[-empyre-] the depth of projection - architectural logic, shadowplay, vjing

[Duncan White]

Thanks Menotti!  and thanks for what has been so far a very interesting dicsussion.
Let’s begin with the rather GODLY point-of-view shot in Malcolm’s wonderful documentation of Horror Film 1.  Besides the ‘meet your maker’ moment putting the viewer in a rather compromising position – it draws attention to the use of the naked body glowing green and red in the projection beam.  
Why is Malcolm naked?  
You might think, as I have, it is to strip the body of any incumbent cultural reference – but then of course the naked male body is not without its markers.  Malcolm looks a lot like Vitruvius, Roman architect celebrated by Leonardo as the pre-modern humaniser of the built environment.  
I don’t mean to flippant.  Works like Horror Film 1 invoke a sort of universal abstract space – accessing the primordial by getting beneath the hard surfaces of reality using light and shadow to soften and bend the fixed landscapes of experience (any one who saw Tony Hill’s shadow work, Point Source (1973) at the Expanded Cinema conference in April will know what I mean).      
Anthony McCall’s solid light films, moved film away from an investigation of materials toward a sense cinema as environment and process.  As Jonathan Walley has noted, McCall’s projection works reconceived ‘cinema as essentially the modulation of light in space’.
But what is the space in these works?  
Douglas Crimp has challenged the contemporaneous use of space in Carl Andre’s sculpture – Andre doesn’t seem to care where the work turns up.  For Andre all space is the same and Crimp doesn’t like it:  ‘If modern art works existed in relation to no specific site and were therefore said to be autonomous, homeless, that was also the precondition of their circulation; from the studio to the commercial gallery, from their to the collector’s private dwelling, thence to the museum or lobby of a corporate headquarters.’ 
Expanded Cinema doesn’t circulate in the same way even though it employs the devices of representation and reproduction – cameras and projectors etc….  MORE TO THE POINT Expanded Cinema doesn’t circulate in the same way because of how it uses space. 
No space is neutral (or as Marc Auge would have it ‘non-referential’) spaces are organised by – and are the organisation of – given narratives of behaviour and exchange.  The classroom is made up of narratives, as is the living room, the artist’s studio, the cinema and the lobbies of corporate headquarters. 
In other Expanded Cinema projection works such as Carolee Schneemann’s Snows (‘in which Carolee occupies the picture as a real person’) or Birgit and Wilhelm Heins’ Movie Show in which they occupy the 'empty' projector beam dressed as Frankenstein Monsters – the popular narratives of space are combined with the ‘degree zero’ representations of Paik’s Zen for Film.  
The space of projection is used as material in the fullest sense – to include the narratives of space and time that define its production and consumption both inside and outside the circulation of images.  
Movie Show is important.  Rather than a naked figure literally stripped of cultural associations the use of Frankenstein monsters appropriates popular narratives of ‘transformation’ somehow already as it were present in the narratives of the projection space – in this case the back of a pub in Bavaria.  
When the light comes on the figures move.  Rather than simply showing bodies in space the cinema the projection beam produces bodies in space – more specifically it produces the body of the viewer as ‘he or she’ recognises ‘him or herself’ in the movements, form and shape of the actor (impersonator/monster/ ‘intermediaries between men and the powers of nature, seeking to conjure or tame the forces at work in the world through mimetic representation’).  
This is why Werner Nekes used the projector like a camera – to show (or un-show) that cinema doesn't simply represent the world but constructs it before our very eyes,  in our very rooms and as part of our v lives...  


________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Gabriel Menotti [gabriel.menotti at gmail.com]
Sent: 08 September 2009 23:33
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: [-empyre-] the depth of projection - architectural logic, shadowplay,  vjing

Dear all:

Thanks for your engagement in this first round of debate, especially
to José Carlos and Rosa! This week will introduce a new theme, whose
implications we seem to be naturally getting into: the depth of
projection. I think the “Fixed Viewpoint” piece commented by Pall
Tayer explicits very well that the mechanic gaze of the camera
transforms the space into image according to a certain mathematical
logic – and that is that of orthogonal projection.

Projection could also be considered as the technique that truly
inaugurate and defines cinema.  Even though /kinesis/ comes from the
greek word for movement, moving images were already popular by the
time cinema as we know appeared. What set the iconic Lumières’ device
apart from others was that it produced 1) enlarged images for a 2)
mass audience. Both these characteristics – the 1) formal and the 2)
economic one – result from projection.

But light projection also has some architectural demands, which the
cinematographic apparatus seems to make us conform to unconsciously.
In that sense, to acknowledge projection could raise the audience
awareness to the complex interplay of temporal and spatial regimes
being negotiated during a screening.

Besides, performances with projection seem to rescue the
tri-dimensionality of the place and set the image back to human scale
and proportions – or at least under human control. For instance, we
could think of contemporary VJing practices, or expanded cinema pieces
– such as Malcolm LeGrice’s /Horror Film I/. [1]

Our first guest for this week is:

Duncan White

Duncan White is a writer and academic currently employed as
Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the British Artists’ Film and Video
Study Collection, Central St Martins College of Art and Design,
London.  He is working with David Curtis on the Narrative Exploration
in Expanded Cinema project, as well as with a number of prominent
academics, artists and institutions in the field.    He recently
co-organised international conferences on Expanded Cinema at Tate
Modern, The British Film Institute and Central St Martins and is
working on a book of collected essays entitled Expanded Cinema: Space,
Time and Context with David Curtis, Al Rees and Steven Ball.  A
complete profile of the project can be seen at
www.rewind.ac.uk/expanded.

Best!
Menotti

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bRddEfxCok
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