A bad rain storm notwithstanding, we had a quite decent turn-out for the masterclass followed by screening of the Retracted Cinema session at the 11th annual Family Film Project: International Film Festival on Archive, Memory, Ethnography. There was a lively and wide-ranging audience discussion after the screening. [Download/View: FFP 2022 Program pdf]
Retracted Cinema in Oporto: CINEMA TRINDADE (22 October 2022)
Retracted Cinema (Redux)
October 22, 2022; 3:20
Cinema Trindade; Porto, Portugal
This one-hour program presents fifteen experimental shorts that focus on recontextualizing found or archival footage via algorithmic intervention. The works presented in the Retracted Cinema program use the appropriated film material itself as the site and means of auto-recontextualisation. Inspired by tendencies within conceptual art and Oulipo, the results are achieved by applying a set of rules or constraints (an algorithm) that governs a repeatable (iterative) array of transformations. In this way, the program forges a bridge linking the algorithmic impulses within the traditions of avant-garde cinema, literature, and visual art.
Filmmakers include: Gregg Biermann (Happy Again, 2006), Blanca Rego (Psycho 60/98, 2016), Albert Alcoz (Home Movie Holes, 2009), Keith Sanborn (Energy of Delusion, 2010-22), Vitor Magalhães (Naturalezas Mortas: Em Seis Movimentos, 2020), Gonzalo Egurza (17-17, 2017), Taller Estampa (¿Qué es lo que ves, YOLO9000?, 2017-18), Eugenio Tisselli (Media Trash, 2002), Eloi Puig (Torvix: Pate Risxas, 2020), Barbara Lattanzi (De-dramatization Engine, 2006), Peter Freund (Floating Point, 2020), and E.P. (1.618 Things I Know About Her, 2020).
The program is presented as a special session within the 11th annual Family Film Project festival, Saturday, October 22, 2022 at 3:20 in Cinema Trindade, Oporto, Portugal. Masterclass by curator Peter Freund precedes screening at 2:30.
Suñol Foundation Performance: Eloi Puig, Raquel Muñoz, & Peter Freund
I was invited to participate this Saturday as a performer in Eloi Puig’s Tilottama-Kptekan Alignment at the Barcelona Suñol Foundation. May 7th is the finissage and final day to visit the exhbit of IN> TRA exhibition. Artistic practice as a model of experience. The artists Eloi Puig, Raquel Muñoz and Peter Freund will do a performance in relation to Puig’s work, Tilottama-Kptekan Alignment (2018-2019), which is part of the exhibition.
For more information about the performance, please visit the Suñol Foundation website.
35 Sentences (After Sol LeWitt) - Declamatori Collective Performance
I participated as a guest performer in this Oulipo-inspired performative recitation of 35 Sentences at Tecla Sala Art Center (Llobregat, Barcelona) in early April 2022. Video of performance link.
ENG
The Declamatori collective, with Eugènia Agustí, Montse Carreño, Jo Milne, Laia Moretó, Raquel Muñoz, Cristina Pastó, Mercedes Pimiento, Eloi Puig and Martí Ruiz, is part of the IN>TRA2 research team and has written a score specific for the performative reading from the proposal of Antònia Vilà, curator of the exhibition, accompanied by artist's books on conceptual poetics, produced by the Tecla Sala Art Center in 2021. Guest performers: Peter Freund with Marc Anglès.
CAT
El col·lectiu Declamatori, amb Eugènia Agustí, Montse Carreño, Jo Milne, Laia Moretó, Raquel Muñoz, Cristina Pastó, Mercedes Pimiento, Eloi Puig i Martí Ruiz, forma part de l’equip de recerca IN>TRA2 i ha escrit una partitura específica per a la lectura de l’acció a partir de la proposta d’Antònia Vilà, comissària de l’exposició. El llibre com a present continu. Llibres d’artista al voltant de les poètiques conceptuals, produïda pel Centre d’Art Tecla Sala l’any 2021. Intèrprets convidats: Peter Freund amb Marc Anglès.
Martí Ruiz
Eloi Puig introducing the program with Eugènia Agustí (right); ensemble behind.
Eloi Puig introducing the ensemble.
Performance of 35 Sentences.
Adversorecto: New Installation: «Agony: You Can Go Whenever You Want»
Agony: You Can Go Whenever You Want (adversorecto, 2021)
[video documentation: Maellyn Macintosh]
The feeling of agony always starts with two points in a weird calculus of time. The first point plots the location at which you’re moving irreversibly forward, and the second where it will all finally come to an end. You face the first point as excessive, a surplus, “too much”; you look ahead to the second as a decisive void, a lack, a point of relief. A person falling from a skyscraper. Strangers falling in love.
But while you move facing forward, fall facing downward, you do so only by looking back in your imagination from a permanently blind future. You cannot definitively experience the end that releases you. The scene of agony resembles a mathematical asymptote: a limit that is infinitely approachable but unreachable. The free fall of agony in this way opens its paradoxical space of enjoyment.
«Agony: You Can Go Whenever You Want» was produced by two artists (Adversorecto: Peter Freund + Werner Thöni) both working between two stipulated points during a five-month period. In making the two main components of the piece – five translucent painted panels and two video/sound projections – the artists collaborated deliberately with minimal contact other than sharing the start and end dates, the physical dimensions, and the theme of agony for the project.
The resulting work is an installation intended for viewers to walk through and to step back, stroll around, and experience as an ensemble.
Video documentation of installation
Still from video documentation of «Agony: You Can Go Whenever You Want» (adversorecto, 2021).
A thank you to Eloi Puig, Montse Lopez, Natalia (assistant) et al of the Department of Fine Arts, University of Barcelona, for inviting adversorecto to exhibit this project in their gallery.
Adversorecto: [L'Auca d'en Félix]
[L’Auca d’en Félix] librito
[L’Auca d’en Félix] presents an experimental librito (booklet) by Adversorecto Collective whose text reads in four different directions.
Text 1 [w]:
quiero tirarme al vacio y
sobrevivir dejar tiradas las zapatillas
deportivas en la puerta del balcon
¡a que se aireen!
soltar la bolsa amarilla y
dar el salto para luego
contemplar la trayectoria de vuelo
echado de espaldas sobre la
grava del patio vecino
Text 2 [p]:
>>
a person
{ }
falling
∞ + x
from a skyscraper
*
strangers
+++
falling
) (
in love
⌄
⌄
Presentation in ADD+ART 2021 Congress
I was happy to take part in the international ADD+ART Congress 2021, organized by the University of Barcelona, Faculty of Fine Arts. Three main areas of the Congress: Spaces + Devices; Decoding + Activation; and Art + Territory; plus a Hybrid section. A link to the video of the panel at which I presented, DECODING / ACTIVATION TALK 01, and to my presentation abstract: Performatic Code. For more info on the general program of the Congress: ADD+ART2021.
Article Published in Found Footage Magazine
The article on the «Retracted Cinema» program I curated came out this week in Found Footage Magazine. The magazine is available through select bookstores and libraries. Locally in Barcelona, the magazine is carried by the CCCB (Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture) Laie bookstore. Cesar Ustarroz (FFM editor) and his team put out a beautiful product, in the choice of design, content, and paper materials.
Contributing filmmakers: 17-17, Gonzalo Egurza, Argentina, 2017, 5:10, Home Movie Holes, Albert Alcoz, Spain, 2009, 3:00; Psycho 60/98, Blanca Rego, Spain, 2016, 6:30; Happy Again, Gregg Biermann, USA, 2006, 5:10; ¿Qué es lo que ves, YOLO9000?, Estampa, Spain, 3:00; Naturalezas muertas (en seis movimientos), Vitor Magalhães, Portugal, 2019-20, (2nd version), 8:39; Floating Point, Peter Freund, USA, 2020, 6:00; Optical De-dramatization Engine, Barbara Lattanzi, USA, 2015, 5:00; Torvix, Eloi Puig, Spain, 2011-Present, 5:00; Lost Footage, Kuku Sabzi, USA, 2020, 2:11.
Adversorecto proposal mailing: loading...
Adversorecto completes its first exhibition proposal «Adversorecto: Round One». Getting ready for the mailing to art venues and curators.
Adversorecto Exhibition Design
The adversorecto collective (est. Barcelona 2020) takes the next two steps in preparing our first exhibit proposal, «Adversorecto: Round One». A few photos of the preliminary and final models for the exhibition design. The show will include ten pieces – including a live performance piece, paintings, installations, video, and an artist book – which were produced by tampering conceptually and formally with duality, reversal, the binary, parallax, inversion, and other reductions of «two» to the flip sides of a «one».
(Models by Werner Thöni.)
Modeling: Phase 1
Werner taping down the layout to prepare next stage of modeling.
Modeling: Phase 2
Welcome…
Retraction Project Wrap
A*Desk compilation page with links to all five installments of the Retraction project. [click to enlarge]
The completed Retraction project, conceived initially almost nine months ago, has now been published in all five installments, quintuplets. Thanks go to Montse Badia (A*Desk, editor-in-chief) for the invitation to guest-edit the November issue and for her hard work in implementing this rather large and sometimes intricate project during challenging times. I’m thrilled that the vast majority of the artists and writers I sought out were interested in the idea and came through with works that are exciting and worthwhile in their own right and that also gave me as a terrific provocation for continuing to think through the idea of «retraction».
List of Contributors:
Dora Garcia
Werner Thöni
Alexandre Madureira
-
Gerard Freixes
Eugenio Tisselli
Cinthia Bodenhorst + Sara Coleman
-
Elena Kuroda
Agnès Thöni
Nuno Carvalho
Andreas Kaufmann
-
Marc Anglès
Estampa
Montse Carreño + Raquel Muñoz
-
Mireia c. Saladrigues
Carlos Miguel Sánchez
Vitor Magalhães
Eva Sòria
-
Peter Freund
Next steps (2021) will be to get the ok from the contributors to create an interactive pdf of the five installments in a modified design (first in English, later in Spanish and Catalan) and consider some additional manifestations of the project sprung from the retractive impulse.
Retraction 5: Copy/Right [A*Desk: Journal of Critical Thinking]
The fifth and final installment of Retraction published this week, which I'm delighted to announce: Retraction 5: Copy/Right. This installment enters the fantasmatic realm of the copy, featuring the work of Mireia c. Saladrigues, Carlos Miguel Sánchez, Vitor Magalhães, y Eva Sòria, introduced by the fifth segment of a running text I wrote for the project.
An excerpt from the introduction:
«From this vantagepoint, the copy defies the self-possession of the image – or even the object – or, let’s take it one step further, even the subject. The copy thereby confronts the central question of property, not because the copy threatens to transgress the law but because the copy exactly embodies the law. We must shift here from a framework of reproduction to a framework of repetition. The image endeavors to cover over the hole that it simultaneously creates (e.g. the holes of reference, of ornament, of illustration) while its failure to do so compels it to repeat – that is, to copy itself again.[6] This intrinsic repetition in the law of the copy shows its entanglement in the dynamics of enjoyment (in the psychoanalytic sense), the way in which the satisfying character of the image gives way to a dissatisfaction that it cannot completely overcome. Precisely at the junctures of its repetition, the image breaks from the property of a particularist vision (points of view, expressions and styles, objets d’art, artistic oeuvres and movements, art markets and collections) and enters the universality of the copy’s self-subversive structure. Here we can risk a legitimate question with which we might stipulate the crux of retraction: The images and their technologies that pervade our world today, that never deliver on their promises, and that dispossess us of the stability of our longed-for identities, how could these repeating images, these “copy machines,” precisely in their failed ambitions, become the basis of a collective project within an emancipatory politics? How could a politics of assembly be formed not on the image of an aggregation and inclusion of marginalized elements but on the structural lack of the all-inclusive, the central hole in the whole, the not-all of every totality that instigates and keeps alive the movement of an emancipatory aim?
This final installment of Retraction presents four works. The first investigates the reality of the virtual presentation of the art exhibition using 360-degree video technology and considers the differences, losses, and gains advanced by the virtual on the real. The project traces the inside-out connective tissue between the virtual and the real as a surface, in which, like the möbius strip or the Klein bottle, one cannot simply orient oneself from the standpoint of orthodox spectator behavior. The second entry introduces a full-scale art foundation in a net art project that retracts and develops the fundamental pretenses of art exhibitions in internet platforms. The third entry presents an epigrammatic text inspired by two canonical works of experimental film in which the recording apparatus significantly expands the frame of view only then, paradoxically, to retract the vision of reality into a view that transcends cinematic viewership. The last entry, written by an attorney and art historian, surveys the history, complexity and contradictions of current copyright law and intellectual property rights in relation to art, suggesting the ways in which the legal system lags behind not only contemporary art practices but also the expressed intent of intellectual property law.»
Retraction 4: Withdrawal [A*Desk: Journal of Critical Thinking]
I’m delighted to announce the publication of the fourth of five installments of my editorial project, Retraction, in A*Desk: Journal of Critical Thinking. «Retraction 4: Withdrawal», which broaches the concept of «interpassivity» in relation to the automaton in art, presents work by Barcelona-based artists Marc Anglès, Taller Estampa, and Montse Carreño + Raquel Muñoz.
An excerpt from this week’s introduction:
« The blind, generative dimension of the automaton provides the creative act with a resource for exercising an interpassive function. In the case of algorithmic art, it might appear that one finally gets to sit back, relax, and enjoy watching the machine produce something marvelous or unexpected. But the interpassive aspect of the automaton functions quite differently. Rather than abandoning subjective agency and the enjoyment that fuels it, the interpassive dynamic transfers the most immediate experiential facet of enjoyment in the creative act to an intermediary (here, the machine) in order to introduce an obstacle between the imagined agency of “creativity” – that is, the symbolic identity of the artist or the respondent – and its manifest object of desire. The obstacle offers the potential to reveal within artistic productivity both its operative limit of enjoyment and a position of agency outside its existing coordinates. As a contemporary philosopher has written, “’Genius’ is our life to the extent that it does not belong to us.”
The three entries in this week’s installment of Retraction, in quite distinct ways, leverage the withdrawn, retractive capacities of the automaton not simply to generate new artforms but to turn the “uncreative” generative gesture of the automaton and its interpassive potential back on the artworld itself – its mechanisms, habits, materials, and public forms. The first work investigates the constitutive inaccessibility of the “technological” as a conceptual bridge for linking the cybernetic black box and the artworld’s white cube. The second work presents an ensemble of aphorisms on the subject of the algorithm that reflects back surprisingly on an epigrammatic style within the genre of literary and artistic statements. The third and final work utilizes the classificatory, normalizing, and predictive mechanisms of current digital technologies to mine the expressive material possibilities latent in the publication in which it is here being published: namely, A*Desk. »
Retraction 3: Flip of a Coin [A*Desk: Journal of Critical Thinking]
From Elena Kuroda’s Dissonance
The third of five installments of my editorial project, Retraction, came out this week in A*Desk: Journal of Critical Thinking. «Retraction 3: Flip of a Coin», which builds on the first two installments entering the topic of chance and determinacy in art, presents work by artists Elena Kuroda, Agnès Thöni, Nuno Carvalho, and Andreas Kaufmann.
An excerpt from this week’s introduction:
«This week we present four works. First, imagine a set of flickering lights about to go out, discovered by chance and plotted as points within a major European city – a global financial center – in distant public spaces over a period of four years. The lights persist in a conceptual state of oscillation in relation to themselves and each other across space and time. As such, they map the terrain of the city like a self-erasing sketch. Second, we find a harmonograph, a hand-built drawing machine designed to produce highly regular, geometric figures through the harmonic motion of oscillating pendulums. Into the machine’s ostensibly natural movements, the artist introduces subtle, arbitrary perturbations from the environment, ranging from slight nudges to steps on wobbly floorboards, that dislocate the reassuring internal order of probability. Third, a sculptural assemblage caricatures today’s recombinatory utopia of absolute openness and the probability on which this fantasy hinges in a series of works that has already been halted at the first assemblage. Finally, consider the oscillation that delineates the art proposal as a writing genre and gesture. The proposal expands or retracts action based on the outcome: if accepted, you go forward; if not, you go back, maybe try again, or maybe change or drop the idea altogether. But imagine then three proposals that are retracted in advance. These works, like all artist proposals, are constructed like Schrödinger’s quantum cat box, which contains a feline that is at the same time alive and dead.The artist of these proposals sees no need to open his boxes – that is, has no interest in their juried consideration and external outcome – but simply constructs and leaves these proposals floating in a conceptual state of superposition. Years later (2020), the artist adds a fourth piece, a rejoinder that retracts the triptych of decisive non-starters, situated in the recent pandemic lockdown. In the universe of this supplemental piece, the observer is no longer positioned outside the contraption’s uncertainty but becomes the cat inside facing the inescapable specter of being simultaneously dead and alive.»
Installments 1 + 2:
Retraction 2: Halting Problem [A*Desk: Journal of Critical Thinking]
Video still from Cinthia Bodenhorst and Sara Coleman, Tr4ns1ts Tr4nsm1ss1ons
This week A*Desk: Journal of Critical Thinking published the second of five installments of my editorial project, Retraction, which brings together the work of twenty artists and writers who interpret the idea of «retraction» from multiple vantage points in various mediums. (For information about the first installment, visit Retraction 1: The Object.) My introduction for the second installment, Retraction 2: Halting Problem, takes a step toward conceptualizing the algorithm in relation to the “halting problem” in computational theory in order to budge the instrumental assumptions of algorithmic thinking and to point to the openness of the algorithm to non-instrumental uses. The installment presents works by artists, Gerard Freixes, Eugenio Tisselli, and Cinthia Bodenhorst and Sara Coleman.
An excerpt from this week’s introduction:
«This week we begin with the story of an abandoned writing project, halted in the experimental pursuit of an infinite generative process. From the aborted endeavor, scraps of text are discovered containing an unexpected commentary. The second entry responds to the contemporary urgency to retract techno-capitalism’s relentless and corrosive expansionism by presenting an algorithm designed to generate a potentially infinite series of relevant questions, which however is halted at the number 2964. Developed in the midst of the retracted life brought on by the ongoing spread of the coronavirus, the third entry presents a collaborative text written by two artists who weave together speculative threads in an emergent fabric of human lives, pandemic data, data visualization, and questions of biopower that drive their layered and heterogeneous proliferation.»
To read and view the second installment, please visit the A-Desk site at this link:
Retraction 2: Halting Problem.
Retraction 1: The Object [A*Desk: Journal of Critical Thinking]
![Eljer Co. Two-Fired Vitreous China Catalogue, Bedfordshire No. 700 [Available in 1917 from the J. L. Mott Iron Works, 118 Fifth Avenue, NYC]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59bacc689f8dce7ac058829b/1604469936886-MMJ7XET2X5GD1M83ZLKA/Header.jpg)
Eljer Co. Two-Fired Vitreous China Catalogue, Bedfordshire No. 700
[Available in 1917 from the J. L. Mott Iron Works, 118 Fifth Avenue, NYC]
This week A*Desk: Journal of Critical Thinking published the first of five installments of my editorial project, Retraction, which brings together the work of twenty artists and writers who interpret the idea of «retraction» from multiple vantage points in various mediums. The project springs from the Retracted Cinema program I curated earlier this year (screened at the Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB, Xcèntric), in September 2020) but brings the central idea into its own and in a broader context, independent of the distinction I previously leaned on between a “retracted” and “expanded” cinema. The November issue of A*Desk is thematically organized into five weekly installments, each introduced by a segment of a running text I wrote to frame the work. The first installment, Retraction 1: The Object, begins by giving a few necessary twists to a familiar artistic touchstone, the Duchampian ready-made – a plumbing appliance turned into a seminal work of art – which many credit with scandalously launching a new conceptual emphasis in twentieth and twenty-first century art. These twists become a way to set up and introduce the first set of contributions by artists Dora Garcia, Werner Thöni, and Alexandre Madureira.
An excerpt from the first installment’s introduction: «Retraction endeavors to follow the lead of entropy in the object. Entropy represents not only the loss produced in any work, as thermodynamics defines it, but also the specific lack or surplus that launches the work to begin with. Imagine three scenarios: The structural identity of a book as object necessarily excludes from its contents the very element that makes it possible: the reading act. Imagine then the same book entirely rewritten to retract the reading process (marginalia, ruminations, free associations) back into the text, woven together, compiled and bound into a single volume. Second, think of the stretcher board as a straight-jacket that defends the cultural identity of painting against the entropy of the painted canvas, which wants to bend, crimp, and bow. One might then imagine an artwork in which the canvas – removed from its stretcher board – is left to curl at its edges, even encouraged to do so, teased on; and then for the final winking flourish, a zipper is installed to join the edges. Or, third, one could picture a series of works in which applied paint is meticulously peeled in a single sheet from the plane surface, held aloft, then parachuted down and configured onto a pedestal like a sculpture.»
To read and view the first installment, please visit the A-Desk site at this link:
Retraction 1: The Object.
A page from Dora Garcia’s L’Amour, 2016. Photography: Roberto Ruiz [click to enlarge]
A page from Dora Garcia’s L’Amour, 2016. Photography: Roberto Ruiz [click to enlarge]
Installation view of Werner Thöni’s Spot’s Forest or Ady’s Paradise, 2020 [click to enlarge]
Close view of Werner Thöni’s Spot’s Forest or Ady’s Paradise, 2020 [click to enlarge]
First in series by Alexandre Madureira, You will find me if you want me in the garden (Flowers No. 1-4), 2019 [click to enlarge]
Third in series by Alexandre Madureira, You will find me if you want me in the garden (Flowers No. 1-4), 2019 [click to enlarge]
Fourth in series by Alexandre Madureira, You will find me if you want me in the garden (Flowers No. 1-4), 2019 [click to enlarge]
Retracted Cinema Screening, September 29, 2020
Post-Screening Discussion (L > R: Peter Freund, Marc Padró, Blanca Rego, Albert Alcoz, and Eloi Puig)
My curatorial project Retracted Cinema was presented this past Tuesday night at Xcèntric, the experimental film wing of the Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB). This was the first presentation for Xcèntric since the covid-19 pandemic lockdown. The CCCB auditorium provided an elegant venue, and everyone's work looked great. All things considered (covid precautions of masks and physical distancing, not to mention it was a Tuesday night), we had a terrific turn-out; the show was sold out.
Thanks to Blanca Rego, Eloi Puig, Marc Padró (Estampa), and Albert Alcoz for coming and participating in the discussion following the screening. Afterward, the Xcèntric coordinator commented that she felt the program made a strong contribution to their institution for multiple reasons, one based on materialist grounds presenting this kind of work to an experimental cinema audience that very often has a principled preference for film over video.
In the intervening seven months between the postponed March screening and September 29, the filmmakers all took part in a writing project, which resulted in an article in which I sketch out the general concept of “retracted cinema” and each of the filmmakers talks about their work. I am currently going through the editorial review process with Found Footage Magazine; the article will be published in a forthcoming issue.
Peter Freund
Eloi Puig
Blanca Rego speaks
Barbara Lattanzi, Optical De-dramatization Engine (still 01)
Barbara Lattanzi, Optical De-dramatization Engine (still 02)
Retracted Cinema
Xcèntric, CCCB
September 29, 2020
Introduction
My first thanks go to Carolina López - former director of CCCB’s Xcèntric - for inviting me to curate this program, to Gloria Vilches for doing the heavy lifting of overseeing every last organizational detail for the evening’s event, and to the Xcentric/CCCB staff. I’m grateful to all the filmmakers who contributed their work that is making the Retracted Cinema event possible and who also participated in a writing project about tonight’s program that will be published in a forthcoming issue of Found Footage Magazine (which will be available in the CCCB bookstore). Among these artists, I want to give special thanks to my collaborator and friend Eloi Puig for inviting me almost three years ago now to come work as a visiting artist with the Faculty of Fine Arts at University of Barcelona to support a sabbatical project from my university in the US and for introducing me to his work (Torvix in particular) and to his cadre of coding programmers. Both of these introductions made an indispensable mark in the formation of the concept of retracted cinema and in my own entry into computational filmmaking. Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who came out to see the work tonight, especially during these strange and cautious times of pandemic and social distancing.
The conceptual backdrop of Retracted Cinema signals an intersection of three well-established artistic paths:
(1) Oulipo, a literary movement based on the stipulation of constraints (algorithms) used to generate unexpected, experimental texts as so-called “potential literature.”
(2) Conceptual art, a gesture within the tradition of visual art that withdraws the declarative mastery from the artwork and underscores the work of art not as a terminal object but as a proposition that asks the question: what if this or that surface or object were taken to be a work of art, how would it function within the field of art and society, how could it catalyze critical dialogue and new artistic productions?
(3) Détournement (also known as “recycled cinema,” “compilation filmmaking,” “appropriation film,” and so forth), a strategy of recombination and recontextualization that turns existing films or film materials against themselves, giving them new meanings while revealing subversive ambiguities and creative possibilities already within existing films and demonstrating that, like all real objects, no film is ever identical to itself.
This three-fold backdrop may be helpful but it also fails to grasp the essential gesture of retraction in tonight’s program. The concept of “retracted cinema” began as an intellectual joke that supposed a reversal of the sweet rebellion of “expanded cinema,” which serves up a la mode the recontextualization of existing film material typically by accompanying the film projection with live action (for example, live music or movement). As a political endeavor – so the story goes – expanded cinema aims to wake the spectator from the coma-like state of consumptive entertainment and to rouse the zombie to see and seize the present moment through active critical thinking and participation. But surely from a political perspective, the desired liberation of the spectator in expanded cinema has been complicated by the fact that the mode of alienation and oppression in contemporary capitalism has expanded the demands of labor to an unprecedented degree to require participation, personal initiative, analytical problem-solving, collaborative participation, enjoyment, and even the utilization of sensitized emotional skill sets. Already long ago the structure was unmistakable that capital’s inherent expansionism would compel all areas of physical and spiritual life to open up as new market opportunities. Today we see the voluntary use of social media itself and more generally the internet click-through as a form of labor in which the user produces a product for predictive analytics in what has been termed (somewhat misleadingly) “surveillance capitalism.”
So the joke of a “retracted cinema” began to take on a more serious note as a legitimate question: What if instead of expanding cinema into other disciplines in an external movement that annexes other cultural territories (e.g. live action performance), what if cinema were to turn back into its own territory, fold back on itself through a set of instructions (algorithms, if you will) that express the idea of the work itself not as a problem solved but as a problem to be considered. Of course this retraction would form another idea of expansion, an inward expansion; however, the idea could bring about a different emphasis that raises questions, for example, about the binary matrix of passivity/activity on which so much avant-garde work has staked its ambitions.
The program tonight has been organized in a sequence that moves from the visually trackable (that is, works in which the viewer can readily track the transformations and driving concepts in the act of watching the films) to the more visually intractable (that is, those pieces that may warrant a bit of background before viewing). My comment here in no way privileges any of the films but is simply meant to mark a departure in the forms and procedures of retraction. (BTW, you can find many of these details already in written program en Castellano.) The first five pieces by Gonzalo Egurza, Albert Alcoz, Blanca Rego, Gregg Biermann, and Vítor Magalhães present moving image works that directly use the visual materiality of existing film footage (such as frames and film artifacts) as the site and means of recontextualization mediated by a specific structure. These first five films, rich in concept and experiential value, perhaps stand more on their own than do the five films in the second half of tonight’s program. Some of the computational films, particularly those in the second half, embrace the elusive character of the automaton with an interest in the performative dimension of the machinic.
Estampa’s ¿What Do You See, YOLO9000? (2019), the sixth film in tonight’s program lies somewhere in between these trackable and intractable camps providing a kind of bridge. This film investigates a contemporary artificial vision tool used in today’s digital industries and by government agencies for automatically tracking, recognizing and annotating images. Estampa’s work applies this trained neural network, containing a dataset of 9,418 words and millions of images, to appropriated selections from the world of 20th-century avant-garde film and archival footage with surprising results.
Next, Barbara Lattanzi’s Optical De-dramatization Engine (2015) launches an artist-designed software that remediates footage from Thomas Ince’s 1912 film, titled The Invaders, moving between the levels of image, film frame, and pixel. By design, each time Lattanzi’s software is launched, it presents a different variation of Ince’s film.
Peter Freund’s Floating Point (2020) utilizes an algorithm that re-presents and re-frames an iconic scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The algorithm in real time embeds the original sequence within a larger (hinted-at) grid system that tabulates the sequence’s twenty-five shots. While presented in the flat, two-dimensional cinema screen, the structure of the grid itself forms an “impossible geometry” whose corners and edges have been folded back to meet each other in the manner of a conceptual origami.
Eloi Puig’s ongoing Torvix series (2011-Present) performs a software remediation of appropriated public YouTube videos based on an algorithm that responds to the position of each letter of the transcribed text spoken in the original footage and re-edits the material accordingly. Here, the algorithm that governs the re-edit correlates each letter of the alphabet with a specific editorial transformation which based on the transcribed vocal track creates a new montage out of the original video materials.
Finally, Kuku Sabzi’s Lost Footage (2020) mobilizes the predictive logic of text generation machine learning to regenerate scan-line by scan-line the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film purportedly documenting a Bigfoot or Sasquatch traversing a forest in Northern California (USA). Lost Footage presents the result of running an algorithmic process for over a month to produce the 3,175 frames of the entirely new film.
Some of the filmmakers are here tonight to join in a discussion with the audience following the screening. They include:
Albert Alcoz, Home Movie Holes
Blanca Rego, Psycho 60/98
Marc Padro of Estampa, ¿Qué es lo que ves, YOLO9000?
Eloi Puig, Torvix
Peter Freund, Floating Point (programmers Marc Angles + Arnau Giralt in audience)
A final note: Many but not all of you will be accustomed to a degree of flicker in the work of experimental film. This is true of a few of tonight’s films, and I mention it to forewarn those who may have special sensitivities to flickering light.
I hope you find tonight’s program worthwhile and look forward to the discussion following the screening.
Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB) website [link]
original Program for Retracted Cinema [Spanish/CASTELLANO]
Book Release: IN>TRA: Artistic Practice as a Model of Experience
After the usual long publication process, the book, IN>TRA: Artistic Practice as a Model of Experience, finally came out this week. A project of the Imarte artistic research group at the University of Barcelona, the bi-lingual book (Spanish and English) comprises a range of artist texts on theory and practice. I co-authored a chapter with Eloi Puig and Vitor Magalhães entitled “il n’y a pas de rapport semiotique: tres lecturas discontinuas.” I’m eager now to see all the contributions together in the book!
“IN>TRA gathers together the results of critical and creative interventions on issues of the digital humanities, new materialisms, and their impact on art. The work emerges from an open, transdisciplinary collaboration articulated through the concept of the prototype. The authors of this book, with diverse philopsophical outlooks, use different technologies and collaborative synergies to confront the current context.”
Book Design: Taller Estampa
Back cover shown in the hand of Eloi Puig
Endnotes for an Allocution
A curious thing happened recently. My wife encouraged me to submit to a literary journal an artist statement I wrote a couple of years ago as I was trying to think through what I’d been doing in my work with appropriation and its relation to the cultural archive and historical memory. The journal where I sent the text, Azure: A Journal of Literary Thought, was running a writing contest looking for challenging texts. A few months after submitting, I received the pleasant news that my piece had been chosen as the runner-up for the prize. That’s nice to hear of course, even without winning, but the truly inspired part of the whole thing was that the jury wasn’t interested in the main body of the fifteen-paragraph text, which I’d written with care over the course of a year, but rather its endnotes. The decision to nominate the endnotes for the prize (and to discard the main body) embraced with such beautiful irony the key role of erasure, retraction, fragment and void in the main body of my text. Here, I thought, is an example of the editorial act as art! Last month they published my endnotes: Azure: Journal of Literary Thought.
How can one follow up on an act like that? A plan: Write an entirely new text that works with the original endnotes, and for the original text, write a new set of endnotes! (The original text can be found on my site: Allocution.)
THE 39th ANNUAL BLACK MARIA FILM FESTIVAL GOES VIRTUAL
The Black Maria Virtual Film Festival in partnership with the Hoboken Historical Museum presents award winning short films completely free of charge – no strings attached - for as long as the pandemic lasts. My film CAMP is included in the experimental category, along with a terrific line-up of other experimental shorts.