Month: January 2009

The worldwide success of the Pecha Kucha event formula – each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each – is pretty exemplary for our recently developed weakness, or urge, for information snacks. A happy crossbreed between elevator pitching and speed dating. Some professors have even started to require their students to deliver their lectures in the 6 minutes 40 seconds format. Speed and convenience are emphasized over detail and complexity. Pitch, pitch, pitch. Time is up.

Yesterday, I was a guest at one of the Pecha Kucha Brussels nights. Needless to say, I wasn’t very good at it, at least not in the storytelling aspect. I’m not even sure if I had a story to tell. Well, at least I had fun selecting the images. Here they are.

Etienne-Jules Marey (chronophotography)

Anton & Arturo Giulio Bragaglia, ‘The Slap’

Frank & Lilian Gilbreth (stereo chronocyclegraphy)

Pierre Bismuth, ‘Following The Right Hand of Doris Day In ‘Young Man With a Horn”

Harold Eugene Edgerton (Rapatronic photography)

Andy & Larry Wachowski, ‘The Matrix’ (Bullet Time effect)

Hiroshi Sugimoto, ‘Theaters’

Anthony McCall, ‘Line Describing a Cone’

Paul Sharits, ‘frozen film frames’

Ken Jacobs, Nervous Magic Lantern Performance

Jim Campbell, ‘Motion and Rest #2’

Rebecca Baron & Doug Goodwin, ‘Lossless’

Vuk Cosic, ‘ASCII History of Moving Images – Psycho’

Dietmar Offenhuber, ‘paths of g’

Richard Linklater & Bob Sabiston, ‘Waking Life’ (rotoscopy)

Kota Ezawa, ‘The Simpson Verdict’

Natalie Frigo, ‘November 22, 1963’

Ken Gonzales-Day, ‘Erased Lynching’

David King & Stephen F. Cohen, ‘The Commissar Vanishes: Falsification of Photographs and Art in the Soviet Union’

Jake & Dinos Chapman, ‘Insult To Injury’

The second workshop I put together in the context of the BOM-Vl project (one of my “jobs”). It’s invitations only, but if you’re really interested, just send me a mail.

Audiovisual Archives in the Age of Access.
New Concepts & New Policies

5 February 2009. 14:00 -17:30
De Zebrastraat, Zebrastraat 32/001, Gent.

The increasing use of digital moving image technologies, combined with their convergence with other media forms through different platforms and network technologies, poses great challenges to film and video archives worldwide. Archivists are not only dealing with the integration of rapidly developing technologies into their professional practice but also with a constituency of users whose expectations have been raised by the massive accessibility of audiovisual documents on DVD, Blu-Ray, P2P networks and video sharing sites such as YouTube. In this “age of access”, to use a expression coined by Jeremy Rifkin, a generation of users is trained in the belief that any and all primary materials should be a mere Google search away. But however versatile, cost-effective and easy-to-use these access tools are, there is still no known solution for long-term preservation of digital data that matches the performance – and experience – of film, and questions of longevity and (historical and technical) integrity are the subjects of tense debate. Digital culture has become the arena in which conflicting priorities in response to the demands of preservation and access have risen again, sharper than ever.

Wherever the answers to these complex philosophical, ethical and strategic issues may lie, there can be little doubt that “digital access” has become the keyword in the politics of the audiovisual archive. This has led to a reassesement of the archives’ role, practice and policy, as well as to an exploration of new business and financial models. For some, Public Private Partnerships may be a way forward. To quote Paolo Cherchi Usai: “We have come to the point where the identity and independence of moving image and recorded sound archives is confronted by the imperatives of the commercial world. In principle, everyone agrees that national collecting institutions should be independent from commercial imperatives. In practice, the commercial world is already within our gates, and it has been within our gates for quite some time. This is no longer a matter of whether or not we want to deal with it; it is a matter of how we can we deal with it without betraying our cultural mission”. How do cultural heritage institutions – and in extenso cultural policy – deal with these new paradigms? What are the opportunities and threats? Which sutainable partnerships and models of cooperation exist and how can they be set up? What is the role of national policy in this? What are the ramifications of this digitization for the public? What is the impact on archival institutions, and its continuing pursuit of its core mission and values?

These questions will be discussed during a workshop, organised in the context of the BOM-Vl project. Four international guests will enlighten their perspectives on the issues at hand.

schedule:
14.00: introductions
14.20: Jeff Ubois + Q&A
15.00: Emjay Rechsteiner + Q&A
15.40: break
16.00: Thomas C. Christensen + Q&A
16.40: George Ioannidis + Q&A
17.20: Questions/Debate

Jeff Ubois is a Berkeley, California-based consultant on archival issues for Intelligent Television in New York; for Fujitsu Labs in Sunnyvale, California; and for the Preserving Digital Public Television Project at WNET/Thirteen in New York. Earlier, he was staff research associate at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley. For the Internet Archive, Jeff has worked on managing orphan works, the collection and retention of digital library usage data, and the launch of the Open Content Alliance.

Emjay Rechsteiner is program manager at the Dutch Filmmuseum for the project ‘Images for the Future’. He received an MA in Communications from the University of Amsterdam, and attended Film School at the New York School of Visual Arts. He has produced and co-produced several (awardwinning) movies and numerous commercials.

Thomas C. Christensen is M.A. in film studies from the University of Copenhagen. He has taught film studies at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Aarhus. In 1998 he was appointed Curator at the Danish Film Institute. He has supervised several full digital intermediate restorations and a series of DVD publications. In 2002-2004 He was involved in the EU project FIRST. Since 2003 he has served on the FIAF Technical Commission. He is currently involved in the EU project European Film Gateway.

George Ioannidis is a senior researcher, managing research and development in the Digital Media / Image Processing Department at the Center for Computing Technologies (TZI), University of Bremen, Germany. He received the Dipl.-Ing degree in 1993 and the Dr.-Ing degree in 1999, both from the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece. He managed and worked in many national and international research projects on digital libraries, such as GAMA (Gateway to Archives of Media Art).

“We always had the intention of rectifying it, to take that nice word from The Shining, when the butler’s trying to encourage Jack Nicholson to kill his family – to rectify the situation”
— Jake Chapman, about ‘Insult to Injury’

Some time ago, I bought Jake & Dinos Chapman’s ‘Insult To Injury’ publication, consisting of an endlessly fascinating series of manipulated/erased images. It started in 2001, when the Chapmans were able to purchase one of the few remaining sets of Goya’s ‘Los Desastres de la Guerra’ (‘Disasters of War’) prints. This group of 80 drawings was made between 1810 and 1820 as an attack on the horrors of war and its supposed romance and idealism, and has since become emblematic of art’s moral voice, as well as a powerful template for the representation of the insanity of such conflict (Picasso and Dali were both influenced by Goya’s work). The Chapmans meticulously “rectified” their Goya prints, drawing on top of what must be the most revered set of prints in existence. The artists superimposed cartoon faces, either those of clowns or puppies, onto figures Goya had intended as allegories of human suffering.

Dinos Chapman has explained: “We modified the Desastres in light of current events. Now they work better, if that doesn’t sound too immodest. The victims are de-individualized. Our ‘Desastres’ denounce any idea of rational humanity in the ideology of the powerful as pathetic and laughable.” “Goya was the first artist to make the scandal of war visible,” added Jake Chapman. “For us, it was about how, and if, moral positions should be or even can be made visible. The Desastres show the impossibility of distancing oneself morally from war. There’s no discerning the difference between good and evil anymore.”

Some interesting comments, by Christopher Turner:
“In ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’, Susan Sontag wrote that, unlike most images of mutilation and torture, Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War’ “cannot be looked at in a spirit of prurience” – it is devoid of pornography. The Chapmans would disagree. “I don’t think that there’s an opposition between a salacious interest and a noble one,” Jake Chapman says. For them there is a “convulsive beauty” in the violent image, and they are wedded to the Surrealists’ avant-garde belief that such shocks and jolts can wake us from the dream-state of a commodity culture by, as Jake puts it, “shocking the viewer from the edifice of comfort”. (The brothers’ work might be collectively titled ‘The Disasters of Capitalism’.) “He’s defended as a humanist,” Jake once said of Goya’s prints, “but there are moments of pleasure. They have an intensity, a humour and a tendency to undermine their own dignity.”

Jonathan Jones has written:
“Given how important the ‘Disasters of War’ were to Picasso, Dali and the image of the civil war, this is clearly an important, evocative, emotionally raw thing, and they have scribbled all over it. Yet the antecedent they themselves claim puts the gesture in a different light. In the 1950s, points out Jake, the American artist Robert Rauschenberg erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning, the great abstract expressionist painter. On the face of it, Rauschenberg was being aggressive – as a younger artist, a founder of pop and conceptual art, he was erasing the work of the older, dominant generation in a flamboyantly oedipal gesture. Yet he said he chose De Kooning for this fate specifically because he admired him; and he sought the older artist’s permission. Destruction can be an act of love. (…) Violet and white bursts of colour, the clown heads and puppy faces are astonishingly horrible. They are given life, personality, by some very acute drawing, and so it’s not a collision but a collaboration, an assimilation, as they really do seem to belong in the pictures – one art historical antecedent is Max Ernst’s collages in which 19th-century lithographs are reorganised into a convincing dream world. What the Chapmans have released is something nasty, psychotic and value-free; not so much a travesty of Goya as an extension of his despair. What they share with him is the most primitive and archaic and Catholic pessimism of his art – the sense not just of irrationality but something more tangible and diabolic.”

Rod Mengham
“If it is accurate to describe the relationship between the Chapmans and Goya as one of collaboration it is precisely because Goya’s graphic works exist in a perpetual process of sign transformation, of which ‘Insult to Injury’ is only the most recent evidence. In fact, ‘Goya’ itself (the holding concept used to organise a corpus of work, as much as a historical figure) is also a sign in constant flux. It has recently been argued that it is precisely art history’s redemption of Goya as the original humanist (where ‘Disasters of War’ represents the triumph of moral outrage over technical sophistication) that made a re-evaluation of the Goya’s ‘irrational supplement’, the indigestible aspect of his work, inevitable. In the face of this same logic, Bataille linked Goya with the Marquis de Sade, suggesting that they share a response to horror that ‘takes the form of a sudden leap into humour, and means nothing but just this leap into humour.‘ It is this Goya: irrational, expendable and hilarious, with whom the Chapmans collaborate.”
(…)
“It is in the wide margin of difference between the carnivalesque and the postmodern body that the Chapmans screw around with our received methods of viewing and reading the topographies of consumption, forcing us to experiment with our buried juvenile selves in imagining the world before we were forced to inherit it”.

“When the Cat’s Away, Neurosis Is on Display.”
– Washingtonpost.com

Natalie Frigo sent us a nice tip, which works well in the context of our little ‘erasure’ program (see previous post). Garfield Minus Garfield is a web project created by Dan Walsh, dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to “reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.” Surely, fans of Garfield have always found ways to tweak the strip. The Garfield Randomizer lets visitors create their own strips out of random panels. Images of strips with Garfield’s thought bubbles removed or Garfield replaced by a silent, realistically-drawn cat have been circulating online as well. But this concept, as simple as it is, became an online sensation in no time (the site started receiving as many as 300,000 hits a day). Even Jim Davis, who pens the original strip, was intrigued and pleased with the concept, calling the work “an inspired thing to do”. He even went so far as to thank Walsh, saying: “I want to thank Dan for enabling me to see another side of Garfield. Some of the strips he chose were slappers: ‘Oh, I could have left that out.’ It would have been funnier.” Dan Walsh’s reaction: “In an age when the internet gives everyone an opportunity to put their own spin on art, music and literature, it’s a pity more people aren’t as generous with their work – just imagine some of the fantastic creativity we could be enjoying.” Thanks to Davis’ involvement (and the subsequent press coverage), a book version has been published in October 2008. In the book, the original strips are published alongside the ones in which Garfield has been removed.

Go here. Hilarious!