art cinematic

2011-11-29T15:57:00.001-05:00

RUINS will soon be haunting its first home!

Join us for the premiere

December 1 - 4, 2011
OPENING RECEPTION December 2nd, 7-10PM

Miami Beach Cinematheque Café
1130 Washington Avenue, Miami Beach

Please drop me a line if you know of a venue in any city that would be interested in presenting this project.

Donate to this project

SONAMBULA

2011-11-05T10:53:00.006-04:00

Multimedia installation by Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez featured as part of Sleepless Night: November 5, 2011 at Miami Beach Cinematheque, 1130 Washington Avenue, South Beach, 10PM onward.

The Miami Beach Cinematheque will be alight with imagery flickering throughout the interior of the space as well as projections of hand-crafted film loops through the building’s seven giant windows outdoors onto Washington Avenue, inviting passersby to explore and interact with the kinetic energy of visual wakefulness and ride upon it as a vehicle into the Night.

Inspired by the Sleepless Night theme and the Cinematheque as a public site, artist Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez is creating an expanded cinema installation using handcrafted vintage film clips to conjure the surreal phenomenon of Sleepwalking vis-à-vis the optical and mechanical phenomenon of motion pictures. Snippets from such cinematic classics as The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, and Betty Boop, mingle with recurring images of giant eyes that blink with the electrifying movement created by hand-coloring and scratching on the film itself, activated by the whirring of several 16mm film projectors rolling at once.

Sleepwalk your way over to MBC… a feast for the sleepy eye.

Poetry in Motion: Karen Aqua 1954-2011

2011-06-05T13:48:00.022-04:00

My dear friend and collaborator, Karen Aqua, passed away last week in Massachusetts. For those who believe they are not familiar with Karen's work, let me just say this: if you have ever inadvertantly sat in front of a Sesame Street epidose, you are not unfamiliar with Karen's work. As a mother of children growing up in the 80's and 90s, I had memorized Karen's immortal Parade of Numbers sequence on Sesame Street long before i ever came to know this world-class animator who eventually became my very good friend, collaborator and mentor.

Karen's work impeccably embodies the natural and organic pleasure of free-form drawing and coloring guided by the rigorous and laborious discipline of frame-by-frame cell animation. Her work is a living arsenal of static images poised to jump off the page and become giant moving entities. Inspired by the transformative, abstract approach to animation popularized by Eastern Europeans during the Cold War, and by such innovative experimentalists as Frank Mouris (best known for his masterpiece A Frank Film), Karen's work often explores transformation, morphing and parallel realities in its themes. Karen's artistic vision was unrestrained by either the natural limitations of physical reality nor the traditional conventions of animation or cinema. In animation, everything is intrinsically possible, and in Karen's work, those possibilities are often expanded even beyond what animation can do by the interjection of dance, music, ritual, tribal symbols, and live-action film and video footage which round out the technical spectrum of her work. In Karen's world, everything is capable of morphing into something else, and rhythmic movement is the constant chi that propels everything. In much the same way that moving the physical body releases endorphins that uplift our human emotions, the magic of moving pictures in Karen's work elevates our aesthetic sensibility to a place of unadulterated pleasure.

I met Karen in the fall of 2001, only a month after the tragedy of 9/11 during which the World Trade Towers tumbled in Manhattan. We met in rural Florida, while on an artists' residency at Atlantic Center for the Arts. She was there with her husband, jazz composer and saxophonist Ken Field, with whom she had been collaborating for over 20 years on the soundtracks to most of her pieces, including many of the Sesame Street clips. The residency centered on filmmaking and musical scoring for film, with Master Artists Alan Berliner, Andrea Weiss and John Eacott each providing workshops and mentoring sessions for the participating Associate Artists.

Right away, I was drawn to Karen and her work: I mean, how often are you going to meet a real honest-to-God cell animator in the 21st Century!?! I knew that she, out of all the other filmmakers in attendance, would understand my bizarre animation process of drawing directly on celluloid. And indeed she did, and we very quickly formed a special bond as both "women of a certain age" and "obsessed animators."

The majority of that residency was spent on a collaborative project that Karen and I created along with documentary filmmaker James Espinas from the San Francisco Bay Area. The combination of our three aesthetic visions and technical strengths forged a process of continuous learning and innovation. For Karen and me, it was our first foray into the realm of digital video, and James was profoundly inspired by our hand-crafted approach to our discipline, acquiring much theoretical knowledge and gaining a whole new appreciation for film (versus video) as a medium.

The three of us journeyed deep into the swampy rural regions of Central Florida to catch glimpses (and footage) of elusive manatees, alligators, shorebirds, banana spiders, miniscule sea creatures, insects and all of the wildness and mystery that the subtropical wetlands had to offer. The result was a film entitled Afterlife, that mixed animation (both Karen's and my own) with live video footage, addressing the aftermath of the national tragedy of 9/11 through the metaphor of Karen's own personal disaster having been recently diagnosed with a very aggressive form of ovarian cancer. Afterlife went on to win an Honorable Mention at the Big Muddy Film Festival in 2002 and a Second Place Jury's Citation Award in the Shorts Category at the Black Maria Festival in 2003. Karen recently contacted me, only a couple of months before her death, to inform me that the film was being entered into a festival in Greece later this year.

Karen Aqua was that tenacious, unrelenting artist who worked diligently and joyfully until the final days of her life. She proudly completed her last film, Taxonomy, editing from her hospital bed only weeks before she passed away, and even enjoyed the opportunity to attend the premiere screening of this work before her death.

Karen's passing translates into a personal loss for me and a score of other female filmmakers of our age who made our mark upon society through the moving image and the fearless propagation of our female-centered sensibilities and vision. Her purpose was to reveal, through the motion of her thousands of drawings, a new direction for human interaction and for the protection, reverence and appreciation of the Earth.

Though we will miss the physical presence of her loving and free-spirited personality, her sensitivity as a friend and collaborator, her cheerfulness and encouragement as a mentor and teacher, and her unselfish ability to rise above her own personal tragedy to pursue the magic of transformation on the screen for children and adults alike, Karen will never really be gone. Every time a programmer pops one of her films into a player, every time the screen is illuminated with her images, every time a kid learns how to count by watching the Parade of Numbers, each of her creative cells is dancing in front of her audience, stretching the muscles of our creative imagination, nurturing our inner child's inquisitiveness, and linking us to the eternal and absolute magic of motion.

Creative Capital Workshop for Artists

2011-03-17T19:36:00.007-04:00

One of the most valuable things I have ever done for my career has been to participate in Creative Capital’s Professional Development Program for Mid-Career Artists. I attended my first of these in 2008, sponsored by Miami-Dade County Cultural Affairs Department, my second in 2009 and, in 2010 a third workshop was offered here in Miami for artists who had attended the first two.

In a nutshell, these workshops release your creative mind from the shackles of passive resistance, foolish habits and counter-productive patterns. The recurring theme of the workshops is “minimal daily effort to bring about massive change,” which always reminds me of the I Ching due to its affirmation that “the small is the path to the great” and an idea that, when implemented, produces truly transformative results.

Another idea that really gelled for me as a result of the workshops is the conscious expansion of my art as a hybrid of several disciplines and practices: filmmaker, visual artist, multimedia designer, art writer, videographer, poet, dancer, educator, curator, and any unnamed possibility of creative being... ultimately this is the most intelligent path to my own fulfillment and the one that is most likely to manifest the varied array of opportunities through which I am supported financially by the fruits of my creative mind and labor.

The workshops cover areas such as strategic planning, fundraising, promotion of your work, art world etiquette (by discipline), online marketing and social networking. They offer intimate personal mentoring sessions in which you get to analyze your own practice and receive valuable feedback. The workshops help you contextualize your work, and identify its potential offshoots and your possibilities for moving it into new venues, increasing your ability to earn more money and/or greater exposure. In one weekend you master your "elevator pitch" and learn how to speak more eloquently about your practice. You get tips on how to revamp your Artist Statement, and insights on everything from how to talk to an art funder, curator or art collector when you run into them at a social gathering to how to build a sticky website or use kickstarter to fund a project idea.

The goal is to identify small, simple things you can easily do to actually get your career to the point where it covers the expenses for the life that you really want to live. Oh, yes, and you learn the importance of preparing a realistic versus an idealistic project budget - one that actually compensates you for the work you do as an artist.

The energy and information from these totally-absorbing yearly weekend-long workshops really propels me to think in a new way and to act on ideas that had been sitting abandoned in my world of uninformed procrastination. The ability to share my concerns and challenges with other artists who have learned different ways to surmount them and can suggest strategies specific to my own practice is like stumbling upon a magic lantern with a genie inside, in my own studio, going unnoticed under my own nose.

These workshops have injected new inspiration and focus into my life, and immediately following each workshop, I've made significant, measurable progress in moving toward my creative and personal goals. I attribute my success in winning the prestigious 2009 Knight New Work Award from Funding Arts Network and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation - as well as all the subsequent opportunities that came out of this - to the grant writing suggestions made at the first Creative Capital workshop I attended in 2008. My new website at solislandmediaworks.com has been re-designed after considering the suggestions made in the second and third workshops.

I highly recommend these intensive workshops to any artist who is seriously ready to take giant strides toward accelerating economic growth and personal satisfaction through their art practice. The workshops are FREE to professional, mid-career artists, and take place in different cities across the United States throughout the year. Check out the Creative Capital website for more information.

ellos y nosotros:them and us

2011-02-09T09:28:00.000-05:00

A little something i uploaded to YouTube. This is the meshed version of the two videos from the installation "ellos y nosotros:them and us" presented last year at the Art & Culture Center of Hollywood. I like the elongated screen created by joining the two videos together, though this is not really how it was presented in the installation.

Eluisve Landscape: Sewell Park

2010-08-23T11:45:00.001-04:00

Please double-click on the video to see the full-screen version.

Video documentation by Kijik Media.

Elusive Landscape: Legion Park

2010-08-08T16:32:00.002-04:00

Please double-click on the video to see the full-screen version.

Thanks to Kijik Media for video documentation.

Elusive Landscape: Arch Creek Park ~ THANK YOU!

2010-06-18T13:23:00.002-04:00

THANK YOU to everyone who helped to make the event at Arch Creek Park as spectacular and magical as it turned out. I am especially grateful to the incredible installation crew - they were like animals in the jungle, stretching cables and speaker wires through the forest. Like having a couple of Indiana Jones's on the set, it was amazing to watch them at work. I also want to extend an immense thank-you to the elusive yet tireless Park Manager at Arch Creek Park: Ms. Sally Timberlake. Her wholehearted support and cheerful attitude really helped to get the project off the ground.

The soundscape by Ricardo Lastre is amazing - it was hard to figure out where nature ended and the recording began. Ricardo threw together a mashup of eerie and dark sound effects mixed with light urban pop and tribal insinuations, layered with frogs and snails and puppydog tails... I'm sure that this helped tremendously in making people want to hang around and endure the climate. But I am grateful to all who fully surrendered to the experience and truly enjoyed the event. This was definitely art you had to sweat for - the trek up and down the Military Trail to see all of the seven projections was long and dark, and many people covered it more than once, searching for missed clues. The projections were kind of hidden in the forest, so it was like a treasure hunt adventure, out in the woods at night. You had to cover the trail to discover all seven. It was very playful.

Everybody was delighted, and a group of folks from the Arch Creek Trust were extremely interested and supportive, as they have been on a mission to preserve the park and to call attention to the contamination of Arch Creek for many years. They were especially pleased that many newcomers had visited the park for the first time that night. My home-made, all-natural, non-toxic insect repellent was a big hit (and it worked!) and overall the event went as i had hoped: kids, families, people with dogs, park regulars, artists, everybody somehow enjoying the evening in spite of the bugs, the heat and the incredible humidity.

Can't wait to do it again at Legion Memorial Park on July 17 - a whole different kind of experience, given the fact that Legion Park is a whole different kind of park than Arch Creek. Stay tuned for more news and updates on the next installation of Elusive Landscape... coming to a park near you SOON!

Elusive Landscape: Arch Creek Park ~ Installation Process

2010-06-18T13:18:00.003-04:00

Setting up before sunset. The crew worked tirelessly in spite of gnats, no-see-ums and mosquitoes, not to mention the heat and humidity. Luckily, the artist-made insect repellent kept us from being devoured to bits...

The artist checks the film to make sure it is right-side up and the tape splices are holding up.

This colorful projection was situated at the end of the Military Trail in the campfire area near the Tequesta shell mounds.

As the night grew darker, the effect of the projections became more dramatic and the imagery more identifiable.

Projections like this one were hidden in small clearings where the Military Trail branches off into the forest. Visitors had to hike the trail to find all seven of them.

Photography by Luis Olazabal, Blue Jazz Photo

ellos y nosotros: them and us

2010-03-28T14:58:00.012-04:00

In memory of Jennylin Duany
1970-2010

Presented from January 23 through February 21, 2010
at the Art and Culture Center in Hollywood, Florida.

This stark and provocative piece consists of
two partially disassembled bird cages
and two video projections onto the bifurcated ceiling
of the enclosed and isolated Project Room.
The theme of "ellos y nosotros: them and us"
speaks to the divided space, the illusion of divisions in general.

The cages are rendered ineffective
and the openings in the ceiling point to an illusory forever
in which freedom and song await endlessly.
The veil between the then and the now is an illusion,
as is the veil between the here and the there.
And the them and the us, the biggest illusion of all.

Still, beyond the implications of universal human oneness,
I really wanted to talk about the illusory divisions between
the world of the living and of the dead,
between all of the poles that one might consider
in opposition to another.

I wanted to create a space in which
both sides of the brain can copulate
and the person can feel balanced there.
I want to move people energetically beyond intellectual thinking.
My hope is that they will walk away feeling something
in the realm of light, balance, release, surrender

Inappropriate Bodies: Contemporary Filmmakers Challenging Gender Constructions through Appropriation

2009-12-20T20:03:00.017-05:00

Reprinted with permission from the author
Jaimie Baron
PhD Candidate, UCLA

Found footage filmmaking has long been a method that filmmakers have used to critique media images or to pay homage to them–or sometimes both simultaneously. Well-known filmmakers like Abigail Child, Su Friedrich, William E. Jones, Chick Strand, and Leslie Thornton, among others, have appropriated images in the service, at least in part, of challenging the audience to rethink the gender constructions posited by the mainstream media. While the use of found footage goes back almost to the beginning of film history, there is now a rising generation of filmmakers using appropriated images to further deconstruct and reconstruct the gender roles established by Classical Hollywood films, television commercials, medical textbooks, pornography, and other institutions of power.

In January 2009, I founded the Festival of (In)appropriation, which is an experimental found footage festival that will likely be held annually from now on, due to the wealth of materials sent in response to the call and to the strong audience turnout for the first event, which was held in June 2009. The only parameters in the call for entries were that works submitted had to have been made in the past four years, be twenty minutes or less, and include at least some appropriated material. My fellow curator Andrew Hall and I received over 120 entries from all over the world. While Andrew and I chose a group of about 25 films that we thought were particularly “good” or “original” based on our subjective sense of aesthetic judgment for the Festival of (In)appropriation, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to examine a different cross section of the films based on a different set of parameters. As we watched these 120 films, we noticed that many of them raised questions about or adjacent to issues of gender and the body. In collaboration with the UCLA Center for the Study of Women and the program in Cinema and Media Studies in the UCLA Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media, I decided to create an entirely different program of films from the same entries, the screening of which was held on December 7, 2009.

I Love (Hate) You: Gloria, Kate Raney, 2007

One theme that emerged from this new cross section of films is an ambivalent fascination with female stars of an earlier cinematic era. In Kate Raney’s I Love (Hate) You Gloria (2007), brief black-and-white clips from the famous films of Classical Hollywood actress Gloria Grahame are cut out and pasted over a swirling, ethereal background of green and blue. Sometimes Grahame appears alone, beautiful but isolated against the background while at other times she appears with various male co-stars, including Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place (Nicolas Ray, 1950), who alternates between caressing and attacking her. Kristy Norindr’s Nana Reedit (2008) similarly exhibits a fascination with Anna Karina, who seems to be dancing with joy in Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962) but whose appearance of happiness is undercut by Norindr, who constantly interrupts her dance.

They have a name for girls like me, Julie Perini, 2009

Anthony Hays’ Anything for My Gal (2008) produces an even more disturbing effect when he re-edits footage of Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop (Joshua Logan, 1956), creating a field in which Monroe’s body is violently stretched and distorted. Another set of films productively “misuse” images of naked bodies–primarily female–derived from pornography and from medical sources. In Marnie Parrell’s About Town (2007), Dinorah de Jesus Rodriguez’s XXX (2007), and Scott Stark’s Speechless (2008), such images are taken out of their accepted context so that they become strange, shocking, and sometimes funny. In About Town, Parrell appropriates images from many different heterosexual pornographic films all shot in the same Los Angeles house and transforms it through voiceover into a fake real estate advertisement. Hilariously, the narration completely ignores the sexual acts being performed onscreen.

XXX, Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez, 2007

Rodriguez’s XXX takes pornographic footage and manipulates it through hand-processing, painting over the footage, and creating a three-screen triptych of porn in which the images suddenly take on an artisanal quality that undermines their function as purely utilitarian sexual stimulants. And Stark’s Speechless appropriates close-up stereoscopic Viewmaster images of female genitalia from a 1976 medical textbook called The Clitoris, “animating” the vulvae by switching back and forth between the two stereoscopic images, and combining these images with patterns found in nature. Interestingly, none of these films engage in an overt critique of their original sources, but, rather, they all exhibit a desire to hyperbolize such images so that they transgress the “rules” of how images of nude bodies and genitals are “supposed” to be consumed.

Two other films focus a critical eye on heterosexual masculinity. Ann Steuernagel’s Pledge (2006) combines footage of young boys, smiling shyly or playing together, with footage of men doing “manly” things–for instance, building a house, marching in military formation, or shooting a missile–suggesting that a particular set of actions has already been prescribed for these boys. Stuernagel’s use of reverse motion, however, also suggests that this process of masculine indoctrination has the potential to be undone. In a similar vein, Elisa Kreisinger’s I Am Man (2008) uses footage from a Burger King commercial in which men sing a song about eating like men which means eating meat and not “chick food.” Kreisinger uses some of the original footage from the commercial but adds militaristic and phallic imagery that defamiliarizes the commercial so that it becomes an advertisement for violence rather than food. Rodriguez’s Is It True Blondes Have More Fun? (2006) similarly interrogates the way in which commercials address women, who apparently care less about eating meat and more about having beautiful hair.

Along with Parrell’s About Town (2006), Brandon Downing’s The Ship (2009) and Julie Perini’s They have a name for girls like me (2009) both exhibit a humorous approach toward language in relation to gendered images. In The Ship, Downing takes a song from a Bollywood film and lays it over images of a scuba diver, adding his own subtitles that sound like the Hindi words being sung, “interpreting” them to make them, and thereby the images that accompany them, seem pornographic. In order to construct her film, Perini appropriates materials from films in which a character named “Julie” appears, preserving only the clips in which someone says the word “Julie.” In each of these two films, the filmmaker “misinterprets” language in order to poke fun at the original sources, Perini’s in order to trace the life of a name and Downing’s in order to show how seemingly nonsexual sounds and images can be transformed by the written word.

The Garden of Life, Nada Gordon, 2009

Nada Gordon’s The Garden of Life (2009) also uses subtitles (she and Downing are both part of the Flarf Collective) but focuses primarily on images of women from across the world dancing for the camera. She and Perini both make appropriation films through the method of “collecting” certain kinds of footage in order to reveal particular (gendered) tendencies. Agnes Moon’s Dream of Me (2007) and Sasha Waters Freyer’s Her Heart is Washed in Water and Then Weighed (2006) meditate on what it means to be a mother, a wife, or a sister. In Moon’s film, images of newspapers scanning by on microfilm and footage of a girl ice skating are overlaid with voiceovers of different women talking about the film subject identified as “you” who was adopted. In this case, the bodies of “you” (who may or may not be the filmmaker) and her (lost) biological sister are absent from the film despite being its central subject. In Freyer’s film, a story about her mother’s lack of fulfillment as a housewife is intercut with images of an autopsy, indirectly linking her mother’s feeling that her labors were taken for granted to the medical objectification and depersonalization of a dead body. Both films are grounded in the desire of others to know a woman, but, in each, a gap is opened between a female subject’s identity and the material manifestation of that identity,the body–suggesting that she is ultimately unknowable.

Her Heart is Washed in Water and then Weighed, Sasha Waters Freyer, 2006

Like Freyer’s film, Akosua Adoma Owusu’s Intermittent Delight (2006) reflects on women’s labor, combining footage of African women weaving textiles with footage from 1950s American advertisements for printed patterns for decorating your refrigerator, aimed at (white) housewives. Owusu’s film traces the similarities and differences between patterned objects as they are made and used across space and time.

While these films constitute only a small sample of the approaches to gender and the body that are being employed by contemporary found footage filmmakers, they nevertheless reveal a certain set of concerns surrounding the gendered body. I suggest that the key trope is, in fact, ambivalence: toward the female stars of Classical Hollywood, toward pornographic and medical images of the body, toward militaristic and carnivorous constructions of masculinity, and so on. To appropriate is often to critique but, as is the case in many forms of ironic and parodic play, such appropriations also repeat and thereby risk reinforcing aspects of the dominant paradigm. Nevertheless, appropriation always has the potential to destabilize meaning itself and, at least in the case of the films discussed above, to encourage us to misread the gender cues that constantly tell us what it means to be a man or a woman.

Jaimie Baron is a Ph.D. candidate in the Cinema and Media Studies Program in the Department of Film. Television and Digital Media at UCLA.

Dinorah de Jesus Rodriguez at Sleepless Night

2009-10-15T21:47:00.005-04:00

Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez will be presenting two moving image installations entitled "o Amor" and "Ephemera" at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden to celebrate Sleepless Night on the evening of November 7, 2009 from about 7pm until daybreak the following morning.

Working with hand-crafted found and recycled film footage, Rodriguez orchestrates transparent realities from fragments of photographs and films.

"O Amor" is a video journey into the subconscious secrets of the Botanical Garden itself. Filmed at this very site, "o Amor" is a giant video projection addressing the cycle of bloom and decay in both the natural environment and the experience of love, looped and screened outdoors through the main window of the Garden's Administrative Offices.

"Ephemera" consists of miniscule transparent images suspended from the branches of the Grand Poinciana tree at the entrance to the Botanical Garden. This 3-D collage will be rendered kinetic by the natural breezes blowing through the outdoor environment, and the projection achieved through the use of spotlights at the base of the tree.

Dancers from Momentum Dance Company will perform an interactive piece in collaboration with this installation, choreographed by Delma Iles. Performance at midnight.

Abstract Film Palimpsests

2009-07-03T23:05:00.006-04:00

On the Work of Rey Parla

pa·limp·sest: n., Writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased; something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface (Webster's)

By Michael Betancourt

Each of the three abstract films hand-painted by Rey Parla take their form from (and owe much of their meaning to) their origins in the form and procedures of aerosol art, where each new writer adds and overlays their imagery and marks onto surfaces that have a history of past marks already there, giving both "graffiti" and his hand-painted films a clear basis in the palimpsest. These films are a document of the process of their own creation. While three films are available for viewing, he produced more than the three films that exist; his earliest films were short loops of marks and layering added to super-8 documentary footage of "graffiti writers" at work in Miami, Florida. These first hand-painted film loops did not survive precisely because each was a collection of experiments. Parla was testing his approach to creating abstract film imagery analogous to aerosol graffiti art. These loops would coalesce into his first finished film, Sporadic Germination — some of his experimental loops are included in his first completed film. Parla's concerns with history and aerosol art as both the subject and the product of his films separates his work from that of other artists making hand-painted abstract films. History and its relationship to Parla, the working film artist, is a recurring issue of his films.

Sporadic Germination announces itself as a graffiti film at the beginning of the film. The title itself appears letter-by-letter as spray painted letters in the immediately recognizable cursive alphabet of graffiti. Much of the film includes faded images of actual Miami graffiti paintings; also known as "pieces," at unidentified and abandoned construction sites already overlaid, obscured, and re-written by the physical marks left by past writers. This visual content is often itself heavily obscured by Parla's own painting:

While editing [a documentary on graffiti writing in Miami called] "An Experimental Segmented Reality," my brother [Jose Parla, the subject of the film] sat next to me to draw in his black book and wait to see what the projector would spit out. He had with him a bag full of designer markers, tools and paint. Using some left over footage, I recalled from a reading that Georges Méliès has used a colorization method to bleach an entire film with a sepia like look. My experiments with color on photographed film began on this work and later experiments developed out of discarded footage which ended up being a part of Sporadic Germination.1

These photographic images are deeply embedded in the graphic patterns of scratches and paint marks that fill the frame and cover both sides of the film itself. When projected, the difference in depth of field gives the film's imagery a tangible depth and visual presence where some marks are crisply in focus while others are softened by their location on the reverse side of the film strip. The sheer number and complexity of marks and scratches is impressive given the small gauge of the actual celluloid.

The gradual emergence of this first finished film from the accumulation of both marks and scratches on the film and the accretion of successful loops combined with new footage prepared specifically for it is reflected in its title, Sporadic Germination. This film results from Parla's discovery that he could paint the film and work the resulting material in a way analogous to his brother Jose's (right) work on wood that partly adapts their earlier "aerosol writing" work with mixed media into a museum/gallery format. Parla's discovery of direct animation came from his desire to create a film analog to the direct work done by his brother working with acrylic and spray-paint. His discovery was a ‘naive' one, done without an awareness of the films made by other artists such as Stan Brakhage or Len Lye.

Parla's second film The Revolution of Super 8 Universe: a self-portrait, also produced on super-8, employed a more complex, self-aware and historically conscious approach to his process. The leftover documentary footage of his first film is replaced by a still photograph of Rey Parla himself. His approach to the photographic footage in both films places the camera's image at the center of the aesthetic:

Technically I was interested in creating layers on celluloid by producing a history of mixed media with paint, spit, scratching, lines; rubbing strips together, using water and cloth and my finger nails to scratch out part of existing images so that the picture would blend seamlessly into what I was painting. It was through the juxtaposition of photography and abstraction that I began thinking about the deeper psychological layers in me and how I could dig further into the image; deeper into the frame. [...] I began to paint on super 8mm film by using the emulsion as part of my initial design. Scratching off the emulsion wasn't the goal; cropping the image was, so that I could later on create a kind of seamless frame around the image with paint and scratching.2

The contents of the photographs in the first two films are thus essential to the form and meaning of these films. The shift in photographic content between his first and second films, from documenting his brother's "aerosol pieces" at abandoned sites around Miami, to a self-portrait, reflects a shift in concern from finding a visual analog to Jose's painting to refining and identifying his own work and place in relation to the history of hand-painted films. The "revolution" of the second film is in part a discovery that his hand-painting belongs to a history and is part of an established art.

Sporadic Germination (right) premiered at the Miami International Film Festival in 1994. The other films he saw there were his first exposure to avant-garde film. 3 This encounter crystallized his approach in several regards. He produced a second film, The Revolution of Super 8 Universe: a self-portrait, and began work on a longer project in 35mm originally titled The Spectacle, but that he would release as Rumba Abstracta. The self-portrait, like the earlier Sporadic Germination, is produced on super-8 working over top of photographs. Where the images in his first film function as links between the hand-painting and manipulation of the film strip itself and the historical layering and build-up of imagery and marks on abandoned, derelict buildings in the urban environment of Miami, the embedded self-portrait (still) photograph in The Revolution of Super 8 Universe: a self-portrait is closer to the "poemagogic" use of photography identified by critic P. Adams Sitney in his discussion of Stan Brakhage's Dante Quartet. These images serve to signify psychological aspects of their creator:

In [Brakhage's] The Dante Quartet brief glimpses of an erupting volcano and craters of the moon, seen amid or under the swirls of paint, could be seen as what [Anton] Ehrenzweig [a psychologist who studied creativity] called "poemagogic images": "I have coined the term "poemagogic" to describe [the] special function of inducing and describing the ego's creativity. . . . Poemagogic images, in their enormous variety, reflect the various phases of creativity in a very direct manner, through the central theme of death and rebirth, of trapping and liberations, seems to overshadow the others.". . . In his later hand-painted films, the "poemagogic" images, allegorical of the psychodynamics of creativity, tend to disappear.4

A similar progression from photography to direct work on clear leader is visible in Parla's work, and his use of photography can be understood in similar terms. Sitney's proposal that the photographic images painted over by Brakhage should be understood in relation to the psychology of creativity, with the over-painting, scratching, and other reworking of the image standing-in as symbols for the death and rebirth Ehrenzweig believes is allegorized in all creative processes. This relationship also describes the Parla films. The images are destroyed as they are forced to become something new that incorporates the hand-made gesture. The embedding of "poemagogic" photography in Sporadic Germination and The Revolution of Super 8 Universe: a self-portrait anchor the abstractions in concrete realism, however attenuated. The photography links the abstractions to his life in direct, obvious ways: pictures of his brother's paintings; a self-portrait.

The literal destruction and transformation of his images, the palimpsest aspect of these films, is also a dramatization of Freud's allegory of the subconscious mind in the "mystic writing-pad":

If we lift the entire covering sheet — both the celluloid and the waxed paper — off the wax slab, the writing vanishes and, as I have already remarked, does not reappear again. The surface of the Mystic Pad is clear of writing and once more capable of receiving impressions. But it is easy to discover that the permanent trace of what was written is retained upon the wax slab itself [...] If we image one hand writing upon the surface of the Mystic Writing-Pad while another periodically raises its covering-sheet from the slab, we shall have a concrete representation of the way I tried to picture the functioning of the perceptual apparatus of our mind.5

Freud's description finds a literal correlate in Parla's procedure of scratching, repainting, and distressing his film strips so they accumulate marks, colors, and other traces of his process. The magic writing-pad's accumulation of marks that never vanish, instead reappearing and interacting with all the new reworkings of the surface, is identical to Parla's description of the film as a collection of "layers." This hand-painting literally becomes a personal expression of self in his second film, making it into a "mystic writing-pad" where the marks can be seen as a reflection of his mind and mental state. His connection between abstraction and internal mental states in The Revolution of Super 8 Universe: a self-portrait, rather than as a transfer of the graffiti procedure into film as in Sporadic Germination, is a direct result of his encounter with the broader traditions and forms of abstract film and abstraction in general.

The link between internal perceptions and abstraction, especially abstract film, is an integral part of the history of this art.6 The shift in emphasis from external reality to internal personal history does not alter these films' construction as palimpsests. Neither is this changed referent from external to internal as dramatic as it might appear: Sporadic Germination has a dual set of referents, both the visible appearance of "aerosol pieces" occasionally visible in the background under the network of painting and scratching, as well as the unseen aspects of a personal history in and around the aerosol art movement in Miami. Embedded in both films is a personal history that connects Parla in unseen ways to his material.

Rumba Abstracta, Parla's third abstract film, follows this same line of development. Unlike the previous films, it was produced without a photographic "substrate," instead being done directly on strips of 35mm clear leader; nearly all of the strips used were 24, 54, or 56 frames long. Originally this third film was meant to be a feature length abstract film titled The Spectacle, after Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, but when Alicia Parla (his aunt) died suddenly, he changed the title. The personal dimension is crucial in his process since it both structures the individual images and provides the contents for the films, informing their meaning beyond the networks of scratches and marks. This is the "history" that is crucial to their form as palimpsests.

The personal dimensions of these scratch films are grounded, like the graffiti procedures that form the basis of Parla's approach to paint-on-film, in the lived experiences of his personal biography. The palimpsest these films present is fundamentally a reflection of these biographical dimensions: the creation and maintenance of links between self and family presented in the form of films. At the same time, Parla's working process is automatic — a stream of consciousness7 — making the layers understandable as records of his reactions and responses to the photographic imagery and previous marks. The progression from documentary footage of his brother working, to a self-portrait that was a "revolution" since it represents a break with his past work as a documentarian, then to a film without underlying photography where any imagery and form must rely entirely upon feedback between the present work and past work demonstrates his movement into self-sufficiency. The psychological maturation process Ehrenzweig describes in the "poemagogic image" as essential to creativity becomes visible in the progression of these abstract films. Parla's palimpsest is himself — in the form of his lived experiences — and through the psychological processes dramatized literally in the gesture, scratch, and painting he puts into his hand-painted films.
Notes

1. Parla, Rey. Reflections on Personal Filmmaking, unpublished article, 8.

2. Ibid, 8-9.

3. Ibid, 10.

from Rumba Abstract4. Sitney, P. Adams. "Tales of the Tribes" in Chicago Review, 47:4, 48:1, winter 2001/spring 2002, pp. 112-113; quoting Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 176-177.

5. Freud, Sigmund. "The Mystic Writing-Pad" in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX, translated by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 230-232.

6. Dann, Kevin T. Bright Colors Falsely Seen (New Haven: Yale, 1998).

7. Parla, Ibid., pp. 1-2.

August 2006 | Issue 53
Copyright © 2006 by Michael Betancourt

Michael Betancourt is an avant-garde theorist, artist, and curator. Journals such as Leonardo, Semiotica, and CTheory have published his essays, he has edited books on visual music, and written one on media art titled Structuring Time: Notes on Making Movies (Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2004).

Note: Parla's Sporadic Germination can be found on the DVD Visual Music from Iota, along with work by Andrew D. Lyons, Michael Betancourt, Michael Mantra, Emile Tobenfeld, Mavie Cahn, Nancy Herman, Bill Alves, and Beth Warshafsky. Happily, it's priced at a reasonable $25 for individuals. Get it here.

Esperanza Collado on THE PRACTICE OF ANTI-ILLUSION

2009-01-24T01:18:00.011-05:00

Esperanza Collado is an artist, curator, and writer based in Dublin. She has recently finished a PhD on dematerialized processes of exhibition cinema. She lectures on Visual Culture and Politics of Representation in Dublin Business School college. Previous curation includes Márgenes: Experimento y Praxis (The National Gallery of Ireland, thisisnotashop gallery, 2008), Structural/Materialist Film (Irish Film Institute and Filmbase for the Darklight Symposium, 2007), and Zero Degree: The New Image of Thought (thisisnotashop, 2007). She is a co-founder of and frequent programmer with the Experimental Film Club in Dublin. Her works have been shown at Anthology Film Archives (New York, 2006), Micromuseum (New York, 2006), thisisnotashop (Dublin, 2008), Annecy Film Festival (France, 2008), Loop Video-Art (Barcelona, 2007), and Directors Lounge (Berlin, 2007).

http://experimentalfilmclub.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/esperanzacollado

"Outer Space," Peter Tscherkassky

THE PRACTICE OF ANTI-ILLUSION

In an attempt to re-define the controversial term Structural Film, coined by American critique P. Adams Sitney in the late 1960s, English filmmaker and theorist Peter Gidal advocated the expression "Structural/Materialist Film" a decade later referring to the practice of avant-garde filmmakers that were revealing and destroying illusionist aspects of cinema. The practice of anti-illusion consisted in dismantling the technical elements that make possible a “suspension of belief” during the act of perception, or the willingness of a person to accept as true the representative and illusionary premises of a work of fiction. The darkness of the cinema venue, the omnipresence of the screen and traditional narrative lines tend to facilitate such redemption of reality in film.

Outstanding avant-garde filmmakers such as Michael Snow, Paul Sharits, Birgit Hein or Ken Jacobs were exploring the material limits of the medium in the late 60s and 70s, exploiting the mechanics of filming and projection and its possibilities within the field of perception. The works we present on this month’s programme are, nonetheless, contemporary. Outer Space by Peter Tscherkassky (Austria), Decasia: The State of Decay by Bill Morrison (USA), and -as Cork Film Festival preview of special guest John Porter, Calendar Girl,- share with the first materialist movement their assault on the illusionist nature of conventional cinema. They approach the materiality of film as a perishable, fragile matter, and exploring, degrading, literally fracturing the physical and aesthetic elements of the frame, they present a substantial difference with the earlier practice of anti-illusion: they work with found footage.

Working with original found footage –a term methodologically anchored in Dada objet trouvé interdisciplinary works- offers a myriad of possibilities, as the works on this programme testify. Possibly, the most overwhelming visual distortion found in Outer Space, Decasia, and Calendar Girl, takes place in the very transformation of realistic imagery into a prism of abstractions in which unique codes between spatial representation and a quasi tri-dimensional layering of images is created. Working with found footage in these films seems ultimately to constitute a manifesto or a radical response to the overpowering presence of digital moving-imagery; a deliberate return to the artistic specificity of cinema's historical expression.

Following the historical genealogy of structural/materialist film in which, degrading the material until the most fundamental components of the medium are revealed –leading cinema, therefore, to a degree zero-, John Porter´s performance Scanning takes the anti-illusionist aesthetic to its logical conclusion. If, after all these experimentations there weren’t many possibilities left in terms of materialist filmmaking, the projection situation had to change, as many artists involved in exhibition and expanded cinema demonstrated in the 70s. Cinema now wanted a body –that corporeal presence which had remained the prerogative of theatre-, and, in the case of performance, that body could be the filmmaker himself manipulating the projector, the audience, or the event itself. Such practice is, in short, in search of new forms of experience, which directly integrate art into life. Beyond the traditional confines of film’s materiality, a cinematic happening as Scanning not only comes accompanied by the activation of the audience; it overcomes the dichotomy of object and depiction, production and reproduction, presence and representation, reality and illusion.

BILL MORRISON'S "DECASIA: THE STATE OF DECAY"
(DVD, 2002, color, sound, 67mins.)
Music by Michael Gordon.

Decasia is an expressionistic film founded on the tension between the hard fact of film's stained, eroded, unstable surface and the fragile nature of that which was once photographically represented. In its fascinating distortion and analysis of destruction, Morrison’s film could be interpreted as a collage of archival footage shot ahead of the 1950s on a celluloid nitrate base, most of it found in advanced stages of decay. Morrison slowed down the footage in order to allow a greater appreciation of the dramatic effect of the severe emulsion deterioration. The aural dissonances of Michael Gordon’s modernist symphony –a soundtrack that decays itself- reinforce the hypnotic effect of Decasia. Gordon took the orchestra to musical extremes by detuning the instruments and using prepared pianos which further emphasize the powerful hallucinatory visual experience.

Decasia´s website: http://www.decasia.com

PETER TSCHERKASSKY'S "OUTER SPACE"
(16mm, 1999, b/w, sound, 9.58mins.)

Tscherkassky is an Austrian avant-garde filmmaker who uses "found footage" and heavy frame-manipulation while editing. His films present a violent force of disjointed narrative and a subversive plot against the conventions of fictional cinema. Outer Space begins with strong implications of genre - a dark suburban landscape with a woman (Barbara Hershey from Sidney J. Furie's 1981 film The Entity) moving towards a dubious sanctuary. As much as the footage was chosen for Hershey's manic performance -attacked by an invisible demon, which in Tscherkassky´s film takes the form of mutilated celluloid-, the symbology of classic horror scenario turns as powerful as persuasive. As the woman reaches the door, the film gesticulates and whimpers. The woman turns the handle and as the door opens a great foreboding falls over the viewer. Slowly, the physical structure of the film reveals itself: images become ghosts of themselves, the soundtrack becomes aggressive and forceful, and our protagonist splits apart. Tscherkassky reduces the original work by subtracting the colour, and, by reworking it, superimposing images, fragmenting through rapid montage, sculpts new time and space rhythms.

Cork Film Festival preview:
JOHN PORTER'S "SCANNING" & "CALENDAR GIRL"
(Super8 film performance, 1983, 3.5mins.); (Super8, 1981-88, color, sound, 3.5mins.)

John Porter belongs to the Funnel collective of independent filmmakers which began operation in Toronto in 1977. Porter was born in 1948. He made his first film, on Super-8, in 1968. Scanning is a series of One-shot Camera Dances, involving "surround super 8" projector dances performed live. Inspired by a projection by Anne B. Walters, Porter produces a continuing series of silent film performances, with hand-holding a super 8 projector in front of the audience. He moves the projected image around onto all the walls and ceiling, following the camera movements in the film. In Calendar Girl, John Porter scratched and painted on a sync-sound, super 8 copy of a black & white, 1960s, pop music film (Scopitone), which he made by aiming his camera at his old black & white TV. Porter's scratches and strokes exaggerate and comment on the sexism in "music videos" of all generations.

The Practice of Anti-Illusion is a film-programme by Esperanza Collado for the Experimental Film Club

on Michael Betancourt at Senses of Cinema

2009-01-08T18:50:00.018-05:00

Telemetry

There’s other Stuff than Art?
An Interview with Michael Betancourt
by Rey Parla

Rey Parla is a filmmaker/interdisciplinary artist who has specialized in exploring abstraction in the moving image through experimental film and video within the tradition of Visual Music animation.

Who is Michael Betancourt? For most artists, this is a simple question readily answered by looking at their artwork, but in the case of Betancourt it is complicated by the coexistence of a large, seemingly independent body of historical and theoretical writing that complicates any attempt to answer this question only by looking at his movies and other art.

Since the late 1990s, Miami, Florida, has produced a number of artists whose approach to their work deserves serious attention. Betancourt is one of the more intriguing, but lesser-known of these artists.

Betancourt was born in the US in 1971 and has been exhibiting a variety of movies, site-specific installations and non-traditional art forms since 1992. He has taken on numerous roles as a documentary photographer, art director and art historian, and claims that he works with experimental art as a way to develop and test theory. He has an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from the University of Miami focusing on the,books intersection of history, media and art theory, and has repeatedly said that dialogue, criticism and history must be a part of any artist’s working process; the writing that proves he “means it” has been published by such academic journals as Semiotica and CTheory.

Betancourt is actively involved with “visual music” and abstract motion pictures. He organized and produced the iota Center’s DVD anthology Visual Music from Iota, and edited a series of anthologies on visual music technologies collecting the designs for “color organs” in Visual Music Instrument Patents, Thomas Wilfred’s Clavilux and Mary Hallock-Greenewalt: the Complete Patents. He is also the founder of cinegraphic.net, a blog focusing on the issues and interests of the experimental/avant-garde film and video community. In 2004, a book called Structuring Time: notes on making movies collected his ideas about experimental film into a single volume. And, recently, he has proposed a taxonomic system for abstract forms, published by Leonardo. This system forms the basis for his most recent movies.

But Betancourt’s movies and other artworks are not purely academic. His weltanschauung comes from the practice of his movies. His world outlook is obtained by crossing the bridge between the empirical nebulas of experimentation to push current boundaries in the visual form through movies that experiment with a proposition on breaking up space, giving new results to his theoretical work as he presents a unique audio-visual experience of simultaneous unity.

I interviewed Betancourt after seeing his latest work, Eigen: the theory of self-generation (2006).

* * *

Eigenkunst, part two of Eigen: the theory of self-generation

REY PARLA: Some artists are “drawn” to their art. Was this true for you? Can you tell us about how you got started with making videos?

MICHAEL BETANCOURT: I wanted to make movies, which is what I’m doing. Along the way, I’ve done things with photography and painting, too. But the first movie-like things I did were with programming in BASIC on the Apple computers: animating text to move around the screen, graphics that would move based on user-defined parameters. This was all in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Nobody saw this stuff – I was just a “dumb kid” – but it was where I started. My early movies all had some aspect of this work. I recently started looking at some of these old computer things I was doing years ago and have been thinking about how to incorporate some of them into my movies.

RP: Do you remember the moment when you realized that you wanted to be a media theorist/artist, over any other profession? Please tell us how you became aware of your ambition.

MB: It was less of a choice than just the way things developed. From the beginnings of my working with media, I was thinking in a consciously theoretical manner, a matter of trying things and then revising my thinking. The Russian montage theorists’ approach – quasi-scientific – was a useful model for how I went about learning things with media. The transition to writing followed naturally, growing out of my note-taking. Most of my work happens in notes and very schematic diagrams that get revised into gradually more specific and detailed things. All of my theoretical writing started with that kind of thing. This is why it’s hard for me to separate making things from my theory work.

The label “artist” got stuck on me by others and, like a lot of labels that people use, it’s stuck even though it isn’t a good description. The same can be said about “theorist” I guess. My interest is mostly in the process of creating and implementing frameworks that determine work, which is why I prefer to identify my movies as “designed”.

RP: Is there one particular event in art history that has influenced your work?

MB: Not really. I look at a wide variety of things, some art-historical, some scientific, so identifying any in particular as “important influences” isn’t something that I would do.

RP: Can you define your style? There are a lot of people working with abstract video, but I haven’t seen anyone making videos that resemble yours. Would you explain how you have developed it to its current, very unique status?

MB: I don’t really feel like I have a “style” per se. There are some formal things that run through most of my recent work, mainly the heavy digital processing of color and break-down of my screen into smaller units. But I don’t know if that qualifies as a style since my most recent work does none of these things, and works with a color palette that can be murky in places. And my recent looping pieces [such as Eigengeistige] are more like static imagery in their cumulative effect than a movie.

RP: Then, where do you place your work: under experimental cinema, video art, visual music, new media art, avant-garde video/cinema or just movies?

MB: These are certainly all historical contexts that have a relationship to my work. I would relate what I do to painting, as opposed to photography, rather than any of these particular niches. The so-called “experimental film” is a history-tradition of great importance, but most of what I do tries to exceed the established, historical boundaries of these histories. Whether the work does or not is a different issue.

With the frameworks I produce for a work/group of works, they always originate with these histories. Meta-historical would be a good word for their relationship.

RP: Do you see your work as part of a larger group of artists?

MB: I think there are other people who are working with some of the same things I am, but my experience with “groups of artists” would make me say, “No.” The art market demands that artists be unique, individual, and so works against the collectivity your question implies.

RP: So does an American Avant-Garde exist now? Does it go by another label or title?

MB: I have no idea. Judging by what I see other people doing and what gets shown, I’m severely “out-of-step” with what’s happening now. So, instead of answering, I’ll just say you should ask someone else.

RP: Okay. Well, how do you define art, and have recognition and awards had an effect on your career?

MB: I try not to define “art”. Recognition and awards are especially important when you’re not trying to make objects for sale in a gallery-type setting. These allow you to continue working, but more important, they serve the same function as the gallery/museum: they are tokens that lend credibility to the work for people who don’t understand what’s happening with it, or whose definition of “art” is otherwise in conflict with the kind of things that I do. I think of them as enablers that open up possibilities.

Over the spring of 2006, I had an Iowa Arts Council/NEA grant to do a microwatt broadcast-video piece based on Telemetry [2003-5] called Reception/Transmission that extended some of the ideas in Telemetry and provided a nice conclusion to that group of works. It would have been hard to do the Reception/Transmission piece without the grant support.

RP: Do you think video is exclusively a contemporary art form just based on technology or can we take it back to painting and the Renaissance?

MB: I’m guessing you mean the framework in Structuring Time. I would say it’s extendable into the past, and out into non-technological media like painting. This is the part of this framework that I find the most interesting: by focusing not on technology, but on human visual interpretative engagement (cognition), we have to rethink our ideas about medium-specificity and what makes “different” media “different” – especially when we’re confronted by the ambiguity inherent in digital objects where the implementing software is what makes the difference between a sound file and a movie or text document.

RP: Do you consider yourself a painter?

MB: No.

RP: Not many artists write about their work as much as you have. In looking at your writing, most of it isn’t directly about your own work. So, why write Structuring Time?

MB: My book on movie-making, Structuring Time, was a way of getting my own ideas to solidify somewhat, while also putting them out into the world as a coherent system. But it’s a descriptive system based on empirical observations, not a prescriptive one. Up to this point, much of that book was a jumble of disjointed fragments, and the collecting and fitting into a whole was very useful. If anything, it accelerated my organization of notes into something more coherent. Having the book has been useful in other ways since it gets the theoretical aspects of the movies into an accessible form.

RP: So do all your experimental videos aim to test your theories?

MB: You could also say all my theories test my experiments. There’s no clear distinction between one and the other. This isn’t a question that means anything in my working process; there isn’t a distinction between one and the other.

RP: So, you have a conscious system in mind before you start to design your work?

MB: Yes. The conscious system is what makes the work; it functions like a “script” would for a drama.

RP: Do you mean to say drama as we know it is only understood through character and story?

MB: Drama demands “characters” and a narrative of some sort. It’s possible to expand this general framework to be very inclusive – Mary Ellen Bute has a film, Escape that is fully abstract, yet also a fully narrative and dramatic work – but in general these are thought of as separate things from what I do. But I’m not certain I would make that distinction.

Structuring Time: Notes On Making Movies

RP: In the intro of Structuring Time, you talk about artistic repetition. Do you use these “conscious systems” as a way to avoid repeating yourself? Are experimental filmmakers known to repeat the same movie as narrative film directors have been known to do?

MB: That’s not how I meant that opening section. Repeating essentially the same piece over and over again isn’t very interesting. The range of what can be done gets exhausted very quickly, but at the same time is essential for commercialisation. I know that it is something I was never interested in doing: establishing some sort of “personal style” or “signature” that would then define anything and everything as being “mine” in the sense we speak of when we talk about the auteur theory. These personal “styles” work in the same way that the different frameworks do. They establish boundaries and limits that allow us to make work. Since I’m much more interested in how these frameworks produce the work than with establishing a singular method for producing works – that is, my interest lies elsewhere than in producing objects for sale – my approach seeks to avoid repetition. I’m sure I fail in this … how could I not?

RP: Does your work grow organically one from the other?

MB: For my working process, this doesn’t make any sense. There is only a limited distinction between any single work and any work from a specific group of prices.

RP: You’ve referred to your movies as only half the equation and implied that the other half is your theoretical writing that emerges from practice. Are you creating a kind of hyper-textual visual poem alluding to literary poetry and its imbedded classical allusions? Are the movies meant to be seen again after the reading of your writings? Is this hyper-visual music-text available on the web, a perpetual timeless project?

MB: No, I say that my writing is the “other half” of my work. There is no clear distinction between one and the other. I don’t see my stuff as having any grandiose claims about what it is. A lot of it is funny and doesn’t try to be more than an exploration of the ideas it’s engaging with. My theory work divides pretty readily into a series of general propositions about media work based on an empirical observation of the materials that constitute movies (whose foundations derive from cognitive approaches to visual interpretations), and based in this empirical framework are the particular sets of choices that determine a specific group of works. Most of the theory tries to be non-specifically tied to my own stuff. It could be used by anyone who wanted to use it.

RP: Your process sounds very scientific, rather than “inspirational”, and your theoretical writings have this same scientific quality. Does science play a role in your movies as well?

MB: Since I work with technology to produce my movies, to distribute them and to show them, science is just there, a background part of it all. At the same time, there is a lot of scientific work – especially in the realm of cognition – that finds its way into the theory; that’s inevitable. Once the theory stops being grounded in a personal claim of “I intended x,” then it moves away from the idiosyncratic. At that point, the question is simply whether the “science” is based in contemporary work or is just a reiteration of popular “notions” that may be discredited, or otherwise rejected. For my own work, I try not to advance new scientific thinking, but instead look for ways that cognitive theory converges on things in the arts. There’s a very real tendency for different disciplines to re-invent the same ideas, giving them discrete terms and focusing on different aspects of what may be the same underlying phenomenon. That part is of interest.

RP: You are also the new curator at the Sioux City Art Center. Does working theoretically as you do impact how you approach the research and selection for the projects you have curated?

MB: Working as a curator is different than making my own work. It’s much too easy to say my ideas are X and anything that doesn’t meet X is thus of no interest, or “bad” or whatever. This is an extremely authoritarian position to take, dictatorial, and does a disservice to the people whose works you’re handling. When thinking an idea through, it’s easy to “see” that idea everywhere, even if it isn’t really there. So, when curating I try to look first for the work that seems well-done – about something, not directly an imitation of some well-known artist, that uses its media effectively to convey itself, etc. – and only after that do I think about how work by different artists could go together; an entirely different approach.

RP: Do you see the people who are filmmakers, experimental artists, painters, writers, sculptors, graphic designers and others intermixing much in today’s scene?

MB: I think this depends on where you’re located. What seems like a “natural” connection to people living in one location may seem utterly foreign to people living somewhere else. We live in a world with plenty of marginal areas that are so distant from the main thrust of the commercial art world that they aren’t even “on the map” for it. This isn’t a criticism. The world is a very large place and the art world is clustered in only a few small parts of it – mostly around money and political power – but there remains this much larger space that has little or no contact with these places. To some extent, the internet has helped change that, but, as it has “matured”, I’m seeing more of these older structures being transferred into it. The extreme openness that was there from say 1995-2000 won’t be imaginable 30 years from now when the relationship between the “new media” and the established institutions has been completely worked out.

There’s a whole rhetoric of there no longer being marginal positions in relation to the art world, and that’s simply nonsense. Yes, the art market has a global reach – it’s globalised – and there isn’t any difference between Tokyo, New York and London or Berlin, and artists who are inside this market can move freely between one and another. This is true, but what about the rest of the world? What about the artist living in Belize or Sri Lanka? They don’t have access unless they move. So, there are still margins, even if the art market/world doesn’t want to see them or admit their existence. What can be done and is being done depends greatly on where one lives.

RP: What is the state of video art these days?

MB: It’s history. If the history is just a series of ruptures with past artists –1980s vs 1970s, or 1990s vs 1980s – then the shift away from “video” per se and into installation where video is simply a part of a much larger, more marketable, whole shouldn’t be a surprise; it was happening in the early 1970s and has more or less been the “default” mode for video art. On the other hand, if “video art” is a subset of so-called “experimental film”, the prominence of installation is very foreign to it and the arguments about installation being “more democratic” – same argument made historically in film about long-take æsthetics – is nonsense. This second view would also suggest that those artists who have chosen to use and/or hire commercial production methods in a Hollywood-style should be viewed suspiciously, and analysed from within the dominant ‘Hollywood language’. There are lots of people doing this, so to single anyone out isn’t really fair. This work is recognizable as violating and fighting against the critical positions historically associated with “video art” – a development that, if true, would be cause for concern.

RP: When I think of your work, I think of long abstract movies, like Telemetry or Prima Materia [2005] that don’t seem to have a basis in photography. Are your movies camera-less productions?

MB: Some are, some aren’t. It depends on what the piece is.

RP: Which works have you used a film camera with whether it was Super 8 or 16mm?

MB: I don’t think whether something was shot with film or video, made with a computer or hand-drawn makes any difference. Certainly you can do things more readily in one form than another, and there are technical differences between them, but in the end it’s what the finished work looks like, and what it means that matters, not the media used.

RP: What tools do you use to make your videos? Do you use custom software, or commercial packages like Final Cut Pro?

MB: I can say what I have used in the past. I’ve worked with feedback, various pieces of software such as Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere, analogue editing, 16mm film, rephotography of both video and film, “direct” on film animation with markers. All of this gets chosen based on what is appropriate to the framework I’m using for the work, since, when the framework changes, the work consequently changes as well. Most of what I’m doing now is digital, and I’ve started doing some things with Flash, but thus far not much.

RP: So, you use optical and audio feedback in your work?

MB: Yes, or, I should say, I did in the past. My more recent works employ forms and structures that resemble these forms, but aren’t technically the same. It’s very difficult to control the results with feedback and it can be very time-consuming to work with it. So, I prefer to create similar effects, but in ways where I have more time and ability to control the parameters of the result. I guess you could say I simulate the underlying processes of feedback, thus creating the same visual/auditory effects, but without actually using feedback per se.

RP: What do you see happening with media integration? Are video artists, media-makers at the forefront of new developments, æsthetics and techniques like the early pioneering filmmakers and American avant-garde experimentalist?

MB: What is “media integration” but the gradual realization that the media don’t matter, that it’s what is done with the media that is important? I’m not seeing new developments happening much anywhere. Refinement, yes. Improvement and increased ease of use, definitely. But new? No, I’m not seeing that so much. But then we’re living in a period when there’s not much interest in new. What we have instead is the iteration – an artist looks at the past and chooses some small aspect that wasn’t fully developed—in a formal sense to exhaust all its potentials – and then makes that the primary focus of their work. This doesn’t mean the work is bad, just that it isn’t new. Rachel Whiteread’s casts of spaces is a great example of this. Her work is really good, but it’s also implicit in Bruce Nauman’s cast of the space under his chair, so we’ve seen what she’s doing before in a general, conceptual sense, but her handling of it is very different and on a much larger scale. And the resulting works are good, but, at the same time, there’s nothing new to them: their seriality, the underlying concept, and even some of the larger scale pieces like the cast house aren’t new developments in the sense you’re asking about. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t artists who are working in these directions, doing this new stuff, simply that we’re living in a period where those artists aren’t generally going to get the kind of attention they might have in the past.

At the same time, I think the internet, email listservs and all these high-speed communications technology have taken the place that was filled by Film Culture in making the new approaches visible, with the result that, in a sense, as access has become easier to making work available and visible, at the same time it has become harder to locate artists whose work may be doing these new things. There’s so much “noise” that it has become difficult to find what you’re looking for. I saw a line in a comic strip that summed this up nicely: “in MySpace, no one can hear you scream.”

RP: You have edited several anthologies on visual music and written about its history. One of your essays talks about synæsthesia. You also created a “taxonomy for abstraction” with synæsthesia as your starting point. Can you tell us a little about synæsthesia and its relationship with visual music?

MB: In a lot of ways, I think that synæsthesia in art is the reaction to/rejection of science by artists; a way of trying to critique the empirical approach with the personal and idiosyncratic. VJing or visual music is one of the things that emerge from this historical moment. The relationship is very complex.

Visual Music Instrument Patents

RP: Visual music is an obscure field, yet you are something of an expert in its history, not just on film but with color organs, too. How and what led you to become interested in color organs? Were you familiar with Daniel Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné, Charles Dockum, Stanton Macdonald-Wright or Thomas Wilfred at the time?

MB: My interest started when I was an undergrad and read an interview with Brian Eno who talked about them. It struck me as an example of how anything could be subjected to æsthetic manipulation.

RP: Have you always worked from computers/programming to arrive at visual music experiments?

MB: Not everything I do or have done qualifies in my mind as “visual music” type work, so I don’t really know how to answer this. Computers are simply a tool, like a camera or a pencil. The point is what gets made, not the mechanical aspects of making it.

RP: Then how does your interest in chaos theory inform or influence the visual and musical aspects of your work?

MB: It is less an interest in chaos theory than an interest in specific structures and forms derived from the study of fractals themselves. The most important of these ideas for my approach is “recursive symmetry”. It’s a complex way of describing the repeating self-similar nature of fractals. It scales. But what is of greatest interest is the way very complex forms can be produced from very simple, limited sets of “rules” or conventions. It’s this aspect that emerges in my work and is the reason it’s difficult to separate the theoretical construction from its implementation. This dynamic relationship is what I think of as the intellectual process and/or visceral result.

RP: Can you share some thoughts on the VJ culture? Where does the line break between wallpaper and art?

MB: I think it could, but generally won’t. This distinction, wallpaper/art, is really a distinction in use of the work by its audience rather than something inherent to the work itself. Like everything, there are VJs who are better than others – as with any work that depends on live performance – but if their audience treats their work as wallpaper – that is, as a decorative supplement to their experience of something else such as the “club” – then that’s all it is.

RP: What kind of music do you listen to?

MB: I don’t. What happens is I’ll be interested in something musical and listen to a lot of work in that vein, then find myself interested in something else and go listen to that for a while. There isn’t a single sort that really holds my interest for very long. Right now, there’s a group that’s “performing” the music written for video games on the Commodore 64 computer called the “C64 Orchestra”. The great variety to this music, even the difference between different composers, is very striking given the extreme limitations of what a C64 computer was capable of doing.

RP: You also work with public art and installations. I remember the projection piece you did in Lummus Park during Art Basel Miami Beach that seems very different from your work with video. Is this work all related, or do you treat different media as completely different things?

MB: Everything I’m doing is connected, even if the connections aren’t apparent from the outside. My work with what can be called “site-specific” art, or “public art” or something like that, this stuff isn’t movies, but relates to the same ideas although in very different ways than the movies do. All of it involves adopting the form of authoritative instructions – signs, barricade tape, etc. – whole roles are unquestioned and “transparent” to our everyday use of them. And this work uses those forms as a way of undoing their transparency. It’s the same process as the movies’ relations to their history, but enacted in different materials. Spook, the Lummus Park projection, falls in-between these since it was an image, but whose installation – through the associations of racism – can evoke issues of authority and force us to confront them – or not, depending on whether we realize what we’re looking at with it.

RP: Your installations and video work are very different in form. Do you have a favourite medium and does it influence your creativity?

MB: I don’t really think that the media I use influence my “creativity” since everything important to a work happens before I start on it. There’s plenty of room for accident and chance in my process, but, because I use technical media whose manipulation depends on how the technology is implemented, planning before hand is essential to making anything happen.

RP: What do you aspire to as an artist?

As an “artist” I really don’t aspire to much but to make work, to show it occasionally to people who are interested. Just to be able to continue working and showing work sounds like a very low-level aspiration, but I’m doing this on my terms, not inside a gallery or with the authorization of that market-system. So, in a way, this isn’t a minor aspiration at all, to remain outside and able to work without the need for the market.

MB: Which challenges do you confront as an artist?

I think it’s the same challenges everyone who doesn’t make things for a gallery market and isn’t trying to get into that market: making work and then finding ways to show it. Once you exclude the market-based aspiration, you also lose a large volume of places to show work, so showing things becomes problematic.

RP: So, do you create with a specific audience in mind? Who are they and how are they reacting to your work?

MB: My audience is Leah [Betancourt’s wife]. Anyone else who likes my things is good, too.

RP: What other interests do you have besides art?

MB: There’s other stuff than art? I thought everything people did was art. I have a bunch of butterflies, bees and squirrels in my yard and their activities are very interesting. How they interact, their territoriality, etc., can be quite compelling. Watching them gives a sense of how the natural world was compelling for ancient peoples.

Michael Betancourt’s work can be found on www.michaelbetancourt.com and on the avant-garde and experimental film blog cinegraphic.net.

on time

2009-01-08T12:54:00.013-05:00

I think a lot about the notion of time in moving-image work.
The time that it takes for the eye to see the movement.
The time that it takes for the movement to be executed in screen-time.
The time broken down into single frames that equal 1/24th of a second each. The time it takes to look at 24 frames of time fragments.
The time that it takes to elaborate upon those 24 frames by coloring, scratching or otherwise marking on them.
The time that it takes to set up the projector in order to view the 24 frames in motion.
The time that it takes to look at the 24 frames once projected.
The time that it takes to set up the camera to videotape the projection.
The time that it takes to capture the recorded projection into the computer for digital editing.
The time that it takes to edit the film and burn the DVD.
The conversion of film to video time (24fps vs 29.97fps)
The time that it will take my viewer to realize that the piece is actually about time.

Masstransiscope Revived for 2009

2009-01-03T13:20:00.024-05:00

The best news I've heard all year!

You may remember, if you happened to be in New York City during the 80s, that a lot of artists were doing cool stuff in the subway stations. And, if you were lucky enough to catch Bill Brand's piece Masstransiscope, installed in the abandoned Myrtle Avenue station in Brooklyn in September 1980, chances are you have never forgotten it.

This piece consists of 228 hand-painted panels viewed through a series of vertical slits set into a specially constructed housing which, when seen from a moving train, create a colorful and provocative animation. The piece works on the principle of the Zoetrope, an optical animation toy designed by Thomas Edison in the 19th Century, which is basically a technological extension of the flip book. This delightfully upbeat moving image installation is not only a work of cinematic genius, but also an essential contribution to urban life, public space and overall improvement of public vibration.

But life is tough in the underground, as we know, and Masstransiscope underwent its share of stress and abuse over the years, eventually being covered over by graffiti, mold, grime and whatever else lurks down there. And, as too often happens with public art abandoned to neglect, it was (almost) forgotten.

But wow! The good (no, great) news is: If you happen to be in New York City in 2009, you may again - after 29 years - enjoy the absolute coolness of this urban masterpiece, along with millions of other commuters on the B and Q trains from Dekalb Avenue in Brooklyn into Manhattan. I am happy to announce that Masstransiscope is now fully restored to its original splendor for public enjoyment.

So Happy New Year and plan your trip to NYC asap. This is really worth seeing, and worth telling everyone you know about. Have a nice ride, and Viva Public Art!

http://www.bboptics.com/masstransiscope.html

watch the piece in action here!

hand-crafted cinema by Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez

2008-12-30T13:42:00.024-05:00

http://www.solislandmediaworks.com

about my art work...

I create time-based art made of hand-crafted film, video, text, performance, installation and/or sound. My passion is subliminal manipulation via the power of embedded single frames and the classic use of cinematic cues to manipulate programmed reactions. My pieces often include snippets of vintage commercials, cartoons, pornography and movie trailers to initiate subconscious dialogues that deconstruct and recycle programmed emotional and moral responses to mass media.

My awakening as an artist came when I saw for the first time the films of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Norman McLaren, and Len Lye while studying Film Production at Boston University sometime around 1977. Since then, I have been working as an experimental filmmaker (and more recently, as a video and installation artist) with an emphasis on vintage 16mm footage and alternative frame-by-frame animation techniques such as drawing and scratching directly on celluloid. I received most of my training and education independently by studying with contemporary artists of the late 70s in the San Francisco Bay Area, inspired by their theories and techniques, their concentrations, preoccupations, processes and solutions. Among my earliest artist mentors were culture and gender theorists such as Barbara Hammer, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and the late Warren Sonbert, Marlon Riggs, Christine Saxton and many others. I will be eternally grateful to every one of them for the influence and vision that each has brought to my life and creative work.

Upon my arrival in Miami in the ealry 90s, I was fortunate enough to meet the elusive and notorious Doris Wishman, who was using the (now defunct) Alliance for Media Arts Co-Op here in Miami Beach to edit her sexploitation films (yes, she was still working on these at that time, well into her 80s i think) with then-local filmmaker Abel Klainbaum as her editor. It was probably at that point that my commitment to working with pornography and to the deconstruction of pop culture, and especially erotic imagery, was clenched. It was also probably around that time that I began working in found 16mm footage in lieu of and alongside footage that I shot myself. Eventually, I added digital video footage to the mix as well.

My filmmaking process is a combination of primitive craft, graffiti, zen meditation, and slick digital technology. I mark on images that have been pre-recorded as part of our cultural legacy and change their meaning by embedding subliminal messages into individual frames. I invest hundreds of hours of real-time to color and scratch frame by frame on the celluloid using processes that date back to the 19th Century, then convert it via digital wizardry into 3 minutes of screen-time. I sometimes tear apart one work to create another from the same original footage, recycling images from an intangible past and projecting them into an intangible memory. In the end, the work is always a hybrid born of cinema and visual art.

I love installation and media design for stage, as these disciplines directly address the “present” much like early cinema did: holding the audience captive in a darkened space while a series of fleeting images flickers before their eyes - images that they will not be able to take home with them. I love it when art is more experience than object. I love the question of time and the notion that many realities may be happening simultaneously in parallel worlds. For this reason, I am profoundly in awe of the mechanisms by which a transparent image, filtering light, can alter the energy of that light into infinity and perhaps into dimensions that we are not yet fully conscious of...