Louise Curham

Canberra Contemporary Art Space. A key work of Expanded Cinema, Horror Film 1 involves a live performer playing with shadows, interacting with the overlapping beams of three 16 mm film projectors. Our reenactment was the first time in the work’s forty-year lifespan that it had been performed by anyone other than Le Grice himself. In this paper, we offer some reflections on the process of making our reenactment, which we regard as ontologically double: simultaneously “the original object ” and an entirely new entity. We discuss our methodology of tending the archive—an activist strategy operating at the borders of archival and artistic practice. And we suggest that reenactment, as a creative practice, can be a way of “reaching through to the object ” which sheds new light on the artwork and its cultural-technological context.

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.

Text: Louise Curham
Presenter: Laura Hindmarsh
About: Louise’s poster ‘Caring for live art that eludes digital preservation’ was accepted for iPres 2016, published in the Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Digital Preservation. Rather than travel all the way from Canberra, Louise asked Laura to ‘stand in’ for her at the conference. Before the hour poster session, poster authors each gave a one minute talk about their poster. Below is the text that Laura based her one minute on.
The published conference proceedings are here http://www.ipres2016.ch/frontend/organizers/media/iPRES2016/_PDF/IPR16.Proceedings_4_Web_Broschuere_Link.pdf (p. 266-7) and the poster is here https://flic.kr/p/Nrphaz (5MB, size AO).

Report commissioned by dLux Media Arts under a National Library of Australia Community Heritage Grant. The report uses Significance 2.0 to determine the significance of the archives of dLux. The archives include two predecessor organisations the Sydney Super 8 Film Group (SS8FG) and the Sydney Intermedia Network (SIN). The archives include audiovisual works by artists, early digital media art, video and film artworks and some sound works. They also include the documents and other paper and photographic items associated with the work of the organisation over its life since the mid 80s. The report was commissioned by dLux director Tara Morelos and contributors include Sarah Van Der Peer and Giorgia Gakas, Museum Studies intern from the University of Sydney. Sections draw heavily on the work of Bob Percival.

This poster outlines my research on strategies of re-enactment to keep alive artworks that rely on performance. While digital documentation for some of these works circulates, the live nature of the works means they evade meaningful digitisation. In an artist/archivist collaboration, Teaching and Learning Cinema, myself and colleague Dr Lucas Ihlein have evolved three principal ways to bring these works from the original artists through to future generations – direct engagement with the original artist, extensive documentation of the re-enactment process and the formulation of new 'expressive' instructions. This approach resonates with a newly ignited discussion in Australia about how the conservation profession can effectively reach beyond institutions to communities. This work suggests that empowering communities to find their own solutions to intergenerational transmission means the process of preservation becomes part of the cultural product, a preservation of doing.