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A new trend that particularly has attained a following in Austria
and The Netherlands can be detected at film and media art festivals:
abstract digital films. Digital techniques are opening the door
to new experiments. The costs are proportionately lower than with
other media and the possibilities almost unlimited. While in regular
feature films digital technology is being employed to precisely
control image and sound, in abstract film and video art the search
is for the anarchy in the computer. Like celluloid in the abstract
films of the 1960s and paint in abstract painting, the computer
is supposed to arrest your attention.
I saw a video work by the Austrian/Dutch
duo reMi (Renate Oblach, b. 1972, and Michael Pinter, b. 1969)
for the first time during the European Media Art Festival in Osnabruck:
"Romutation" (1999, 35'00"), a triptych
in which a different primary color (red, yellow, blue) is central
in each part. Once that is said, every structure that can be grasped
has been exhausted. In a torrent of gradations of color, neurotically
recurring diagrams and spluttering and squeaking noises, digital
disinformation hurtles over the audience. I call it disinformation
because the audio-visual signals provided are not aimed at recognition,
but are merely and solely designed to produce a frontal, physical
confrontation with the senses. Sometimes one still tried to relate
the images and sounds to each other, but changes in the intensity
of the image and sound made it impossible to focus attention on
both signals, and thus to follow any structuring or relations
they had with each other; either the image or the sound demanded
full attention. For those who persevered and sat through the whole
film, after 35 minutes of pure abstract terror their senses were
purged. What remained was an emptiness in the auditory and visual
cortex, because brain functions had been sidelined, and the eye
sockets were filled with afterimages and the canals of the ears
with noise.
The work of the Utrecht artist Bas van
Koolwijk, another adept at this abstract digital film style, corresponds
closely with that of reMi, with whom he has collaborated in the
past. But there are several great differences. Van Koolwijk's
work is more minimal and has a clear structure. He himself calls
it "a search for the balance between order and chaos."
The fluctuations in the works are greater, less fragmented than
the work of reMi, and sequences frequently play with the dividing
line between whether there is a signal or not. In addition, his
works are also shorter in duration, about three to five minutes
(the ideal length for a song), which make them easier to grasp.
As well as, and in contradistinction
to their threatening aura, works of Van Koolwijk and reMi also
have a playfulness in composition which betrays the delight in
the process by which they were made. It is an long, drawn out
process of seeking the right sequence, the right diagram, in which
it is not so much construction but rather experimentation which
is central to the production process, and with it the decision
of whether the result will be preserved or not. Thus composition
proceeds without restraint, since the "undo" button
offers a potential way out, if necessary.
Bas van Koolwijk combines analog with
digital failures by messing around with the wires between the
computer and the video, or exporting the image sequences created
into an audio mixing panel in order to create his sounds via this
analogue "detour." Says Van Koolwijk, "Thus there
is always a moment of delight, every time it happens, when you
have gotten the monitor crazy enough to repeat those image sequences.
At that moment I am also curious about how the sequence sounds.
The pulse of the image and sound can then be the same, because
the essence of my work does not occur in the computer, but in
the triangle computer + video + picture tube or beam/sound. I
am chiefly interested in the pulse itself."
"We operate from overload and hope
to reach a new land with these digital films," says Michael
Pinter. "It's a matter of constantly feeling out how far
you can go. We are not interested in a meaning, a political message
or critique of the medium, but seek the physical experience of
color and sound... The films are constructed from files with loops
of disrupted video and audio signals, what are called 'fuck ups.'
You can make these by, for example, interfering with the signal
by speeding up the picture, or, on the other hand, rewinding while
reading video images into the computer. It is searching for the
signal for the sake of the signal itself. Thus what was being
read in is of no importance. You only look at the color patterns
that are produced."
In doing this, the video signal is completely
stripped of its extrinsic representative character and selected
only for its structure. For that the most extreme, generally unused
possibilities of the computer are sought out. This conceals a
reactionary attitude toward the computer. While in regular film
and video production digital technology is employed to gain total
control over image and sound, precisely on the frame, in work
by reMi the search is for the uncontrolled, the anarchy in the
computer. The computer is not a servant in the production process,
but is allocated an autonomous function.
"The disruption process arises from the sum total of a number
of conditions/settings," Pinter explains. "For instance,
by allowing a particular version of Adobe Premiere to run in a
Windows environment, so that the computer becomes irritated and
itself produces images. Because the signal is disturbed, it flips
out and begins to live a life of its own. As soon as you open
the file of the video signal you read in, the structure repeats
itself in the frame. Files of this sort are the basic foundation
images for the film. We don't make any further alterations to
them or lay any effects over them, because it is precisely from
pure disruption of this sort that we want to work. We compose
the films by combining different fuck ups with one another."
The makers speak of fuck ups as the point
of departure for the films and call the creative manipulations
"transmutations," terminology that reminds one strongly
of "glitch" related art. A glitch is a deliberately
sought disfunction that serves as a building block for the composition
and its specific, fostered for the agitated character of its tone
or image. It is a way of working that has a following in contemporary
electronic music and is founded on an extreme urge to experiment.
It is a search for untrodden territory, which now appears to be
reachable for the first time by means of digital techniques.
This manner of working with the computer
image is completely new, because the apparatus and software to
do this has only been available to consumers for a couple of years.
Yet the image that is created appears to be founded on an older
tradition of experimental film that enjoyed its heyday in the
1960s and '70s, the abstract film and the "direct film"
and abstract video art. Then too new apparatus came to be available
for artists, who profited in this way from the democratization
of technology. In the '60s and '70s this involved freer access
to recording techniques as the 16mm film camera with synchronized
sound and the video camera were launched on the consumer market.
In a certain sense this contributed to the flowering of experimental
film. For instance, by scratching the celluloid stock Len Lye
(in his case beginning as early as the 1920s!) and Stan Brakhage
sought an abstract film language that was not based on recording
reality and was stripped of narrativity. In electronic videos
by Nam June Paik, the Vasulkas or the Dutchman Livinus van de
Bundt, the electronic signal itself was thematized. Many of these
abstract films and videos were discussed in the visual art discourse
and compared with painting. In this, the emphasis was particularly
on their makers' orientation to their material, comparing their
use of celluloid and the video signal to the way in which painters
in the modernist tradition used paint.
Since the 1990s there has been a second
phase in the democratization of film and video technology. The
accessibility of post-production technology has now increased
enormously through the availability of more powerful computers,
which can be outfitted as complete studios. It is therefore the
montage process - the act of intervening in the material (whether
shot or otherwise) after the fact - that oversteps the boundaries
of representation, or throws them entirely overboard. Today it
is particularly artists and filmmakers who are pushing their formal
experiments to the limits by means of the new possibilities of
digital technology, and seeking the new opportunities hidden in
the apparatus. As in the 1960s, it would seem that the object
orientation of the signal is important in this. With the coming
of the computer, it is the digital signal which in a comparable
way has become central in the work.
One could perhaps best characterize these
video experiments with the words that Lev Manovich used to describe
the whole of digital cinema, namely as "painting in time."
Manovich poses the question of whether we can still speak of cinema
as an art/medium that is based on an indexical link with reality
(or more simply, based on the reproduction of reality), now that
many films are being made with the assistance of techniques involving
digital manipulation. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis,
1988), Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) and The
Matrix (Andy & Larry Wachowski, 1999) are perhaps the
best known and most discussed examples of films that made the
integration of digital image manipulation techniques visible (or
perhaps better, invisible). According to Manovich, with the integration
of digital technology the development of film has again returned
to its first stage, the animation film, and it can therefore again
be classed as a form of painting. (See L. Manovich, "What
is Digital Cinema," in P. Lunenfeld (ed.), The Digital
Dialectic (MIT, 1999), pp. 172-192.)
The interface of visual manipulation
programs also works hand in hand with this. These use stereotypical
icons such as the brush, eraser and pencil. Here too Manovich's
characterization of digital cinema can be recognized. The new
crop of digital filmmakers can be seen as abstract painters in
time. It is therefore striking that many of the artists have a
past history as painters, and have thrown themselves into the
new medium out of their fascination with the use of color, and
particularly with the physical power of light in combination with
techno-sounds. As said above, it is primarily an orientation to
material that expresses itself here. In exactly the same way that
the celluloid was emphasized in the abstract films of the 1960s
and paint in abstract painting, the computer must be conspicuous
as the central, key tool in the production process, in contrast
to the use of the computer in regular film.
The process by which digital films are
made displays one considerable difference from painting, and also
from the older forms of abstract film, a difference in the financial
sense - and, connected with that, in the creative sense too -
that contributes to greater freedom for the creative artist. It
seems that the production process changes fundamentally when one
composes with computers. Because in the computer the signal is
uncoupled from the carrier, with the digital process the production
phase involves no extra costs. The fact is that trying out any
number of different versions on the computer therefore has no
consequences for the end result in a material sense. Only when
the signal in its definitive version is transferred to video or
cd as the distribution format does it become comparable with film
or canvass.
Within the computer the signal itself
has an ephemeral nature and can be endlessly replayed and copied
without wear or loss of quality. Thus, when compared to other
media, this information storage technique has within it a greater
freedom for experimentation. With film, treating the celluloid
with acid, for instance, will have a definitive result, just as
an extra layer of paint on a painting can only be undone with
difficulty. The artist must thus be more sparing with interventions
on the canvass or with film, because the experiment will almost
always remain visible on the bearer. Software designers have handily
taken advantage of this and optimized this ephemeral intermediate
phase in the creation process by introducing an "undo"
button in between the icons from painting. This is an function
that is of essential importance in the use of software, because
every step is reversible again with a click on your screen. The
question of how something might look is easy to answer, and this
promotes the potential to experiment. The freedom for intuitive
editing is unlimited.
Also, the costs of electronic and digital
video carriers are considerably cheaper than their predecessors
in film or older video formats such as Umatic and open-reel. There
the high costs of the material forced the makers to work more
frugally. If making a film or video in the 1960s and '70s was
more costly than canvass and paint, now the material costs for
making a video are often less than those of a painting.
"I was trained as a painter (1994, HKU)," says Bas van
Koolwijk, "but began to work with video for the first in
1998, to make an installation. In the images that I shot then,
what interested me most were the 'in between moments,' those fragments
that afterwards you forgot you had even shot, really just like
in your memory the time between two memories often disappears.
I selected fragments for their meaningless character, and with
the images and sound that were then 'left over' made a composition
for an installation." Before Van Koolwijk began to abstract
the signal itself, he had wanted to strip images of their story
as much as possible. The result was however too noncommittal.
Because the combination of recognizable images implied a new story,
the effect remained stuck in randomness. As a viewer you could
only sit there guessing what you were looking at, and you were
constantly busy trying to combine the content of the separate
sequences with one another. The representation in images distracted
attention from the composition. Van Koolwijk continues, "Very
quickly I became more interested in the qualities of the images
and sounds that came in as extras, the interference, the noise,
that seemed to have their own language. Here I found the link
to painting that I had always made. With these meaningless elements
I could compose freely, without being distracted by a narrative.
It was chiefly a search for the balance between order and chaos
that inspired me."
Making use of an abstract visual language
that maintains a direct connection with the medium used would
seem a risky path. The outer limits of this abstract language
would seem to have been reached already, creating the danger that
new works will only be variations on the same points of departure.
The question is how long this investigation of image and sound
will afford room for innovation and surprise, certainly when this
"new land" is reached and it becomes established as
a genre in film and video art, losing its radical character. But
as appeared earlier, this is precisely a matter of applications
of the computer for which the technique was not invented, and
thus it is difficult to predict what will follow now, precisely
because people will break with the expectations that we have with
regard to computer use.
Bart Rutten
This article appeared in Skrien 33:7
(September, 2001) under the title "Anarchie in de Computer"
(p. 43)
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