[-empyre-] On camerawork and montage transformed by ETC video processing

[Turim,Maureen Cheryn]

I have been following the past weeks of discussion with great interest, notably on the issues of preservation and on the theorization implied in the inventive analog technologies of the ETC.   To continue on this later notion, in light of my teaching an senior honors seminar this semester on cinematography, I want to raise the question of the camera in the ETC works.  Some artists brought externally shot material to the ETC to process (for example Shalom Gorewitz) while many others tended to set up one or multiple cameras at the ETC as studio, working with themselves or others as models/actors, or setting up still lives. In both cases the status of the camera image was reworked, but differently in the studio set-ups in which the immediacy of the transformation of the image was performed.  In other words, what in cinema constitutes post-production could be integral to the recording process itself.  I have long been fascinated by what that meant, and would like to hear more from others about the status of the camera image in these works. Some of my favorite images from the early days were those that reduced representational imagery to some ephemeral outlining (Barbara Buckner) that could fluctuate dynamically.  Its been so long since I’ve seen this work, but for example, those transforming outlines remain etched in memory. Perhaps we can talk more about the camerawork + processing in both semiotic and perceptual terms.  

The sequencing aspect of ETC works also brings up a comparison to filmic montage, and particularly theories of intervallic structure.  Peer Bode’s Video Locomotion (man performing forward hand leap), 1978, made explicit a para-cinematic comparison, while contrasting the stillness and rectilinear structure of Muybridge’s photo sheets with a contorted raster and whirling motion.   So signal transforms signifier into a meta-commentary on sequenced imagery.  We were all aware of the cubo-futurist components of the multiple cameras linked through a sequencer, but now, is there more to think about this process in retrospect?