Medium Practices.

A considerably shorter version of the essay was published, with monochrome illustrations, in Public journal, issue 44 (Toronto: York University Press), in autumn 2011). (Couple of glitches found their way into the text in the process of uploading it, which I’ve been unable to resolve so far).

I am interested in works that could not have existed other than in the medium in which they were made. The essay develops out of two chapters in my book Film Art Phenomena (2003), which worked with an idea that different media offered different possibilities and facilitated particular ways of working and kinds of outcome: a kind of medium specificity-lite argument, in the sense that it held back from a stronger position on film, video and digital media as being absolutely distinct or antithetical (1). Actually, I don’t think it’s possible, or even necessary, to show that they are absolutely distinct in order to argue for medium specificity; they are, obviously, all media designed for recording moving images, and for many people, in a majority of production contexts, such as TV, the distinctions are simply irrelevant.

A second motive for writing was prompted by a feeling of resistance to the long running fashion for a rejection of medium-based forms in favour of so called post-medium practices. Practitioners, however multiple, mixed or post-media their work may be, can never escape the question of medium. In relation to photographic media, such attempts would seem to commit them to an ideology of transparency, while, more broadly, artists who mix media cannot ignore the specificities of those media’s histories and effects, just because they’re using them in conjunction with sculpture, drawing, installation or combinations thereof.

Thirdly, I wanted to challenge the assertion that medium-specific practices entail a commitment to a reductive kind of formalism (an assertion for whose proponents formalism is seen as intrinsically reductive anyway). Even assuming that such a formalism can apply to painting, which is always more complex and multifarious than the traducers of a Greenbergian position would like it to be, it surely cannot be applied to film and video, which combine optical, mechanical and electronic or photo-chemical stages in sequences that cannot easily be defined when taken together as a whole: this becomes clear as soon as one tries to answer the question what is a “film”? The fact of film’s compound technology also underlies -and makes possible- the range of works produced by artists that explore single aspects or stages of the medium, from Man Ray and Len Lye’s hand crafted filmstrips to Rose Lowder and Helga Fanderl’s in-camera films, to Malcolm LeGrice and Zbigniew Rybczynski’s printer collages to Guy Sherwin and Bruce McClure’s projection events. It’s hard to think of equivalent practices in photography, painting, sculpture or even video: in the latter case, there is a much closer bond between the recording device and its storage medium which, increasingly, has become part of the hardware of the camcorder or mobile phone, which also includes the means of sound and picture replay. Thus all the separate functions and stages of film technology are embodied in a single device: the video image is always already present, storable, viewable and reviewable, at the press of a button. (Compared to film, video, at least in its current state, is a black box technology, and to my knowledge no significant work has yet emerged from the re-programming or circuit bending of camcorders. The pioneering work of the Vasulkas, for example, was largely possible because early video production equipment consisted of large, separate analogue devices, that made access to circuit boards practical in a way that would be extremely difficult with the miniaturised circuitry of modern camcorders.) The idea that work will necessarily be reduced to being only, or even mainly, “about” its medium because it works with a notion of medium specificity, underestimates the medium’s -any medium’s- complexity. Even monochromatic paintings, however much they may be about flatness and edge, are always about other things as well; the relationship between process and meaning, the production of space and texture and the tension between them, perception and thought, the form of arrest and direction of attention etc. Film and video have the additional question of recording, if not representation, as their all but inescapable condition (2).

In what follows I will discuss a selection of works for which their medium is a central and critical aspect of what they are about, and where medium is an expanded term that includes the rendering of space and time and the viewer’s orientation in relation to them. Furthermore I hope to show that these works could not have been made in a different medium without their losing the meanings they generate.

In Neil Henderson’s Candle (16mm, black and white, silent, 2’ 50”, 2006), we watch, in reverse, a Polaroid photograph of a candle developing. The flame and the top of the candle itself are all that are visible against a black background. Thus the candle flame provides its own illumination as image: the flame is both light source and image. The film comprises an entire roll of 16mm film, so that the end-roll flare is also included, and forms part of the work’s meaning.

There are two kinds of movement in the image: firstly, the strongly visible pulsing of grain around the top of the candle and to a lesser extent around the edges of the flame, whose white centre is grainless. The second movement consists in the gradual lightening of the photograph as it un-develops. The shimmering grain brings the flame to pseudo-life, reanimating a classic symbol and measure of time passing, while its pulsation animates the flat duration that characterises static shots of static objects. It also marks the unseen passing of frames through the projector that are necessary to sustain this stasis. As the image gradually whitens, the visibility of grain constantly shifts: black and white grain is most visible in mid greys, so that as the background moves through that range, the grain becomes strikingly coarser, before rapidly disappearing as the image whites-out. The gradual lightening of the image also constitutes a kind of medium-specific movement, in the same way that the de-focussing of the photograph at the end of Michael Snow’s Wavelength more dramatically does (3). We tend to think of movement as occurring in the realm of the pro-filmic –subject and/or camera movement- and don’t realise that any change within an image is movement. This is the case with Candle: image change is image movement. Thus the film gives back to its subject the movement it was deprived of in the act of being photographed: given that the image moves, the “candle” does too, in a sense. But this is also a movement to its own demise, and so in another move the film reinstates to the lit candle its defining transience.

Candle, Neil Henderson, 2006.

When the screen goes to white, candle flame and background are united. As the film flares out at the end of the roll, we also pass from image-light to projector light; from image surface to screen surface, in an uninterrupted process that is self-defining in both form and duration. It hardly needs saying that if the same work were made on digital video, the relationship between fixed pixel array and image content would be static; no pulsation, therefore no marking of time, and no re-animation of the image or its attendant connotations. On a slightly broader level, the reconstitution of an image from electronically processed voltages deprives this work of its strongly indexical sense, whereas the flame burns, as it were, a hole directly into the photographic emulsion. (In the early days of video, the technology was closer in this respect to film, in that it was possible to burn images onto the vidicon tube inside the camera. The British video artist David Hall made a work that directly exploited this (4)). At the point of white-out, the film continues to run through the projector, so that we still see a mediated image, even though the candle has disappeared, whereas video’s equivalent is an imageless, unmediated light issuing directly from the projector’s lamp. The sense that we are still seeing an image, and not merely white, is also important to the meaning of Candle, because it reminds us that, as long as there is film running through the projector, we are looking at an image, even if the screen is “blank”. This premise accords with the work’s overall structure, given its move from near dark through to maximum lightness. Furthermore, it reaffirms the fact of film projection as a series of discrete components; film, projector, image, whereas the unmediated light from a video projector or TV screen issues from its technology, not from its image carrying medium, insofar as image-data and resulting image are one and the same at the moment of projection.

In Chris Kennedy’s Tape Film (16mm, colour, silent, 5 minutes, 2007) the filmmaker attaches strips of masking tape horizontally to a transparent screen that is hinged vertically, with a wider, left hand side section and a narrower one at an angle to it on the right. The hinge is visible as a brilliant strip of light, and bisects the frame in a ratio close to the Golden Section (1: 0.618). The framing is tight and the performance takes place in a dark space such that nothing is visible other than the dramatically lit screen and the filmmaker’s head, upper body and arms. Throughout, there are abrupt shifts between dark and light, and colour and black and white. Violent flares and apparent fogging disrupt the flow and frustrate the viewer’s gestalt-forming efforts, so that by the end of the film it is still fundamentally unclear as to the nature of the space and Kennedy’s position within it. The placement and direction of lighting is also highly ambiguous, so that Kennedy appears sometimes as reflected image and sometimes as a shadow or silhouette. The light on the right side of the screen could be the same kind as the band of light on the opposite side, or it could be edge fogging. But the way it occurs here raises the question of what the difference is, or why it should necessarily matter, since the light that enters through the lens and light that enters other ways are effectively the same, both image-forming, only differently mediated. Both make indexical impressions, trapped as traces that evidence a certain situation that existed in the room where the event took place. The light in the film, the fogging and the moments of solarisation caused by it, interact with the shadows and surfaces of the profilmic space; its transparent partitions, silhouettes and translucent tape areas, thereby generating ambiguities that are significantly derived from the film medium’s characteristics.

Tape Film, Chris Kennedy, 2007.

The film’s complexity turns on the creation of screens within screens, and here again, the fogging plays a key role. A film’s surface –the field of grain that bears the image- usually sits on the picture plane, and depending on the coarseness of the grain, one can flip one’s attention between this surface and the represented space of the pro-filmic, in films of this kind. In Tape Film, however, a number of strategies complicate matters. The application of tape establishes the evolving screen within the screen of the performance, realised and developed in the duration of the work, while the fogging periodically sweeps away the grain texture, simultaneously imposing a new surface level. There are thus at least three interacting layers; screen surface, created screen and fog-light screen. The created tape-screen develops gradually more resistance to the effects of fogging as it grows in area, and the pro-filmic seems thereby to stabilise, but the fogging weakens the image contrast, undoing the effects of the taping. At certain points there are little more than marks on a dark surface, which both reassert the framing edge and posit another surface that is neither on the picture plane nor illusionistically in it. At these moments we are looking solely at the film surface though it is not visibly a surface, but rather functions as a barrier or mask, through whose scratches light escapes to appear not as on a surface but as lights flashing briefly in the dark.

Towards the end there is a long passage of intense light-flare and flicker, apparently from fogging, but it’s not actually clear if this is the case, since some of the light seems to come from a source, which, of course, it does in one sense. We are forced to question what counts as an image, what is intentional and what not. It goes without saying that such imagery could not have been generated with a camcorder. Nor, however, is this a reductive assertion, since the interplay of different lights has a direct and complex effect on the spatiality and illusionistic aspects of the image. At the beginning of the film the tape appears translucent, if not opaque, since there is an initial correspondence between the strips of tape and the stripes of Kennedy’s tee-shirt that imply a projection through the tape to form an image on his chest, but this impression is soon dispelled. It appears that the tape has variable degrees of translucency, depending on the angle at which light hits it. By the end it has become opaque; silvery and wholly reflective, simultaneously obscuring the space behind it, while the figure, previously apparent as front lit, now appears in silhouette. This latter, whose flat opacity depends reciprocally on the tape’s own density, forms a new screen or layer within the work, stabilising the place of the tape-screen, yet newly redefining the space, since it contrasts with other points in the film where Kennedy’s image is front-lit and hence three dimensional, and the screen’s location and orientation different while similarly unclear.

The mix of film stocks productively hinders the comprehension of the image: in other words it’s not merely a decorative or graphic effect as it often has been in films that use a mixture of stocks. Since the interferences are not pre-planned or contrived in post-production, the film can be said to generate something not previously known. By contrast, the application of colours or modifications to contrast etc in post production would have to be done on the basis of what can already be seen to exist, and therefore in response to that, so that its effects are predictable and adjustable towards an end goal. Either way the results are artificial. The use of different film stocks combined with hand processing, however, leads to uncontrolled interactions that generate unanticipated effects; new experience that counters the given of the iconic photographic image. Thus the strategy depends on the nature of the medium used, and here specifically it depends in part on the fact that ultimately one is working blind when working with film, especially where fogging is concerned. The kind of experience generated, and the way it is generated, is unique to film, notwithstanding that one can have some sense of what is going to happen when one deploys certain materials in a certain way. Video editing and painting, by contrast, share the same feedback-based working procedure whereby a mark is made, or an image generated, which is then responded to and modified. In painting this is done directly in the making process, in video it is done either through live mixing or in post-production.

In video the use of post-production methods to interfere with the perceptual-spatial stability of the image involves a synthetic activity, as in a work like David Larcher’s Ich Tank, where new kinds of spaces and objects are sculpted from conventional footage through processes of fragmentation, distortion, multiplication and recombination (5). This is a very different process from the blanket treatment of a given image, such as the use of filters in Wavelength, where coloured gels over the lens are applied to the whole image achieve a flattening effect by altering the contrast between objects. While such effects could be done digitally in post-production, the relationship between performance-process and medium-knowledge is fundamentally different. The video image exists as a provisional structure, wholly mutable from the bottom up, whereas the film image is what it is all the way through, from the very beginning: it can be subsequently supplemented, but not modified in itself: even with scratching or over painting, the filmed, iconic image remains, as in Stan Brakhage’s Eye Myth (colour, silent, 9 seconds, 1972), where the original images clearly persist as such, even if only glimpsed beneath dense layers of scratching and over-painting. So a film cannot but attest to its method of production: it exists as a record of its making in a way that video can only simulate, insofar as the latter is reconstituted from transduced, converted and filtered data. Post-production treatment involves the fundamental restructuring of the image data, and is a predictable and reversible process. Painting is similar: an additive process of building up undertaken in a trial and error fashion. This process includes most, if not all, subtractive actions, since the removal of paint from a surface is rarely absolute, or if it is, the removal from a surface usually can modify it in a way that may still have consequences for subsequent applications of paint.  The new knowledge that emerges from the unpredictable interplay between film medium and image emerges from a retrospective analysis, as opposed to that which emerges from video post-production, that is, through a generative, feedback process.

Cathy Rogers’ Super 8 films 14.11 and Scotopic (both 2009-10) explore metrical relationships between the spatio-temporal scale and physical form of the filmstrip and its subject. In the first, a set of pinhole cameras was made to house 2ft lengths of Super 8 film. These were placed on the northeast-facing windowsills of an industrial unit in a large building in Maidstone, Kent, which face a busy railway line that runs roughly parallel to them. The films were exposed at the moment a train arrived from London into the platform at Maidstone East station.  They were then processed, joined and projected at 6fps.

Part of a frame strip from 14/11, Cathy Rogers, 2009-10.

Rogers says of the film: “14.11 derives from the desire to capture simultaneous moments of time at once.  As the train arrives onto the platform it moves through the window frames (of the unit), which visually segments its progress like a film-strip running through the camera”. This is true both figuratively and literally, and, one could add, the train’s own windows bring a third interacting layer to that between windows and film strips, figuring, as Rogers implies, the processes by which the work was made. Within each camera a number of frames (approximately 160, or 6 ½ seconds running time) are simultaneously exposed. Thus the film records a spatially contiguous sequence of views of the passing train at a single moment in time, in a technical move akin to the pinhole Time Slice camera originated by Tim Macmillan and later popularised in the camera-based system of The Matrix. Here, though, there is an isomorphic relationship between medium and subject in the longitudinal, segmented form of both filmstrip and train, and a mutually reflective one in the manner of recording. The piece turns on its being, as a filmstrip, a series of static moments that are spatially contiguous and temporally simultaneous at the moment of their sampling, but discrete and momentary in their re-presentation as projected film. The work thus instantiates a disjunction between the near identical means of recording and projecting, in which both camera and projector utilise a shutter to break time and space into fragments.

 In The Matrix, as well as a number of TV ads, the spectacular flight around an object frozen in space and time frequently takes the form of a 180 degree rotational tracking motion that occurs in a plane at right angles to that of the object being circled. (In theses examples, the seemingly radical step of Time Slice appears conservative since, in its limited rotation, it conforms to, and thereby reasserts, the 180 degree principle, as opposed to Tim Macmillan’s system which is 360 degree). In Rogers’ film, by contrast, the imagery is aligned on the filmstrip in a configuration that mirrors its subject: it is a complete, longitudinal photograph of the train at a given moment in time. The projector animates this still image, but in order to do so must fragment the continuity of the filmstrip both spatially and temporally, in order to turn a momentary image into a time-based one.

14/11: Production photo showing one of the cameras in situ, photographing a passing train.

No moving image technology that depends on the fragmenting of time into a sequence of discrete moments can adequately represent its subject; 14.11 must remain either as a photograph, thereby abandoning its ambition to record movement as such, or it may become a movie at the cost of negating its status as a true, or truer record. These negations are equally true of all such attempts at complete or continuous time based photographic representations, from Marey’s Chrono-Photographs, in which the image promises to reach saturation point when all its moments are co-present, to Paul Sharits’ films for shutterless projector, where image iconicity is sacrificed to true spatio-temporal continuity (6). Rogers’ film sits among these various manifestations of critical-technical filmmaking, broadening the area for moving image practices that question their own adequacy.

14.11 embodies a use of film entirely distinct from video, demonstrating some fundamental differences between the two. Here film is brought into the world to encounter its subject in a direct manner. The physical disposition of the film material and its technology is adapted to the situation in which it will make a record of a mutually defining encounter. The medium is flexible (sic) and adaptable: its character as both indexical and physically malleable, and its technology, the camera, because separable, can be adapted independently of the film itself. This allows it to be used non-instrumentally, as a recording device in which unconventional applications are possible, and wherein the relationship with the pro-filmic can be infinitely re-configured. There is an illuminating precedent here. Before he started making films, William Raban made a number of works in which canvas was tied to a tree and allowed to weather for prolonged periods of time: “Whilst a student at St Martin’s School of Art (1967-71) some of my paintings involved lifting traces from a range of natural phenomena…The Tree Print series (1969-73) worked like photographic time exposures.  Tree trunks were wrapped in canvas soaked in organic dyes.  After six months of weathering and exposure to sunlight, I removed the canvas to reveal a permanent coloured texture of the tree imprinted on its surface.   Both the wave and tree prints were concerned with using elemental forces as a means for making images.  My thinking was inspired by the dictum from Thomas Aquinas that “art imitates nature not through mere appearance but in her manner of operation”… this idea seemed to suggest that naturalism in art need not be confined to mimetic representations of nature, so much as by attention to modus operandi and the intrinsic properties or materiality of the artistic medium”. (7).

Scotopic is: “a more intimate study of a small hole in the floor of the same room, through which the space of the room below is visible.  A single frame is taken with the hole positioned centre frame, covering every increment of the focal length through the range of a 15-60mm zoom lens.  After each cycle the Super 8 hand held camera performs a slow pan of the area so that the hole no longer is centre frame” (Cathy Rogers). Here a complementary operation is undertaken, in that the images are sequenced in another spatial plane, along the axis between lens and infinity. The hole becomes a kind of pinhole, and thus the film a kind of pinhole film, in which two spaces, the room below and the camera’s dark interior, are in a complementary relationship. As in 14.11, Rogers’ approach is to expand, or break, the use of film in its conventional relationship with the camera as co-imaging device. Even though she is using a camera here, the hole in the floor becomes a kind of lens extension, connecting the camera with the pro-filmic in a quasi-physical way, and hence changing the camera’s usually distanced relationship to its subject. This “lens” is also the light source and subject of the work, which applies a precise technical procedure to the contrastingly ineffable subject. As with 14.11, the association with pinholes grounds the work in film’s photographic pre-history, in a period when its technologies and techniques were still in flux.

Scotopic: installation view showing projection above and the illuminated hole in the floor below.

Scotopic: installation view showing back-projected image on right and the reflection of a street lamp on left.

Rogers’ films can be seen as an attempt to move beyond the narrowly mimetic image-producing function of camera technology. By liberating film from its accompanying apparatus and using it in a freely configured way, Rogers questions the prioritisation of the two dimensional image conjured from out there, and which is thereby necessarily divorced from it, in camera based recording processes. This prioritisation is especially exemplified in the phenomenon of the camcorder, which exists as a highly circumscribed and convention-bound image generating package, and which, in its strictly regulated technical parameters, default aesthetics and modus operandi, must distance itself from its subject through pre-determined, and hence indifferent, image generation, in order to function as such. The images it will make will be uniform, regardless of the situation in which they were made. In the broadest sense these kinds of images are generic; instantly recognisable as such and unbending in the manner in which they chew up their subject matter and re-render it.

Needless to say, all of the above does not preclude the possibility of making interesting work with video. Callum Cooper’s Victoria, George and Thatcher (colour, sound, 2 minutes, work in progress) deftly exploits the constraints and uniformities of the camcorder, and specifically the possibilities offered by the screen that has supplemented or replaced the viewfinder in camcorders, digital still cameras and mobile phones. One of the significant consequences of having a screen instead of a viewfinder is that the image is always already formed and visible as such. When one presses the shutter release, all one is doing is storing a moment in that continuity, briefly arresting, or rather sampling, the stream of data that flows constantly through the camera’s circuits. Cooper’s film, compiled from precisely aligned photographs of London row-houses, and shot on an iPhone 3gs, takes advantage of the ever-present screen image to allow him to create a template to structure a work based on precise repetitions and differences. The camera faces its subject square on and keeps a clear distance from it. The work’s particular strength comes partly from the fact that video imagery is so consistent, allowing the numerous small variations in the pro-filmic to have maximum impact, unimpeded by fluctuations in exposure or colour balance. The piece was made by marking key points on the phone’s screen with a chinagraph pencil, and using these to align successive shots. Cooper then elaborates a virtuoso animation, varying the pace and building zooms into the sequences. It is thus a film that breaks the boundaries between animation and “live action” since it is both animated and of the world, graphic and cinematic, a photographic series cum movie.

Adjacent frames from Victoria, George and Thatcher, Callum Cooper, 2010.

Finally, Simon Payne’s New Ratio (colour, sound, 1’ 40”, 2007) is a pure digital work, created entirely in a computer. Payne describes the piece as follows: “New Ratio is the first piece that I’ve made that explicitly explores the move from the 4:3 screen ratio to 16:9, which is now effectively the standard for broadcast television and video in general.  The colour fields that comprise the work involve a tense relationship with the edge of the screen.  In commenting on this piece Sean Cubitt has suggested that the equal mixture of additive and subtractive colours is effectively a ‘democratisation of colour’.  Each colour has been assigned a particular tone: white was attributed a standard 1KHz test tone; the pitch of the tone attributed to blue was half that of the test tone; and each of the colours in between (in descending order of luminance) were attributed tones at intervals between these values.  An additional sound is the ‘pip’ every time there is a cut.  This sound was the result of a glitch, but it has become an integral part of the soundtrack.  The video comprises two simple repeating sequences, which are fundamentally the same duration.  However, one sequence includes an additional frame of black that throws them out of synch causing a phasing that effects different mixtures of colour, a range of tone combinations, and various pulsations in the soundtrack and within the frame.  There is a discrepancy between the formal structure of this piece (as described) and the perceptual effects that arise, which are far more difficult to account for.” (8).

Two sequences of colour fields from the second cycle of New Ratio. Simon Payne, 2008.

The work’s effectiveness, again, is due in part to the consistently clean and flat colour fields, and the absence of grain and film flicker, which allows the resultingly pure colour frame sequences to generate impure interactions with each other, unimpeded, uncomplicated, by surface textures or imperfections, like an electronic version of a Steve Reich phase pattern piece. The video flicker engendered by the work’s construction is quite different from the regular rhythm of film flicker, and is key to the kinds of effects that are generated, which are more complex and unstable than film’s 24fps pulse. Another important aspect of the work is its hands-off aesthetic: our attention is directed wholly to its unfolding as an abstract sequence, unmediated by notions of craft or subjectivity. Thus the work shares something with other systems art, for example the painted reliefs of the British artist Malcolm Hughes, but without a trace of the hand made that marks that work, be it in the presence of brush strokes or slight imperfections in construction, or in the use of curves or more anthropomorphic or suggestive shapes. New Ratio, by contrast, has a iron logic in that its forms are derived directly from the given parameters of the technology from which it is constructed. In a much broader sense, the work itself is not an object but a portable, digital file –a virtual film- that can be stored in a number of media, and is thus independent of those media though it is, obviously, senstive to its forms of presentation, be it TV monitor, projector or web.

I started this essay on a note of caution, aware of the pitfalls of trying to define absolute differences between film and video. Now it seems increasingly clear that in a number of specific respects they are fundamentally different. These differences, however, become apparent not in the process of trying to describe them in the abstract, but from looking at how artists, in using them, have opened up and defined important differences. In other words, if one simply describes what these media do, then there is merely the obvious and superficial point that they share their most important function and raison d’etre: the generation of moving images. However, when one breaks them down into their constituent parts, and looks at those parts in relation to specific practices, one witnesses the emergence of unbridgeable gulfs in the way the media relate to, and can address, the world of their representations.

I am grateful to A L Rees for commenting on an earlier draft of this essay.

1. Film Art Phenomena, British Film Institute, 2003, chapters one and two.

2. ‘Film, “Motion Picture”, and “still” film, unlike painting and sculpture, can achieve an autonomous presence without negating iconic reference because the phenomenology of the system includes “recording” as a physical fact’. Paul Sharits: Words per Page, Film Culture 65-66, 1978, page 31.

3. Wavelength, Michael Snow, 16mm, colour, sound, 45 minutes, 1967). Wilhelm and Birgit Hein systematically and somewhat didactically explore this and a set of related issues in their film Structural Studies (16mm, colour and black & white, 40 minutes, 1974)

4. David Hall: Vidicon Inscriptions, analogue video, black and white, 30 minutes, UK, 1973-4.

5. David Larcher: Ich Tank, video, colour, sound, 59 minutes, UK, 1998.

6. For example: Sound Strip/Film Strip (1972).

7. (William Raban: Early Works on Canvas and Paper, in The Expanded Cinema Book, ed. Duncan White, David Curtis, Steven Ball and A.L. Rees, Tate publishing, 2011.

8. Simon Payne at: http://www.simonrpayne.co.uk/

This is a revised version of an essay originally published in Journal of Visual Art Practice in 2015, in which I consider a number of video works made by Jamie Jenkinson using an iPhone 5. The discussion centres around the visible interactions between the technology – lens, file formats, codecs, resolution, etc. – subject matter and the way the camera is moved. The imagery generated by these interactions often exhibits aberrant effects, such as uneven blur, which point to the limitations and determinations – the specificity – of the technology. (These ideas form the basis of Jenkinson’s PhD project, completed at Lancaster University in 2020)

Jenkinson’s¹ series constitutes a body of genuinely experimental works that are, however, underpinned by understandings about visual parallax, and which knowingly exploit the characteristics and shortcomings of video recording media: frame size and rate,bit rate and depth, file formats and codecs. Much of the videos’ imagery separates itself into two or more distinct layers, depending on the scene and the disposition of objects within it. Most of them also refer to, figure, or otherwise exploit the scanning processes involved in the formation of video images, and in some cases, such as Spiral Staircase (2013) refer back to film technology, with its step-by-step presentation of a series of individual frames.

Film and photographic processes are also referenced in titles, such as Shutter (2013) discussed below, and in at least one work, e.g. Fans on Floral (2013)

the subject is filmed through a spinning fan, breaking up the image in a manner akin to the way a film camera’s shutter closes between frame movements, so as both to preserve the stability of individual frames and to conceal the movement of the film through the camera.This latter process has historical precedents in John Smith’s 16mm film Blue Bathroom (1978–1979)

and in Ken Jacobs’ series of Nervous System films (1994 onwards) and is fundamental to the way an illusion of movement is sustained. However, in Blue Bathroom the fan, which is wholly visible in the shot, is used as part of a negative–positive printing process, while in Jacobs’ films, where the fan blade is rotated slowly to control the individual presentation of successive frames of film, it does not form part of the on-screen image. In Jenkinson’s work, by contrast, the fan blades function as a mechanical shutter, clearly visible, in front of the digital camera’s own electronic scanner. The effect is similar to many of his other videos, which is to generate two distinguishable layers of imagery that interact, and which function both qua image and as the explicit visualisation of their generative means, so that a technical process presents – not represents – itself, as imaged within the work, as it does its work on the image.

Digital camcorders do not have a mechanical shutter. Rather, the shutter is a function of the moment when light hits the chip, while speed is adjusted by electronically varying the amount of time the light sensitive charge coupled devices (CCDs), behind the lens are allowed to build a charge, within the standard (UK) video frame rate of 25 frames per second (fps). The CCDs, which form the rectangular chip – analogous to the celluloid film in analogue cameras – that gathers the light from the lens, have now largely been replaced by complementary metal oxide semi-conductor (CMOS) chips in most camcorders as they are cheaper to manufacture and use about one thousandth of the power of that consumed by CCDs.² However, like so many digital devices or functions (and their nomenclatures) that are modelled on their analogue precursors, the ‘Rolling’ shutter, common to digital cameras with CMOS chips, functions in an equivalent manner to that found in a film camera, which consists of a rotating disc with a triangular aperture cut out, like a pie with a slice removed. As the opening sweeps across the film it is exposed to light. In the digital equivalent, the chip is activated from left to right and top to bottom, which forms a slightly diagonal sweep that lasts about 1/50th of a second, similar to its analogue forebear, except that whereas the film camera’s sweep is rotational, the video camera shutter’s is for the most part diagonal, since the two edges of the slice are only parallel with the horizontal edges of the frame at one moment.³

The pie-slice movement is exactly figured in Spiral Staircase. The camera advances up a cast iron spiral staircase, step by step, recursively figuring the manner by which film advances through a camera/projector. The staircase’s structure is given, and is formed from identical units, whereas Jenkinson’s movement up it exhibits small variations from step to step, again in the manner of film frames, which are formed from identical rectangles within which the image typically changes slightly in each one. At a certain point one’s visual sense – one’s ‘seeing as’ – of the image shifts from being that of a point of view shot of a person, to that of a diagonal array sweeping erratically through the frame. (Thereby enacting a perceptual shift that has been most eloquently articulated by Tony Hill⁴ in his Short Historyof the Wheel (1992) in which, because of the way the camera rotates with its moving subject to hold it static in the frame, it is the ground that rotates about the wheel rather than vice versa)

Spiral Staircase also exhibits a number of characteristics – ‘artefacts’ in the technical language – that are common to many of Jenkinson’s videos, the most obvious ones being blur and skew. The image spins past our eyes, as a blur, but we are nevertheless aware of the forms that underpin the blur: they cannot be seen clearly but they are clearly there. This again gives rise to a sense of two layers to the image and although the effect is not as striking as in some of the other works, in which blur is generated by deliberately swiping the camera in rhythmic movements across the subject, it nonetheless conveniently raises the question of what we are really seeing, and of course what the camera is really recording and how.

Blur is necessary to realistic-looking moving images, specifically images that desire to simulate human vision, as most movies in some respects aim to do, but at the same time it threatens their legibility, and this understanding is central to Jenkinson’s modus operandi. It is well known that animators add blur to what are otherwise sharp drawings in order to render them more realistic. In filmed material blur is an effect of shutter speed and frame rate, both of which can be altered independently of each other, within limits. Faster shutter speeds eliminate blur but beyond a certain point this gives way to a strobing effect that equally draws attention to the medium’s functioning. Strobing occurs because we see a rapid sequence of sharp images where in nature we would see equivalent things as continuous and blurry. Strobing also affects the apparent continuity of motion because the shorter the shutter speed, the longer the time gap between frames, and the faster the moving object the greater the difference between one frame and the next. All this occurs at a normal frame rate of 25 fps (25 time slices of about 1/50th of a second each), but the very small durations involved and the minimal differences between them can have a dramatic effect nonetheless.

Having said all this, there is another aspect of Jenkinson’s methods that is crucial to its appearance. All the works are made with a handheld camera, and the recording procedure is different in every case. The action of mounting a spiral staircase is, like the film’s movement though the camera, intermittent: the placing of a foot on a step occasions a stationary moment, followed by the body’s movement upwards as the alternate leg aims for the next step. This stop-start moment is reflected in the video, which has correspondingly sharper and blurrier moments. Additionally, the camera has a certain amount of independent free movement, since arm movements are only partially determined by those of the legs. The result is that small areas of the individual frames appear momentarily sharp, against a general sense of overall blur.

Logically, the areas with the smallest amount of rotation, i.e. those nearest the centre of rotation, and therefore the slowest moving, should appear least blurred, but, surprisingly, this is not the case. Whereas these differentials of movement occur across a single plane, in many of the works the differentials are through or between planes, that is, from front to back, from the camera lens to infinity, in the manner of the parallax commonly seen from a train window, in which distant objects apparently move more slowly than near ones. (The effect is brilliantly explored by Guy Sherwin in his 16mm film Night Train (1979), in which time exposures trace the passage of lights in the landscape across the film frame. Nearer lights draw longer lines, whereas distant ones form shorter dashes and dots. Night Train is a perfect example of a mechanically created photograph: a drawing made by light).

The shift in seeing-as that is prompted in Spiral Staircase occurs in a different form in Obscured Windy Scene (2013)

Here the subject, trees blowing in the wind, is filmed through patterned glass. The image is doubly mediated, first by the camera and second by the glass, which functions as a compound lens. Initially we peer through the distorting glass to discern the turbulent foliage blowing in the wind. In a second sense, one that requires the gestalt brought to the first kind of viewing to be overridden, the lozenge shaped areas of glass can be seen as irregular phials containing coloured liquids that move up and down inside them. Each is a video within a video, and once one sees them as such, the image no longer seems distorted, because it has become a self-contained abstract work – it is what it is. Hence ‘distortion’ comes to be seen as such only in the context of a normative concept of representational imagery: it is an instrumentalist, ideological term, not an empirical one.

Video ‘Smear’ is a kind of afterimage, in which rays from bright light fall directly onto the chip, overloading the pixels (there is another analogy here with human vision, in that the rhodopsin in the rods and cones on the retina, which form a fixed array not unlike a pixel grid, become temporarily saturated, and therefore unable to function, when overexposed to light). Smear is more often seen in cameras that use a CCD sensor and a global shutter, which exposes the whole chip in a single flash, but is in any case a key feature of Silla en Balcón (2013)

which exploits this deficiency to create a tracery of light lines that float in the layers of blur in the foreground and background, which latter is kept out of focus. The shallow plane of focus allows Jenkinson to isolate the lines from the background. The foreground objects that generate them are blurred, and hence separated from them, partly through the rapid camera movements (there is a difference between movement-generated blur and defocus). The lines seem to persist by virtue of their relative brightness alone, even though they remain to varying degrees attached to that which generates them. While the creation of two or more planes is effected by rapid hand movements, in other works the layering is formed through structural procedures from the outset. Shutter effects this process even more explicitly, through rapid back and forth camera movements across a metal concertina shutter, such as those found at closed tube stations or as anti-burglar devices in houses.

The repetitive pattern and the work’s title again refer to film technologies and processes. The rapid movements of the camera generate distinct virtual lines from rivets in the shutter rods, which connect the rods to form a composite grid from real and apparent/virtual elements within the frame. In a number of other works layering is explicitly structured in, as opposed to being an effect of certain camera procedures. In Two Kitchen Pans (2013) the whole piece is re-filmed off a computer monitor, which imparts a layer of moiré pattern that remains distinct from the footage throughout the piece.

Two continuous camera pans around a room, shot at different times of day, are intercut into short sections so that the flow is interrupted. The scene includes bottles, shelves, potted plants, a clock and a door with patterned glass panels very different to those seen in Obscured Windy Scene. Each segment of pan overlaps with its predecessor, and because of the way they have been made it sometimes seems as if there are three pans not two.

This disruptive strategy generates a number of imponderables that productively obstruct an easy reading of the work, turning it into an undermining of seemingly straightforward representations. Jenkinson says of the work:

 ‘The video is not so much a series of “shots” but two videos opened in Apple Mac’s “Preview” software, and I am tapping the down arrow to flick between the two videos, which keep their respective time stamps. The first frames slightly reveal this, and there is a subtle tapping sound’⁶.

It thus becomes very hard to tell if one is seeing previously seen material from a different starting point or an exact repeat of a given segment, as sometimes appears to be the case. It is also not clear whether the cutting occurred in the original construction or in the process of rerecording. These are the work’s epistemological challenges. Layering occurs in at least two ways. First there is a sense of bi-temporality, an implied or virtual layering indicated by the intercutting through which repetition is created. Second there is the re-recording off the screen, which creates the persistent moiré pattern that floats over the space of the image – a picture plane within the picture plane as it were. The fact that the pattern does not change throughout the work does not mean that in-camera cutting did not take place during re-filming, because the pattern would not move if a tripod or similar was used. In Peter Gidal’s Room Film 1973 (1973) the second six-seconds of a 12-second shot of details of a room is repeated for 6 seconds.

It then continues unbroken for a further six seconds. This further six seconds is then itself repeated and extended for a further six seconds and so on. The film’s absolutely regular structural pattern focuses attention on what we can learn about what we think we have learnt from the first appearance of a shot and then from its repetition.

Two Kitchen Pans owes something to Gidal’s seminal film -an acknowledged inspiration to Jenkinson- but here the cognitive struggle turns on the extent to which we think we may or may not be seeing exactly the same thing again, where and when the selections took occurred, whether the repetitions were generated before or during re-filming etc. What both works have in common is their refusal to satisfy the viewer’s desire for epistemological security. Underlying all the various technologically inflected formal strategies in this work is, of course, the nature of the camera in its ‘normal’ functioning mode. The camera’s recording parameters are the given, framing layer, responsible for the particular qualities and shortcomings that generate the work’s effects, in combination with the various filming strategies employed, which most of the time are specifically intended to test the device’s limitations: the work is in this sense always pushing at those limitations so as to force them into generating something unexpected; this is the key sense in which it is experimental.

The iPhone 5 offered two video file formats, which pertain to how data are stored; MPEG-4 and Motion JPEG, and the H264 compression codec. The ‘codec’ (an abbreviation of ‘compression-decompression’) allows a file to be reduced in size for recording, storage and distribution and then decompressed for display. H264’s degree of compression, and hence quality, can be varied in the same way as a JPEG’s can in Photoshop. It is typically used for compressing video for Internet streaming, and, for example, is the codec recommended by Vimeo for loading videos there. Compression is intended to reduce file size without unacceptably compromising quality⁵ but there is always a trade-off between the two: within given settings, the price for a higher data rate will be lower quality and vice versa.

The iPhone 5’s ability to capture footage, its data rate, is about a 10th of what a high-end HD camcorder is capable of, and it is partly this limitation that allows for the generation of artefacts that typify Jenkinson’s approach. The piece that most explicitly focuses this is Cabinet 1–86, presented as the final piece at his Royal College of Art graduation show in 2013, and which consists of a large wooden box with eight small holes in it. Behind each hole is in most cases a simple kinetic sculpture. For example, ‘Hole 2 – Fan spinning black and white zigzag pin stripe pattern with flourescent strip light. Hole 5 – Portable TV displaying static. Hole 6 – Marco lens on a rotating hanging basket with flowers and incandescent light’⁷In order to view the work, the spectator is required to place their camera – phone’s lens over a small hole.

The spectator’s camera co-produces and completes the work, since its subject is the way the camera-phone handles and transforms what it sees. The camera displaces the naked eye, though of course it is also possible to view the holes directly, so that one can get a measure of the startling difference between this and viewing via a video screen. The work could be said to subvert Vertov’s idea of the perfectibility of vision, in that although human vision is in some sense improved by camera technology, it is an imperfect, highly circumscribed image that is proffered here. What is revealed is not the truth of what the camera saw, but the means by which it synthesises something quite distinct and technologically determined. In this light the work can be seen partly as a critique of the triumph of convenience of use (miniaturisation, automation) over fidelity that is characteristic of so much digital technology.

Cabinet is both didactic and revelatory. Didactic in the sense that it offers the chance to learn something by explicit comparison and consideration, and revelatory in its presentation of the dramatic and unexpected phenomena resulting from the camera’s shortcomings. Revelation is also tempered by bafflement, because one realises that it is impossible to grasp the complexities of what one is seeing, let alone what is causing the camera to render what it is seeing as it does. The rolling shutter-firings interact with the rapid rotations of the kinetic objects, generating chaotic, synthetic interactions between vertical sweeps and horizontal rotations, colour processing errors, data handling and mishandling. The work subverts the Kodak Box-Brownie ethos of ‘you push the button, we do the rest’, which has survived to dominate the digital age, with the knowledge that all one has to do with a camcorder in order to create sharp colour images with sync sound, is to switch it on. The way to subvert this loaded starting point from the bottom-up is to insist on some basic considerations that precede this state of affairs, by borrowing from analogue procedures, which have to ask: ‘black and white or colour, sound or silence, focus or blur?’ The top-down way is to expose and undermine the camcorder’s normal functioning by testing its abilities to the limit on its own terms. This latter is Jenkinson’s route in both Cabinet and the more recent work discussed above.

Notes

1. Jamie Jenkinson: http://www.jamiejohnjamesjenkinson.com/.

2. Barry Green: Sensory Artifacts and CMOS Rolling Shutter (nd). Accessed April 14. http://dvxuser.com/jason/CMOS-CCD/.

3. Karim Nice, Tracy V Wilson and Gerald Gurevich: How Digital Cameras Work (nd).

Accessed April 14. http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/cameras-photography/digital/digitalcamera2.htm.

4. Tony Hill: A Short History of the Wheel: https://vimeo.com/17593720.

5. It’s interesting how, in the TV broadcasting world, subjective terms like ‘quality’ are used as if they were technical standards. The most enduring one is ‘broadcast quality’ which has evolved along with the technology, and means nothing more than ‘acceptable by best currently available standards’.

6. Email to the author.

7. Cabinet 1-8: http://www.jamiejohnjamesjenkinson.com/p/cabinet-1-8.html.

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Nicky Hamlyn // INSTALACION //

Jueves 24// 20h// Hangar, Sala Polivalente

Nicky Hamlyn es uno de los artistas clave en el panorama cinematográfico de Gran Bretaña de los últimos treinta años. Trabaja tanto en 16 mm como en vídeo. Sus obras exploran los elementos básicos de la experiencia fílmica: la relación entre el espacio del film y del fotograma, entre el tiempo, el parpadeo y el movimiento, y entre la luz y la imagen material. Hamlyn fue un miembro activo de la London Film-Makers Co-operative. Además de realizar sus películas, escribe a menudo e investiga sobre cine experimental en publicaciones especializadas como Film Quarterly o Sequence.

El jueves 24 en Hangar mostrará unas instalaciones en loop en 16mm en Sala polivalente. + INFO ›› 

Permutative Loops
Las tres obras forman parte de una serie de bucles dobles para un solo proyector. En cada caso, un bucle es un fotograma más largo que el otro, de modo que cada vez que los bucles completan un ciclo, cada diez segundos, la conjunción entre fotogramas se desplaza un fotograma.

FOUR CORNERS 2024.
Bucle doble para proyector de 16 mm. La obra está filmada en película Regular/Standard 8 sin dividir, de 16 mm de ancho. Se coloca una forma en forma de L en una de las cuatro esquinas de la imagen. La película se expone cuatro veces, una para cada una de las cuatro esquinas (arriba a la izquierda, arriba a la derecha, abajo a la izquierda, abajo a la derecha). La forma se filma para dos fotogramas, luego hay un espacio de entre 4 y 24 fotogramas, determinado mediante el lanzamiento de dados. El negativo y una copia de la misma se proyectan simultáneamente a través del mismo proyector. A diferencia del 16 mm, que tiene un orificio de rueda dentada por fotograma, el 8 mm tiene dos por fotograma de 16 mm, de modo que es posible cortar un extremo del bucle en la línea del fotograma y el otro extremo en el medio del fotograma, de modo que cada vez que el bucle pasa por el proyector, la línea del fotograma aparece en el medio del fotograma. Un bucle tiene una longitud de 239 fotogramas, el otro 240 (10 segundos), de modo que cada vez que los bucles dan una vuelta, la conjunción de fotogramas se desplaza un fotograma.

CONCENTRICS, 2016

Bucle de película doble para proyector de películas de 16 mm, sin sonido, duración indefinida. Dos bucles idénticos, de diez segundos de duración, pero uno más corto que el otro en un fotograma, pasan por el mismo proyector. Cada diez segundos, la conjunción entre los dos bucles se desplaza un fotograma, generando cambios en los patrones muaré generados por las superposiciones. Se necesitan cuarenta minutos (240 fotogramas x 240 repeticiones) para agotar todas las permutaciones.

RISONI , 2025

Doble proyección en bucle de película de 16 mm de duración indefinida. La obra consta de dos bucles idénticos de imágenes de minestrone animadas, el Risoni (arroz grande) del título, expuestas varias veces. Ambos bucles se ejecutan simultáneamente a través de un único proyector. Un bucle tiene una duración de 250 fotogramas, el otro de 249, de modo que cada vez que se ejecutan, cada diez segundos aproximadamente, la sincronización entre los bucles se desplaza en un fotograma. Se necesitan 42 minutos para agotar todas las permutaciones. Las superposiciones generan patrones muaré que cambian con cada ciclo del bucle.

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Jueves 24 Octubre // 20h

Hangar // Sala Polivalente

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Nicky Halmyn // INSTALACION

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NICKY HAMLYN // Cycles and Systems

Miercoles 23 // 21:15h// Zumzeig Cinema

Nicky Hamlyn es uno de los artistas clave en el panorama cinematográfico de Gran Bretaña de los últimos treinta años. Trabaja tanto en 16 mm como en vídeo. Sus obras exploran los elementos básicos de la experiencia fílmica: la relación entre el espacio del film y del fotograma, entre el tiempo, el parpadeo y el movimiento, y entre la luz y la imagen material. Hamlyn fue un miembro activo de la London Film-Makers Co-operative. Además de realizar sus películas, escribe a menudo e investiga sobre cine experimental en publicaciones especializadas como Film Quarterly o Sequence.

Nicky Hamlyn mostrará en Zumzeig Cinema Coop, un programa de películas filmadas y proyectadas en formato 16mm, donde explora ciclos y sistemas como conceptos cinematicos.

El jueves 24 en Hangar mostrará unas instalaciones en loop en 16mm en Sala polivalente. + INFO ›› 

CYCLES AND SYSTEM ›› PROGRAMA

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Seven Windsor Films, 16mm, silent, col and B&W, 18′, 2012, Canada.

Serie de siete cortometrajes realizados durante una residencia organizada conjuntamente por la Galería de Arte de Windsor y el Festival de Cine de Media City en Windsor, Ontario, Canadá, en 2012. Las cinco secciones en blanco y negro se procesaron a mano y se imprimieron utilizando una cámara Bolex de 16 mm como impresora. La primera sección en color es un estudio en cámara rápida del edificio de la sede de General Motors en Detroit, al otro lado del río desde Windsor, filmado durante 48 horas. Las otras secciones se realizaron en la propia galería de arte.

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Hole, 16mm, silent, col, 2′, 1992, UK.

HOLE, es una película sobre un agujero en una valla temporal que rodea un sitio de construcción. Me gustó la idea de hacer una película sobre una ausencia, en lugar de una presencia, aunque es una ausencia bastante completa. El agujero aparece en cada toma y la escala está indicada por gatos y un hombre que pasan a través del cuadro.

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Gasometers 3, 16mm, silent, col and B&W, 13′, 2016, UK.

Tercera parte de una serie de cuatro partes que examina los gasómetros en el norte de Londres, a medida que desaparecen para siempre del paisaje urbano. Este fue filmado desde un estacionamiento de camiones detrás de un IKEA en Edmonton, al norte de Londres, y desde Tottenham Marshes, parte del valle del río Lea que incluye el Parque Olímpico.

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Tobacco Shed, 16mm, com-opt, col, 10′, 2010, Italy.

Filmada en una fábrica de curado de tabaco en el noroeste de Umbría. Se adopta un enfoque uniforme para resaltar las variaciones en cada sección de la fábrica.

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Pro Agri, 16mm, silent, col, 3′, 2008, Italy.

Una de las películas de la serie sobre edificios relacionados con la producción de tabaco en Umbría. Se filmó durante un período de dos horas, desde una hora antes hasta una hora después del atardecer, a una velocidad de un fotograma cada dos segundos.

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Panni, silent, 3 minutes, 16mm, 1995.

Filmada en la última semana de diciembre de 2005, cerca de Trestina, Umbría.

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Passaporta, 16mm, silent, col, 10′, 2022, Belgium

Filmado desde un único punto de vista, el título hace referencia a la librería multilingüe en el centro de Bruselas, cuya gran linterna de vidrio constituye el foco de la obra.

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Miercoles 23 // 21:15h// Zumzeig Cinema

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NICKY HAMLYN // Cycles and Systems

Another short piece made from a single jpeg of Manglewurzels in which three overlapping crops of the image are looped and repeated. What’s interesting to me is the way the image continues to appear to develop or change (the distinction between change and develop in itself raises interesting questions) for as long as one watches it. It seems to offer an experience that’s quite different from that of looking at a painting for a long time or a film in which ‘nothing happens’, such as Warhol’s Empire. On the one hand I feel a certain amount of self-doubt about the value of making repeated works that follow the same procedure as previous examples I’ve made, especially since they’re about effects and feel therefore under-conceptualised, however this feeling is offset by the realisation that there is something interesting going on in terms of how the brain continues to see differing patterns within the same rigidly repeating loop. I like the instability that’s involved, that the brain can’t settle or nail something down, and that one can change the experience simply by fixating on parts of the screen. So on the one hand the work does things to the viewer while at the same time the viewer can partially control or direct the experience.

The cultivation of Manglewurzels was developed in the C18 by farmers for feeding cattle and pigs, though they can be eaten by humans. They were also used for the rustic sport of ‘Mangold Hurling’, for brewing beer and as a cure for constipation, for which the scored seeds are taken per anum.

Raw White (2022) is another short piece in a series of occasional works that uses a three-frame loop structure to generate a kinetic experience. I don’t know what these works mean or what value they have since in a way they’re not about much more than an open-ended exploration of optical phenomena that are no doubt well understood by visual psychologists. Mind you, the same could be said for Ken Jacobs’ apparent-movement works that utilise the 4-stroke illusion: http://www.georgemather.com/MotionDemos/FourstrokeMP4.html

I am increasingly attracted to making work from ever more reduced means. A previous piece, Concentrics (2016), was generated from a single static image of concentric circles, downloaded from the internet, printed out on a single sheet of A3 paper and filmed with a hand-held Bolex camera. (Two copies of the loop, one of 249 frames, the other of 250, are projected simultaneously in the same projector. It takes the ten second cycle about 41.66 minutes to complete a cycle of all the permutations).

 Raw White goes a step further. The image is generated from an initial Jpeg of a sheet of blank A4 paper. Three closely overlapping close-up crops are rendered as three Jpegs, which are then made into a loop in Premiere Pro and rendered out as an interlaced file. Interlacing seems to result in smoother movement, but it’s hard to tell as the image judders anyway. To ‘complete’ the work the viewer should fixate on part of the screen so that spurious rotating and other movements can been seen. The experience shifts depending on where on the screen one fixates. This seems to reduce the artist’s role to that of facilitator or enabler of an experience. He cannot claim fully to be the author of the work since the core experience is something out of his control, inside the spectator’s head. The spectator really is the generator of the work which, in itself, is nothing but a repeating sequence of three more or less randomly chosen static images. In a wider context I want to ask if there’s any value in this kind of work. Does it consist of mere effects, which makes it seem antithetical to the idea of properly authored or constituted art, or does it say something a bit more interesting about what artworks need to be to count as such? Why am I assuming that effects are not enough on their own? While there is evidence of conceptual activity in terms of certain procedures and values at the level of the work’s making, can these be said to constitute something more, something that says something interesting not just about the art making process, i.e., a form of meta-thinking, but that it generates more interesting conceptual issues around the experience per se?

These Brillo boxes sit on a top shelf in the bookshop in the Bozar, Brussels’ contemporary art museum. They’re not made of cardboard, like the originals, nor plywood, like Warhol’s faithful copies, but of what looks like a fine-grained foam. They appear to be smaller than their predecessors. They made me wonder what it is one is buying. Not a Warhol, but something that looks like it from a distance. The philosophical issues raised by the boxes that occupied Arthur Danto in his essay on them in his book on Warhol (Yale University Press, 2009), are here absent. They have been displaced by something domesticated, both in terms of scale and meaning, since the conundrums embodied by the originals at the time when they were shown in 1964 have long since been accommodated by art theorists, however, Danto says he does find the boxes beautiful -he has one at home- so the Bozar boxes share this with the originals but they are impoverished, one could say, in that they have been reduced to aesthetic objects. This seems strange since art objects are typically supposed to be aesthetic objects. (The boxes were designed by an artist, James Harvey, who was amazed to see Warhol’s copies selling for large sums of money). Danto says: ‘nothing that the Brillo box and Andy’s Brillo Boxes have in common can be part of the definition of art, since they look—or could look—absolutely alike. What makes something art must accordingly be invisible to the eye’. The Bozar boxes are surely not art, but are rather distinct copies of an original artwork. They’re not examples of appropriation art because they lack the right context and authorial claim to be seen as such. The question of context relates directly to Danto’s remark about what makes them art being ‘invisible to the eye’. However, whereas Warhol’s original boxes were made by craftsmen and meticulously hand-painted and screen printed by his assistants to resemble the originals as closely as possible, the Bozar ones are, in terms of fabrication, are more like the originals, in that they would presumably also have been made on a mechanised production line. As such they complete a circle by returning the boxes to an industrial context that they share with the originals, deprived, however, of both functionality and artistic meaning.