The gallery plan for Lossless at Harvard has a specific architecture, guiding viewers to interact with the pieces and to think about their relationships as different media types. In addition, it provokes thought about the diversity of screened environments for moving image works in gallery situations.
The first work one encounters is displayed on one of our most ubiquitous electronic screens: the video iPod. Embedded in the gallery wall, and thus disguising or withdrawing from view the display apparatus, one views the work on a personal and intimate scale as befits its source material: Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon.
Upon entering the gallery, one is also struck by the immediate dialectic, or dialogue, set off between the iPod display and the second work. Here the apparatus is on full display–a two second 16mm projected loop, whose source material are Dorothy's clicking slippers from The Wizard of Oz, projected onto the milky glass windows at the front of the gallery. The viewer is confronted, then, with two kinds of display at opposite poles of the technological spectrum. And at the same time, a key idea of the installation is set in play as the passage from the analog to digital and back again, setting off a variety of elegant mutations of space, time, and movement.
The preferred trajectory through the exhibition next follows a zig-zag pattern through three interconnected rooms. Similar in size and scale, the next two Lossless pieces offer variations on two types of graphical abstraction: the first whose source is quite recognizably a Busby Berkeley musical, the other harder to guess. In passing from the first to the second enclosed room, however, the viewer is asked to bridge another dialectic, and one related to the entryway. The source of the third work is a classic of American structural film, which already strove to pull an abstracted grid from an actual physical space through an algorithmic process. But here the grid is again transformed and projected into a digital space as a kind of moving Cartesian map of the source images. Where the rigorously patterned female bodies of the Berkeley musical dissolve and flow into the liquid space of digital distortion, here the mathematically inspired process of structural film is inverted or folded into pure geometric abstraction.
Leaving the second room, the viewer arrives at the most spectacular and sensuous work of the installation. Projected large scale on the rear wall of the gallery, and recalling the size and scale of a “cinematic” projection, the source material here is John Ford's classic The Searchers. Indeed the viewer has been on their own kind of quest, perhaps for that blue gardenia of our age, what Paolo Cherchi Usai has called the Model Image. But there are no original images left to us, no pure cinema to which we can nostalgically return. Only an incessant circulation of images, a transmigration of the souls of images from analog to digital and back again, from screen to screen(s), where the fixed, serial movement of film dissolves into the tessellated liquid space of digital flows.
Discussion