the presence of the artist as the pro- ducer who makes the decisions to modify the recorded experience. No longer in charge (of the television remote), the spectator sits back and cognitively dives into the screen. The images on the screen cohere within the spectator.

There is a violent decentring of the place of mastery in which since the Renaissance the look had come to reign; to which testifies, in my opinion, the return, synchronous with the rise of photography, of everything that the legislation of the classic optics—that geometrical ratio which made of the eye the point of convergence and centring of the perspective rays of the visible… 3

184 From old film technology, the filmmaker assembled a time machine for unlayering the multi-dimensional reality recorded on the film. Hybrid machines comprised of odd shutters and analytical projectors warp the temporal-spatial experience opening a portal through which Jacobs and his audience plunge into the elisions shaped by the text. The mechanically driven intermittent system provides a path on which an audience moves forward conceptually, at the same time encountering images from the past.

The use of retooled film technology warps one hundred years of motion picture history. The projector mechanism disassembles footage recovered one frame at a time. Slowing down the film, disrupting its illusion of another reality, the event emerges as an interactive experience. The event exists somewhere out there, a projection forged somewhere in the cerebral cortex. D’Agostino describes it as experiencing an “apparition happening in front of the screen; a seance—something coming out at me, a kind of magic; vaudeville shows that take the cinema back.”4 When the separation breaks down between the spectator and the screen, “…the human eye loses its immemorial privilege; the mechanical eye of the photographic machine now sees in its place, and in cer- tain aspects with more sureness.”5 Digital cinema deconstructs the mechanical intermittent processing of images. It compresses, transmits, and unravels visual information. Higher level operations supplant the eye.

On the simplest level, over 127 million receptor cells respond to light stimulation in each eye. Only one million fibers, however, transmit that information along the optic nerve. The wiring in the eye reduces the registered signals, compresses the information to shifts in contours and contrasts, colors, and patterns. A complex reconstruction, a figuration of associations, recollections, and recognitions creates the illusion of a retinal image, a condition that an individual with “normal” vision takes for granted. In short, new cinema experiences by- pass the illusions, the perspectival renderings that reinforce those illusion. They penetrate “the codes of classic Western representation, pictorial and theatrical.” In essence, deep focus yields to deeper stimulation.6

According to Buckminster Fuller, ninety-nine percent of the universe remains invisible. Forming the remaining one percent, a repository of permanent

185 referents anchor all experience and memory. The construction of randomness, ordering chaos, becomes a key component of the interactive installation. The interactive program forms a web of jumps and starts, a matrix of problematic intersections and decisions. Each choice made, each path bears different com- plications. Within the virtual, metaphoric, and spiritual dimensions of their work, interactive media artists weigh the variables. Within the programmed interstices of the installation, the spectator forms his or her own virtual, metaphoric, and spiritual linkages. First person experience will not guarantee closure.

In his stories of cycles, dreams, and passing generations, writer Jorge Luis Borges places narrative’s decisionmaking junctures within this ephemeral first person territory. He resists a rational determination that events must cohere within some absolute system along a uniform linear plane. In “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Borges drew

an infinite serious of times, in a dizzyingly growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time—the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries—embrace every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist…”7

Borges strips away the shrouds cloaking day to day artifice and reveals its fugi- tive underpinnings. He deconstructs time, challenging dimensional linearity and rational coherence. Time remains fluid, ephemeral, and immaterial.

Comolli, in “Machines of the Visible,” refers to the social relations that govern the cinema spectator exchange, image verisimilitude, and plot engagement, as a self-deception: “the spectator… expects to be fooled and wants to be fooled.”

There is no spectator other than one aware of the spectacle, even if (provisionally) allowing him or herself to be taken in by the fictioning machine, deluded by the simulacrum: it is precisely for that that he or she came… We want… to be both fooled and not fooled, to oscillate, to swing from knowledge to belief, from distance to adherence, from criticism to fascination.8

186 As seductive and powerful as the semblance to reality may seem on the screen, other factors mediate the engagement between the spectator and the text. Jean-Louis Baudry describes one factor as simply the satisfaction of self-deception. In his article “The Apparatus,” Baudry writes:

Freud hypothesized that the satisfaction resulting from hallucination is a kind of satisfaction which we knew at the beginning of our psychical life when perception and representation could not be differentiated, when the different systems were confused, i.e. when the system of consciousness-perception had not differentiated itself…

A perception which can be eliminated by an action is recognized as exterior. The reality test is dependent on motricity. Once motricity has been interrupted, as during sleep, the reality test can no longer function.9

The spectator prospects these differences between cinematic artifice and its encompassing reality, between reception and motricity. After the events have transpired, how the spectator processes their history has its own reality.

History has no meaning outside of the positions constructed by the storyteller. In “TLON, UQBAR, ORBIS TERTIUS,” Borges suggests that “it reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, and that the past is no more than present memory.”10 Historic events serve merely as synecdochic bridges crossing the strands of personal experience with institutionalized memory. Memory exists ontologically as malleable raw material. Within this fabrication, symbols, signs, critical events or their presentations, often markers of cataclysmic disruption, prevail.

Viewer-participants become problematic gatekeepers when they mediate their own memories.11 Framed, positioned, determined in their raised questions, they discover that their identity remains entirely fabricated by outside forces. In “The Circular Ruins,” Borges taps this despair. Toward the end, the voyager “…with relief, with humiliation, with terror, …understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.”12 Fully programmed, each decisionmaking moment becomes a part of the illusion. The options have no true choices. Every path leads home.

187 In her essay “The Memory of the Senses, Part I: Marks of the Transitory,” C. Nadia Seremetakis describes memory as a protean abstraction within the perceptual process.

Memory is the horizon of sensory experiences, storing and restoring the experience of each sensory dimension in another, as well as dispersing and finding sensory records outside the body in a surround of entangling objects and places. Memory and the senses are co-mingled insofar as they are equally involuntary experiences. Their involuntary dimension points to their encompassment by a trans-individual social and somatic landscape.13

Cybernetic media goes one step further. It erases the boundaries of the body. The individual becomes both a sender and a receiver, and a reservoir of information. The media apparatus revisits the material previously stored in the subject and helps rebuild the individual’s memory along the lines of a particular mediated condition.14

Theorist Jean-Louis Comolli argued that changes in media apparati and tech- niques mirror audience “demands, desires, fantasies, speculations.” These social factors take precedence in the formation of what Comolli calls the “cinema machine.”

The cinema is born immediately as a social machine, and thus not from the sole invention of its equipment but rather from the experimental supposition and verification, from the anticipation and confirmation of its social profitability, economic, ideological and symbolic. One could just as well propose that it is the spectators who invent cinema…15

As information resources supplant manufacturing capabilities, as cinema tools become interactive, their changing operating systems structure inscribed memories differently in the retrieval and fabrication of memorable events. Cybernetic systems guide the individual through an experience shaped by short and long term memory. The individual self-navigates toward his or her own reception.

Uncertainty tempers decisionmaking activity. With the passage of time, other events and perspectives compound, distance, compromise, and modify lingering ties. Other moments establish new buffers, new junctures binding the event with exceedingly peripheral if not unrelated memories. Some filmmakers’

188 work excavates memory by recovering old film footage and restaging its captured events. The image becomes raw material, conjuring illusions that go far beyond the recorded objects and figures originally seen on the screen.

My avant-garde is very reactionary, because I am still quite concerned about quality of film and the hit of the machine on our history and on our psyches. Before it is all whisked away, I actually want to reflect upon it and deal with its machine quality.16

For Ken Jacobs, eash frame operates as a potential junction in its relationship to the frame before and after it. Compounding the complexity of moving so deliberately from one frame to the next, a second projection system intermit- tently and systematically probes the same material. Working with two identi- cal strands of film—very, very short pieces of film—Jacobs builds sixty minutes of intense experience out of sixty seconds of footage.

The demarcation of frames segments the continuity and provides numerous opportunities for interceding in the flow of the text. Each frame becomes a digital switch, a stop-start decisionmaking junction, a site of “commotion” and interaction. Jacobs calls these moments

‘eternalism:’ unfrozen slices of time, sustained movements going nowhere unlike anything in life (at no time are loops employed). For instance, without discernible start and stop and repeat points a neck may turn… eternally.17

Each stop and start, forward and reverse temporal decision that he makes flicks a switch. Crossing each junction corresponds to the mental synapse trig- gered when moving from frame to frame, shot to shot.

In the sixties, Paul Sharits built repetitive series of visual icons, signs, and colors into filmic loops. Tony Conrad manipulated light in The Flicker. Hollis Frampton, a photographer who became a filmmaker, continually juxtaposes the two. Un- ravelling the cinematic process on the screen, Stan Brakhage, Ernie Gehr, and others worked the image at the cognitive level of the spectators’ reception.

Restoring cinema as theater, they pushed the magic lantern process. In their paracinematic performances, these artists choreographed the stops and starts

189 and synaptic leaps of cinematic time and space. They built junctures using lights, projected images, filters, and performers. On the stage, they created a virtual environment, then placed their performers into that imaginary space. The audience, though not immersed in this virtual world, still entered into a manipulated sensuous experience but remained aware of the manipulation.

In the shadow play of the seventies, Jacobs severed the two dimensional constraints of the screen by moving the audience into an ephemeral three dimensional world. On the cortical edge, Jacobs played with binocular stereopsis. The spectator donned a pair of Polaroid glasses, with respective lenses positioned at right angles to each other. Operating on the same psycho-perceptual principles as the head mounted displays (HMDs) used for enabling virtual experience, each lens confined each eye to the reception of a different tempo- rally displaced overlapping image projected through a corresponding Polaroid filter.18 Manipulating these binocular, omni-oriented displays, Jacobs constructed an imaginary space into which he projected his performers.

Despite its cybernetic overtones, the shadow play performance differed markedly from the configuration of most contemporary VR installations. In d’Agostino’s VR/ RV installation, the experience of the spectator almost but does not replicate the experience of riding in a recreational vehicle (caravan). The driver wears the helmet but everyone else experiences the phenomenon on screen, watching through the driver’s eyes. D’Agostino points out that the installation operates on the same conceptual level as the camera on the moon. The monitor captures the excitement of the performance, of an experience taking place in the spectators’ real time, but taking place in a different, in an imaginary or distant space.

Jacobs does not enter VR’s realm of surrogate experience. Jacobs’s performance space stretched to the tip of every spectator’s nose. Phantoms danced with live performers. The screen on the proscenium wall ballooned outward visually enveloping each individual spectator, forming an arc from his or her particular seat, within his or her head. The visual system rendered an abstract pattern as a coherent vision, a viewer shared fascination that doesn’t necessar- ily adhere to any commonplace physical law.

190 Jacobs began this exploration in the dark. In his feature length film Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, Jacobs resurrects and then disembodies a short chase film made by the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company in 1904. The mutoscope film depicts a boy running from his fellow townspeople with a pet pig that he playfully absconded. A chase sequence ensues. Jacobs reshoots the film, fragmenting the action into a series of finite events. Jacobs

…took this old movie and translated it into the modern film sensibilities. He rephotographed it, dissected it image by image, frame by frame, detail by detail, and came up with a movie of his own, seventy-five minutes long. He achieved two things: he created a film of much greater visual and formal impact than the original; and he set up a precedent of ‘film translation.’19

Jacobs does more than rupture the flow of the film. Slowing and stretching the sequence, violating the continuity, breaking down each movement into its constituent gestures, each frame becomes a trace not only of the original staged event, but of a relationship between the contemporary viewer and a representation of past actors/characters/actions. The experience of Jacobs’s film con- structs the bridge between a contemporary audience and a cinema being born.

…My camera closes in, only to better ascertain the infinite richness (playing with fate, taking advantage of the loop-character of all movies, recalling with variations some visual complexes again and again for particular savoring), searching out incongruities in the story-telling (a person, confused, suddenly looks out of an actor’s face), delighting in the whole bizarre human phenomena of story-telling itself and this within the fantasy of reading any bygone time out of the visual crudities of film: dream within a dream!20

The cinematic apparatus serves as a vehicle for studying the real people, the actors playing characters in front of the camera. The analytical overlay retraces the inscribed record of each small action captured on the emulsion and explores the meaning of its viewing and reviewing many years later.

Each frame becomes a governor. Each individual image offers the option of moving foward, backward, or repeating the frame. Jacobs choreographs the movement of the film through each of those decisionmaking junctions. By slowing and arresting the film, by weighing, revelling in, or analytically assess- ing each continuity decision and motion, a spectator joins the filmmaker in

191 Fig. 2. Ken Jacobs and The Nervous System, performance at the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, October 1994. Photo by Ken Paul Rosenthal.

“mining the existing film,” as Jacobs himself describes it.21

The individual attends to a specific part of the frame. The spectator focuses on one or on another element of the image. Each movement inscribes a meta- level event. Only one step removed from the action, the viewer watches Jacobs travel through the antique text, constructing junctures and then pushing the buttons to plunge deeper and deeper into the material on the screen.

Jacobs effaces the illusion of real movement. A single frame, a photograph embodied in the film remains the absolute and indivisible entity, frozen in time and potentially frozen on the screen. The movement back and forth through that captured moment becomes a catalytic event at the core of a sec- ondary cinematic discourse. Prospecting the gaps in the film’s deconstruction, the viewer participates in that discourse.

In his more recent work, Jacobs manipulates memory using his invention called The Nervous System to reconfigure audience perception and cognition. The

192 spectator sits down, the lights dim and the image comes on—a strange, flicker- ing, sometimes indecipherable array of shadows, patches of emulsion, traces of a recording. Ken Jacobs navigates the audience through a series of dual screen, syncopated film projections. He uses two projectors, modified by a large frontal shutter, to present spectacles that combine and overlap syncopated filmic images of recorded individuals and captured events. The two overlapping images, each coming from one of the two independently operated projectors, flow in and out of sync with each other. As the images divide, wander, and periodically combine, the spectator perceptually stitches the two components together. The cognitive nature of that converging operation constantly changes as it fluctu- ates from decisionmaking moment to moment.

Beyond excavating memories, Jacobs uses The Nervous System not as a prosthetic device for resurrecting old images but as a time machine for moving freely within virtual memory. In Two Wrenching Departures, Ken Jacobs’s two longtime associates, the late Bob Fleischner and Jack Smith, perform a free form ballet choreographed by the rhythm and elision of Jacobs’s reenactment.22 Jacobs arrests and restructures their gestures; he distills the moments “closing in on (to allow the expansion of) ever-smaller pieces of time.”23 The movement from each frame to the next opens that “fresh territory for sentient exploration.”24

…if picking at the texture of cinema, at the end of its filmic phase, seems about as inward as one can get, it’s because the name of this digging tool I’ve devised, The Nervous System, also designates a main territory of its search, that place where we’ve blithely applied mechanism to mind willy-nilly producing that development of mind known as cinema.25

Having recorded the original footage, Jacobs annotates the imprint of the event. His decisionmaking marks an active trace of his own time, a passage behind both cameras.

At his Nervous System presentation of Ontic Antics (a play on a segment of an old Laurel and Hardy film) at the New York Film Festival in October 1998, Jacobs explained his fascination, his excavation of time and place.

I’m dealing with a phenomenon of movies, and movies in our lives and imaginary characters like Laurel and Hardy.

193 I’m trying to locate something. What is this odd thing? I’m not someone that lets go of things easily. History is not over for me. I’m plagued by it. I’m not through with it. I don’t like everything whisked away as quickly as it is. I come from Williamsburg, but I might as well come from across the globe it’s all changing so quickly. Your hometown becomes another part of the planet after twenty or thirty years. None of us can go home again. There must be some desire on my part not to give a glancing interdiction to things. The few things, people, the few places that I meet up with I want to hold, to taste, to savor, to cry, to suffer, whatever it is. It has to do with attention.26

The image flattens out and the negative space, the holes in the image, become more prominent. In the figure-ground oscillation, the spectator enters into the past, probing the darkness, as if the gaps in the film trigger the synapses in the brain, at times in a one-to-one pas de deux.

With Jacobs behind the projector, The Nervous System captures the paradox of all cinematic performance. The filmmaker occupies the unseen space beyond the screen, behind the projector. In Stan Brakhage’s 1962 film Blue Moses, the camera turns around at the direction of the onscreen character to ostensibly find the cameraman. Instead, it reveals a source of light coming from the projector. “No, it’s hopeless,” the characters cries lamenting the impossibility of crossing the cinema’s temporal spatial boundary.

The events transpire within the spectator’s head. When watching The Nervous System performance of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the viewer works hard to assemble a gestalt from the vibrating traces of shapes and bodies, pulsating black smudges on a gray background. Eventually, the scene coheres but not on the screen. Similar to the fusion that transpires when binocular vision presents itself as a single image, the performance emerges somewhere out there between the viewer’s eyes and the screen, inhabiting a projected dimension of the viewer’s mind.

The Nervous System distorts the sender-message-receiver model.27 Orientation shifts with the transformation of experience. Head mounted displays, touch- screens, and other devices mimic this operation of the mind. They, however, immerse the individual within the experience rather than the experience within the individual. In contrast to the smoking mirrors and magic of a Jacobs performance, the VR spectator entraps him or herself in an enclosure, a helmet,

194 a CAVE, a vehicle. As d’Agostino describes it, the spectator enters a VR/RV— a virtual reality recreational vehicle (caravan).28 Like Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad, Scott Bartlett, and other film artists, Ken Jacobs anticipates this shift at the same time resisting its implied metamorphosis.

For a number of years, film artists tinkered with both the material of recorded film and the apparatus that restores its captured and implied movement and revisits its latent content. They have stopped, reworked, and, in the process, reinvented film technology. Jacobs continues to resist abandoning the fundamental character of a mechanical chemical medium that inscribes visible images on an emulsion base, of an intermittent process that gives recorded images life. Moving frame by frame through a linear presentation, his film or video performances anticipate the stop- start pattern of an interactive presentation. His interactive performances allow the viewer to participate in the mediation. They unravel and dissect the meaning of the recording process while compiling the cumulative effects of the inscribed memories.

For these film artists, the text remains separate. When Jacobs sifts through the archaeological remnants of a filmic past, he attempts to, in his own words, “draw some of it out for a deep look, sometimes mix with it, take it further or at least into a new light with flexible expressive projection.”29 Surprisingly, mechanical film technology can indeed replicate the cognitive sophistication of the more contemporary plug-in devices.

The cybernet can make narrative into a longer term fascination. Mediating the engagement, more branches lead off in a greater number of different directions. An increased number of variables clock the contextualized changes.30 A time out in the installation, in the form of a moment or juncture, helps the individual to process events through the malleable membrane of his or her own personal experience, before that experience slips into unconsciousness.

Knots in the Weave

When the analog experience goes digital, each branch or fork mediates the boundaries of the text. As knots in the weave, they coalesce to form larger

195 junctions that tie together the multiple influences, and threads surrounding a seminal event. Each player provides one more subroutine to the design of an installation. If retained in machine memory, each subroutine contributes to the growing context of the piece. The piece hovers between the actualities recounted and the fantasies and voyages that it enables.

Efforts to suture the shrinking distance between the spectator and the screen have an ongoing history. Each challenges the boundaries between an individual and the larger audience. The ersatz “interactive” system available to QUBE subscribers, a two-way “interactive” cable-TV technology in Columbus, Ohio, took the form of a console attached to the television set. It enabled the home viewers to “participate” in the programs by pushing one of five “response” buttons. D’Agostino’s Proposal for QUBE (1979) critiqued this corruption of two- way interactive television, its potential as well as its shortcomings. Delimited choices do not empower decisionmaking. D’Agostino compares the viewer-con- sumer to “Sherlock, Jr.,” a character in a Buster Keaton film by the same name. Keaton, the protagonist, dreams that he has the capacity to climb into the silver screen and “participate” in the action. QUBE encourages this kind of fantasy. D’Agostino, however, found that the prescribed interaction only operates on the level of a simpleminded game show. Since QUBE controls all the options, public participation remains circumscribed. In d’Agostino’s Proposal for QUBE, the audience would structure by consensus the sequence of a tape comprised of five segments: a text, newspaper, photograph, film, and video performance. D’Agostino factored in one hundred twenty possible variations.31 Although encouraged by QUBE to do his “proposal,” bureaucratic red tape and delay prevented d’Agostino’s tape from being aired.32 Sherlock, Jr. runs into the screen and gets thrown out.

Peter d’Agostino’s installation TRACES stretches the somatic landscape across electronic dimensions. TRACES uses the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bomb to frame its cataclysmic memory, an event beyond experience. Balanc- ing personal reminiscences with global perceptions, in TRACES d’Agostino weaves together fragments of his own recollections and observations as part of a generation that lives with the threat of total annihilation. Revisiting his el- ementary school, the artist’s walk down the quiet, interior corridor retrieves the memory of countless air raid drills.

196 Co-existent with the installation’s images of a time once lived,33 a TRACES website (http://www. temple.edu/newtechlab/TRACES) links to live images of the Green Peace Rainbow Warrior trying to block French nuclear testing in the South Pacific. Like the radio inter- play of Jacobs’s Blonde Cobra, the live images on the web do not nec- Fig. 3. Still from TRACES. © Peter essarily sync with those of the instal- d’Agostino, 1995. lation.34 The web, however, presents a parallel event from another time and place that repositions the spectator in his or her contextual experience. “If somebody wants to break through the screen and tell you what the reality was about,”35 then their reaction will contribute to the evolution of the text.

Nam June Paik’s retrospective Electronic Super Highway: Nam June Paik in the ‘90s, morphs memories of a small town America that has changed over the past thirty-five years. Historic signs, figures, and temporal indicators from an almost nostalgic Americana evolve and dissolve across its own emerging electronic landscape. Paik’s installations exercise a subtle control over the spectators attention and processing. The electronic array fills in the contemplative space, removes the silence between shots, shrinks the spectators conceptual maneuverability and regulates the frame surrounding memory, a continuous ebb and flow with no divide.

Paik transforms the myths, those images of a recently expired sensibility: a wooden billboard, an old post office reminiscent of the WPA mausoleums, the one room schoolhouse—a decaying image of a living myth—into forty video sculptures.36 A somewhat equivocal advocate of new electronic technology, Paik chronicles the changing world. His work restages contemporary history into a flowing compres- sion of events. Wandering through the global community, the couch potato still remains passive. The viewer, now an internet resident of what Paik calls “Cyber- town,” walks through the respective pavillions, changing the channels from site to site with each becoming another contextual and structural proscenium.

197 Virtual reality, cybernetic experience—the most far-reaching phase in the evolution of interactive technology—harbors the capability for recording the narrative- in-process, the history of the participant’s decisionmaking activity. Like all new technology, it risks becoming excessively systematized by everyday experience.

Current VR has not yet achieved the means to construct a full cybernetic experience. VR remains a not yet realized destination. A simple prosthetic device, contemporary VR only suggests the freedom of liberating the mind from the prison of the body.37 Nevertheless, controlling the synaptic process does allow the voyager to enter cyberspace. That crossover satiates some latent desire.

The dream machine, however, has its blatent flaws. D’Agostino’s 1990 installation TransmissionS: In the WELL musters the false hopes and inflated fantasies vested in the world of electronic experience.38 Nested within a conical tower—a totemic well—TransmissionS engages its own contradictions. The installation’s features include an interactive touchscreen, a ceiling projection, and an image of an eye glaring back at the viewer through a peephole. The text of the touchscreen took the history of the electronic cinema and wove it together with two tragic memories fortified by their television coverage: a short visual segment of the space shuttle Challenger explosion, and excerpts from Italy’s twenty-four hour coverage of a failed rescue of an entrapped Ital- ian boy who had fallen into a well and who eventually died.39 The cathartic effect becomes that of madness and imagination. Advanced communication technology falls short of rescuing its subjects from the symbolic and ancient terrors of falling from the sky and dropping into the earth.

Cyberspace, however, suggests alternative outcomes. According to Norbert Wiener, “feedback is a method of controlling a system by re-inserting into it the results of its past performance.”40 A more integrated feedback system al- lows the spectator to alter the method and pattern of performance. On the other hand, too much freedom may inhibit interactive installations feedback systems from truly provoking an insightful experience. Graham Weinbren and Roberta Friedman’s The Erl King and Weinbren’s later installation Sonata make the continuity contingent on the viewer-partipant’s own fascination. Each derives from tales, references, and psychoanalytic

198 parables. They situate characters within complex literary settings overloaded with evocative material. Not so easily seen, portals open and close within each segment that bridge sequences and reveal hidden enigmas. When the spectator wanders into the text, he or she can bounce about the images or plunge into the cavities surrounding their construction. Discovering some small part of the elusive interactive structure helps the viewer now become participant in his or her reconstruction of the latent text.

Jeffrey Shaw’s The Legible City situates itself somewhat differently. It evolves from the viewer-now-become bicyclist’s navigation of a fabricated urban grid of words posing as buildings. At each intersection, the viewer-cycler can turn or proceed. The viewer literally cycles through this landscape forced to notice, to read the environment. That fascination, the novelty of activated perception and its at- tendant cognitive processing can last indefinitely, until one grows wary or weary.

In The Erl King, at each bridge or interval, the viewer-participant can make a decision. Each decision, in turn, leads to a different path which leads to another decisionmaking moment, and so forth and so on. The text becomes interactive and the level of interactivity becomes directly proportional to the number of critical nodes that operate within the text and the multiplicity of interrogations that appear at each juncture. In The Erl King, those junctures seem limitless through an array of options that traverse each scene and fluctuate within each. Sometimes, a menu appears on the screen. Most other times, “touching” the screen will recreate the sequence adding or deleting characters, reconfiguring audio-visual sync relationships. As the matrix of decisionmaking moments pulls the audience away from the ideological drivers of a linear narrative text, in the process it reinvests them with other emerging codes and structures.

The Cybernetic Future

The installation format enables the video artist to break the constraints. Un- fortunately, the most advanced systems preclude their own distribution. D’Agostino’s installations occupy that edge. His most technically advanced, VR/RV, simulates a recreational vehicle (RV) traveling through a virtual environment of “utopian hopes and dystopian fears.” The voyager travels in a simulated

199 recreation vehicle (RV), a comfortably familiar shielded environment.41 Each decisionmaking site forms the connecting tissue, the temporal markers conflating the space and time of the atomic experience with the cybernetic adventure.

VR/RV explores the genesis of electronic technology. In this environment, the viewer-participant lies suspended, hovering between reception and illusion. In the midst of that immersion, d’Agostino interrogates the meaning of illusion by asking “how do you criticize VR in VR?” His work turns in on itself, ques- tioning process as well as content.42

D’Agostino intentionally calls attention to the artifice. Buildings become transparent. The mountains resemble paper maché models. He interrogates the effects of VR immersion and inhibits the seduction of the voyager. Some distance prevails. The cybervoyager does not become Peter Pan, “I’m flying;” a critical border splits the voyager enabling his or her intellect to examine the effects of the overwhelming seduction of the immersion. According to d’Agostino, VR needs definition, needs recontextualization.43 While William

200 Gibson in his cyberpunk novels charts the implicit terror of VR, d’Agostino establishes the links between the cybernetic horrors that exist on the inside and outside of cyberspace. Fifty years of memories anchor the passage into any form of metaphysical future.

A protean apparatus that immerses the voyager in a topology of ideological con- structions might never supplant the video game. Alas, a value system predicated on achieving highest scores will probably remain the prevalent system for vent- ing frustrations and playing out obsessions. That sort of system, however, does have the capacity to compile insights. Not simply a recording tool, a VR environment can allow the viewer-participant to analyze and explore the meaning of his or her activity. At the same time, the spectator might shape his or her distance to the text and position within the rubric of the piece. Ken Jacobs describes the border between staged memories and open-ended excursions. He explains:

This is not an improvised work. These are all chosen moments, chosen operations. There are a lot of things that I am doing back there and there are a million other things that can happen beyond what you’re seeing.44

All sorts of things can happen between the frames. VR permits the spectator to get at some of that uncanny stuff “that cannot be photographed with the camera, that cannot be made except in the brain.” When the recollection becomes a reworkable memory, the voyager can appropriate the virtual event. The investigation sustains an active dialectic that permits the voyager to achieve a heightened awareness. Otherwise, the electronic drug seduces the passive spectator en route to refabricating his or her history and memory.

Notes

1. An interactive platform depends upon the technology that makes storage and processing of an expanding number of subroutines possible. Fortunately, trends develop and patterns emerge that allow for subroutines to converge with only small variations marking their difference. 2. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 755. 3. Comolli, 743.

201 4. Discussion with Peter d’Agostino, September 20, 1998. 5. Comolli. “Machines of the Visible.” 6. The notion of the “retinal image” takes its place alongside “persistence of vision” in the bin of convenience misrepresentations of complex human processing activity. 7. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” trans. Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd, in Ficciones (New York: Grove Press), 100. 8. Comolli, 758-59. 9. Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus,” Camera Obscura no. 1 (Fall 1976): 115. 10. Jorge Luis Borges, “TLON, UQBAR, ORBIS TERTIUS,” trans. Alastair Reid, in Ficciones (New York: Grove Press), 25. 11. A recurrent theme, for example, in work like Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. 12. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Circular Ruins,” trans. Anthony Bonner, in Ficciones (New York: Grove Press, 1962): 63. 13. C. Nadia Seremetakis, “The Memory of the Senses, Part I: Marks of the Transi- tory,” in The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1994), 9. 14. See Jonathan Steuer, “Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence, in Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality, Frank Biocca and Mark R. Levy, eds., (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associations, 1995), 36-7. 15. Comolli, 742. 16. Ken Jacobs, New York Film Festival, October 11, 1998. 17. Ken Jacobs, notes from the artist. 18. HMDs work on the same principle of binocular parallax as 3D glasses. 19. Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema 1959-1971 (New York: Collier Books, 1972), 350. 20. Filmmakers’ Cooperative Catalogue No. 6 (New York: The New American Cinema Group, Inc., 1975), 132. 21. Ken Jacobs, notes from the artist. 22. Drawn from a portion of the footage shot by Jacobs for his film Star Spangled To Death. 23. Ken Jacobs, notes from the artist. 24. Ken Jacobs, notes from the artist. 25. Ken Jacobs, notes from the artist. 26. Ken Jacobs, New York Film Festival, October 11, 1998. 27. The spectator experiences the recorded moment as a kind of dance, a pas de trois, an interdimensional embrace between living and dead performers. The Fleischner/ Smith and Jacobs collaboration operates from both sides of the screen, from both sides of the projector, across the impenetrable divide separating the living from the dead. Conjuring up traces of their existence, Jacobs projects his own previous relationship as an implied part of the ongoing continuum. The projector becomes a medium for bring- ing the two performers back to life, a time machine stretching across the continuum. 28. A discussion with Peter d’Agostino on September 20, 1998. 29. Ken Jacobs, notes from the artist. 30. Building memory begins by separating an event from other branches clouding and restraining its history and continuity. An individual’s mediation, the retention, dissec- tion, or elision of an event springs from both the omniscient forces that lie beyond the central text, and the key interlocutors nested within the text itself. The interlocutors within the text, salient points along a track, take the form of voices or other auditory

202 instruments, symbols, camera operations and visual devices, or any combination of the above. The individual, drawing from his or her own personal experience, brings the omniscent variables to the encounter. 31. Peter d’Agostino: The Proposal for QUBE tape incorporates five segments ranging from theoretical con- cerns to everyday events and are in the form of: a text, a newspaper, a photograph, a film, and a video performance. Given these five segments the audience would, by the consensus of their response, determine the sequencing of the tape and see the results of that process. The formula I derived for the work was 5x4x3x2x1 to show that this simple structure would yield 120 possible variations for editing the final sequence. (I was making reference to Eisenstein’s formula of 1+1=3, his theory of film montage as a ‘collision of ideas,’ to make a statement about the kind of complexity that video and computer technology had now reached as it specifically relates to montage.) The ap- parent novelty of producing a videotape editing, in effect, by a public opinion poll. 32. H. Drohojowska, “Don’t Touch… Now Don’t,” LAIC Journal, Los Angeles, Spring 1977. 33. Scenes of Hiroshima on the annual anniversary of the bomb—a staged die-in near the dome, the camera lingering on the faces of young Japanese men and women, cap- turing the incomprehensibility of the living mimicking death before the devastated structure that represents ground zero; scenes of Nagasaki, Pearl Harbor, and New York City; scenes of the Japanese landscape take shape: a village, the forest, barbed wire, looking through the window of a train, a finger pointing, a waiting room, neon lights; scenes of passing trees, homes, small villages, unexpectedly lead to an image of the Empire State Building, the sound of ticking, and graffiti ridden, post-apocalyptic, der- elict neighborhoods in New York City; Machito Square, brick building, streets and al- leyways in the neighborhood where Peter d’Agostino grew up. The reflection of the videomaker on the glass door to an apartment dwelling dissolves to the 8mm 1950s home movie footage of the d’Agostino family gathered upstairs in their living room watching television; scenes of a birthday cake, a barbecue, a Communion procession, a local marquee announcing the introduction of cinemascope. 34. Ken Jacobs’s film Blonde Cobra requires that the projectionist follow a complex set of instructions syncing live talk radio with specific sections of the film during its presentation. 35. Attributable to Peter d’Agostino. 36. “Electronic Super Highway: Nam June Paik in the ‘90s” was organized by the Mu- seum of Art, Inc., Fort Lauderdale and Exhibition management Inc., in Cincinnati. It opened November 1, 1994, at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, then moved to the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio. After its installation at the Museum of American Art in Philadelphia from October 1995 to January 1996, the exhibitil will travel to the San Jose Museum of Art in California, the Jackson- ville Museum of Art in Florida, the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of art in kansas City, Missouri, and finally the Honolul Acad- emy of Arts in the fall of 1997. 37. Frank Biocca and Mark R. Levy, Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality, ed. Frank Biocca and Mark R. Levy (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associations, 1995), 7. 38. TransmissionS: In the WELL, installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. See David Tafler, “Der Blick under der Sprung,” (“The Look and the Leap”), Kunstform, Bd. 103, September/Oktober 1989.

203 39. The images include visual references to Edison, Marconi, and Mikola Tesla, the respective founders of the motion picture, wireless telegraph, and alternating current. 40. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1954), 61. 41. The voyager travels down a two lane highway bordered by billboards. Each billboard shows the images of memories related to the sites thematically encountered on the map. Moving image fragments of war move the voyager to four separate points on a map: he West (the Rockies), the East (Philadelphia), the Mid East (the Persian Gulf War), and the Far East (Hiroshima). Hiroshima and the Persian Gulf War replace the heartland of the United States, the Mid West, with the bombed out overseas test sites of American techno-miliary expeditions. 42. Discussion with Peter d’Agostino. 43. Discussion with Peter d’Agostino. 44. Ken Jacobs, New York Film Festival, October 11, 1998.

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