"On Daniel Canogar's Trace " (Art Experience NYC, 2011)

European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) Conference - Transitions: Moving Images and Bodies, 2021

Master of Fine Arts report/thesis - supervisor John Gillies UNSW College of Fine Arts, 2004

Surface and Projection is an investigation of the cinema event, defined as image, projection, space and audience. The project interrogates the place where cinema occurs for the viewer, starting with the special viewing conditions for film watching and the accepted roles they create for the film maker, the exhibitor and the spectator. The artworks in Surface and Projection have been a series of reassemblages of the elements of the cinematic event. The film installation Moving Still Life is the key work. The report starts by defining the event of cinema, drawing on French film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry’s 1970 essay Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus. As Moving Still Life took shape, identifying its art and film historical contexts became part of the wider investigation of the cinematic event. Section 2 teases out resonances with Italian Arte Povera and outlines a brief history of super 8 art film making in Australia. It links these to the specific material grounds of Moving Still Life. Art in the public domain is discussed as the art work was initially conceived as an installation for outdoor public spaces. Section 3 discusses expanded cinema, a primary art historical context. There is a general survey of this early intermedia form as it developed in the US and Europe and its presence in Australia. While I make a case for the four elements that comprise the cinematic event, I expand upon the development of the artwork, where image became a dominant strand of its own. A specific form of film making evolved, focusing on the layered image. The final sections of the report, ‘Image’ and ‘Sequence’, focus on this image work, drawing on Umberto Eco’s 1960 essay The Open Work and American art writer Rosalind Krauss’ writing on installation and post-medium artwork. The deconstructive ethos of the project leads to an analysis of the frame within the sequence and the attacks on the frame made by Moving Still Life and my image work in general. The analysis of sequence within moving images, draws on a seminal 1945 essay by American writer Joseph Frank, Spatial Form in Literature. This builds to a discussion of new media, interrogating its claim for interactivity in moving images, an impossibility while the frame remains the primary unit.

This article investigates the curation and presentation of screen-based works that involve the use of light and darkness. Focusing on two works, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Under Scan (London, 2008) and Gregory J. Markopoulos' Eniaios (Lyssaraia, 2012), it exposes the complexities that arise in the space/sensation relationship when there is an interchange of light and darkness. Moreover, it explores the ways in which screen-based works can function as ephemeral architecture and as communication vehicles between the physical environment and living agents. I will present Lozano-Hemmer's practice in dialogue with Markopoulos's screenings, in an attempt to define the curated event -as an experience and as a process -based on notions of immersion and the sensorial apprehension of space.

There has been always an interest from artists in the study of optical phenomena beyond the framework of classical media, such as film and video, considering the aesthetic possibilities of filmmaking. The expanded concept of media art makes the boundaries of the transmission of the image itself obsolete and provides another means of expression and interpretation in the artistic process, for example, in media installation art. The invention and search by the viewer of spatial and temporal contexts within an organism undergoing transformation acquires the status of the creative process, and is configured as the exhibition itself. This shift completely reconfigures the role of the spectator, developing his own spectacle in his wandering throughout the installations of the works of art. Therefore, and due to the transfiguration of the spectator, we find immanence where the audience now becomes the spectacle and produces spatial and temporal context. This paper will address issues of time and place in the representation and presentation of time-based media works of art. We focus on case studies of artists who explore filmic languages in their work, like Doug Aitken, Stan Douglas and Gregory Chatonsky.

The Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), 2016

This article attempts to define a phenomenon in video installations that emerged during the 1990s. It is a type of audiovisual architecture that I call deictic transformer. Deictic transformers are not representations, they are events that trigger a specific type of effect, namely, a shift in time-consciousness, which is characterised as total engagement with the present moment in its impermanence, non-substantiality and self-differentiation. The article unfolds in the form of experiment. As a first step, phenomenological accounts of Christian icons are compared to phenomenological accounts of Bill Viola’s ultraslow motion video art installations. The reader is guided to experience how different media (religious paintings, video) generate different engagement with the present moment. Thereby, the main subject of this article is ‘the now.’ The analyses demonstrate that there are various ways of engagement with ‘the now’ and these ways trigger specific shifts in present-time consciousness. These shifts, on the other hand, are closely related to formation of subjectivity and thus demonstrate that temporality is not a given, but could be seen as a technology of the self. Christian icons are representatives of a metaphysical approach to the present moment, predominant in the arts and philosophy of the western tradition before the 20th century. Bill Viola’s video installations The Greeting (1995) and The Passions series (2000-2001) represent a new sensitivity towards time brought by electronic media. Therefore, dualist experience of time deeply embedded into the Christian tradition is recomposed via video and digital manipulation into a dynamically holistic temporality. As a second step, other video-based examples of deictic transformers are discussed, such as Gary Hill’s Viewer (1996) and David Claerbout’s Rocking Chair (2003). As a third step, the aesthetic strategies of these video installations are extracted into a formal definition and their modus operandi is explained. This article does not claim that deictic transformers represent the mainstream of video art installations. Deictic transformers, however, are seen as a growing tendency in new media art praxis that demands intensive engagement with the emerging dynamic of embodied presencing; a tendency, which could be regarded as relatively unprecedented in western culture before the development of video and digital media and therefore should be considered as an (in)direct result of the capacities of these technologies. In other words, the analyses of Viola, Hill, and Claerbout’s audio-visual experiments demonstrate that video and digital technologies of late 20th century tend to shift our perception of time: from attempts to escape everyday impermanence and search for permanent metaphysical presence towards entanglement with non-substantiality of presencing.

Da compreensão da arte ao estudo da história da arte, hoje.

We have noted the importance of the exhibition Les Immatériaux-Modernes, et après? (at the Georges Pompidou Center) which would ultimately prove a watershed, stating clear intentions as to the change of values-the key ingredient in the genesis of Postmodernity. In the words of its main curator, Jean-François Lyotard, the exhibition did not intend to be more than "(…) une expo pédagogique-expliquer par exemple les nouvelles technologies (...), mais une expo qui soit une oeuvre d'art. De viser donc non pas la capacité d'acquisition d'un public mais plutôt sa sensibilité, c'est-à-dire un sentiment esthétique." Les Immatériaux took on the role of artistic form based on science, presenting itself for enjoyment. Not just the creator's enjoyment, at least not first and foremost; instead, it offered itself to a wide audience. Thus began a praxis that would send ripples across the history of art over the following decade: the curator as artist, as creator. At the core, Les Immatériaux had global claims on the avowal of complexity, and even though mass computerization was not yet a reality, it was intended that the mass audience should get to grips with a host of "…dispositifs technologiques en passe de constituer notre environnement et une nouvelle écologie de l'esprit". The exhibition is underpinned by philosophy , concept, science and aesthetic, committed to the "recherche de la recherche", accepting the uncertainty of concepts. It is the acme of all exhibitions of super-modernity, to some, or a second stage in postmodernity to others: a place of passage, a wandering through realities and eras, where borders, not tightly upheld, come to fade naturally-bereft of the support of ideology, theory and even matter. The airtight compartments that seal off fields of research make no sense on the virtual plane. In Les Immatériaux, different sites embody different contexts. The same now happens when we browse the internet, looking at site after site. Favoring what can be sensed rather than what can merely be seen (this is a fundamental operation), the goal is to achieve total involvement, engagement with the multiple senses of the human. Les Immatériaux is above all a course in reflection in perception. As Martine Moinot would have it: "(...) la mise en espace, repose sur l'idée de 'parcours' réflexifs / perceptifs, qui se déplacent de questions en questions, et non pas d'objets en objets proposés comme des références. La perception dans le parcours de l'expo ne doit pas fonctionner uniquement sur le visible, mais plus largement sur le sensible."

Conference Paper - Spiral Film Symposium, 2018

In The Address of the Eye, film scholar Vivian Sobchack famously posits a dialectical experience of cinema where as we gaze at the filmic image, the image seems to look back. Flowing through time, while carrying complex meaning through both the internal image-space and the physical venue, she asserts that film is “…never merely a viewed ‘thing’”. Instead, the cinematic image operates in a “…mutual resilience and resistance… this back-and-forth exchange...” that mimics human intersubjective relations (24). This paper fleshes out this phenomenological understanding of film spectatorship using Henri Bergson’s work on memory and perception, along with Laura Marks’ notion of haptic visuality, and interrogates how this conversation between a spectator and the filmic object plays out in a simultaneously temporal and spatial context. Although I agree with Sobchack that film viewing has never been as passive as previously claimed, it is perhaps easier to visualize the conversational qualities of spectatorship in works that literally engage viewers’ bodies in time and space. Through interactivity and skin-to-skin contact between the artwork and viewer, it becomes easier to grasp the many ways that the cinematic blurs the lines between the temporal and the physical. As such, this paper will examine a series of different moving image installations from the itinerant Manifesta art biennale from 2012 and 2016. Situated in different European cities for each iteration, Manifesta necessarily adapts already-existing venues for its unique exhibition needs. With a mandate to embed deeply in its host city, the festival regularly uses non-gallery spaces for a variety of exhibition formats, and emphasizes artwork as a discursive tool, with a large program of educational and audience engagement activities. Of particular interest is their 2016 Pavilion of Reflections—a floating platform on Lake Zurich, which hosted film screenings, performances and lectures, as well as swimming recreation area and bar—and their 2012 take-over of a defunct coal mine in Gent, Belgium. In both these iterations, moving images were deployed as stand-alone artworks, but also as part of a larger conversation around how site and image intertwine with the performance of viewing.