(Alphabetical by Surname)
Digital Body Living Beside Screen
Miguel Almiron and Azadeh Nilchiani
The masterpiece “The Invention of Morel” by Bioy Casares is among several science fiction novels and films that put forth the idea of devices capable of recreating realities or bringing fantasy worlds to life, dwelling somewhere between illusion and reality.
But the ghostly representation of human body, and the oscillation between presence and absence are no longer confined to works of fantasy stories. Advancements in science and technology have brought telepresence devices (Telephones, Video Games, AR and VR) to everyday life.
Digital technology has tapped into new potentials and has created new paradigms of make-believes: we live and communicate with beings without flesh, digital beings whose presence emanates uncertainty, or beings in digital flesh, such as Hatssune Miku, Tupac Shakur, and even with realistic robots, the Geminoid Hiroshi Ishiguro.
This suggests a human being whose presence / communication overcomes carnal barriers of time and space, thanks to immersion systems such as holographs, ghost pepper, etc. Thus, as if through magic, the body seems inscribed in a total, real and virtual space, capable of achieving ubiquity.
Immersive systems are capable of creating more profound and fuller experiences, through the introduction of both visual and audio senses.
Hearing acts as an auditory space indicator and navigational system, providing the body with coordinates and distance information. Leveraging this potential, and through the refinement of sound phenomena in an acoustic system, it is possible to transform a virtual space into a perceptual bodily experience.
Through curation of a combination of physical and virtual movements of dynamic sound systems, and using head mount sound displays in conjunction with stationary devices, this project aims to reach a ubiquitous immersive soundscape.
Virtual concerts are an example of such immersive experiences, where a corporeality takes place between synthetic sound and multiple virtual duplicates of the same sound, projected across a physical soundscape. Although pioneering pieces such as Philips Pavilion by Le Corbusier and Xenakis (1958) have long ago put forth this idea, many new systems are emerging in the Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) to advance this practice, namely holophonic and “contiguous phantom imaging” 4D Sound systems.
We undertake a comprehensive review of various systems in an attempt to capture and affirm the expressive potential provided by technologies through the presence / absence of the body.
Miguel Almiron, Ph.D. ‘Aesthetics, Sciences & Technologies of Art’, is a Media Artist and Assistant Professor at the University Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France, Department of ‘Cinema, Music and Digital Art’. He is a member of research lab (LISAA, EA 4120).
He leads a theoretical and technical practice exploring and reflecting on the possibilities of expressing the senses of body, and the human being through the use of new digital technologies.
Azadeh Nilchiani, is an artist and a PhD fellow in laboratory LISAA at the Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée). She has a Diploma in Space-Art from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Decoratifs of Paris (2007), Diploma in Sound Art and Electroacoustic Composition from the Pantin National School of Music (2009), and Masters degree in Art, Music and Media at the University Paris-Est (2010).
She takes an interdisciplinary approach in her practice, including video, sound and electroacoustic music into cohesive bodies of work.
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Mapping Body and Space, on the Body Installation “Study for Nowhere”
Marcus Bastos
This article will discuss conceptual and technical aspects of the project “Study for Nowhere”, by Vera Sala, Hideki Matsuka and Marcus Bastos. It is a site specific installation, in which the contemporary dancer Sala creates real time improvisations on constructed structures. The resulting envorinment is completed with sound and video projections that expand and diverge from Sala´s body. Exploring ideas of voidness and instability, the piece was installed on venues such as Praça Victor Civita, SESC Pinheiros and Casa do Povo. By discussing aspects of video and sound development, as well as the different installation solutions created for each space, the author aims to provide a wide view of news forms of montage that the relation of video, body, sound and space suggest.
Marcus Bastos is an artist, curator and researcher on the areas of convergence between audiovisual, design and new media. PhD in Communication and Semiotics at the Pontificial Catholic University of São Paulo, he is author of Networks Thresholds: writing on contemporary art and culture (Intermeios, 2014) and editor, with Lucas Bambozzi and Rodrigo Minelli, of Mediation, Technology, Public Space – A Critical Panorama of Art in Mobile Media (Conrad, 2010). He was curator of Noise on Video (Itaú Cultural Institute, 2005), Cellular Geographies (Telefonica Foundation, 2010), installation –> video (SESC Arts Show, 2010) and VIVO Arte.Mov – International Festival of Art in Mobile Media, (2007-2011). He is author of audiovisual pieces such as absences (2009) and fluxes (2010), with telemusik, and solo pieces such as abstractions (2014).
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Views from Above
Elena Cologni
This is a videoinstallation for the Northumberland Telescope, Cambridge University, Institute of Astronomy (2012), floor projection (pics attached)
My research is part of the critique to the ocular-centric discourse within western philosophy, with reference to Martin Jay. Yet, the fascination i have for perception and its psychology, and geometry (all linked to the primacy of vision) is a recurring aspect in my enquiry. My critical position is manifested through overturning given assumptions therein by adopting paradoxical formats,including: juxtaposing visual perception with physical positioning in space, drawing ’proto-geometric’, non-exact shapes, setting up contradictory research hypotheses. In this context ‘views from above’ is linked to my project ROCKFLUID.com, concerned with making the viewer aware of the space proximal to the body. This in relation to a technology driven life where most of us become increasingly familiar with (and hooked into) the views form above (GPS, Googleearth, NASA satellites). A way to feel in control, by locating ourselves in the world,which can be paralleled to the renaissance perspective system, whereby the centralfocus perspective represents man, butalso God, the eye is God. Telescopes were built applying optics and perception studies and while telescopes offer a ‘view from below’ outwards in the universe my work creates a critical context where the above connections become apparent.
http://rockfluid.com/institute-of-astronomy-cambridge
Elena Cologni studied at Brera Academy of Art, Università Statale in Milan (Italy), University of Leeds, and she has a PhD from Central Saint Martins College, London (2004, Fine Art with Philosophy and Psychology).She was awarded from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for her Post Doctoralproject at Central Saint Martins addressing issues of memory and liveness(2004-2006), Research Fellow at York Saint John University (2007-2009) when herwork became primarily site specific and participatory (www.elenacologni.com/experiential). She was selected for a residency at Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow (2006),participated to Glasgow international (2008) and received funding from Arts Council of England for a project at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2009). Her current umbrella project rockfluid is an outcome of a residency funded by Arts Council of England, Escalator Program through Colchester Arts and Wysing Arts Centre.
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Six (or Seven) Ways of Looking at a Magic Lantern Slide
Richard Crangle
This presentation will offer a consideration of the magic lantern slide from a series of six (or seven, or perhaps more) viewpoints giving overlapping ways of thinking about what it is as an artefact, how it works as a component of a narrative and performance medium, and what its significances may be in historical and contemporary contexts of creative use.
With illustrations drawn from the Lucerna web resource, institutional and private collections, and the work of the Million Pictures research project, the presentation will consider:
- the physicality of slides as objects;
- their relative cultural (and financial) valuations;
- their various roles and motivations in the transference of knowledge …
- … and its concealment (for example as ‘magic’);
- their relationships with other portions of the projection process (as ‘software’ interacting with ‘hardware’ and human elements);
- and some parallels between historic usage of slides and modern media practices, especially in the complex mixture of ‘authority’ and ‘freedom’ that determines their use and interpretation.
Conventional approaches to what is sometimes called the ‘historical art of projection’ can be prone to dwell on one or two of these aspects, often with an emphasis on the visual content of the slide image or the physical nature of the artefact. However, to begin to understand the overall cultural impact of this largely lost medium we need to open out the discussion beyond its component parts and consider its possible uses, both historical and current. This presentation will therefore aim to describe lantern slide projection as an interactive, ephemeral performance medium, elusive and difficult to categorise, but rich in its creative possibilities.
Richard Crangle has a PhD on early film and related media and has been researching magic lantern slides for over 20 years, with a particular focus on British commercial slide manufacture of the late C19th and early C20th. He is co-editor of The Encyclopaedia of the Magic Lantern (2001), Realms of Light (2005) and Screen Culture and the Social Question 1880-1914 (2014), and author of numerous articles and conference papers. He is currently employed as Associate Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, working on the ‘Million Pictures’ European collaboration project which is researching the use of the projected image in educational and heritage contexts in a number of EU countries. Among other projects he has been largely responsible for creating and developing the Lucerna Magic Lantern Web Resource, www.slides.uni-trier.de
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Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope and the Campaign to Control the Film Industry
Claudy Op den Kamp and Amanda Egbe
This paper is concerned with the cultural implications of legal decisions around the invention and patenting of projection technologies.
In the early 1900s Thomas Edison won a patent suit against his main competitor Biograph, a decision that stunned the industry, because Biograph seemed to be in the best position to oppose Edison’s dominance. The technical innovator behind Biograph’s technology, W.K.L. Dickson, had originally developed Edison’s own motion picture technology, the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope. If anyone understood how to avoid infringing Edison’s patents, it was Dickson. With a focus on Edison v Biograph and Edison v Lubin, this paper will highlight the surprising shift in intellectual property regimes from patent to copyright that followed. As a counterfactual exercise, this paper will play with the idea of what cinema today would have looked like if Edison’s campaign to control the film industry by controlling the technology would have succeeded. What difference would it have made if films would have been protected under the patent regime as part of the hardware (based on the assumption that projection was an integral element of the film), as opposed to under copyright as part of the software, as they did? And how does that help us understand the role of projection within the history of cinema?
Claudy Op den Kamp is a postdoctoral research fellow at Swinburne Law School, Australia. She recently finished a PhD at Plymouth University investigating the relationship between copyright ownership, access to archival film, and film historiography. She is a graduate of the University of Amsterdam (Film and Television Studies) and holds a Masters in Film Archiving from the University of East Anglia. She has worked as Haghefilm Conservation’s Account Manager in Amsterdam; as a Film Restoration Project Leader at the Nederlands Filmmuseum, and as a senior research assistant at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich.
Amanda Egbe is a Lecturer in Media Production at the University of Bedfordshire and a PhD candidate with the Transtechnology Research group at Plymouth University. A filmmaker, artist and researcher, she has contributed to archival projects such as ArtFemTv, the Tesla Art & Science archive and the National Review of Live Art Archive project Into the Future at the University of Bristol. She has also shown her artistic work nationally and internationally at exhibitions and festivals.
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Elastic 3D Space
Anthony Head and Leila Sujir
We propose a paper to discuss the Elastic 3D Space research project (elasticspaces.hexagram.ca), which is exploring the intersection of virtual and augmented reality and stereoscopy, predominantly through an artist led methodology, but embracing many methodologies and disciplines. The ongoing project started 18 months ago with outdoor 3D stereo projections for the Illuminate 2015 event in Bath, UK ( www.illuminate2015.org ). Since then we have organised two international meeting/workshop events in Montreal (October 2015, February 2016).
The term elastic†3D†space†refers to the illusion of depth that stereographic 3D content creates, the ‘popping out’ of objects from the screen in glasses based stereoscopy (such as 3D cinema) and the potential that arises when the audience is not seated but can move around the space in front of the screen. The amount of popping (in front of and into the screen) is elastic: it stretches as people can move closer and further away from the screen, if they are untethered from the cinema seat, just as they will be able to in VR experiences of the near future.
Elastic 3D Space is exploring how people can interact with that augmented reality and virtual reality. Although virtual reality is generally a single person experience in terms of each set of screens (from a headset); it is participatory and can be multiple person with multiple headsets.
In our paper we will take a broad look at stereoscopy past and present, referencing experiences of projected caves, VR, AR, stereo projection as augmentation of a building, as architectural projection. We consider a the future when the problems of
untethered VR is a reality in our everyday lives. Drawing on our recent activities in stereoscopy we show how artist led approaches to stereoscopy and participatory experiences could lead to new insights into the world of 3D content including 3D cinema, architectural projection, theatre, VR, 3D design, sculpture.
Anthony Head is a Senior Lecturer at Bath Spa University. As an artist and software designer his practice includes coding and realtime 3D graphics. Anthony runs the outdoor projection festival Illuminate Bath ( www.illuminate2015.org ) and curates the MediaWall at Bath Spa University (artdesign.bathsp.ac.uk/mediawall). See www.anthonyhead.co for examples of Anthony’s work.
Leila Sujir is an artist and a professor at Concordia University in Montreal. Most recently, she was an artist in residence at the Bath School of Art at Bath Spa University to present a spatially mapped video projection, Elastic City Spacey, onto the Roman Baths, as part of Illuminate 2015. http://leilasujir.com
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Casting: Projection Mapping Installation at the V&A
Yiyun Kang
This presentation will discuss the projection mapping installation, CASTING at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK. From October, 2015 to March, 2016, I was selected as a resident artist of the V&A, and CASTING was the culminating project during the six-month of the residency. At the same time, I’m in the finishing stage of my PhD thesis paper on projection mapping at the Royal College of Art. I am also teaching projection mapping in the RCA and V&A through various workshops and tutorials. I sincerely wish to share my experience and research on projection with Besides the Screen’s network by participating in this international conference.
Yiyun Kang was born in Seoul, Korea. She holds a BFA from Seoul National University and a MFA degree from UCLA’s Design & Media Arts department. Kang currently lives in London, working and pursuing a PhD at the Royal College of Art.
Kang is internationally recognized for her projection mapping installations. Her work has been exhibited in diverse museums and galleries in Europe and Asia and she has taken part in several residency programmes, including Victoria and Albert Museum. Her work has been shown at the V&A, Seoul Museum of Art, Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art and the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014. Kang has received several awards and commissions from various institutions and foundations.
Rather than focusing on the making of objects, Kang’s work explores the cultivation of relational environments through spatial projection mapping installations. Kang’s work attempts to generate mixed-reality environments, engendering perceptual ambiguity. As the centripetal force that precipitates this mixed condition, digital media provide the vehicle for her exploring the in-betweenness.
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Metaphorical Projections of Knowledge: How Science Fiction can help Museums Envisage Knowledge Systems in Virtual Reality or Immersive Vision Theatres.
A museum is a virtual space (Parry 2007) conceived in the second half of the sixteenth century when the phenomenon of encyclopaedic collecting emerged in response to the rapid expansion of knowledge and information available to the Western world. In order to structure this knowledge, whether through physical collections or memory, metaphors based on architecture become common, e.g. temples of knowledge, pillars of knowledge, theatres of knowledge. The implication was that orderly physical spaces could form the basis of the organisation of knowledge – so the concept of the museum was born (Kuwakino 2013). In fifteenth to eighteenth century literatures the ideal museum architecture was imagined as a rotunda topped with a dome to reflect both the temple of memory and of knowledge (Borsellini 1981) but also the heavens and divine inspiration (Fabianski 1990). The paper will explore how a museum collection can be re-imagined in virtual reality using the same ideals as the original physical museum concept. The paper will therefore suggest the immersive virtual environment is an ideal mechanism for viewing museum collection data as it performs the same metaphorical function as the architecture of the dome.
The paper will propose methods for envisioning virtual knowledge structures. Just as Greek Mythology inspired Renaissance designers, modern museum designers working in the virtual world might be inspired by science fiction film visualisations of information in cyberspace, virtual and augmented reality for viewer cognition. The paper will reflect how our view of knowledge has developed from what we can hold in our memory to extended views of knowledge (Clark & Chalmers 1998) both of which can be visualised in an immersive virtual environment in the same way the architectural dome could reflect the memory held in the mind and the heavens. The paper will look at sci-fi visualisations of structured knowledge – from viewing data in an architectural sense as the earliest metaphors for structuring large amounts of knowledge to modern views of knowledge structures changing from centralised to disseminated and non-hierarchical in structure – architectural metaphors vaporising into clouds.
- Parry, R., Ed. (2007). Recoding the Museum: Digital heritage and the technologies of change. Museum Meaning. London, Routledge.
- Kuwakino, K. (2013). “The great theatre of creative thought.” Journal of the History of Collections 24(3): 303 – 324.
- Borsellini, E. (1981). “Il cardinale Neri Corsini mecenate e committente Guglielmi, Parrocel, Conca e Menucci nella Bibliteca Corsiniana.” Bolltino d’Arte 6(10).
- Fabianski, M. (1990). “Iconography of the architecture of ideal Musaea in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.” Journal of the History of Collections 2(2): 96-134.
- Clark, A., Chalmers, D.. (1998). “The Extended Mind.” The Philosopher’s Annual XXI
Coral Manton is a research student at i-DAT, funded through the 3D3 consortium. Her professional background is in museums and galleries specialising in collections and exhibitions. She is a digital artist and animator with an interest in interactive design and immersive cinema, has lectured in making immersive films for full-dome cinema with the University of the West of England and the Royal Academy of Music and been in-house digital artist for Birmingham Planetarium.
Coral’s research brings together her background in museums and immersive digital art practice. Her research investigates whether an immersive museum collection database can be an effective way for visitors to explore collection objects and historical data. Her study also explores ways visitors can interact with the collection database and whether visualising the collection in an immersive way can be useful for curators’ understanding of the collection and extracting multi-layered narratives for exhibition. She is developing prototypes to map the intangibility of a museum collection working with Birmingham Museums as part of the master planning process for a proposed redevelopment of the museum.
Coral is currently undertaking a research placement for the British Library investigating the PhD thesis in multimedia or non-text form and exploring how the British Library managed database for UK doctoral theses, EthOS, might allow the submission of non-text theses.
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Behind/Beyond the Screen: A Screen History
Cecile Martin
Created at the end of the 19th century, the cinematograph distinguished itself from other moving pictures apparatus since it combined both a projector and a screen. Although the projector was specifically designed for projecting movies, the screen already had a long history of its own.
This is a fact that tends to be forgotten, as it is quite notable that the cinema screen has overshadowed all previous forms of screen. A study of these different models will contribute to the analysis of contemporary devices which border the field of the cinema.
After a brief study of the history of the screen, it will be interesting to consider its evolution as an indicator of a cultural phenomenon in connection with the movie industry. Finally, we will list and map out some interesting post-cinematographic screens to show how the scope of their use, set out by their designers, can limit the practices of their users. Proxemics, as a science whose purpose is to study the spatial organization of cultural features, will help shed light on the links between these various artefacts throughout the history of the cinema.
Cecile Martin, after studying Performing Arts, trained in communication skills, marketing, and Computer Aided Design. She was a curator and artistic director for several exhibitions (Babel numérique, Futur en Seine, Paris 2014 ; Ecrans, bibliothèque François Truffaut, Paris 2014; Computer art congress, Paris 2016) and worked as a media consultant. Graduated in Laws, with a speciality in Media (University Paris 1), in Cinema (The myth of Orpheus : New insights on the western artist’s status), and Aesthetics (Cinema and Video Games, a Common Language,), she teaches digital art, cinema history and IT (University Paris 1, University Paris 8, Ecole du Louvre). She also writes for the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) and participates in discussions about the place of the humanities and arts studies in France.
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From the Geometry of Anamorphosis to Expanded Cinema – An Interval in the Body
Thi Phuong-Trâm Nguyen
This paper aims to address the performativity of projection, to engage with its geometry in order to bring forth the role of the body in the perception of the image. Going back to a historical understanding of space and representation, I will trace what we can learn from the development of anamorphic images to explore the site of moving images. Anamorphosis are deformed images (projection or drawing), which point of view is displaced in space. Therefore the resolution of the image is only possible through the adjustment of the body nearby that particular point. They were developed within the science of perspective, but while perspective has evolved toward the idea of representing space and restoring its appearance as accurately as possible with geometry, anamorphic images used the same geometrical principles and carried them to an extreme, and instead created a break between the real and its representation.
I intend to use the understanding of the anamorphic construction as a way to access a world beyond the visual realm. From a purely visual medium, anamorphic images possessed the capacity to evoke an active way of perceiving involving the body. They represents the embodiment of the experience of vision in a perpetual state of becoming. In addition to the idea of the body as the principal protagonist in the creation of the sense of space, anamorphic construction allow the experience of a space whose meaning unfold through the process of questioning our understanding of the real and fictional. The space of discovery of anamorphic image, which delays our understanding, results in a return of the notion of temporality and presence, which I will relate to the work of Anthony McCall, James Turrell and Peter Campus in the field of expanded cinema, as they hold a potential to relate to the body and establish a relationship between the space of the real and the space of representation.
Phuong-Trâm is a trained architect in Canada, she also holds an MA in History and Theory of Architecture from McGill University, in Montreal. She is currently working on a practice-led PhD in Architectural Design at The Bartlett, London, where she is exploring the temporal encounter between the body and the space of wonder using anamorphic images. Her research encompasses a historical investigation into the development of anamorphosis in 17th century, with a particular interest in the discoveries and advancement at the Minims Convent, by Jean-François Nicéron (1613-1643). Her practice work attempt to unfold the potential between the encounter of the body and moving images in installations that combine film, sculpture and text.
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Azadeh Nilchiani (see…. Miguel Almiron)
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Imagistic Projection as Relational Becoming
Andréia Oliveira and Felix Rebolledo Palazuelos
The geometry of projected images is rather simple and can be quite readily understood through basic optics and Euclidian geometry. However, the relationship between the spectator and the screen combines imagistic process within a spatial configuration whose geometrical implications bear teasing out. All spectators are served the same relational proposition that enfolds them within the encompassing reach of the projection on the screen before them. And as a result of this imagistic immersion, they share in the experience of spectatorship through the common subjectivity of the spectacle. Yet, the shared subjectivity of the screen is different from the becoming-one with the projected screen image: the milieu of imagistic encounter associates all aspects of our experience so that the inside and the outside articulate a singular becoming. In the interest of undoing the dualistic spectator/screen relationship which perpetuates the divide of the subject/object relation, we look at the formation of the image as a compositional assemblage which encompasses the world we live in as the image that lives within us. Our paper seeks to answer the question of how we become one with the screen through an articulation of Deleuze’s concept of the fold by way of the optical perspective models of Alberti and Viator, Kepler’s explorations of continuity through the generalised understanding of conics and perspective, as well as the implications of Desargue’s projective geometry and a final resolution through topology.
Andréia Oliveira has a Ph.D from the Multidisciplinary Program at UFRGS and at the Université de Montréal (Canada); MA in Social Psychology, UFRGS; BFA, UFRGS (Brazil). She is currently chair of the InterArtec/Cnpq research group and of the Interdisciplinary Interactivity Lab (LabInter). Multimedia artist with expertise in the fields of art and technology, contemporary subjectivity, interactive systems, as well as production of cultural and educational projects. Associate Professor in the Graduate Program in Visual Arts at UFSM, Brazil and in the Graduate Program in Networked Educational Technology. She sits on the Digital Arts Advisory Board to the Ministry of Culture and was alternate delegate to the plenary of the National Research Center (2012-2014); she is member of the National Association of Researchers in Fine Arts (ANPAP).
Felix Rebolledo Palazuelos is a doctoral candidate in Social and Institutional Psychology at UFRGS Porto Alegre/ Brasil. MA (S.I.P.) from Concordia University (2013), Montreal, Canada. Lecturer in Screenwriting and Documentary Theory at UNIFRA in Santa Maria, RS Brazil. Researcher at InterArtec/CNPq and LabInter/UFSM, Brazil and member of the SenseLab (Montreal, Canada). He is a member of the editorial collective of Inflexions Journal. His research interests revolve around cinema: spectatorship, memory, identity and multi-media documentary production.
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Claudy Op Den Kamp (see Amanda Egbe)
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Bark and Butterflies: Projection, Post-Memory and Phantasmagoria
Adrian Palka
This paper explores the role of site specific projections in the digital remediation of family and personal history in the mixed-media performance/installations “Bark and Butterflies” by the author. (www.palkadiaries.com) Drawing on the work of Marianna Hirsch, the paper explicates the notion of post-memory, which complicates and extends family-history and its application to this project. It is a case study, amplified with personal and theoretical reflections, on the role of projection in the creation of mixed-media memorial works and their dissemination.
Bark and Butterflies was the artistic result of a research trip to Siberia following in the footsteps of an inherited war time diary. The paper will outline and demonstrate the role of site specific projections in a series of action-research performance interventions en-route and examine the potential they offer for the visual interrogation and remediation of symbolic space.
Drawing on the work of Knapstein, Weibel and Grau, the paper will argue that site specific projections can produce a “phantasmagoric” world in which past and present overlap. The paper goes on to suggest that through this overlap the project became an immersive process of “self-sacralisation,” using projections to re-enact paradigmatic devotional forms (Turner), in a type of secular “aesthetic redemption”(Kristeva).
Adrian Palka is a Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts at Coventry University. Adrian’s research interests are in the field of inter-disciplinary performance and installation as well as the politics, art and culture of Central and Eastern Europe.
He has worked in performance since the 1970s with performance group Bogdan Club and with the Cupboard Cabaret in the 1990s. Since 1996 he has collaborated with Berlin based artists Robert Rutman and Wolfram Der Spyra producing work incorporating Rutman’s musical sculptures, the Steel Cello and Bow Chime in performances and installations. His recent work focuses on the overlap of sound and image projections in memorial work. This includes the installation “Bark and Butterflies”, which was the product of an artistic research trip to Siberia in 2013 following in the fotsteps of an inherited war time diary,(www.palkadaireis.com) and “Iron Curtain” a 24 multi-media reminiscence event to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2014 (ironcurtain.coventry.ac.uk).
He is currently working on a chapter covering the digital aspect of the Siberia expedition for the forthcoming CDare publication, “Digital Echoes: Spaces for Intangible and Performance Based Cultural Heritage.”
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After Cinema: Projection Mapping Digital Culture in the Video-Esséance
Craig Saper and Lynn Tomlinson
It’s Alive! This video-esséance (essay-meets-séance) is reminiscent of video art projections, like Tony Ousler’s MMPI (Self-Portrait in Yellow) in which a video image of a narrating head is projected onto a puppet, and explicitly alludes to the mining of proto-cinematic projections in performance mapping video art projects, animator-artist-scholar Lynn Tomlinson collaborated with art, media, literary, and cultural theorist and historian Craig Saper on this project(ion). Tomlinson describes examples of this historical dimension of live performance mixed with animation, visual effects, and projections as “animation and performance … intertwined.” Our work is informed by a tradition of scholarship in which the inextricably linked design-and-argument produces media-as-essay building on electracy, which uses avant-garde art approaches to scholarly issues in the electronic milieu. As a result, this video-essay more closely resembles proto-cinematic performances, and the video art that mined those performances. Projections in séance-performances particularly intrigued us because of the “magical” and post-human discourses surrounding “new” media. In those early séance-performances, smoke would fill a theater and a magic lantern would project a human image or floating head. The image wavered and moved with the heavy smoky clouds, and men were known to have drawn their swords to defeat the ghosts. The tone of mourning and séances, in terms of the media technologies looking backward into the past, conjuring or remediating (in a much more perverse way) the old departed media forms into the new forms of “animate art” – the inanimate brought to life. By approaching animation with a broad definition, the breath of life, we can rethink what it means to be alive in terms of animacy rather than agency. As performance art functioned to resituate art in earlier decades, now, the animator was coming into her own – séance like – as a conjuror of the inanimate, the machine, and the inanimate.
Craig Saper is a Professor at UMBC in Baltimore. He is the author of The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown: Real-Life Zelig Who Wrote His Way Through the Twentieth Century (2016), Intimate Bureaucracies (2012), Networked Art (2001), Artificial Mythologies (1997) and has co-edited and introduced books on Electracy (2015) and Imaging Place (2009). He has co-edited special issues of Rhizomes on Posthumography (2010) and Drifts (2007). He has just edited, with new introductions, editions of Bob Brown’s Words (2014), Gems (2014), The Readies (2014), and 1450-1950 (2015), published with http://rovingeyepress.com.
Lynn Tomlinson‘s clay-on-glass animation creates the effect of fluid transforming and evolving oil paintings. Her 2014 environmental film, The Ballad of Holland Island House, received awards in numerous film festivals and is included in the touring compilation The Animation Show of Shows. In her work as an artist, scholar, and curator, she focuses on expanding definitions of animation. Her award-winning animated shorts have aired on PBS Kids, MTV, and Sesame Street. She is an Assistant Professor in the department of Electronic Media and Film at Towson University.
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Title TBC
Dan Shay
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Donec quam felis, ultricies nec, pellentesque eu, pretium quis, sem. Nulla consequat massa quis enim. Donec pede justo, fringilla vel, aliquet nec, vulputate eget, arcu. In enim justo, rhoncus ut, imperdiet a, venenatis vitae, justo. Nullam dictum felis eu pede mollis pretium. Integer tincidunt. Cras dapibus. Vivamus elementum semper nisi. Aenean vulputate eleifend tellus. Aenean leo ligula, porttitor eu, consequat vitae, eleifend ac, enim. Aliquam lorem ante, dapibus in, viverra quis, feugiat a, tellus. Phasellus viverra nulla ut metus varius laoreet. Quisque rutrum. Aenean imperdiet. Etiam ultricies nisi vel augue. Curabitur ullamcorper ultricies nisi. Nam eget dui. Etiam rhoncus. Maecenas tempus, tellus eget condimentum rhoncus, sem quam semper libero, sit amet adipiscing sem neque sed ipsum. Nam quam nunc, blandit vel, luctus pulvinar, hendrerit id, lorem. Maecenas nec odio et ante tincidunt tempus. Donec vitae sapien ut libero venenatis faucibus. Nullam quis ante. Etiam sit amet orci eget eros faucibus tincidunt. Duis leo. Sed fringilla mauris sit amet nibh. Donec sodales sagittis magna. Sed consequat, leo eget bibendum sodales, augue velit cursus nunc.
Dan Shay Is a visual artist working with digital projection as his primary medium, based in Glasgow.He completed studying Art and Philosophy at Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee and Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto in 2013. His artwork addresses the impact of technology on our society, investigating the increasingly blurring boundaries between the real and the virtual. Recent projects employ contemporary media in traditional ways to develop a visual language where digital projection and film converse.
Furthered through an ongoing research fellowship at the Vilém Flusser Archive, Berlin, whilst hosting the Glasgow LUX Critical Forum at the Centre for Contemporary arts, Glasgow. Shay’s artwork utilises projection to make films, installations and sculptures. Increasingly he explores the use of performance to reveal the process of creation. His work has been shown in exhibitions and film festivals across the UK from Dundee to London and internationally from Toronto to Hong Kong.
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Profilmic Parallax Projections
Patrick Tarrant
Ever wondered what happens when you turn the film projector side on, point your camera at the holes in the take-up reel, run the projector and film through those spinning holes? Owing a debt to the work of Ken Jacobs and Alfons Schilling, my recent films have adopted just this approach to produce images in, what Jacobs would call, ‘Stunning 2.5D’.
This technique also returns to the video screen the flickering, kinetic mobility we associate with celluloid based film, while making the image malleable enough that it shifts strangely along three axes, producing curious parallax effects that function as depth cues.
This paper is about a particular instance of digital/analogue hybridity and the way this practice illuminates and subverts our expectations of the essential qualities of a given medium including the essential flatness of the cinema screen. This gives rise to a concern less with film’s obsolescence, than with its ability to productively interact with the newer form such that it might return to the digital a certain plasticity, thickness, and mobility.
The technique also brings the projector, anachronistically, into the profilmic space of the camera and thereby enacts a kind of performance, before the camera, rather than after the camera.
Patrick Tarrant is Associate Professor of Film Practice at London South Bank University. He has published articles on the portrait films of Pedro Costa and Ben Rivers and has recently had films screened at the London, Hong Kong and Melbourne International Film Festivals.
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Lynn Tomlinson (see Craig Saper)
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The Case of an Unfortunate Mural: Videomapping as a Response to City Planning Violence
Ela W-Walters
In 2012, I was commissioned to create a videomapping projection which would relate to a rather unfortunate mural located in the centre of Lodz city in Poland. The mural entitled ‘Lodz in nutshell’ was commissioned by Lodz city authorities. It portrays 33 people thought to be the most famous and/or the most honoured for Lodz city. The list of people emerged as a result of a competition entitled ‘You too can write your name into history’. The idea of the mural was, I suppose, to uplift Lodz citizens’ morale. The end result was aesthetically awful, and the citizens of Łódź actually grew to dread the project.
Standing in front of the mural, I asked myself a question of reasons for cities to create similar murals. The mural was meant to empower the people, but did the opposite. While standing in front of the mural, my mind drifted to the ideas of manipulation. Being on a continuous stand-by, awaiting an illusionary point in the future. A critical point where all becomes certain and clear. The Answer portrays a form of an ideology, which places integrity and raison d’être somewhere in the future. The followers of that ideology are requested to fill up their time of waiting with as many tasks (preferable with the ones, which are beneficial to the creators of the ideology) as possible. All their endeavours become just means, not aims in themselves. The illusionary future point of time (which is just a projection put in people’s minds) disables entirely any ability to understand the gift of a present moment. People, consumed with an obssession to arrive at the much sought after answer, sacrifice their lives for a cause, ideology, or simply aims of others.
The final videomapping entitled The Answer took a form of a giant egg-timer-film sequence, in which images from the mural where integrated into the sequence.
Ela W-Walters (Elżbieta Wysakowska-Walters) completed an MFA in 2011, at the University of Arts in Poznan, Poland under the supervision of Professor Sławomir Sobczak. Currently, she is a PhD student on Interdisciplinary PhD programme at the University of Arts in Poznan, Poland. Her practice is marked by the use of diverse art media – traditional, new as well as those that are not usually associated with art. She likes the condition of uncertainty, of being on the threshold. Walters runs many art outreach projects for people not connected with art. She lives and works in kuczkiLas, Poland.
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Slide-tape: Key Works in the UK since the 1970s
Mary C White AKA Mo White
This paper will look at the use of slide-tape by artists during the 1970s and 1980s in the UK. Slide-tape was a series of projected 35mm photographic slides with a synchronized audio soundtrack. As a technology, it is significant in the UK for being used by a number of key and emerging artists for a brief period before being abandoned. This moment itself has been largely forgotten and the paper will consider this and the importance of slide-tape as a critical tool used in artists’ projected works.
Slide-tape emerged in the late 1970s and led to a moment where artists, commandeered an otherwise educational and presentational tool, and explored the separation of image and sound. Slide-tape was regarded as an unreliable and temporal form; cheap and accessible to make, factors which were initially to its advantage but also amongst the reasons why it has been taken less seriously. Slide-tape was a time-based media form, with the technology – the slide projector – itself having a distinct presence in the live performance of the work.
Amongst the artists who used the medium were Black Audio Film Collective and Susan Hiller, as well as Tina Keane and others who took part in the key exhibition About Time: Video, Performance and Installation by 21 Women Artists, which took place at the ICA, London in 1980.
In the paper I account for the emergence of this work and suggest that slide-tape allowed for artists’ experimental work where the simultaneous projection of images and sound were transformed to establish a new medium.
Mo White is an artist, writer and lecturer. Mo works in moving image media (film and video), photographic media and print media and has exhibited widely, including exhibitions in New York, Dublin, Athens, Berlin, Oslo, Belfast, and Birmingham. Her research concerns gender, diasporic and queer identities and their effects on contemporary artists and art practices – and was awarded a PhD in 2007 for her research examining the work of Laura Mulvey and artists using the moving image in the UK since the 1970s. Mo is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Loughborough University in Leicestershire.
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Kate Moss and the Holosphere: Presence, Illusion, and Savage Beauty
Su-Anne Yeo
The closing of Savage Beauty, the recent V&A retrospective of the work of the late fashion designer, Alexander McQueen, featured a singularly arresting yet endless repeatable appearance via hologram of the iconic British supermodel, Kate Moss. Originally created for McQueen’s 2006 Widows of Culloden show in Paris, this updating of the Victorian parlour trick of Pepper’s Ghost by post-production house Glassworks, director Baillie Walsh, and long-time McQueen collaborators Gainsbury and Whiting, was no less rapturously received at the V&A exhibition than it had been at the hologram’s launch almost a decade earlier. This exploratory talk looks at the function of holography, both of Moss and to a lesser extent of McQueen himself, in Savage Beauty’s critical and commercial success. It questions whether the “framelessness” and three-dimensional quality of holographic images can be linked to the increasing demand by audiences for immersive experiences, whether these be through the cinema, the gallery or museum, or through live (theatrical) performances.
Su-Anne Yeo recently completed an ORSAS-funded PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research interests revolve around the cultural studies of screen distribution and exhibition, the globalization of independent and especially non-Western film, video, and new media art, and issues of the public sphere and public culture. She has presented her research internationally at conferences such as Society for Cinema and Media Studies and Screen. Forthcoming publications include the chapter “Translating the Margins: New Asian Cinema, Independent Cinema, and Public Culture at the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival,” in the book, Chinese Film Festival Studies: Sites of Translation, edited by Chris Berry and Luke Robinson, and published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016.