Millennium Film Journal No. 56 Fall 2012 MATERIAL PRACTICE: FROM SPROCKETS TO BINARIES Millennium Film Journal No. 56 Fall 2012 MATERIAL MILLENNIUM FILM JOURNAL MATERIAL PRACTICE FROM SPROCKETS TO BINABINARIESRIES A BI-ANNUAL JOURNAL OF THE MOVING IMAGE, APPEARING SPRING & FALL. GO TO MFJ-ONLINE.ORG FOR BACK ISSUES, SUBSCRIPTIONS AND SUBMISSION INFORMATION. IMAGE: A visitor performs SK8Monkeys on Twitter (2009/2012), an installation work by JODI. Part of “JODI: Street Digital,” at Museum of the Moving Image, March 31-May 20, 2012. BRADLEY EROS - HOLLIS FRAMPTON - JANIS CRYSTAL LIPZIN Credit: Photo: Daniel Love / Museum of the Moving Image. MICHAEL SNOW - JODI - TACITA DEAN MILLENNIUM FILM JOURNAL No. MATERIAL PRACTICE 56 FALL 2012 FROM SPROCKETS TO BINARIES Senior Editor Millennium Film Workshop Grahame Weinbren Board of Directors Stephanie Wuertz, President 30 16 8 Editor Tom Jarmusch, Treasurer Jessica Ruffin Noe Kidder, Secretary Ken Jacobs, Member/Founder Art Direction and Design Lili White, Member No. Shona Masarin Howard Guttenplan, President Emeritus 56 FALL 2012 Development Associate Millennium Film Workshop Vivian Lee Executive Director Jay Hudson material practice: from sprockets to binaries Editorial Assistant Andrew St. Maurice 2 Grahame Weinbren 62 Lucy Reynolds Introduction Laure Prouvost: Incorrect Syntax Front Cover Bradley Eros, magenta space (1999), 35mm slide collage. Courtesy the artist. REVIEWS 66 Clint Enns Title Page Navigating Algorithmic Editing: Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, Light Spill (2005), 16mm film projector, 16mm film, screen; Lonely at the Algorithmic Editing as an Alternative Approach Top: Graphology Chapter 4, curated by Edwin Carels, MuHKA, Antwerp, Belgium, August 25 – September 25, 4 Kim Knowles to Database Cinema 2011. Photo Courtesy of MuHKA. Tacita Dean Film Printing SPECIAL FEATURE Sheridan Books, Chelsea, Michigan. 7 Carolyn L. Kane Error as Critical Praxis, Millennium Film Journal, issued twice a year in the Spring and the Fall, is dedicated to providing an Review of Peter Krapp’s Noise Channels: 74 Processing Parameters: international forum for discussion and debate of and around artists’ cinema. Filmmakers, videomakers, those Glitch and Error in Digital Culture A Lecture by Hollis Frampton who use other technologies of image production, and all parties interested in advanced or regressive cinema Introduction by Gerald O’Grady are encouraged to submit articles, reviews, manifestoes, schemas, and proposals. Manuscripts should be 8 Rachel Stevens sent to: The Editors, Millennium Film Journal, 119 West 22nd Street, 3rd Floor, New York, N.Y. 10011 or may be JODI: Street Digital submitted electronically to [email protected]. ARTIST PAGES The Editors are grateful to the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, 11 Chris Kennedy Evan Meaney: the well of representation creative communities in New York State’s 62 counties; the National Endowment for the Arts; and the New 42 Bradley Eros York City Department of Cultural Affairs. ‘more captivating than phosphorus’ 13 Kenneth White ADVERTISING Michael Snow: In The Way Please contact Vivian Lee at [email protected]. 50 Janis Crystal Lipzin A Materialist Film Practice in SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION the Digital Age INTERVIEWS Individual 1 year: $16 *Plus shipping. 58 Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder Institution 1 year: US $45 / Canada $55 / Outside N. America $70 *Includes shipping. 16 Justin Remes Subscriptions and back issues are available through the MFJ website, www.mfj-online.org. Sculpting Time: An Interview with Michael Snow COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS Published by the Millennium Film Workshop, Inc. 66 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 ARTICLES 54 Katherine Bauer, Steven Woloshen, Email: [email protected] Richard Tuohy Web: www.mfj-online.org 22 Martin Rumsby Copyright © 2012 by Millennium Film Workshop, Inc. Photographic Memory: Diary of a Viewer IN MEMORIAM ISSN 1064-5586 Distributed in the U.S.A. by Ubiquity Distributors, Inc. and internationally by Central Books. 30 Jihoon Kim Bruce Elder’s Film-Digital Hybrids and 88 Amos Vogel by Scott MacDonald Materialist Historiography Chris Marker by Bill Horrigan INTRODUCTION marketing of the ‘always new’ . .” An allegory of resistance underlies Eros’ explorations of the breakdowns and limits of photochemical production the cracks and fissures of film baked or burned in the projector gate, the beauties that emerge at the snags and stoppages of cinematic production. One of the foundations of the materiality of film is its processing chemistry. We are honored to be able to include With the bankruptcy of Kodak, the movie industry’s embrace of ‘the digital’, the reduction of services by some a previously unpublished lecture by Hollis Frampton on that subject. Gerald O’Grady provided the transcription of the film labs and the closing of others, the photochemical cinema appears to be in free-fall. However, moving image three-hour lecture, delivered without notes in 1976 at Media Study Buffalo, the influential institution O’Grady started artists around the world continue to use film with commitment and enthusiasm, many of them producing works that in 1972. Frampton’s legacy is an undercurrent throughout this issue, most explicitly in Evan Meaney’s video ceibas: foreground the material substrata of the medium in one way or another. In a parallel move, artists working with electro- epilogue – the well of representation (discussed by Chris Kennedy), which reconceives Frampton’s final work Gloria as magnetic media seek out ways to ground their explorations in bits and bytes, developing homemade technologies that a lo-fi video game. Frampton’s work is both reference and inspiration for both photochemical and electromagnetic expose the material (or immaterial) underpinnings of digital media. practitioners who take the materiality of their media as subject-matter, including some of the filmmakers analyzed in Tacita Dean has become a high-profile spokesperson for the necessity of maintaining the technologies and Martin Rumsby’s essay: Steven Woloshen, who buries sugar-coated archival footage in the earth as a supplementary materials of the photochemical. Her recent installation, titled FILM (reviewed in this issue), was a two-story high, form of processing; Richard Tuohy, who works with lens flares, superimpositions and specific chemical processes and portrait-format projection in the cavernous Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, funded by the global mega-corporation Greg Biermann, who applies systematic (digital) post-production techniques to scenes from classic movies, bringing Unilever. The accompanying catalogue is an impassioned, multi-vocal argument for the perpetuation of celluloid and out qualities that would otherwise be unnoticed. the photochemical, as a medium for artistic endeavors above all else. And the idea of film as a medium primarily for However . a comparison of film and ‘digital’ as if they were alternative production media is fundamentally artists is one of the themes of this issue of the journal. unsound. Unlike celluloid film, with its clearly defined photochemical architecture, the digital is not a medium. The The center of Dean’s personal commitment to film is in the regiments and methodologies the medium demands term ‘digital’ covers multiple modalities, with the single common feature that at some stage in the transition from the from its practitioners, with the implication that the practices of the artist are essentially communicated in the ‘aura’ of perceptual through the computer and back to the perceptual, data has been encoded numerically (i.e. digitally) for the work. Her description of editing on a Steenbeck flatbed highlights the significance of the working process to her: transfer, storage, or transformation, and then decoded so as to be available for perception. Even when ‘digital video’ means “to cut something in or take something out and then spool backwards to the beginning to watch how it has worked, ‘captured with a digital camera’, there is a wild range of visual qualities, encoding techniques, and methodologies— is the time of film and the time of film edited, as well as a time of deep thought, concentration, and consideration. I different capture devices produce images that can be either markedly distinct or visually indistinguishable from film, need that material resistance to my ideas and that is what I am most afraid of losing.” (Tacita Dean, FILM, ed. Nicholas inferior in ways that can only be experienced, or superior in measurable terms such as resolution, color palette, and Cullinan [2011: London, Tate Publishing] p. 20) dynamic range. Janis Crystal Lipzin, who has been working in film for over three decades, also describes the medium as a Although the single definable feature of the digital is its numerical foundation, the generally accepted immateriality st collaborator in the artistic process, but in different terms. The optics, mechanics and chemistries of the photographic of the digital has been foregrounded and undercut by artists at least since the beginning of the 21 century, as Jihoon apparatus and processing required (which Lipzin often undertakes herself) function like a dance partner, sometimes Kim points out in his analysis of the hybrid work of Bruce Elder. There is a range of approaches. Some artists embrace leading, sometimes following, but always contributing to the work in ways beyond the artist’s control. Several of the areas of digital malfunction, exposing armatures of numbers, pixels, and pages of