"Levitated Potentiality": MEDIA X MUMM at Art Central 2017

Thoughts on Early Cinema (roughly 1895-1907) gathered as I put together this program. Or is it just sheer resemblance?

Early Cinema was a moment …
...of spectacles of attraction, before the term “spectacles” turned stigma of empty consumerist visual pleasure;
…of spectacular attraction invoked by fascination with new machines and their affordance;
…of spectacles that “shocked” because they enabled viewers to look and pay attention to the world differently; and
…when slice-of-life actualities, trick effects, tableaux vivants, filmed burlesque and vaudeville numbers were equal in their luring present-ness.
It was a time when images and motion on a screen addressed our senses directly rather than called for comprehension or decoding exercises. It was a time before the Hollywood studio system’s standardization fell in to delimit our imagination to the demand of a “properly told story.”

The Levitated Potentiality series stock-takes the many ways contemporary moving image artists restore the attraction of spectacles with what new technologies afford them. On screen #1 “Dramaticity,” Benson’s Fortitudine performs “affect” as an open drama whereas Leong’s silent Infinite Love holds our breath for emotions in search of unknown landings, and so does Derz’s Wash Hands on screen #3 “Fixation.” On screen #2 “The Invisibles” and #4 “Concrete Places,” familiar locations and recognizable places almost all deliriously open the door to unknown spaces – Choo’s underground world of Hong Kong’s MTR system (Consecutive Breaths), MacNeil’s icy surfaces (Sparrowhawk Single), Derz’s desert (Departure without Return #2) and graveyard (Someone Digging in the Ground) – as they invite us to usual experiences of time by offering our attention differently. Localities nonexistent, invented or mutative, such as MacNeil’s Angle of Incidence (screen #4), Aziz+Cucher’s SB_Etude II (#1) and Haley’s Repose (#4), are spectacles made possible in post-camera moments of creativity. Likewise, the choreographic-graphic magic of Newsome’s Knot (screen #2) is only possible with packaged effects. Ramirez’s Postcard eXotica (#1) looks like a complex story, or one simply enjoys a string of loosely strung together performances for the camera interspersed with found film footage. Schwenk and Raisin remind us not to forget the power of the camera’s presence. Raisin’s Soak I (#4) asserts temporal integrity as the video camera’s signature through “duration” and playfully uses water as a frivolous found lens. Schwenk, in her Five Prison Stories (#4), inconspicuously marks the gap between what we see and what we hear, which upsets the hierarchy we take for granted in sight and sound synchronization. Carey’s visual puns in Flow (screen #4) and Unroll (screen #1) apply “regular” film language to handmade models.

What was formerly known as video art should more appropriately be called “digital imaging”: moving images made with or without a camera, oriented towards composing over recording, and highlighting what is visually potential over what is found.

The “screen” in digital imaging must not be taken for granted. It is a productive device with four frame lines generating magical games of seeing.

These benefits also return to us due questions. How has packaged software in the marketplace delimited our aural-visual experiences? What does it mean to engage with digital tools that conceal rather make transparent digitality as artistic raw material? What should artists do to keep open the infinite aural-visual realm? What is the place of the camera? What is a camera? How have art galleries, a relatively fresh art market for video pieces, shaped the practice of digital imaging? “Levitated Potentiality” has embodied many questions and answers.