forgetthebody

[forgetthebody]

Forgetting the body helps: As media goes immersive do I get in my own way?

Is cinematic technology now capable of constructing immersive media environments that are as compelling as the worlds created through traditional cinema? We enter the alternate realities of cinema in our minds, while the body slips into the armchair and disappears in the darkness. Lasting a few seconds or the length of the feature, imagination and narrative coalesce into consciousness. You become the character, you exist in that world. To be able to actually enter such a world physically, the realm of Star Trek’s holodeck, may still be beyond our means, yet filmic imagery has already leaped into the two-and-a-half, three, and four dimensional worlds.

What has been happening amateurishly by design in video art and mew media installation for decades is expanding and being polished for consumption by a much wider audience than the art world. Filmmakers, musicians, theater and dance companies, creative directors, etc. are capitalizing, creatively and otherwise, on the experiential potential of the medium. But how suited are we to this full-body immersive experience. Traditional cinema’s magic works so well precisely because the body is excluded, unencumbering the mind to “immerse” itself in the story. If we look at precursors to our current state of immersive potential we have video installation at the low end and “Transformers: The Ride”, “Epcot Center”, and other amusement park spectacles on the high end. In the theme park you enter a kind of carriage that moves you through the world of fantasy, thrilling you along the way. As the carriage whisks you here and there your mind engages with the media all around you. On top of this you feel sensations in the body as you speed along the track. Yet the body isn’t fully activated, the carriage still contains the body, it’s movements choreographed and devoid of choice.

In video installation the body is free to roam, to experience the content according to choice. The question for the viewer then becomes what to do? How should you move around the space? I have often come across viewers who became trapped by their own choices, in terms of where to stand and “appreciate” the piece. They get locked in, become awkward and hyper aware of their own presence, they get distracted. As people see more and more media installations they start to feel freer, they learn to explore the space, to make choices, and follow them through, and then to make others. Yet no one tells you this, you must reach this conclusion for yourself. The uninitiated, those who are not yet savvy enough to negotiate the saturated media environment, are left to fend for themselves.

So on one hand you are pushed along in the stroller, while on the other you are cast into the void, albeit a void with bean bags or benches provided on occasion. Should the viewer be taken more into account now that cinema is expanding? Should the body’s relationship to the content be paramount in terms of delivering the desired experience?

We have been conditioned to comprehend conventional storytelling strategies like movies. We are attuned to understand discrete blocks of experience like the 30 min soap, the 60 min drama, the 2 hour movie. We can make temporal connections between characters and scenes within the frame, we can navigate the storyline. But when the temporal score and storyline is coupled with spatial imagery that forces us to get out of our chair and explore, we tend to get lost along the way, distracted by our own baggage.

[forgetthebody]

Why is video art so amateurish? Video art’s humble beginnings have held on tight.

Video art is a young medium, not even fifty years old. When Sony introduced the Portapak in 1965 video art was born. A technology previously reserved for studios and agencies became portable and affordable, and quickly found its way into artists hands. The first decade of video art set the tone firmly in opposition to what the studios and agencies were trying to accomplish. Video art was often unedited, dry, unwatchable, everything that TV wasn’t. By positioning itself on the opposite side of the quality divide, TV and cinema’s slickness to video art’s amateurishness, the medium formed a lasting resistance to refinement, to quality control, to entertainment. The rule became that video art was boring, that it was single-minded, that it repeated over and over again, that it refused even the most elemental components of cinema, like cinematography and montage.

The amateurish legacy has remained, durational performative actions for the camera are alive and well in the works of artists like Kate Gilmore and Tamy Ben-Tor. Ryan Trecartin’s videos are purposely low-fi and crudely chaotic, working to the benefit of the work and the content. But while the rough, raw, unrefined nature of video art has endured, have there been side-effects to the medium’s resistance to being polished?

As video art and video installation are sold globally in the ever expanding art world, demanding higher and higher prices, there is actually a rudimentary nature to the presentations of many of these works. More often than not the available equipment determines the presentation. Video artists often make do as any artist does, yet with video this often translates to sloppy display, with cobbled together supplies. Projector masks made out of dowels and tape come to mind, or using bits of wadded up cardboard to even out a projection, or high definition screens hooked up to standard definition dvd players. Even at the highest level of institution, like The Whitney Museum, video installations are just not constructed that well. There is a slipshod nature to many works that is not a part of their content, but seemingly a result of a low standard of quality control when it comes to presenting these works.

TJ Wilcox’s In the Air at the Whitney Museum, an immense circular video panorama of New York City is “dazzling” according to Roberta Smith in her review in the New York Times. She goes on to say that “it may be hard to tear your eyes from Mr. Wilcox’s mirroring of his city and his medium...” Upon entering I first tried to orient myself, to figure out north, south, east, west, to figure out which direction my apartment was in. Then it dawned on me that I couldn’t see my apartment, that there was a big building blocking the view, that even with an all encompassing panorama, the city from one perspective is incomplete, its too massive to capture. The piece is spectacular, the shallow video cylinder is 7 feet tall and 35 feet in diameter. It hangs 4 feet off the floor so viewers must duck under it, entering into an immersive, all encompassing 360 degree view of the city. It’s seductive, but the more I watch the more I notice. The projections are not clear, not nearly sharp enough to get close to and appreciate the details of the city. And it’s a shame because the piece invites this kind of scrutiny, to study the city in all its unfathomable complexity. As expansive as the panorama is I want more, I want clarity, I want to see into windows.

Wilcox shot high-res stills, 60,000 of them, but he used small rugged GoPro cameras with tiny lenses, so the images suffer, especially as the sun gets low. The multiple projections that compose the panorama don’t line up perfectly, they are overlapped in some places and not others. The colors are not evenly balanced across the board either, which is especially apparent in the color of the skies. The screens themselves are bowing and curving in different ways, breaking the symmetry of the piece. All these determining factors occur haphazardly, and they influence the overall impression of the work. The spectacular is muffled by the poor craftsmanship, by the seeming lack of attention to detail.

Why, at the museum level, is video installation so rudimentary? Why are the standards at the highest level of presentation so low? Is this really a nod to the amateurish legacy of the medium, or has that legacy mothballed into the common practice of accepting a low standard of quality when it comes to video installation? Perhaps we are just to easily seduced by moving imagery that most people just don’t notice.

[forgetthebody]

Marco Brambilla’s “Creation (Megaplex)” @ St. Patricks Cathedral

In Creation (Megaplex), Marco Brambilla, drawing from the gamut of mainstream cinema, assembles and re-contextualizes a vast amount of pop cultural content.  Challenging and conflating standards of filmic convention from cinema to video installation, Brambilla arrives at the emerging intersection between video and architecture, the expanded universe of an immersive cinematic experience. Spanning centuries of history Brambilla’s Megaplex Trilogy, beginning with Civilization (2008) and Evolution (2010), concludes with 2012’s Creation, taking the viewer according to Brambilla “on a spiraling trajectory that begins with a big bang and continues through embryonic inception, idyllic, Eden-like bliss and decadence, and culminates in annihilation, only to then interminably re-invent itself."

I first saw Brambilla’s seductive 3D video appropriation piece at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in Chelsea, where it was installed according to the conventions of basic video installation. Despite it’s 3D nature it existed simply as a large projection in a black box, conventional video art with a twist of 3D. A few months later the piece transformed into a site-specific audio/visual performance at the St. Patricks Cathedral in Soho, part of the second Ideas City Festival hosted by the New Museum. The massive 3D video hung on a projected screen in front of the altar. The audience sat transfixed in pews as live music from the darkened outer aisles permeated and surrounded the audience, setting an ominous tone. Performed by the Young New Yorker’s Chorus, composer Christopher Cerrone's score, a stirring reinterpretation of Prokofiev’s Cinderella Waltz, made the immersive scene feel dream-like, with the full choir intoning an enveloping ethereal soundscape that reverberated around the cathedral.

The tunnel like 3D video draws the audience through a rotating spiral that is based on the structure of DNA, the double-helix, producing a kind of vertigo effect, where the endless tunnel keeps repeating its cycles, throwing you down and drawing you back up, spitting you out and sucking you back in. Well-known Hollywood characters like Major Kong from Dr. Strangelove as well as Maria von Trapp, Yoda, and Winona Ryder as Beetlejuice’s Lydia fly towards the viewer, whirling around the double helix and dropping down through the vortex. There is an indisputable draw and accessibility to Bramillia’s appropriated source material, in that we know these characters, they are so familiar from their mainstream triumph that we inherently respond to them. Yet the mainstream nature of the media is also it’s biggest liability, running the risk of controlling the conversation and hampering the analysis of the work’s larger message that critiques more than reveres this media. The viewer becomes transported into the work and often watches its cycles repeatedly, continually noticing different characters and moments, leaving the door wide open for the work to be boxed-in and reduced to a kind of game show trivia contest where audience conversations never get passed the “oh that’s that movie, and oh that’s this movie.” (Creation includes excerpts from the Superman, The Big Lebowski, The Sound of Music, Mars Attacks, The Terminator, and Ghostbusters among others.)

The digitally assembled scenes generate hyper-real swirling landscapes and burning cityscapes, against which mankind vacillates between creating and consuming, each 4 minute cycle of the work immersing the viewer in an overload of media, impossible to absorb. According to Brambilla “these spectacle films have become so cosmetic, aggressive, and interchangeable that this language could be used to communicate. If properly configured and collaged in a certain way, this language could be used as the brushstrokes to take this journey. It celebrates and satirizes films simultaneously.”

The piece exists as a kind of timeline of mainstream entertainment, a western cultural residue, smeared into a media saturated vortex, showcasing the high standing of cinematic icons within our collective cultural consciousness. Situated in a Gothic church, with the video in the position of the pastor, the work speaks to how embedded both technology and media have become, reaching the point where they are practically sacred, and redolent of the apparently never-ending cycle of life, death, and rebirth that most all religions incorporate in some fashion.

Marco Brambilla, born in Milan and raised in Canada, is a New York City based video collage and installation artist. He had his moment as a Hollywood player in 1993, when he directed Demolition Man at 28, but he found the level of compromise discouraging.

[forgetthebody]

Peter Greenaway’s “Leonardo’s Last Supper” @ Park Avenue Armory

Peter Greenaway purposely fails as a storyteller in the traditional sense of cinema, instead his films and installations provide copious food for thought, often a veritable feast for the senses. Visuals for Greenway have always been paramount, whereas traditional cinema remains tethered to the story, the text, the word, Greenaway seems more interested in visual language. And to look at his films they are highly concerned with formalism and so often devoid of the emotional language that runs through mainstream cinema. The emotional affinity that runs through Hollywood movies has become an expected part of the cinematic experience, the public has largely become addicted to this kind of emotional rapport with the film and its characters. Hollywood films largely demand this kind of sentimentality to the point where both the visuals and the text feed only the continuation of the formula. Greenaway’s visuals are sumptuous, the spaces he creates already frees the imagery from the demands of the narrative, breaking the traditional mold. With Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway he literally breaks out of many more boxes, the painting, the single screen, and the theater among them.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper has always been in motion. The painting is a tableaux infused with an unfolding narrative, ripe for a filmic transformation. In Greenway’s rendition he attempts to transform a masterpiece into a multimedia experience, expanding The Last Supper into a multi screened immersive environment, a cinematic and architectural mix, part homage, part history lesson, part Appropriation Art, part spectacle. The piece unfolds in three parts, the “Italy of the Cities” is a kind of hyper-speed romp through the history and landscape of the country. Then on to the clone of Santa Maria delle Grazie and Da Vinci’s mural The Last Supper, which goes from static magnificence in its digitally scanned uncanniness to a kind of animated projected light show that shares links with educational media, highlighting and directing the eye to inform more than seduce. The imagery expands to all sides, illuminating various parts of the painting’s scene, some shot at almost macro levels as to resemble topographies. Part three brings narration into play, describing the imagery from Veronese’s Wedding at Cana with a voice that leans towards the dry educational and art historical.

Greenaway’s goal seems to be to get the viewers to “really” engage with Da Vinci’s masterpiece, as well as others, including Picasso’s Guernica and Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, throughout the continuation of his ongoing series, “Ten Classic Paintings Revisited.” As a way to study art history, as an academic tool, it reminds me of educational cd-rom’s, albeit a super-sized new-fangled version, the Mars Rover to the cd-rom’s Voyager 1. The multimedia experience of the painting certainly invites deeper analysis, if only as a result of the length of commitment in viewing the piece. The statistical “8 seconds” that typical viewers spend on any given artwork has been bumped to 45min. Screens, screens behind screens, screens on the floor, screens hanging makes it hard to look away.

Greenaway was born in Wales and raised in Essex. He trained as an artist at Walthamstow. His early features – The Draughtsman's Contract, A Zed and Two Noughts – saw him hailed as one of the most distinctive, provocative talents of his generation. His chosen subjects are sex and death. Greenway has often been quoted as saying that he plans to kill himself at age 80.

[forgetthebody]

Yang Fudong’s “The Fifth Night” @ Leeum Samsung Museum of Art

In The Fifth Night (2010) Yang Fudong uses traditional cinematic means, including professional actress Maggie Cheung, lighting direction, cinematography and montage to arrive not at a film for the cinema, but instead at a seven-channel,  seventeen meter long mise-en-scène designed for the gallery. Originally referring to directing scenes in a stage play, mise-en-scène in filmic terms is a cinematic tool for advancing a story without the aid of spoken lines or even editing. Gesture, movement, gaze, and posture can communicate content and mood. These elements of visual composition as well as lighting and sets can all determine the tone of the scene. Gestures are imbued with symbolism, objects are ripe for metaphoric interpretation.

Filmed in the famous Shanghai Film Studio, using the studio’s film decors as the set, The Fifth Night (2010) was shot from seven simultaneous camera angles, each filmed in one long take lasting exactly 10 minutes and 37 seconds, the duration of a standard 35mm film reel. The seven 35mm cameras were outfitted with various lenses providing a range of depth effects that reveal the scene in its most minute detail. The setting, utilizing the old film decors, appears Chinese, but alludes not to the China of today, but to the China under the rule of the West, the Shanghai of the European concession territories. Yang deliberately juxtaposes the theatrical time of the film with the real-time of the filming process, depicting present-day reality through the a historical lens. In addition all the footage was photographed at night to underscore the theatricality and artificiality of its mise-en-scene.

Across the seven parallel screens, which Yang describes as emulating a Chinese scroll painting, boys and girls meet and part at random, their movements dreamlike and full of solitude. The cameras follow individuals in a seemingly meditative state. The long tracking shots trailing seven young people are reminiscent of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003). In both films the roving cameras enhance a feeling of loneliness and isolation, where everyone doesn’t quite see one another. The interconnected stories are told from seven different perspectives and jump from one to another. What transpired a moment ago on one screen became the past, and in a sense became imbued with a familiarity. Without the linear nature of more traditional, commercial films, The Fifth Night appears far more difficult to approach. The lack of spoken lines to covey characters’ emotions and moods, means that it is up to the viewer to decipher and assign feeling to purely visual compositions in order to flesh out the narrative. Language itself is actually extremely limited in articulating emotion precisely. The failure of language to adequately describe the world has traditionally been a limitation. Not being able to “find the words” is certainly part of our vocabulary and indicative of the boundaries of our discourse. Moving imagery, of the kind Yang utilizes, has the possibility of transcending the limits of language, of more accurately describing the scene. The difficulty arises in our lack of familiarity with dissecting and fully understanding images, since most of the images we come across in our daily lives are fairly devoid of complex content. The layering or combination of imagery can also go beyond language by simply introducing a multidimensionality to the story, allowing for the intersecting narratives to materialize. Despite that there is no real communication, no words are exchanged at all, sound is present in the piece, the sound of footsteps, hammering, horses’ hooves, and street traffic also function to link the scenes together.

The seven black and white screens of The Fifth Night do not prescribe or impose an order for viewing, the film can be read from left to right, or vice versa. Because the action is spread between multiple screens or projections the audience is forced to be more active, to make decisions about what to watch and how to follow or make sense of the story-arc. At first the seven channels seem to start from different points of time, when in fact they are all simultaneous. With the story traversing the multiple screens, the single incident being described from multiple standpoints, the audience is forced to interpret the parts they see, those they focus on, and reconcile them with the rest, extrapolating the “narrative” from the characters’ encounters. Considering where we are in time, arguably the age media, it should be second nature to contend with multiple streams of content. We apparently live in a media-saturated world, and yet our comfort level and skill with negotiating the content spread out between Yang’s video panorama is still rudimentary. There is certainly a learning curve in being able to grapple with an onslaught of imagery, one that most audiences are still in the initial phases of mastering. The question becomes: In this learning environment, is the audience failing to keep up with or fully appreciate what the work has to offer? Food for thought....

Yang Fudong was born in Beijing in 1971 and trained as a painter at The Academy of Fine Arts Hangzhou from 1991-95, and then later in the Department of Photography there, as well as the Film Academy Beijing in 1996. One of the most important artists to emerge in contemporary China, his film and photographic work is characterized for its painterly approach to its subject.

[forgetthebody]

Doug Aitken’s “Sleepwalkers” @ Museum of Modern Art

In the frigid winter of 2007 Doug Aitken staged a massive media intervention on the facade of the Museum of Modern Art. In an interview about the public artwork, which incorporates eight monumental projections, Aitken is quoted as saying: “I wanted to try and create something that transformed architecture into a moving flowing space, I wanted to see buildings live and breathe and reflect their communities in a subtle way.” In the official press release put out by MoMA and Creative Time Sleepwalkers is described as activating the building, “enlivening the building’s architecture with the nocturnal journeys of five characters representing city dwellers—a bicycle messenger, an electrician, a postal worker, a businessman, and an office worker.”

At dusk each evening, an early 5:00pm in the New York winter, five narratives, each 13 minutes in length, began to illuminate and transform the exterior of MoMA. Unfolding simultaneously across the eight projections, the linear narrative structure is broken and continuously re-edited as story-lines become intertwined in different combinations and juxtapositions. Sleepwalkers narratives focus on five “archetypal” New Yorkers, played by celebrities such as Cat Power, Tilda Swindon, and Donald Sutherland, among others. Insofar as we are all used to the suspension of disbelief when it comes to an actor playing a role, the choice of star power in this already purely blue-chip affair does little to open the conversation with or reflect the surrounding communities. Yet the idea of revealing the banal beauty of the city as well as its magical energy in a kind of site specific expanded documentary format is exciting and groundbreaking, even now 6 years later in 2013.

Aitken’s characters start their days at our dusk, setting out into the city, moving from isolation into the urban flow, their journeys becoming fragmented as they collide with other narrative threads. To Aitken’s credit he keeps true to breaking from the linear mold, his fast-cut editing style, his meditative lingering shots that dissolve into abstraction and geometric patterns collapse the narrative, and provide a rhythm that matches the city just as it was starting to feel too real. Aitken is quoted as saying “I used a variety of people in Sleepwalkers, some were well known, others not. The roles they played were not about a narrative or a persona, but instead an emotional landscape. Each story was about an individual that increasingly vanished into the world around them.” The idea of vanishing into the city, becoming part of it, resonates with Aitken’s process, as he literally enmeshes story-arcs into the cityscape, into buildings which have housed and will undoubtedly continue to house countless “real” moments. Does using the city as a literal backdrop for documentary based storytelling allow us to re-activate the past alongside the present, in the end making the audience part of the story? I can imagine site-specific stories being projection mapped onto numerous locations in the city that relate to their content, installations that communities would live with and contribute too and that passers by would happen across and engage with. If expanded cinema is about a more active experience, where the viewer can’t simply sit back in the darkness and be served, but must navigate through multiple focus points, then Aitken is certainly succeeding in being a part of that genre. Yet by using buildings for screens he may well in theory be moving to another level of activation, where the content mixes with the surrounding reality and is informed by it and vice versa. Although Aitken’s piece falls short of this melding between art and life, the stage has certainly been set. The trouble is ambitious and for the time being experimental projects like Doug Aitken's take a tremendous amount of vision and even more resources, making it feasible only with partners like MoMA, at least when we are talking about an intervention that is longer than a night or two. Projectors of the magnitude needed can easily be $100,000 for starters.

One might ask though, if you walk west and south to times square hasn’t this all been happening already? Is the fact that Aitken’s work is not an advertisement the only difference in terms of cinematic exploration? One might say that Aitken is breaking out of the cinematic box in a way that is rather conventional. But so it’s not the giant projections on the sides of buildings that are groundbreaking but the fact that there has been an attempt to cast midtown in a role in the movie. To allow reality to be the soundtrack, the bustling street traffic and the cold icy wind. What’s exciting is that the urban landscape can become the screen, the canvas on which one can sow countless tales where the public and private collide, which literally engage the public as they go about their lives, allowing them to pause and reflect in real time, and also for free. Museums are places for those with means, connections to get in comped, or $20 to pay your way at the likes of MoMA. Yet Doug Aitken’s piece was largely free, viewable from the street without commitment nor contribution. When the gates of the museum are turned inside out and the artwork lives of its own accord, the entire museum experience becomes upended in a positive way, breaking down barriers, opening doors.

The moving image is already an entrenched part of any major metropolitan public space, as realized through all the screens and billboards that promote a plethora of agendas. Yet Aitken offers us the city as living, breathing organism that subsists on and supports its occupants. His intervention speaks to the ever-evolving ways in which people experience memory and narrative given the hyper-fast speed of modern life and the technological advances that go hand in hand.

Doug Aitken was born in Redondo Beach, California in 1968. Initially studying magazine illustration and fine arts, he moved to New York in 1994 where he had his first solo show at 303 Gallery. Working with film, photography, installation, architecture, design and text, to name just a few of his mediums, Doug Aitken is both an avid collaborator and highly prolific.  He currently lives and works in Venice, California, and New York

P.S.

Sleepwalkers, the former public artwork, was released in 2011 as a box-set, designed to the T and in a limited edition of 1000, some of which are still available for $300 each.

“Among the treasures inside: a 23-by-36-inch, double-sided poster; a 12-inch vinyl picture disc with unreleased tracks by Broadcast, as well as a live recording of Aitken's opera "the handle comes up, the hammer comes down;" a CD of the same, plus further tracks by acts including Canyon Country and Bibio; two flipbooks with sequences excerpted from the film; a DVD with a special-edition cut of Sleepwalkers and a street-level walkthrough; and, most enlightening of all, a 96-page visual diary, "Fragments, Markings and Images from the Making of Sleepwalkers," which tells the story of the installation's conception from the inside out.”