When Analog Cinema Becomes Digital Memory…

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When Analog Cinema Becomes Digital Memory…

Tafler, David.

Wide Angle, Volume 21, Number 1, January 1999, pp. 181-204 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wan/summary/v021/21.1tafler.html

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Fig. 1. Ken Jacobs and The Nervous System, performance at the Pacific Film Archive,

Berkeley, October 1994. Photo by Ken Paul Rosenthal.


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When Analog CinemaBecomes Digital

Memory…

by David I. Tafler

Introduction: Memory as Open Territory

For a brief moment in time, film/videomakers may join with empowered spec-

tators and open up the boundaries of the cinema machine. In a unique reflexive

environment, film/videomakers and spectators can unravel their own memory/

history. Each, in their own way, may dredge the matrix of their home environ-

ment—the country landscape, the urban grid, the tenement clusters, ethnic

neighborhoods, farmhouses, barns, and the recorded ghosts of their occupation.

The landscape models the intersections in their work, complex networks of

intermittent movement, commerce, and ideas. The bonds stretch between the

text and the spectator. Memory and technology become inseparable, the effects

of each structuring the other. Prodding a living memory, the tools mediate the

social experience and the social, political implications of the captured image.

Efforts to explore the relationship between the social and the technical have

taken many forms by many artists. Media artist Peter d’Agostino describes a

childhood experience of flinching and ducking when the 3D objects came fly-

ing out of the cinema screen in the nineteen-fifties. He imagines how Lumière’s

David I. Tafler is Head of the Communication Department of Muhlenberg Collegein Allentown, Pennsylvania. He has written extensively on interactive media and

new technologies and co-edited a book with Peter d’Agostino titled TRANSMISSION:

Toward A Post-Television Culture. He is currently working with the Pitjantjatjara and

Yankunytjatjara people in central Australia on the development of their telecom-

munication environment.

WIDE ANGLE NO. 1 (JANUARY 1999), pp. 177-200.V O L . 2 1© OHIO UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF FILM


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Train Coming Into The Station prompted some discomfort on the part of an audi-ence that realized the illusion but could not break away from reacting to its

shocking effects. While the “high tech” of the eighteen-nineties now looks

relatively crude, at the turn of the century people ducked and scrambled out

of the way of this virtual train reality.

In the nineteen-sixties, Austrian film artist Peter Kubelka designed a cinema

theater which enclosed the spectator in a wooden cocoon. Wooden partitions

isolated the individual from the other members of the audience in order to

minimize the possibility of anything distracting the spectator from his/her rela-

tionship with the images projected on the screen. Not surprisingly, an indi-vidual experiences the cinema differently when isolated from the audience.

For example, laughing patterns change when partitions break up the group.

At times, audiences can lose their restraint. Spectators can lose their individual

identity or willingness to process information individually. Group identity pre-

vails. In a commercial venue, teenagers will vocally deride the manipulative

conditions of a film by collectively resisting its operation. The audience resists

the film’s passion and its emotional engagement by calling attention to it. They

scream back at the characters by taunting the walking spectres. In a non-com-

mercial screening, for example at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,

adult audiences fresh from their odyssey through galleries of abstract paintings

will vent their displeasure at watching an abstract film. When an audience

yields to the filmmaker’s temporal control, its expectations narrow.

We continue to invent the cinema. As film becomes video becomes digital, the

cinema remains a fluid vehicle, perpetually in process, unstable in its projection

and reception, and more difficult to interpret and deconstruct.1 Accompanying

each shift, options appear that expand the possibilities for resistance within the

text by forming gaps in the flow of the experience. Those intervals provide an

opportunity for reconstructing meaning. The forks in the road set up decision-

making junctures. Each becomes a moment of silence, a negative space. Posi-

tioned to maneuver within those gaps, film and video makers and spectators

can incrementally break down and gradually rebuild the codes binding them

in their experience.


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Newer interactive work restores temporal freedom, but at what cost? Newdecisionmaking intervals affect the arrangement of movie fantasies and

speculations. At the very least, the maker/spectator pauses and assesses the

situation before the text can move on. The prevailing cinema, television, de-

parts from the coherence of classical drama. Navigating branches that overlap,

intersect, and diverge in different directions, home television spectators channel

graze, mute, record, replay, or ignore given sequences. Television commercial

interruptions and their offspring MTV (music television) reinforce these inter-

ruptive, fragmenting, and often abrasive patterns.

No longer “ceaselessly restoring the illusion of the homogeneous and the con-tinuous,” television, nevertheless, approaches the real by “confirming the

spectator in his or her ‘natural’ relationship with the world,” “reduplicating the

conditions of his or her ‘spontaneous’ vision and ideology.”2 Only the reality

out there has changed. In that revised reality, specific socially motivated rep-

resentations trigger programmable memory. Most common, the instant-replay

experience, prevalent during the screening of sporting events on commercial

television, generates a brief intervalic fascination for a fleeting event. It invests

that event with inflated importance, accompanying it with a dramatically

charged voice-over that makes the moment into an immediate memory. In the

cinema, dramatic, non-diegetic music may have the same effect.

Analog causality creates seminal moments within a play of events. It shapes or

choreographs particular gestures and actions within an overall sequence. Seam-

less, ephemeral, and manipulable, key events rise and fall with causal regularity,

changing gradually, occasionally more dramatically, but always progressively in

response to numbers of stimulating factor(s). Within this fabricated encounter,

the individual’s experience, feeling, and thought flows with each dramatic wave.

Interruptive junctures disrupt the continuity and restore the boundaries be-

tween the spectator and the screen.

Decisionmaking presents variables in the formation of a collective memory

where makers and viewer-participants hover between recorded events and

their after effects. A number of film and video artists have probed this terrain

bridging early and late twentieth century techno-social transitions. Filmmakers


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who continue to work in a post-futuristic niche ruminate on the short-livedworld captured and recreated by a mechanical cinema. Videomakers, a half a

generation later, mark film’s electronic genesis. Technologically, the positioning

of the spectator becomes significant.

Spectator and Screen

The move to digital media marks a site of convergence for so-called “experi-

mental/avant-garde” film and video, the two major exploratory moving image

canons of the past thirty years. As both film and tape become technical anach-

ronisms, their memory and legacy open the portal for a second reading.

D’Agostino’s cybernetic installation VR/RV: a Recreational Vehicle in Virtual Reality

explores the video to VR (virtual reality) genesis and the geography of represen-

tation inscribed by this transition. Filmmaker Ken Jacobs’s analytical study of

an old short Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son reinvents the cinema, revisiting its origins,

probing the boundary between fascination and meaning. One hundred years

ago, George Melies used the cinema to build his own fantastic narratives,

while the Lumière Brothers rooted their films in documenting everyday actu-

alities. Looking at their work today sews together traces of the inscribed events

recorded in their fluid encounter with a shifting conceptual and technical envi-

ronment. That environment threatens to disappear altogether over time.

Digital media anticipates the complete devolution of the screen by building a

cinematic experience that “is made to happen in your head.” At the same

time, it adheres to the old apparatus and the century old ways of manipulating

perception. The “living” factor becomes the presence of the artist as the pro-

ducer who makes the decisions to modify the recorded experience. No longer

in charge (of the television remote), the spectator sits back and cognitively

dives into the screen. The images on the screen cohere within the spectator.

There is a violent decentring of the place of mastery in which since theRenaissance the look had come to reign; to which testifies, in my opinion, the

return, synchronous with the rise of photography, of everything that the

legislation of the classic optics—that geometrical ratio which made of the eye

the point of convergence and centring of the perspective rays of the visible… 3


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From old film technology, the filmmaker assembled a time machine for unlayeringthe multi-dimensional reality recorded on the film. Hybrid machines com-

prised of odd shutters and analytical projectors warp the temporal-spatial ex-

perience opening a portal through which Jacobs and his audience plunge into

the elisions shaped by the text. The mechanically driven intermittent system

provides a path on which an audience moves forward conceptually, at the same

time encountering images from the past.

The use of retooled film technology warps one hundred years of motion picture

history. The projector mechanism disassembles footage recovered one frame

at a time. Slowing down the film, disrupting its illusion of another reality, theevent emerges as an interactive experience. The event exists somewhere out

there, a projection forged somewhere in the cerebral cortex. D’Agostino de-

scribes it as experiencing an “apparition happening in front of the screen; a

seance—something coming out at me, a kind of magic; vaudeville shows that

take the cinema back.”4 When the separation breaks down between the spec-

tator and the screen, “…the human eye loses its immemorial privilege; the

mechanical eye of the photographic machine now sees in its place, and in cer-

tain aspects with more sureness.”5 Digital cinema deconstructs the mechani-

cal intermittent processing of images. It compresses, transmits, and unravels

visual information. Higher level operations supplant the eye.

On the simplest level, over 127 million receptor cells respond to light stimula-

tion in each eye. Only one million fibers, however, transmit that information

along the optic nerve. The wiring in the eye reduces the registered signals,

compresses the information to shifts in contours and contrasts, colors, and pat-

terns. A complex reconstruction, a figuration of associations, recollections, and

recognitions creates the illusion of a retinal image, a condition that an individual

with “normal” vision takes for granted. In short, new cinema experiences by-

pass the illusions, the perspectival renderings that reinforce those illusion. They

penetrate “the codes of classic Western representation, pictorial and theatrical.”

In essence, deep focus yields to deeper stimulation.6

According to Buckminster Fuller, ninety-nine percent of the universe remains

invisible. Forming the remaining one percent, a repository of permanent


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referents anchor all experience and memory. The construction of randomness,ordering chaos, becomes a key component of the interactive installation. The

interactive program forms a web of jumps and starts, a matrix of problematic

intersections and decisions. Each choice made, each path bears different com-

plications. Within the virtual, metaphoric, and spiritual dimensions of their

work, interactive media artists weigh the variables. Within the programmed

interstices of the installation, the spectator forms his or her own virtual, meta-

phoric, and spiritual linkages. First person experience will not guarantee closure.

In his stories of cycles, dreams, and passing generations, writer Jorge Luis

Borges places narrative’s decisionmaking junctures within this ephemeral firstperson territory. He resists a rational determination that events must cohere

within some absolute system along a uniform linear plane. In “The Garden of

Forking Paths,” Borges drew

an infinite serious of times, in a dizzyingly growing, ever spreading network of

diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time—the strands of

which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through

the centuries—embrace every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In

some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet

others both of us exist…”7

Borges strips away the shrouds cloaking day to day artifice and reveals its fugi-

tive underpinnings. He deconstructs time, challenging dimensional linearity

and rational coherence. Time remains fluid, ephemeral, and immaterial.

Comolli, in “Machines of the Visible,” refers to the social relations that govern

the cinema spectator exchange, image verisimilitude, and plot engagement, as

a self-deception: “the spectator… expects to be fooled and wants to be

fooled.”

There is no spectator other than one aware of the spectacle, even if

(provisionally) allowing him or herself to be taken in by the fictioning

machine, deluded by the simulacrum: it is precisely for that that he or she

came… We want… to be both fooled and not fooled, to oscillate, to swing

from knowledge to belief, from distance to adherence, from criticism to

fascination.8


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As seductive and powerful as the semblance to reality may seem on the screen,other factors mediate the engagement between the spectator and the text.

Jean-Louis Baudry describes one factor as simply the satisfaction of self-decep-

tion. In his article “The Apparatus,” Baudry writes:

Freud hypothesized that the satisfaction resulting from hallucination is a kind

of satisfaction which we knew at the beginning of our psychical life when

perception and representation could not be differentiated, when the different

systems were confused, i.e. when the system of consciousness-perception had

not differentiated itself…

A perception which can be eliminated by an action is recognized as exterior.

The reality test is dependent on motricity. Once motricity has beeninterrupted, as during sleep, the reality test can no longer function.9

The spectator prospects these differences between cinematic artifice and its

encompassing reality, between reception and motricity. After the events have

transpired, how the spectator processes their history has its own reality.

History has no meaning outside of the positions constructed by the storyteller.

In “TLON, UQBAR, ORBIS TERTIUS,” Borges suggests that “it reasons

that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as

present hope, and that the past is no more than present memory.”10 Historic

events serve merely as synecdochic bridges crossing the strands of personal

experience with institutionalized memory. Memory exists ontologically as

malleable raw material. Within this fabrication, symbols, signs, critical events

or their presentations, often markers of cataclysmic disruption, prevail.

Viewer-participants become problematic gatekeepers when they mediate their

own memories.11 Framed, positioned, determined in their raised questions,

they discover that their identity remains entirely fabricated by outside forces.

In “The Circular Ruins,” Borges taps this despair. Toward the end, the voy-

ager “…with relief, with humiliation, with terror, …understood that he also

was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.”12 Fully programmed,

each decisionmaking moment becomes a part of the illusion. The options

have no true choices. Every path leads home.


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In her essay “The Memory of the Senses, Part I: Marks of the Transitory,” C.Nadia Seremetakis describes memory as a protean abstraction within the per-

ceptual process.

Memory is the horizon of sensory experiences, storing and restoring the

experience of each sensory dimension in another, as well as dispersing and

finding sensory records outside the body in a surround of entangling objects

and places. Memory and the senses are co-mingled insofar as they are equally

involuntary experiences. Their involuntary dimension points to their

encompassment by a trans-individual social and somatic landscape.13

Cybernetic media goes one step further. It erases the boundaries of the body.

The individual becomes both a sender and a receiver, and a reservoir of infor-

mation. The media apparatus revisits the material previously stored in the

subject and helps rebuild the individual’s memory along the lines of a particu-

lar mediated condition.14

Theorist Jean-Louis Comolli argued that changes in media apparati and tech-

niques mirror audience “demands, desires, fantasies, speculations.” These

social factors take precedence in the formation of what Comolli calls the “cin-

ema machine.”

The cinema is born immediately as a social machine, and thus not from thesole invention of its equipment but rather from the experimental supposition

and verification, from the anticipation and confirmation of its social

profitability, economic, ideological and symbolic. One could just as well

propose that it is the spectators who invent cinema…15

As information resources supplant manufacturing capabilities, as cinema tools

become interactive, their changing operating systems structure inscribed memo-

ries differently in the retrieval and fabrication of memorable events. Cybernetic

systems guide the individual through an experience shaped by short and long

term memory. The individual self-navigates toward his or her own reception.

Uncertainty tempers decisionmaking activity. With the passage of time, other

events and perspectives compound, distance, compromise, and modify lingering

ties. Other moments establish new buffers, new junctures binding the event

with exceedingly peripheral if not unrelated memories. Some filmmakers’


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work excavates memory by recovering old film footage and restaging its cap-tured events. The image becomes raw material, conjuring illusions that go far

beyond the recorded objects and figures originally seen on the screen.

My avant-garde is very reactionary, because I am still quite concerned about

quality of film and the hit of the machine on our history and on our psyches.

Before it is all whisked away, I actually want to reflect upon it and deal with

its machine quality.16

For Ken Jacobs, eash frame operates as a potential junction in its relationship

to the frame before and after it. Compounding the complexity of moving so

deliberately from one frame to the next, a second projection system intermit-tently and systematically probes the same material. Working with two identi-

cal strands of film—very, very short pieces of film—Jacobs builds sixty min-

utes of intense experience out of sixty seconds of footage.

The demarcation of frames segments the continuity and provides numerous

opportunities for interceding in the flow of the text. Each frame becomes a

digital switch, a stop-start decisionmaking junction, a site of “commotion” and

interaction. Jacobs calls these moments

‘eternalism:’ unfrozen slices of time, sustained movements going nowhere

unlike anything in life (at no time are loops employed). For instance, withoutdiscernible start and stop and repeat points a neck may turn… eternally.17

Each stop and start, forward and reverse temporal decision that he makes

flicks a switch. Crossing each junction corresponds to the mental synapse trig-

gered when moving from frame to frame, shot to shot.

In the sixties, Paul Sharits built repetitive series of visual icons, signs, and colors

into filmic loops. Tony Conrad manipulated light in The Flicker. Hollis Frampton,

a photographer who became a filmmaker, continually juxtaposes the two. Un-

ravelling the cinematic process on the screen, Stan Brakhage, Ernie Gehr, and

others worked the image at the cognitive level of the spectators’ reception.

Restoring cinema as theater, they pushed the magic lantern process. In their

paracinematic performances, these artists choreographed the stops and starts


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and synaptic leaps of cinematic time and space. They built junctures usinglights, projected images, filters, and performers. On the stage, they created a

virtual environment, then placed their performers into that imaginary space.

The audience, though not immersed in this virtual world, still entered into a

manipulated sensuous experience but remained aware of the manipulation.

In the shadow play of the seventies, Jacobs severed the two dimensional con-

straints of the screen by moving the audience into an ephemeral three dimen-

sional world. On the cortical edge, Jacobs played with binocular stereopsis.

The spectator donned a pair of Polaroid glasses, with respective lenses posi-

tioned at right angles to each other. Operating on the same psycho-perceptualprinciples as the head mounted displays (HMDs) used for enabling virtual ex-

perience, each lens confined each eye to the reception of a different tempo-

rally displaced overlapping image projected through a corresponding Polaroid

filter.18 Manipulating these binocular, omni-oriented displays, Jacobs con-

structed an imaginary space into which he projected his performers.

Despite its cybernetic overtones, the shadow play performance differed markedly

from the configuration of most contemporary VR installations. In d’Agostino’s VR/

RV installation, the experience of the spectator almost but does not replicate the

experience of riding in a recreational vehicle (caravan). The driver wears the

helmet but everyone else experiences the phenomenon on screen, watching

through the driver’s eyes. D’Agostino points out that the installation operates on

the same conceptual level as the camera on the moon. The monitor captures the

excitement of the performance, of an experience taking place in the spectators’

real time, but taking place in a different, in an imaginary or distant space.

Jacobs does not enter VR’s realm of surrogate experience. Jacobs’s perfor-

mance space stretched to the tip of every spectator’s nose. Phantoms danced

with live performers. The screen on the proscenium wall ballooned outward

visually enveloping each individual spectator, forming an arc from his or her

particular seat, within his or her head. The visual system rendered an abstract

pattern as a coherent vision, a viewer shared fascination that doesn’t necessar-

ily adhere to any commonplace physical law.


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Jacobs began this exploration in the dark. In his feature length film Tom, Tom,the Piper’s Son, Jacobs resurrects and then disembodies a short chase film made

by the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company in 1904. The mutoscope

film depicts a boy running from his fellow townspeople with a pet pig that he

playfully absconded. A chase sequence ensues. Jacobs reshoots the film, frag-

menting the action into a series of finite events. Jacobs

…took this old movie and translated it into the modern film sensibilities. He

rephotographed it, dissected it image by image, frame by frame, detail by

detail, and came up with a movie of his own, seventy-five minutes long. He

achieved two things: he created a film of much greater visual and formal

impact than the original; and he set up a precedent of ‘film translation.’19

Jacobs does more than rupture the flow of the film. Slowing and stretching the

sequence, violating the continuity, breaking down each movement into its

constituent gestures, each frame becomes a trace not only of the original staged

event, but of a relationship between the contemporary viewer and a represen-

tation of past actors/characters/actions. The experience of Jacobs’s film con-

structs the bridge between a contemporary audience and a cinema being born.

…My camera closes in, only to better ascertain the infinite richness (playing

with fate, taking advantage of the loop-character of all movies, recalling with

variations some visual complexes again and again for particular savoring),searching out incongruities in the story-telling (a person, confused, suddenly

looks out of an actor’s face), delighting in the whole bizarre human

phenomena of story-telling itself and this within the fantasy of reading any

bygone time out of the visual crudities of film: dream within a dream!20

The cinematic apparatus serves as a vehicle for studying the real people, the

actors playing characters in front of the camera. The analytical overlay retraces

the inscribed record of each small action captured on the emulsion and explores

the meaning of its viewing and reviewing many years later.

Each frame becomes a governor. Each individual image offers the option of

moving foward, backward, or repeating the frame. Jacobs choreographs the

movement of the film through each of those decisionmaking junctions. By

slowing and arresting the film, by weighing, revelling in, or analytically assess-

ing each continuity decision and motion, a spectator joins the filmmaker in


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“mining the existing film,” as Jacobs himself describes it.21

The individual attends to a specific part of the frame. The spectator focuses

on one or on another element of the image. Each movement inscribes a meta-

level event. Only one step removed from the action, the viewer watches

Jacobs travel through the antique text, constructing junctures and then push-

ing the buttons to plunge deeper and deeper into the material on the screen.

Jacobs effaces the illusion of real movement. A single frame, a photograph

embodied in the film remains the absolute and indivisible entity, frozen in

time and potentially frozen on the screen. The movement back and forth

through that captured moment becomes a catalytic event at the core of a sec-

ondary cinematic discourse. Prospecting the gaps in the film’s deconstruction,

the viewer participates in that discourse.

In his more recent work, Jacobs manipulates memory using his invention called

The Nervous System to reconfigure audience perception and cognition. The

Fig. 2. Ken Jacobs and The Nervous System, performance at the Pacific Film Archive,

Berkeley, October 1994. Photo by Ken Paul Rosenthal.


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spectator sits down, the lights dim and the image comes on—a strange, flicker-ing, sometimes indecipherable array of shadows, patches of emulsion, traces of

a recording. Ken Jacobs navigates the audience through a series of dual screen,

syncopated film projections. He uses two projectors, modified by a large frontal

shutter, to present spectacles that combine and overlap syncopated filmic im-

ages of recorded individuals and captured events. The two overlapping images,

each coming from one of the two independently operated projectors, flow in

and out of sync with each other. As the images divide, wander, and periodically

combine, the spectator perceptually stitches the two components together. The

cognitive nature of that converging operation constantly changes as it fluctu-

ates from decisionmaking moment to moment.

Beyond excavating memories, Jacobs uses The Nervous System not as a prosthetic

device for resurrecting old images but as a time machine for moving freely within

virtual memory. In Two Wrenching Departures, Ken Jacobs’s two longtime

associates, the late Bob Fleischner and Jack Smith, perform a free form ballet

choreographed by the rhythm and elision of Jacobs’s reenactment.22 Jacobs

arrests and restructures their gestures; he distills the moments “closing in on (to

allow the expansion of) ever-smaller pieces of time.”23 The movement from

each frame to the next opens that “fresh territory for sentient exploration.”24

…if picking at the texture of cinema, at the end of its filmic phase, seems

about as inward as one can get, it’s because the name of this digging tool I’ve

devised, The Nervous System, also designates a main territory of its search, that

place where we’ve blithely applied mechanism to mind willy-nilly producing

that development of mind known as cinema.25

Having recorded the original footage, Jacobs annotates the imprint of the

event. His decisionmaking marks an active trace of his own time, a passage

behind both cameras.

At his Nervous System presentation of Ontic Antics (a play on a segment of an old

Laurel and Hardy film) at the New York Film Festival in October 1998, Jacobs

explained his fascination, his excavation of time and place.

I’m dealing with a phenomenon of movies, and movies in our lives and

imaginary characters like Laurel and Hardy.


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I’m trying to locate something. What is this odd thing? I’m not someone thatlets go of things easily. History is not over for me. I’m plagued by it. I’m not

through with it. I don’t like everything whisked away as quickly as it is. I

come from Williamsburg, but I might as well come from across the globe it’s

all changing so quickly. Your hometown becomes another part of the planet

after twenty or thirty years. None of us can go home again. There must be

some desire on my part not to give a glancing interdiction to things. The few

things, people, the few places that I meet up with I want to hold, to taste, to

savor, to cry, to suffer, whatever it is. It has to do with attention.26

The image flattens out and the negative space, the holes in the image, become

more prominent. In the figure-ground oscillation, the spectator enters into the

past, probing the darkness, as if the gaps in the film trigger the synapses in the

brain, at times in a one-to-one pas de deux.

With Jacobs behind the projector, The Nervous System captures the paradox of

all cinematic performance. The filmmaker occupies the unseen space beyond

the screen, behind the projector. In Stan Brakhage’s 1962 film Blue Moses, the

camera turns around at the direction of the onscreen character to ostensibly

find the cameraman. Instead, it reveals a source of light coming from the pro-

jector. “No, it’s hopeless,” the characters cries lamenting the impossibility of

crossing the cinema’s temporal spatial boundary.

The events transpire within the spectator’s head. When watching The Nervous

System performance of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the viewer works hard to

assemble a gestalt from the vibrating traces of shapes and bodies, pulsating black

smudges on a gray background. Eventually, the scene coheres but not on the

screen. Similar to the fusion that transpires when binocular vision presents itself as a

single image, the performance emerges somewhere out there between the viewer’s

eyes and the screen, inhabiting a projected dimension of the viewer’s mind.

The Nervous System distorts the sender-message-receiver model.27 Orientation

shifts with the transformation of experience. Head mounted displays, touch-

screens, and other devices mimic this operation of the mind. They, however,

immerse the individual within the experience rather than the experience

within the individual. In contrast to the smoking mirrors and magic of a Jacobs

performance, the VR spectator entraps him or herself in an enclosure, a helmet,


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a CAVE, a vehicle. As d’Agostino describes it, the spectator enters a VR/RV—a virtual reality recreational vehicle (caravan).28 Like Paul Sharits, Tony

Conrad, Scott Bartlett, and other film artists, Ken Jacobs anticipates this shift

at the same time resisting its implied metamorphosis.

For a number of years, film artists tinkered with both the material of recorded film

and the apparatus that restores its captured and implied movement and revisits its

latent content. They have stopped, reworked, and, in the process, reinvented film

technology. Jacobs continues to resist abandoning the fundamental character of a

mechanical chemical medium that inscribes visible images on an emulsion base, of

an intermittent process that gives recorded images life. Moving frame by framethrough a linear presentation, his film or video performances anticipate the stop-

start pattern of an interactive presentation. His interactive performances allow the

viewer to participate in the mediation. They unravel and dissect the meaning of the

recording process while compiling the cumulative effects of the inscribed memories.

For these film artists, the text remains separate. When Jacobs sifts through

the archaeological remnants of a filmic past, he attempts to, in his own words,

“draw some of it out for a deep look, sometimes mix with it, take it further or

at least into a new light with flexible expressive projection.”29 Surprisingly,

mechanical film technology can indeed replicate the cognitive sophistication

of the more contemporary plug-in devices.

The cybernet can make narrative into a longer term fascination. Mediating

the engagement, more branches lead off in a greater number of different direc-

tions. An increased number of variables clock the contextualized changes.30 A

time out in the installation, in the form of a moment or juncture, helps the in-

dividual to process events through the malleable membrane of his or her own

personal experience, before that experience slips into unconsciousness.

Knots in the Weave

When the analog experience goes digital, each branch or fork mediates the

boundaries of the text. As knots in the weave, they coalesce to form larger


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junctions that tie together the multiple influences, and threads surrounding aseminal event. Each player provides one more subroutine to the design of an

installation. If retained in machine memory, each subroutine contributes to

the growing context of the piece. The piece hovers between the actualities

recounted and the fantasies and voyages that it enables.

Efforts to suture the shrinking distance between the spectator and the screen

have an ongoing history. Each challenges the boundaries between an individual

and the larger audience. The ersatz “interactive” system available to QUBE

subscribers, a two-way “interactive” cable-TV technology in Columbus, Ohio,

took the form of a console attached to the television set. It enabled the homeviewers to “participate” in the programs by pushing one of five “response” but-

tons. D’Agostino’s Proposal for QUBE (1979) critiqued this corruption of two-

way interactive television, its potential as well as its shortcomings. Delimited

choices do not empower decisionmaking. D’Agostino compares the viewer-con-

sumer to “Sherlock, Jr.,” a character in a Buster Keaton film by the same name.

Keaton, the protagonist, dreams that he has the capacity to climb into the silver

screen and “participate” in the action. QUBE encourages this kind of fantasy.

D’Agostino, however, found that the prescribed interaction only operates on the

level of a simpleminded game show. Since QUBE controls all the options, pub-

lic participation remains circumscribed. In d’Agostino’s Proposal for QUBE, the

audience would structure by consensus the sequence of a tape comprised of five

segments: a text, newspaper, photograph, film, and video performance. D’Agostino

factored in one hundred twenty possible variations.31 Although encouraged by

QUBE to do his “proposal,” bureaucratic red tape and delay prevented d’Agostino’s

tape from being aired.32 Sherlock, Jr. runs into the screen and gets thrown out.

Peter d’Agostino’s installation TRACES stretches the somatic landscape across

electronic dimensions. TRACES uses the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic

bomb to frame its cataclysmic memory, an event beyond experience. Balanc-

ing personal reminiscences with global perceptions, in TRACES d’Agostino

weaves together fragments of his own recollections and observations as part of

a generation that lives with the threat of total annihilation. Revisiting his el-

ementary school, the artist’s walk down the quiet, interior corridor retrieves

the memory of countless air raid drills.


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Co-existent with the installation’simages of a time once lived,33 a

TRACES website (http://www.

temple.edu/newtechlab/TRACES)

links to live images of the Green

Peace Rainbow Warrior trying to

block French nuclear testing in the

South Pacific. Like the radio inter-

play of Jacobs’s Blonde Cobra, the

live images on the web do not nec-

essarily sync with those of the instal-lation.34 The web, however, pre-

sents a parallel event from another time and place that repositions the specta-

tor in his or her contextual experience. “If somebody wants to break through

the screen and tell you what the reality was about,”35 then their reaction will

contribute to the evolution of the text.

Nam June Paik’s retrospective Electronic Super Highway: Nam June Paik in the ‘90s,

morphs memories of a small town America that has changed over the past

thirty-five years. Historic signs, figures, and temporal indicators from an almost

nostalgic Americana evolve and dissolve across its own emerging electronic land-

scape. Paik’s installations exercise a subtle control over the spectators attention

and processing. The electronic array fills in the contemplative space, removes

the silence between shots, shrinks the spectators conceptual maneuverability and

regulates the frame surrounding memory, a continuous ebb and flow with no divide.

Paik transforms the myths, those images of a recently expired sensibility: a wooden

billboard, an old post office reminiscent of the WPA mausoleums, the one room

schoolhouse—a decaying image of a living myth—into forty video sculptures.36 A

somewhat equivocal advocate of new electronic technology, Paik chronicles the

changing world. His work restages contemporary history into a flowing compres-

sion of events. Wandering through the global community, the couch potato still

remains passive. The viewer, now an internet resident of what Paik calls “Cyber-

town,” walks through the respective pavillions, changing the channels from site to

site with each becoming another contextual and structural proscenium.

Fig. 3. Still from TRACES. © Peter

d’Agostino, 1995.


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Virtual reality, cybernetic experience—the most far-reaching phase in the evolu-tion of interactive technology—harbors the capability for recording the narrative-

in-process, the history of the participant’s decisionmaking activity. Like all new

technology, it risks becoming excessively systematized by everyday experience.

Current VR has not yet achieved the means to construct a full cybernetic experi-

ence. VR remains a not yet realized destination. A simple prosthetic device,

contemporary VR only suggests the freedom of liberating the mind from the

prison of the body.37 Nevertheless, controlling the synaptic process does allow

the voyager to enter cyberspace. That crossover satiates some latent desire.

The dream machine, however, has its blatent flaws. D’Agostino’s 1990 instal-

lation TransmissionS: In the WELL musters the false hopes and inflated fanta-

sies vested in the world of electronic experience.38 Nested within a conical

tower—a totemic well—TransmissionS engages its own contradictions. The

installation’s features include an interactive touchscreen, a ceiling projection,

and an image of an eye glaring back at the viewer through a peephole. The

text of the touchscreen took the history of the electronic cinema and wove it

together with two tragic memories fortified by their television coverage: a

short visual segment of the space shuttle Challenger explosion, and excerpts

from Italy’s twenty-four hour coverage of a failed rescue of an entrapped Ital-

ian boy who had fallen into a well and who eventually died.39 The cathartic

effect becomes that of madness and imagination. Advanced communication

technology falls short of rescuing its subjects from the symbolic and ancient

terrors of falling from the sky and dropping into the earth.

Cyberspace, however, suggests alternative outcomes. According to Norbert

Wiener, “feedback is a method of controlling a system by re-inserting into it

the results of its past performance.”40 A more integrated feedback system al-

lows the spectator to alter the method and pattern of performance. On the

other hand, too much freedom may inhibit interactive installations feedback

systems from truly provoking an insightful experience.

Graham Weinbren and Roberta Friedman’s The Erl King and Weinbren’s later

installation Sonata make the continuity contingent on the viewer-partipant’s

own fascination. Each derives from tales, references, and psychoanalytic


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parables. They situate characters within complex literary settings overloadedwith evocative material. Not so easily seen, portals open and close within each

segment that bridge sequences and reveal hidden enigmas. When the specta-

tor wanders into the text, he or she can bounce about the images or plunge

into the cavities surrounding their construction. Discovering some small part

of the elusive interactive structure helps the viewer now become participant in

his or her reconstruction of the latent text.

Jeffrey Shaw’s The Legible City situates itself somewhat differently. It evolves from

the viewer-now-become bicyclist’s navigation of a fabricated urban grid of words

posing as buildings. At each intersection, the viewer-cycler can turn or proceed.The viewer literally cycles through this landscape forced to notice, to read the

environment. That fascination, the novelty of activated perception and its at-

tendant cognitive processing can last indefinitely, until one grows wary or weary.

In The Erl King , at each bridge or interval, the viewer-participant can make a de-

cision. Each decision, in turn, leads to a different path which leads to another

decisionmaking moment, and so forth and so on. The text becomes interactive

and the level of interactivity becomes directly proportional to the number of

critical nodes that operate within the text and the multiplicity of interrogations

that appear at each juncture. In The Erl King , those junctures seem limitless

through an array of options that traverse each scene and fluctuate within each.

Sometimes, a menu appears on the screen. Most other times, “touching” the

screen will recreate the sequence adding or deleting characters, reconfiguring

audio-visual sync relationships. As the matrix of decisionmaking moments pulls

the audience away from the ideological drivers of a linear narrative text, in

the process it reinvests them with other emerging codes and structures.

The Cybernetic Future

The installation format enables the video artist to break the constraints. Un-

fortunately, the most advanced systems preclude their own distribution.

D’Agostino’s installations occupy that edge. His most technically advanced,

VR/RV, simulates a recreational vehicle (RV) traveling through a virtual environ-

ment of “utopian hopes and dystopian fears.” The voyager travels in a simulated


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Fig. 4. VR/RV: A Recreational Vehicle in Virtual Reality. © 1994 Peter d'Agostino.

recreation vehicle (RV), a comfortably familiar shielded environment.41

Eachdecisionmaking site forms the connecting tissue, the temporal markers conflating

the space and time of the atomic experience with the cybernetic adventure.

VR/RV explores the genesis of electronic technology. In this environment, the

viewer-participant lies suspended, hovering between reception and illusion.

In the midst of that immersion, d’Agostino interrogates the meaning of illusion

by asking “how do you criticize VR in VR?” His work turns in on itself, ques-

tioning process as well as content.42

D’Agostino intentionally calls attention to the artifice. Buildings becometransparent. The mountains resemble paper maché models. He interrogates

the effects of VR immersion and inhibits the seduction of the voyager. Some

distance prevails. The cybervoyager does not become Peter Pan, “I’m flying;”

a critical border splits the voyager enabling his or her intellect to examine the

effects of the overwhelming seduction of the immersion. According to

d’Agostino, VR needs definition, needs recontextualization.43 While William


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Gibson in his cyberpunk novels charts the implicit terror of VR, d’Agostinoestablishes the links between the cybernetic horrors that exist on the inside

and outside of cyberspace. Fifty years of memories anchor the passage into

any form of metaphysical future.

A protean apparatus that immerses the voyager in a topology of ideological con-

structions might never supplant the video game. Alas, a value system predicated

on achieving highest scores will probably remain the prevalent system for vent-

ing frustrations and playing out obsessions. That sort of system, however, does

have the capacity to compile insights. Not simply a recording tool, a VR envi-

ronment can allow the viewer-participant to analyze and explore the meaning of his or her activity. At the same time, the spectator might shape his or her dis-

tance to the text and position within the rubric of the piece. Ken Jacobs describes

the border between staged memories and open-ended excursions. He explains:

This is not an improvised work. These are all chosen moments, chosen

operations. There are a lot of things that I am doing back there and there are

a million other things that can happen beyond what you’re seeing.44

All sorts of things can happen between the frames. VR permits the spectator

to get at some of that uncanny stuff “that cannot be photographed with the

camera, that cannot be made except in the brain.” When the recollection be-comes a reworkable memory, the voyager can appropriate the virtual event.

The investigation sustains an active dialectic that permits the voyager to

achieve a heightened awareness. Otherwise, the electronic drug seduces the

passive spectator en route to refabricating his or her history and memory.

Notes

1. An interactive platform depends upon the technology that makes storage and

processing of an expanding number of subroutines possible. Fortunately, trends

develop and patterns emerge that allow for subroutines to converge with only small

variations marking their difference.

2. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in Film Theory and Criticism:

Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1985), 755.

3. Comolli, 743.


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4. Discussion with Peter d’Agostino, September 20, 1998.5. Comolli. “Machines of the Visible.”

6. The notion of the “retinal image” takes its place alongside “persistence of vision” in

the bin of convenience misrepresentations of complex human processing activity.

7. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” trans. Helen Temple and

Ruthven Todd, in Ficciones (New York: Grove Press), 100.

8. Comolli, 758-59.

9. Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus,” Camera Obscura no. 1 (Fall 1976): 115.

10. Jorge Luis Borges, “TLON, UQBAR, ORBIS TERTIUS,” trans. Alastair Reid, in

Ficciones (New York: Grove Press), 25.

11. A recurrent theme, for example, in work like Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon.

12. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Circular Ruins,” trans. Anthony Bonner, in Ficciones (New

York: Grove Press, 1962): 63.

13. C. Nadia Seremetakis, “The Memory of the Senses, Part I: Marks of the Transi-

tory,” in The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (Boulder,

Colorado: Westview Press, 1994), 9.

14. See Jonathan Steuer, “Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining

Telepresence, in Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality, Frank Biocca and Mark R.

Levy, eds., (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associations, 1995), 36-7.

15. Comolli, 742.

16. Ken Jacobs, New York Film Festival, October 11, 1998.

17. Ken Jacobs, notes from the artist.

18. HMDs work on the same principle of binocular parallax as 3D glasses.

19. Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema 1959-1971 (New

York: Collier Books, 1972), 350.

20. Filmmakers’ Cooperative Catalogue No. 6 (New York: The New American Cinema

Group, Inc., 1975), 132.


22. Drawn from a portion of the footage shot by Jacobs for his film Star Spangled To

Death.





27. The spectator experiences the recorded moment as a kind of dance, a pas de trois,

an interdimensional embrace between living and dead performers. The Fleischner/

Smith and Jacobs collaboration operates from both sides of the screen, from both sides

of the projector, across the impenetrable divide separating the living from the dead.

Conjuring up traces of their existence, Jacobs projects his own previous relationship as

an implied part of the ongoing continuum. The projector becomes a medium for bring-

ing the two performers back to life, a time machine stretching across the continuum.

28. A discussion with Peter d’Agostino on September 20, 1998.


30. Building memory begins by separating an event from other branches clouding andrestraining its history and continuity. An individual’s mediation, the retention, dissec-

tion, or elision of an event springs from both the omniscient forces that lie beyond the

central text, and the key interlocutors nested within the text itself. The interlocutors

within the text, salient points along a track, take the form of voices or other auditory


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instruments, symbols, camera operations and visual devices, or any combination of theabove. The individual, drawing from his or her own personal experience, brings the

omniscent variables to the encounter.

31. Peter d’Agostino:

The Proposal for QUBE tape incorporates five segments ranging from theoretical con-

cerns to everyday events and are in the form of: a text, a newspaper, a photograph, a

film, and a video performance. Given these five segments the audience would, by the

consensus of their response, determine the sequencing of the tape and see the results

of that process. The formula I derived for the work was 5x4x3x2x1 to show that this

simple structure would yield 120 possible variations for editing the final sequence. (I

was making reference to Eisenstein’s formula of 1+1=3, his theory of film montage as a

‘collision of ideas,’ to make a statement about the kind of complexity that video and

computer technology had now reached as it specifically relates to montage.) The ap-

parent novelty of producing a videotape editing, in effect, by a public opinion poll.

32. H. Drohojowska, “Don’t Touch… Now Don’t,” LAIC Journal, Los Angeles, Spring

1977.

33. Scenes of Hiroshima on the annual anniversary of the bomb—a staged die-in near

the dome, the camera lingering on the faces of young Japanese men and women, cap-

turing the incomprehensibility of the living mimicking death before the devastated

structure that represents ground zero; scenes of Nagasaki, Pearl Harbor, and New York

City; scenes of the Japanese landscape take shape: a village, the forest, barbed wire,

looking through the window of a train, a finger pointing, a waiting room, neon lights;

scenes of passing trees, homes, small villages, unexpectedly lead to an image of the

Empire State Building, the sound of ticking, and graffiti ridden, post-apocalyptic, der-

elict neighborhoods in New York City; Machito Square, brick building, streets and al-

leyways in the neighborhood where Peter d’Agostino grew up. The reflection of the

videomaker on the glass door to an apartment dwelling dissolves to the 8mm 1950s

home movie footage of the d’Agostino family gathered upstairs in their living room

watching television; scenes of a birthday cake, a barbecue, a Communion procession, a

local marquee announcing the introduction of cinemascope.34. Ken Jacobs’s film Blonde Cobra requires that the projectionist follow a complex set

of instructions syncing live talk radio with specific sections of the film during its pre-

sentation.

35. Attributable to Peter d’Agostino.

36. “Electronic Super Highway: Nam June Paik in the ‘90s” was organized by the Mu-

seum of Art, Inc., Fort Lauderdale and Exhibition management Inc., in Cincinnati. It

opened November 1, 1994, at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, then moved to the

Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio. After its in-

stallation at the Museum of American Art in Philadelphia from October 1995 to January

1996, the exhibitil will travel to the San Jose Museum of Art in California, the Jackson-

ville Museum of Art in Florida, the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the

Nelson-Atkins Museum of art in kansas City, Missouri, and finally the Honolul Acad-

emy of Arts in the fall of 1997.

37. Frank Biocca and Mark R. Levy, Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality, ed.Frank Biocca and Mark R. Levy (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associations, 1995), 7.

38. TransmissionS: In the WELL, installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. See

David Tafler, “Der Blick under der Sprung,” (“The Look and the Leap”), Kunstform,

Bd. 103, September/Oktober 1989.


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39. The images include visual references to Edison, Marconi, and Mikola Tesla, therespective founders of the motion picture, wireless telegraph, and alternating current.

40. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York:

Doubleday & Co., 1954), 61.

41. The voyager travels down a two lane highway bordered by billboards. Each bill-

board shows the images of memories related to the sites thematically encountered on

the map. Moving image fragments of war move the voyager to four separate points on

a map: he West (the Rockies), the East (Philadelphia), the Mid East (the Persian Gulf

War), and the Far East (Hiroshima). Hiroshima and the Persian Gulf War replace the

heartland of the United States, the Mid West, with the bombed out overseas test sites

of American techno-miliary expeditions.

42. Discussion with Peter d’Agostino.

43. Discussion with Peter d’Agostino.


When Analog Cinema Becomes Digital Memory…

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