Re: nettime Cinematic Video, v. 2
Video Art, and video as a medium, cannot reconcile moving images as mediated products. To say that video, does a better job of exposing flaws, or shrinks the 'perceptual distance' between maker and audience to me is a reflection upon the uses of the medium, and not the medium itself. When looking at early moments of artistic production in video like Vito Acconci, or even second gen makers like Bill Viola, it is easy to see how the medium was sculpted to form a more immediate exchange between messenger and receiver, or at least to speculate on the affects the medium has to offer. However, this is not to say that Video itself implies symbolic connectivity. Also to say that video is a poor substitute for any medium to me discredits the aesthetic choice most artists made to use the medium because of its particular stylistic qualities. A clear example of this, that seems to be overlooked within the essay is moments of feed[back] systems, realTime image processing, and live preformative elements developed in Chicago by Dan Sandin and Phil Morton (with Tom DeFanti later on). Regardless of their marginalization in the cannon (compared to Bruce Nauman lets say), it seems unavoidable to call upon these types of makers to disrupt, and/or problematize the idea of video being an easy solution to film. If video was an obvious financial choice of artist in its earliest moments, then why did artists such as Paul Sharits and Hollis Frampton continue to work in film? Frampton in particular could have easily made Nostalgia(1971) in video, however he was influenced by the weight of narrative history that occurs in film cinema. He uses film artistically in order to deconstruct the language that narrative cinema to that point had established (and continues to maintain). In essence, video was, and should continue to be not a substitution for finance (although I'm aware that it is necessary sometimes), but instead an aesthetic decision that makers should utilize. Video artists did not keep the medium happily to themselves, and to propose that Video now bemoans the encroachment of the 'professional world' or to an invasion of 'filmmakers' to me seems historically(hystorically) hypocritical. Early Video moments occurred (not exclusively mind you) as a response to the 'professional world,' particularly to Television. They were the encroaching force on the medium at one point, and their viral tendencies now grace our canonized worldview, and we congratulate and admire those moments of broadcast bastardization. Cinema is not imagining. Watching cinema is imagining. Cinema is a construction, but it is also a device used for documentation, and this I believe occurs throughout different mediums of time based image making. It is important to distinguish between recording and documenting. Recording on the one hand is supposedly objective, whereas documenting is a subjective act (regardless of what Cinéma vérité has tried to teach us). There are constantly decisions being made in cinema that dismantle an argument for objective filmmaking (such as an edit). In this way video is also not a recording device, but instead of documentation machine. The Film Image is now an index. There are rules, implications, references, styles, and constructs that are (for the large part) maintained by commercial ventures. and this has allowed for alternative mediums to insert themselves into the act of filming (for instance game design). Moving images made with a camera are now bound by their constructs, and the insertion of different tools does not enhance any potential that cinema has to offer. To presuppose the introduction of new technology will bolster the medium seems too linear, and only will help solidify the modern epoch of 'progress,' whereas the democratization of tools should defer into a more pluralistic opportunity of radical image making. These rule sets continue to be unchallenged by mediums due to expectations that cinema has made and continues to abide by for the past century. Digital production has marginalized the effort of making a clear distinction between film and tape and now high-end HDV/HD production where 'data' is the new film(i.e. tape less/film less digital recording of files to portable HDD) has blended the vernacular even more. However, these new technologies continue to unchallenged the constructs that cinema has created over time. From a narrative cinema standpoint, new tools sets have just started to disrupt the conventions of cinema (for instance Russian Ark, and its break down of the expectation of cuts in film). Now there should be a call for deconstructing cinema along side the development of new tools. Cinema is constantly being reborn, but that resurrection does not rely on new mechanisms it relies on new thinking. On 1/18/07, Heiko Recktenwald [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... porculus wrote: just a question of $..welknown those who find filth super8 of their granma hidden in their dead granda bazar are
nettime Cinematic Video, v. 2
Cinematic Video: film is dying while 'film' is being born... by Tom Sherman The word 'film' is undergoing a radical change in meaning. Film used to be a photochemical medium--shot, processed, edited in celluloid, and projected through 16mm and 35mm polyester prints. As Kodak says, film is animal, vegetable and mineral. The base of film stock is cellulose acetate (vegetable); the photo-sensitive emulsion is a thin gelatinous coating composed of boiled, emulsified cattle bones and cartilage laced with silver halides (animal and mineral). Kodak's rather organic medium was the basis of film production for over a century. Now film likely describes something very different. 'Film' is increasingly digital and electronic. Today most 'film' is captured by light sensitive CCDs (charged coupled devices), the silicon chips that make the pictures in video camcorders. The lion's share of the editing and image processing done in 'film' post-production is done with computers. The non-linear digital editing station is fast replacing the hands-on Steenbeck and the wet film processing lab. DVDs are used for printing, duplicating, distributing and projecting 'films.' Film projection is a dying art. Digital video projection is all the rage as screenings everywhere are increasingly conducted in video. 'Film' has become just another word for video. This major shift in the technology of 'film' is bemoaned by two communities in particular--the diehard celluloid filmmakers who consider themselves film artists, and by video artists, who find their medium being trampled by an invasion of 'filmmakers.' Scores of film artists are now involved in direct or handmade film (sometimes camera-less), splashing their celluloid with bleaches and acids in sinks and bathtubs, pushing film through alchemical transformations in order to get the most extreme wet film look. Video artists, having had the medium of video to themselves for forty years, find themselves necessarily pushing the cybernetic aspects of video to its limits, focusing on 'live' performance to the camcorder, or making limited-edition video installations for exhibition in galleries and museums, capitalizing on video art's origins as a systems-based sculptural form. The vast majority of independent 'filmmakers' are simply working in video while calling what they do 'film.' Film artists dedicated to celluloid and video artists are offended and squawking because their ways of working, their aesthetic languages are being threatened with extinction. In the same way that half the world's 6,000+ spoken languages are being discarded for World English, Spanish, French and Mandarin Chinese (half the world's languages will likely disappear by 2050), cellulose-based film art and video art's forty-year history of experimentation and innovation are currently being threatened by 'filmmakers' who don't seem to realize they are working in video. Most of these 'filmmakers' couldn't say video if they had a mouth full of it. Some would say that this is simply a crisis in semantics, that the meaning of the word 'film' has shifted radically under the force of technological evolution. Does it really matter what we call a moving image projected on a screen that tells a story--fictional, documentary, or a mix of both? But there are reasons to watch our language in the interest of preserving and expanding diversity in contemporary independent film and video. The medium of video is not 'film,' nor does video effectively embody the conventional approaches of making cinema. Cinema is the century-old tradition of translating literature or live drama to the screen. Cinema is an act of imagination and construction, not an act of recording or transmission. It could also be thought of as the emotional manipulation of audiences through the illusion of film, a media extension of the novel and the social dynamics of theatre. Celluloid has been the preferred medium for cinema, as it was sufficiently distant from real space and time, but could fully immerse the audience in a high-definition, concrete resolution of illusory space. I'm not saying that cinema cannot be made in video, but it would be a good idea to acknowledge and understand the actual medium one is working in, and to write and shoot specifically for video, not to assume video will respond to the same creative approaches as celluloid. Video, before these 'filmmakers' arrived, was the medium of choice for thousands of artists, who developed an aesthetic based partly on the material qualities of video (and more fundamentally on its cybernetic strengths--video modifies and governs behavior through instant feedback) and on different goals (the translation of literature and theatrical performance was NOT the main goal of video artists). Video art is not a history of illusion, but in fact is a creative use of a specific technological medium to eliminate the gap between art and life. Part of video's intimacy is its material qualities of acoustically
Re: nettime Cinematic video
On Fri, 16 Jun 2006, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is the new video 'film,' video or film? Video art has been pushed around and roughed up by a technological revolution throughout its forty-year history. Analog video, rolling through several formats of technological evolution, has been completely replaced by digital video. A better way to look at this is that video art _is_ technological revolu- tion, from Portapak and earlier through Newtek Toaster to the latest Beowulf cluster. It's always on the edge. [..] Filmmakers, displaced and stunned by these developments, have latched onto video. Wanting video to be film they slow video's frame rate and insist upon progressive scan. Video's aspect ratio has been stretched from 4:3 to 16:9. Filmmakers try to slow down and overtake an electronic medium that runs at the speed of light. Major equipment manufacturers exploit this migration, for the time being... The central digital art form is simulation. The goal is the creation of a complete fake: the fusion of the copy and the original. As with 'reality television,' the digital 'film' demonstrates the difficulties of controlling hyper-reality. I have absolutely no idea who you're talking about and I know a lot of filmmakers, videomakers etc. form all over the country. I don't even understand why you say the 'central digital art form is simulation' - where is this coming from? And what is 'hyper-reality' about all of this? Are you talking about studio photorealist work or small independents? As it is this is problematc. for that matter, the aspect ratio hasn't been 'stretched' - it's changed with HDTV, but there has been analog letter- boxing for years. Filmmakers collectively attempt to transform the balanced, brutally explicit retinal-acoustic reality of video into an electronic, digital photo-optical simulation of 'film.' They try to blanket the video medium's essential cybernetic characteristics (behaviour shaped and governed by instant replay) with scripts and actors and the conventions of cinematic history. It has not yet dawned on filmmakers that the explicit nature of the video medium undermines the illusions of fictional narrative. There is NO explicit natu of video and certainly video does not 'undermine' fictional narrative; just watch an evening of television. As far as instant replay goes, that's also been in existence for years with video assists. The semantic trail of this awkward takeover is amusing. Filmmakers now say they work in 'digital cinema.' 'Video cinema' or 'video film' are too straightforward and don't sound right (video sounds better as a noun than it does as a verb). Filmmakers, confined to computers and non-linear editing, are attracted to the term 'movies' (as in 'QuickTime movie files') -- but the idea of digital 'movies' is ultimately too small and fails to encompass the grand 20th century scale of cinematic history. The word cinema must remain in a description of filmmaking in video. The millennial practice of making 'films' in the medium of video is exactly what it is: cinematic video. It is filmmakers making cinema using the medium of video. It is cinematic video. Which filmmakers say this? People I know say that they work in video? And for that matter filmmakers aren't 'confined' to anything - there is still film and all sorts of admixtures. This definition seems very unnecessary and confining; what bothers me is the constant need to define and redefine whole fields of practices ranging from analog film through video installation through video art online through interactive work or Internet II work, etc. etc. As far as the history of 'cinema' goes or 'cinema' itself? Which history? Which cinema? I certainly don't seem my work in this tradition, if such it is, at all - there are cinemas of the 20th century surely but I'd be hard picked to define any of them. As far as 'cinema' goes, I think the word itself carries too much baggage. - Alan blog at http://nikuko.blogspot.com - for URLs, DVDs, CDs, books/etc. see http://www.asondheim.org/advert.txt - contact [EMAIL PROTECTED], - general directory of work: http://www.asondheim.org Trace at: http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk - search Alan Sondheim # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
