Do You See What I See? New Works from Adele Horne, Rebecca Baron and Doug Goodwin
Egyptian Theater in Hollywood , Sunday March 15, 2009, 7:00 pm
Filmforum is delighted to welcome back some of our good friends with new films. We last hosted Adele Horne with her documentary The Tailenders, which went on to win an Independent Spirit Award. Her new short works investigate realms of vision and interpretation of visual phenomena in delightful ways.
We’ve screened Rebecca Baron’s films in a few different shows, most recently How Little We Know of Our Neighbors. With the Lossless Series, she and filmmaking partner Doug Goodwin look into the small and large changes done to film images through digitization, compression, and digital manipulation, and by extension raise questions of the potential of the de- and re-construction of all images from/of the past.
November 30 through December 5 2008 in Zagreb, Croatia
Vinogradska 21, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia
For this year's issue, Nicole Brenez, Alex Horwath and Hirasawa Go made wonderful programs related to relationship between film, body and desire and, as Japanese Cinema of 60s would say, about Eros+Politics. Nicole Brenez will talk about films by Peter Whitehead, Anthony Stern and Carole Roussopoulos. Alex Horwath made a broad program about the concept of cinematic body. Japanese activist and curator Hirasawa Go about Japanese revolutionary cinema and I am delighted that Wakamatsu Koji accepted to be at Film Mutations, as the Japanese program is mainly related to his work.
Lossless #2 was accepted into the AAFF's experimental program. Ann Arbor has leapt from a separatist film venue right into the heart of digital performance. We prepared a special file just for thi sprogram. They will be showing a 720p rendering of the video encoded with an intermediate codec (Apple ProRes 422) through a Kona video card. Rebecca and Doug will be available to answer your questions.
This, then, is one thread through Day One. A sense of summation also came from Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin's Lossless #2 (2008). Images of Maya Derens Meshes of the Afternoon were subject to digital decay, reflecting on the process whereby the kind of work seen at Experimenta is translated into digital and web-based formats, changing its patterns of distribution and composition. The film tantilisingly proposed such processes as both annihilation, transformation and redemption.
non-linear storytelling: Rachel Stevens
week 7 [Time/Memory] Loop / Database / Recombinatory
readings Designing a Database Cinema, Marsha Kinder The Database, from Language of New Media, Lev Manovich
Supplemental The Index, J.G. Ballard
La Jetée, Chris Marker Memento, Christopher Nolan work by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy Soft Cinema & Little Movies, Lev Manovich Tango, Zbigniew Rybczyski A Zed and Two Naughts, Peter Greenaway examples from ArtIntact CDs
Visitor: Artist Doug Goodwin
i'm excited to see as much as possible of lossless, and the themes work well with intertextuality and borrowing, themes i was pushing earlier. the lossless pieces work partly because the viewer is filling in the cultural references blanks. rachel_stevens
the sources are borrowed, but the series isn't about borrowing per se. this is an opportunity to investigate the potential of a new medium.
we see lossless as a starting point, an entry into a new form which uses existing work only to introduce an investigation into the textures and potential of a new medium.
the lossless series uses references to facilitate experiments in a new medium. what otherwise might be disconnected abstraction has a clear referent (work by maya deren & alex hamid, john ford, ernie gehr, busby berkeley) that helps us look at the ways representation in digital video departs from traditional (film) cinema. heavy dependance on prior work always concerns me. it makes me think of how much ancient drama (especially aristophanes) is lost to us. I know all the jokes about Cleon and Pericles whip right over my head, and Aristophanes' dependance on in-jokes ruins whole scenes of otherwise great drama. our choices are not arbitrary, and we like to think that they elicudate the insectigation for anyone who cares to think about the intertextuality, but this is not required.
each of the pieces starts with a rule. it investigates one area of digital media (compression, file-sharing, spatial flows, performance of media, representation as instruction, etc.)
cinema and new media: Dale Hudson
I introduced the series with a provocation: that digital media is not cinema. I supported this idea in a handful of ways including:
moved over here: discussion blanca meyers
structuring strategies (with adele horne): Berenice Reynaud
questions from students, james benning, berenice reynaud,
what about the audio? doesn't need radical transformation, but you could make it avector (like a vocoder) granular synthesis
what would the next step be? try #4–information without any of the image data
lossless_2: Wavelengths programme: Horizontal Boundaries: Andréa Picard, curator
Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin’s Lossless #2 is a mesmerizing assemblage of compressed digital images of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s 1943 masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon. Baron and Goodwin play heavily with Teiji Ito’s 1959 soundtrack, making the film’s lyrical ambience feel more astonishing than ever before. Neil Karassik
Discussion