Through Some Trick of Nature It Appears: From Proto-Cinema to Expanded Cinema Matt Rossoni Film Studies Undergraduate Thesis Advisor: Dr. Tobias Nagl Second Reader: Dr. Janelle Blankenship April 2013 Rossoni 2 Acknowledgments I would like to thank both Tobias Nagl and Janelle Blankenship for guiding me through this thesis. More importantly, they have had more influence on my academic career than anyone else, as the subjects of this study demonstrate, and without them it would truly not be possible. Though it’s unlikely he will ever read this, I would also like to thank Bruce McClure for first exposing me to expanded cinema. When I asked you if you would be willing to send me video recordings of more of your performances, you said you would expect nothing less than an entire book. I’m afraid a few paragraphs will have to do. See you in Windsor Bruce! Title page image: a biunial lantern, taken from Ceram, 47. Rossoni Table of Contents Introduction 4 Chapter One – Expanded Showmanship 14 Chapter Two – Cinema Without Borders 38 Chapter Three – Black Box, White Cube, and the Proscenium Arch 79 Conclusion 109 Endnotes 114 Bibliography 135 Filmography 143 3 Rossoni 4 Introduction The first encounter I had with expanded cinema was in 2010 at the Media City International Film and Video Festival in Windsor, Ontario. It was my first time attending the festival at a time when I was very inexperienced and uninformed about avant-garde cinema. Most of what I had seen and read about were canonical avant-garde films like those of Duchamp, Eggeling, Deren, Brakhage, and Anger, and I knew practically nothing about the contemporary experimental scene, including the names of its ‘major players.’ A friend who had attended the festival in prior years was feverishly excited about one Bruce McClure, an artist from Brooklyn. When I entered the theatre to watch McClure’s program, I saw a large table wedged over-top the seats near the back of the auditorium. On it were three 16mm projectors, a sound board, and a dazzling array of guitar pedals. I was fascinated by the set-up and took a seat just behind the table. What followed – Through Some Trick of Nature It Appears – was like nothing I had ever experienced before. Positive and negative images of birds pulsated on the screen with a near-deafening percussive yet minimal beat. My concentration shifted between the images on-screen and Bruce standing behind the table, with a small flashlight held in his mouth, illuminating the soundboard while his fingers probed the switches. Only later did I discover that McClure’s performance was not an anomaly, that there was in fact a rich, sophisticated, and exciting history of live cinema. Despite its age, maturity, and widespread recognition amongst art and academic circles, expanded cinema is still a lesser-known subject whose full history is yet to be Rossoni 5 discovered and written. The 2011 anthology Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film, published by Tate Publishing, is an excellent and comprehensive guide to understanding this reclusive history: but it is only a launching point. There is still a great deal of work to be unearthed and examined from a number of different points-of-view. The term “expanded cinema” first became popularized in the mid-1960s in conjunction with the multimedia performances given by Stan Vanderbeek and Carolee Schneemann. Starting in 1964 Jonas Mekas regularly wrote about “absolute,” or as he would soon call it, “expanded” cinema in his Village Voice column. In 1970 Gene Youngblood published his influential book Expanded Cinema, the first extended survey on the subject and the first to consider video as an art form. While many, if not most of the artists who emerged in the 1960s whose work we now recognize as “expanded cinema,” were unaware of the term, it is now a highly visible and separate category. Film festivals regularly encourage calls for expanded cinema, multiple projection, and projection performances, or other kinds of live-based events. In 1973, a major exhibition at the National Film Theatre entitled “the Festival of Independent Avant-Garde Film” featured important “expanded” artists like Malcolm Le Grice, Annabel Nicolson, the duo Wilhelm and Birgit Hein, Gill Eatherly, William Raban, and Ken Jacobs. 1976 saw the first festival dedicated solely to this type of filmmaking, the Festival of Expanded Cinema held at the ICA in London, which featured the likes of Guy Sherwin, Lis Rhodes, Ian Kerr, Raban (again) and Nicky Hamlyn. Now in its 7th year, “Mono No Aware” is an annual expanded cinema festival held in Brooklyn. Clearly expanded cinema has carved out its own niche within critical avant-garde discourse and practice, though in many ways it is easier to say what expanded cinema might be rather than what it is. Rossoni 6 To propose an exact definition for this mode of cinematic practice would suggest drafting a number of criteria or conventions that a piece must meet in order to be considered expanded cinema. If it were at all possible the parameters would need to be exceedingly loose so as to incorporate theatre, idiosyncratic projector machines, musical instrumentation, installation art, and paracinematic works in which no film or video is involved. Expanded cinema, then, is a highly inclusive umbrella term for live and/or environmental configurations with “the idea of cinema” at their core. 1 A.L. Rees summarizes the apparent frustration that can arise and hinder a straightforward historiographical framework. He writes, “’[e]xpanded cinema’ is an elastic name for many sorts of film and projection event[s]. It is notoriously difficult to pin down or define. At full stretch, it embraces the most contradictory dimensions of film and video art, from the vividly spectacular to the starkly materialist.”2 The colossal multimedia imagery bombardment in Vanderbeek’s Movie-Drome or Jordan Belson’s infamous “Vortex Concerts” stand in high contrast to the ‘analytical and primal’ screenings in the UK by Filmaktion or the deconstructive and at times ironic Dada-esque performances by Peter Weibel and VALIE EXPORT in Vienna. Historically expanded cinema has been summoned as a way to deconstruct and reconfigure traditional ways of viewing cinema. According to EXPORT, it is “the expansion of the commonplace form of film on the open stage or within a space, through which the commercial-conventional sequence of filmmaking – shooting, editing (montage) and projection – is broken up . . .”3 In this way it bears strong resemblance to structural or structural-materialist film, though expanded cinema arguably moves beyond the formal interrogation of film material and the subjective processes to encompass the Rossoni 7 entire cinematic dispositif that EXPORT mentions, but more specifically it also includes elements like the screen (often more than one), seating, location of the projector, source of sound, and the source of the images themselves. In her 1970 programme notes “Free Form Recollections of New York” Schneemann describes a key transitional period of art and culture in New York. Breaking away from immobile forms like painting, artists from many different backgrounds in the 1960s commonly began using cinema in combination with other media. Rather than film’s traditional use as a fixed product, these artists employed film for its tactile, live, and ”kinetic” qualities.4 Apart from Schneemann’s own work, contemporary manifestations of this tendency included: the theatrical plays of Robert Morris; Robert Whitman’s Happenings; USCO; the Judson Church Dancers; the Fluxus concerts of La Monte Young; and performances by Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik. Outside of the US another major centre for excursions in expanded cinema was in England, centered particularly around the London Filmmakers Co-operative in London. In Britain more than in the US, early video materialized alongside more structuralmaterialist ideas and paved the way for the introduction of cinema into the gallery. The idea of cinema as living pictures that many of the works discussed here invoke, provides a second important framework of this thesis. I explore the parallels and re-chartings between expanded cinema and historical predecessors that existed before 1895, the debut of the Lumière Cinématographe, as well as the aesthetic and perceptual changes brought about in conjunction with cinema in the early years of modernism. Tom Gunning argues that both early and experimental cinema offer alternatives to mainstream commercial film and its tedious, rehashed formal syntax.5 I attempt to show that the Rossoni 8 same can be said for pre-cinematic works and expanded cinema. In proto-cinema we find alternate ways to display or exhibit images that fundamentally differ from the standard presentation in a film auditorium. In the first chapter, “Expanded Showmanship,” I look at the contextual similarities between magic lantern culture and projector performances that first arose in the early 1970s, notably in the work of Ken Jacobs and his Nervous System and Nervous Magic Lantern. Projector performances are live events in which the artist controls a projector (or array of projectors) to manipulate the imagery. For instance, the French group Metamkine often use mirrors to alter and scatter the projector’s light beam. Chance, spontaneity, and improvisation are integral factors in the investigations of these works. Yet there is also the sense that the artist knows exactly what he/she is doing; that while their performance is open to new directions on every occasion, the artist has a rehearsed choreography in mind and a good idea of what they want to accomplish. Nicky Hamlyn’s 4 X Loops (first performed in 1974) is a good example of this tendency. The “film”6 uses four projectors with a looping “X” intermitted with clear stock. The “X”s can be arranged in a number of ways so that they align into larger pattern structures, such as a straight diagonal line or an over-lapping cube grid. Hamlyn necessarily rearranges each projector one at a time. Spectators anticipate the next pattern, and once the third projector is in alignment one can usually deduce what it will be. Still, the full realization doesn’t take effect until he has completed the configuration. Hamlyn creates a wonderful sense of improvisation, all the while the “X”s have a finite number of possible permutations. Rossoni 9 Nicky Hamlyn, performing 4 X Loops at the Camden Arts Centre in 2004. Similarly, magic lanternists controlled painted and/or photographic slides in front of a live audience with their experienced and talented hands. Eventually technologies improved to the point where lanternists could create complex dissolving views and create the sensation of movement. When a lanternist begins the show, there is the sense of unfolding into uncharted territory (the way narrative does) while also having a predetermined, rigid structure administrated by the seasoned practitioner. Jacobs referenced the magic lantern explicitly in 2000 when he stopped performing his “Nervous System” to focus his attention on the “Nervous Magic Lantern.” Controlling images at the site of their exhibition seems increasingly important in today’s digital world, and it is no coincidence that there are more artists incorporating projector performances into their repertoire. Films can be distributed globally online with great ease, transporting the finished product further and further out of the hands of its maker. While projector performances certainly rearticulate fundamental ways of viewing and exhibiting cinema, they are still predominantly exhibited as single-screen works. Rossoni 10 McClure’s multiple projectors, for instance, are layered overtop one another to form a composite image. If we take a step back, even Hamlyn’s 4 X Loops, while using four projectors and moving in and out of layered patterns, is still cast upon a frontal, contained surface. There is a profound difference when these images move from a single frontal screen or surface and onto the walls around you, activating the entire space around the spectators as a potential screen. In chapter two, I examine the relationship between immersive multi-projector cinematic environments, like Vanderbeek’s infamous MovieDrome, and the panorama, a 360° painting developed by the Irish-born painter Robert Barker in 1787. The panorama was designed to situate spectators in an inescapably realistic simulation of a particular view, often of nature or a modern metropolis, like London. A visit to a nautical scene by Mrs. Sarah Earle, a chambermaid, was recorded in Joan!!! A Novel (1796): “The panorama did not suit her taste for having been once frightened on the water, her nerves were affected; but she was really astonished how the sea, for the sea it was, and the water was salt, could come up to Leicester Fields: she supposed it ran at the back of the houses; - she thought that river had been the Thames – at least so she had been told.”7 Her story testifies to the strength of the illusion that mesmerized audiences. This was also the reason many were critical of the panorama. It was seen as too convincing, and critics like Hester Piozzi detested the simplicity of the illusion and the public’s willingness to buy into it; “a mere deception,” she wrote, “ad captandum vulgus [to attract the rabble].”8 The diorama emerged as the descendent of the panorama, and already the narrowing of the gaze towards more directional imagery is apparent. Whereas in the panorama spectators are free to roam around the viewing platform and choose what Rossoni 11 to look at, the diorama made viewers immobile, part of a mass seated audience where the views were mobilized using a system of pulleys and rollers. The creation of immersive cinema environments counters this narrowing effect that commercial cinema so fundamentally depends upon. In comparing the above comments on the panorama’s realism with remarks on Belson’s “Vortex Concerts,” for instance, we can already note both similarities and important differences. “The impact of “Vortex” on the average audience is extreme. The experience of being engulfed and overwhelmed by the patterns of sound and light seems to produce both awe and exhilaration. Laughter, applause, oh’s and ah’s are frequent during the performance”;9 “Especially magnificent was the sense of space – limitless, incomprehensively vast, and awe-inspiring in its implications.”10 The two characteristics of ideas the panorama and expanded environments – realistic illusion and cinematic engulfment – converge in contemporary cinema, with increasingly sophisticated 3-D technologies, sound orchestration, and virtual reality. It is important to trace this lineage back to its roots so as to maintain awareness of the social and political history embedded in such immersive realities, a project that lays outside the scope of this thesis. In chapter three I arrive at a historical destination within the early years of cinema. The development of modernism, theoretically often associated with Clement Greenberg and notions of medium specificity, largely eschewed earlier late-19th century experiments with synaesthesia and synaesthetic art, such as colour organs. As I noted earlier, one of the projects of expanded cinema is the deconstruction of the cinematic dispositif; isolating elements like the screen, the projector’s beam of light, etc. In this way it operates in the theoretical framework of Greenberg et. al.. However, this notion is Rossoni 12 complicated by expanded cinema in regards to other media and the formation of hybrid forms. How, then, can we explain the persistence of medium specificity within a postmodern, “post-medium” culture?11 In particular, I focus on two of the most important considerations in the history of expanded cinema: the addition of theatrical performance and sculpture, which combined with the 1960s video boom resulted in the emergence of installation art. The modes of expanded cinema discussed in the first two chapters are still, by and large, contained onto surfaces; theatre and sculpture give cinema a body. These other mediums add a level of tangibility and extension of live bodies out of the two-dimensional that is remarkably different from these other forms of expanded cinema. Here one is reminded of Buster Keaton’s infamous action in Sherlock Jr. (1924). The projectionist, having fallen asleep, walks up past the orchestra pit and up on the stage in front of the screen and enters the perilous diegesis. Artists like Schneemann, Gill Eartherly, Guy Sherwin, David Hall, and Tony Sinden, perform the opposite movement of Sherlock Jr.. Rather than stepping into the screen, they break out of it, towards and around the audience rather than merely in front of them. It is a dual function that shows us not only what cinema can be, but in comparison, what commercial cinema has denied. While my focus on pre- cinema and early modernism is by no means an original point of departure, previous writings, many of which are in the Tate anthology, are limited in terms of their historical scope. Yet an in-depth chronological study on expanded cinema seems chimerical. Would such a study include references to the Mareorama and Hale’s Tours, or László Moholy-Nagy’s kinetic sculptures? While I cannot lay claim to representing or mapping all of these possibilities and historic occurrences, I hope to provide an alternative framework for the discussion and analysis of Rossoni 13 expanded cinema that might be useful for further elaborations by other scholars and artists. Rossoni 14 Chapter One - Expanded Showmanship In an essay on the relation between early cinema and American avant-garde film, Tom Gunning notes there is an “immense gulf separating the technical, economic, and ideological aims of the pioneers of cinema from those of the avant-garde films made in the U.S. since the 1940s.”12 Arguably, the “immense gulf” between pioneering cinema and expanded cinema is even greater.13 Pre-cinematic optical machines are often, if only retrospectively, described using terminology like “clunky” and “primitive,” whereas the concept that Youngblood put forth (and has since been “expanded” on) emanated from the burgeoning complexity of video art in combination with analogue and the incorporation of other mediums toward a heightened stimuli. Nevertheless, if “one of the projects of the avant-garde is to return to the origins of cinema,” as the abundance of rich work on the matter no doubt indicates, “that return can only be historically aware.”14 This is to say that in the long period of optical devices and methods, starting with Athanasius Kircher’s treatise Ars magna lucis et umbrae in 1646 and up to and beyond the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe of 1895, the seemingly unbridgeable relations between expanded and proto-cinema are at their most evident. A prevalent practice within expanded cinema is the culture of projector performances, where the projector’s capabilities and the apparatus itself is put on display, displacing the traditional hierarchy of predetermined images as the primary signifier. Projector performance artists are the contemporary reincarnation of magic lanternists. Both deliver a live and ephemeral array Rossoni 15 of images, though the logical imperatives of each are essentially reversed, moving to and away from cinema proper. In the 1970s, apparatus theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry, Stephen Heath, and Christian Metz traced the origins of narrative spectatorship back to an ideology formed in Renaissance perspective,15 embroiling proto-cinematic projection devices within that historical trajectory.16 The avant-garde, however, is resistant to such claims of disembodied spectatorship and ‘transcendental idealism.’17 The effect sought out by apparatus theorists cites an incredibly complex and varied theorization of spectatorship dependent on narrative film language. Spectatorship in pre- and early cinema, however, was relatively simple. The “apparent realism of the image makes it a successful illusion, but one understood as an illusion nonetheless;” a “vacillation between belief and incredulity.”18 Expanded cinema moves beyond and outside of illusion to create an embodied level of spectatorship that actively incorporates the viewer into the space of reception. In comparing both practices of projector art and performance (proto-cinematic projection and avant-garde projector performances) it becomes apparent that both operate in modes of image-making that lay outside of apparatus and suture theory as well as evading the fixed objectification as a commodity or document. There were a tremendous number of new vision machines created in the 18th century that were revised in the 19th century that like expanded cinema offered new ways of seeing. It was the age where tinkerers and inventors were also showmen. Within this historiographical framework we find the remarkably consistent element of light-play and screen address, what Charles Musser calls “a history of screen practice.”19 This includes Rossoni 16 the biunial and triunial magic lantern, phantasmagorias, stereopticons, animatographs, and a number of other apparatuses and methods of casting images onto a screen. And while the most prevalent way of looking at these vision-machines is to analyze how they manipulated illusion to create ‘realism,’20 equal weight must be brought to the fact that these illusions were imperfect.21 There were always gaps in space and time that brought about a certain disillusion in the spectator, despite their respective willingness to ‘buy in’ and accept the illusion of what they were seeing; “the illusionistic arts of the nineteenth century cannily exploited their unbelievable nature, keeping a conscious focus on the fact that they were only illusions.”22 Gunning reminds us elsewhere that this awareness and simultaneous delight in trickery, in spectacle, was the compositional force behind cinema’s earliest years up until around 1903-1904, a period of filmmaking he has termed “the cinema of attractions.”23 In his analysis, Gunning notes that both early film and avant-garde cinema have their own respective styles that differ from commercial film. This “difference” in early cinema, however, “is not the same ‘difference’ by which the American avant-garde separates itself from commercial cinema.”24 One must take into account “not the similarity these later films bear to the audience engagement of early films . . .” but rather “the difference both forms share with classical narrative [film].”25 The methods by which both pre- and expanded cinema generate disillusion are indeed rather polemic, with the former undergoing dynamic technological transformations, eventually becoming cinema, while the latter combats the normative, stagnate state that developed out of those transformations. Experimentation with new methods and ways of viewing images was the Rossoni 17 norm before cinema, a project later resumed and recontextualized by expanded cinema artists. A number of expanded cinema practitioners appropriate the forms, images, and methodologies of pre-cinema in a conscious act, and equally, there are those who do so unconsciously. The former acknowledge their fascination with early forms of visual technology and pay tribute to it in their own work.26 Ken Jacob’s Nervous Magic Lantern, for instance, recreates the magic lantern apparatus while subverting its inclination to more realistic depictions with abstract-expressionist imagery. On the other side there are expanded cinema artists like Stan Vanderbeek, Carolee Schneemann, David Hall, who make no reference to proto-cinema. Their reappropriation of certain characteristics paralleling their distant, if unspecified and unacknowledged early cinematic predecessors, thus becomes an unconscious act. As I mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, while a definition of expanded cinema seems analytically impractical (this would imply a ‘reductive’ analysis, antithetical to the very term ‘expanded’ cinema) given the vast and disparate approaches the mode encompasses, there are to an extent, shared concerns, forms, and methods that appear in a number of expanded works.27 The basic cinematographic apparatus, dating back to the Camera Obscura, is the projection of images in a darkened room onto a surface. Expanded cinema interrogates and deconstructs this basic arrangement. On one hand what is emphasized is the act of image projection, and on the other, the space of the auditorium or viewing arena.28 Much longer than the history of cinema proper is that of the magic lantern and the showmen who operated them. These showmen were responsible for the mastery of the apparatus and the casting of images. The trade Rossoni 18 demanded itinerancy, with lanternists often traversing national borders, even continents. The theatrical space of reception was actually less important than the projection of images (however, one might argue that the notion of unfixed space, both public and private, attests to the incredulity of the spectator, their eagerness for entertainment). Artists who focus on the mechanics of projection via projector performances and modified machines do nevertheless affect the space of reception. Space is posited as an active element, rather than the black space of the auditorium that seats the audience and becomes forgotten during the development of intense identification between screen diegesis and the passive, or ‘immobile’ spectator. But there is a pronounced difference between spatial activation by those who stand behind the projector, like Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, and an immersive environment like Vanderbeek’s Movie-Drome. Screens are not ‘windows’ to another world, but compositional exponents. Projection artists are the contemporary reincarnation of the “showmen” and “lecturers” of cinema’s past. Their work can be single or multi-screen, though the perception of liveliness and presence of showmanship is generally greater when the work is single-screen, the apparatus is revealed, or when the live manipulation of multiple screen images is evident.29 As Charles Musser points out, Kircher’s 1646 Ars magna lucis et umbrae was not the first description of a magic lantern, though it does occupy an important place in the history of “screen practice.”30 Through a complex system of lenses Kircher was able to reflect natural sunlight off of painted mirrors, which contained both text and image, and onto a wall in a darkened room. He called the reflecting device a “catoptric lamp.” When Rossoni 19 more than one lamp was used motion could be created, and when combined with text and colour created theater-like scenes, usually of satires of tragedies. Important to Kircher’s methodology was his “militant stance toward the demystification of the projected image.”31 Kircher made available a book that both described and illustrated the scientific mechanisms used to project the images, so that they were understood to be “art” rather than magic.32 He also urged other exhibitors to do the same, lest they be accused of witchcraft and tortured to death. Knowledge allows for entertainment, whereas ignorance can be frightening. A cross diagram of Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae (1646). By 1659 the Dutch scientist Christiaen Huygens developed a much simpler version of Kircher’s catoptric lamp, called the lanterne magique. The commercial development of Huygen’s device was left to Thomas Walgensten, a Dane living in Paris. The Huygens/Walgensten model differed from Kircher’s in a number of ways. Its illumination came from a flame inside the lantern rather than the sun, it used painted Rossoni 20 glass rather than painted mirrors, and it was portable. Thus, Walgensten initiated the tradition of the itinerant magic lantern showman, a tradition that would continue well past the debut of cinema in the aid of the lecturer, until conventions allowed the cinema to ‘speak for itself’ without the need for external exposition. In the 19th century multiple lanterns (biunial and triunial devices) and sophisticated dissolving views were often combined to create composite images and to bring movement to the screen.33 For instance, one lantern may provide a background of a seaport while the other projects a ship that “slides” across the background and exits the harbor. Travel and tourism made for popular lantern performances,34 but the lantern was also used at London Polytechnic and other venues as an educational/instructional device.35 Although some magic lantern performances used rear projection, usually a narrator or lecturer would stand beside the screen and address the audience. Historically, revealing the means of production has been associated with more sophisticated audiences. Mr. Child, a lanternist who many claim to have invented the dissolving view around 1843, used rear projection behind a transparent screen when performing his dissolving views. Concealing both himself and the apparatus behind a curtain ensured viewers would not see the image’s light source and decreased the chance of spectators noticing any breaks in the illusion, such as the black bottom line that flashes when quickly removing a slide; “[t]his is the whole art and mystery of the dissolving views.”36 When Child performed at the London Polytechnic, however, he moved the lantern to the same side as the screen and only used one lantern, suggesting that the self-referential flashes of switching slides was not taken as a distraction. Rossoni 21 In the case of travel shows, the lecturer would identify the locations and provide, at times, historical background information. Or the lecturer would verbally connect the otherwise diverse images and form narratives out of them. Music could also accompany a performance, as background gestation to the lecturer. A variety of materials were therefore required for an enjoyable performance, harnessing elements of liveliness (narrator, musician, and the lanternist) with a constant flowing set of prepared images to create an illusion of space and temporality.37 The basic magic lantern apparatus was a catalyst for a vast number of lantern variants that became rapidly more elaborate. As early as 1834, Henry Langdon Childe introduced the lantern to dissolving views. Double and triple lanterns emerged, allowing for increased visual complexity. The development of the albumen and collodion processes in the late 1840s made it possible for a photographic image to adhere to a glass surface, bringing the far superior reproduction of photographic images to the lantern, now commonly referred to as the Stereopticon,38 instead of hand-painted slides.39 There were countless new devices created to aid the lanternist in manipulating the slides while also increasing the speed of projection, including: flexible bands (William Speirs Simpson, 1893), cassette trays (William Henry Duncan, 1884), chained stacks (Edmund Hudson, 1894), and William Friese-Greene’s automated lantern, which could project four or five pictures a second.40 The magic lantern became an incredibly elaborate operation. In 1894, for instance W.R. Hill’s production, Gabriel Hill, featured a single scene of a churchyard that required fifteen combined effects.41 Hence, what astonished early spectators of the Cinématographe was not the presence of movement, which they had long been accustomed to from the cultural Rossoni 22 tradition of magic lanterns, but the detail of movement in time, what Dai Vaughn refers to as “spontaneities.”42 This observation has lead Deac Rossell to poignantly state: “[c]inema did not being motion to the screen; it brought the duration of motion.”43 Yet the limitations of the magic lantern led to some of the most dazzling variants and creative reconfigurations in cinematic pre-history. As mentioned previously, this was an era of rapid technological experimentation. A telling figure, though taken from a somewhat later era, is that “[b]etween 1895 and 1910 over 200 patents in America, France, Germany, and England proposed elements of optical projection systems.”44 Most of the inventors created them with commercialism and entertainment in mind, and subsequently most of the inventors operated the mechanisms personally. The human element was by necessity a pivotal part of any given magic lantern performance. The technology demanded that every act be “live,” hand manipulated by a showman, who stood behind the lantern and controlled the imagery with his hands. The effectiveness of any given performance was dependent on the skill of the showman, whose reputation could reach, to an extent, that of star status. As Rossell notes, “[m]any professional touring lanternists painted their own slides, and the quality can frequently be astonishing. The reputation of a lanternist depended as much on the merit of his brushwork and visual interpretation as on an ability to manipulate special effects in the lantern.”45 Consequently the showman was an artist in numerous ways. Not only did the handling of the lantern require artistic capabilities but a number of lanternists also created their own subject material. Likewise, the first edition of a publication entitled The Magic Lantern, from 1 November 1822, features a short story entitled “The Gallant-ee Show.” A father, having been to a magic lantern performance, is questioned by his two daughters Rossoni 23 and wife what the show was like, and if he will take them. ““Is it a good thing?”” his daughter asks. “”That depends on the showman,”” he says, “”if he is a man of spirit, selects proper subjects, and handles them well, much rational amusement, and no little instruction, may be gathered from such an exhibition.””46 Each performance possessed a sense of ephemerality. The combination of live manipulation with self-made slides (though the manufacture and selling of slides became a huge enterprise) resulted in a performance that was unique and subject to chance, no matter how many times the lanternist repeated and perfected each respective routine. Contemporary showmen often revel in this sense of liveliness, what Peggy Phelan calls an “ontology of performance,” to the point where they refuse documentation of their work.47 These artists, including Ken Jacobs, Bruce McClure, the duo of Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, Alex MacKenzie, Ben Russell, and the French group Metamkine, emerge as contemporary “showmen.” They operate and control the imagery by manipulating either the projector itself, or the beam of light emanating from the lens. Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, in their 2008-present piece Untitled rig an electric humidification system to produce mist in front of glass panes situated in front of two 16mm projectors. The resulting imagery is a constantly shifting, directionless monochromatic blur on screen. In his 2008 dual piece, The Black and the White Gods, Ben Russell commands two custom-made 16mm projectors with such physical intensity, starting and stopping the motors, waving his hand back-and-forth in front of the lens, that he reminds one of a kind of DJ, but with light. That he situates himself and the projectors at the front of the auditorium only makes the “show” all the more engaging. His role of Rossoni 24 showman48 is so strong that one is obliged to consider what to pay attention to, the flickering images on screen, or Russell himself. Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder perform Untitled at the 2012 25 FPS Festival. Untitled (Gibson, Recoder, 2012). Rossoni 25 Ben Russell performing The Black and the White Gods at the 25 FPS IFF in 2011. In the lowerright corner one can see Russell operating the projectors. Ben Russell, The Black and the White Gods. Rossoni 26 Unlike Gibson and Recoder, who develop new manipulative projector configurations for each piece, and Russell, whose forays into performance are far less frequent than his single-screen projects, Bruce McClure’s work is more consistent and characteristic.49 His performances involve multiple 16mm projectors (typically anywhere from two to four) running loops, often with coloured gels and metal plates with shapes cut out of them. As I have experienced on numerous occasions at the Media City International Film Festival, in Windsor, Ontario, a deafening electronic audio track is patched through a number of guitar pedals that allows him precise control over a wide availability of distorted sounds. Crucial to a number of McClure’s performances, and which provides another level of chance and ephermerality, is the bi-packing of the film projector. The added strain of two film loops forces the claw mechanism to simply grab at whatever sprocket holes it can. The selection of compositions is therefore out of McClure’s hands and left up to the machine, and exact repetition becomes impossible, unlikely, or at the very least, unnoticeable. In the program notes he provided at a 2006 performance at Ocularis, in Brooklyn, New York, McClure writes: This presentation will consist of works that articulate the willful glow of the projector bulb while shunning the cozening effect of cinema. The camera is now off our backs and film, typically an intermediate agent, takes on a new identity. Here the projector will be our dutiful companion perched over our shoulders motoring through time with the beat of intermittent light. Film, once criticized as out of focus, becomes recognizable. The projector, whose machinery, optics, and sound system have been shunted to the wayside, re-enter the theater not as cinema’s silent and faithful servant, but as a star. 50 The projectionist is usually seen (or more literally, not seen at all) as a neutral technician rather than a tradesman or performer; one who administers the film but does not shape it. Rossoni 27 Though McClure is much more likely referencing commercial cinema than magic lantern culture, there is nevertheless a historical narrative being deployed. The projector “reenters” the theatrical space, suggesting both physical relocation and historical lineage to when the magic lantern was placed in front of the screen. Neither Gibson, Recoder, nor McClure have made any claims of drawing inspiration from magic lantern culture. Yet their manipulation of the image in a live setting harbors back to the traveling magic lantern showmen (after all, these artists must travel to present their work) who hold the power of the image in their hands. McClure’s acclamation of the projector as a “star” testifies to a conviction that he shares with many, that, in the words of Canadian filmmaker Keewatin Dewdney, “the projector, not the camera, is the filmmaker’s true medium.”51 Bruce McClure performing with bi-packed 16mm projectors at Rotterdam IFF, 2007. Rossoni 28 Here it might be useful to acknowledge analogous experiments in music. Though most often associated with 1990s DJ culture, turntablism - the use of a turntable as an instrument - has a much longer history dating back to the 1920s. Laszló Moholy-Nagy, a Hungarian-born artist and theorist, proposed the following in 1922: “Since it is primarily production (productive creation) that serves human construction, we must strive to turn the apparatuses (instruments) used so far only for reproductive purposes into ones that can be used for productive purposes as well.”52 To this end he proposed notching different sized grooves into phonograph records by hand. Doing so would produce sound without external instruments or an orchestra, carrying “no prior acoustic message.”53 In the 1930s, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, and John Cage fulfilled Moholy-Nagy’s vision. For instance, in his 1939 piece, Imaginary Landscape, No. 1, Cage manipulated variable speed turntables and studio test recordings to create a fusion of sirens, percussion instrumentation, and strummed piano strings. In the 1940s Pierre Schaffer created musique concrete by producing rhythmic loops and sharp contrasts through sampling train sounds in his first piece, Étude aux chemins de fer (Railroad Study) (1948). Inspired by William S. Burroughs’ tape cut-ups, Throbbing Gristle invented industrial music in 1976, and were soon followed by bands like Cabaret Voltaire and Einstürzende Neubauten in Berlin. Most of these artists were either working in the parameters of high modernism, or at the least were inspired by them. These techniques, however, were brought into the realm of pop culture by way of disco, dub reggae, and the birth of HipHop music. In 1974 DJ Kool Herc isolated breakbeats and extended their duration using two turntables and two records at once. This is widely considered the most important development in the history of HipHop, as all Rossoni 29 subsequent developments in the genre were based off of it. Scratching was another key innovation, discovered accidentally by Grand Wizard Theodore in 1976 and popularized by his mentor, Grandmaster Flash. As John Oswald explains, a “phonograph in the hands of a “HipHop/scratch” artist who plays a record like an electronic washboard with a photographic needle as a plectrum, produces sounds which are unique and not reproduced – the record player becomes an instrument.”54 By moving the needle against its proper direction, Flash et. al. reappropriated the record player and initiated a new form of African-American modernism. The term “turntablism,” however, was not introduced until 1995 by DJ Babu, a member of the Beat Junkies crew. For Babu, the term signified the difference between DJs and turntablists. The former is someone who merely plays already existing records, while the former samples these records and uses them and the turntable as an independent instrument.55 The use of turntables and other music playing platforms as an instrument is comparable to the use of the film projector as the creator of images. To return to an analysis of expanded cinema and the debt it owes to pre and early cinema, let us also note that crucial to projector performances is the live experience itself. These works are as much an experiment to the artists’ themselves as they are to the spectator.56 Despite the great technological divide, both magic lanterns and projector performances necessitate live presentation. Malcolm Le Grice, in his essay “Time and the Spectator in the Experience of Expanded Cinema”, states that the effect of expanded cinema “breaks down the singularity of the experience – but more particularly breaks any assumption that there is a singular (authorized) interpretation based on matching spectator experience to artistic intention. Meaning becomes latent and unfixed”; the Rossoni 30 viewer becomes “aware of occupying the space of the presentation.”57 The visual and sonic dynamism of a McClure performance, for example, actively resists interpretation. To do so would require consideration after the film-piece has concluded and would miss the point. Its ‘meaning’ is experiential and ends when motors stops.58 Le Grice’s comment, that time in expanded cinema “breaks any assumption that there is a singular (authorized) interpretation” marks a point of historical divergence between magic lanterns and projector performances. The former were interpreted to a degree by a singular individual: the lecturer.59 But on a practical level this was necessary to make sense of and clarify narratives, travelogues, and science lectures. The magic lantern, and other optical toys, were often seen to be primarily consumed by the workingclass; lowbrow entertainment.60 The avant-garde, meanwhile, has always been criticized in the opposite direction, as appealing only to the cultural elite. The second half of Le Grice’s comment, again, that time “breaks any assumption that there is a singular (authorized) interpretation based on matching spectator experience to artistic intention,” indicates a neutralization of viewing tastes based on class structure. The local viewer who works as a waiter and the curator from England may both walk out of a McClure performance and say, “I liked the flickering images and the loud sound,” and they would both be correct. The “unfixed” nature of expanded cinema more readily opposes the “fixed” codification system of commercial film, what Noël Burch calls the “closure” of the “institutional mode of representation.”61 Burch contrasts this to what he terms the “non-closure of the PMR [primitive mode of representation],”62 a set of characteristics found in early cinema that, like Gunning’s “Cinema of Attractions,” was gradually abandoned around 1906 with the standardization of narrative film conventions. Rossoni 31 Kircher purposely sought to demystify the projected images in his Ars magna lucis et umbrae. Subsequent lanternists, however, sought to make their illusions as believable as possible, initially for entertainment purposes, and later for analytical and scientific purposes, via the chronophotographs of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey . Without the ability to recreate motion fast enough to exploit the persistence of vision, however, even the most elaborate and talented lanternists could not present images moving in real time and could not immobilize the spectator to the same degree that Baudry et. al. claim the cinema to be capable of doing. Kircher’s bold demystification, his laying out of the apparatus for all to see, was not followed suit by others, despite his urging for them to do so. A popular reconfiguration of the magic lantern was Étienne-Gaspard Robertson’s Phantasmagoria, which opened in Paris in 1797. Constructed within an abandoned Capuchin monastery, Robertson used a complex arrangement of mirrors, lenses, and concave reflectors to produce apparitions and spectres. The physical setting of the abandoned monastery only enhanced the effectiveness of his “macabre entertainment.”63 The images were projected from behind a screen, making the ‘apparitions’ appear out of nowhere, and would be accompanied by sound effects. The performances demanded several talented lanternists to project multiple slides, often producing composites, and to physically move around the rear stage, making the images move. The key difference between Robertson and many itinerant lanternists was that he moved the lantern from its traditional place in front of the screen, within the audience’s view, to behind the translucent screen. By hiding the means of production he sought to make the apparitions seem more convincing, to produce “an illusion of unmediated referentiality.”64 Rossoni 32 Yet Robertson was still forthright in dispelling the Phantasmagoria as illusion, though on a more reserved scale than Kircher.65 He would address the audience before the show began, and in one recorded instance said: That which is about to happen before your eyes, messieurs, is not frivolous spectacle; it is made for the man who thinks, for the philosopher who likes to lose his way for an instant with Sterne among the tombs. This is a spectacle which man can use to instruct himself in the bizarre effects of the imagination, when it combines vigor and derangement: I speak of the terror inspired by the shadows, spirits, spells and occult work of the magician: terror that practically every man experienced in the young age of prejudice and which even a few still retain in the mature age of reason.66 He thus sought a sophisticated audience composed of spectators who were conscious of the illusion on hand and whose enjoyment of the spectacle “played on the simultaneous realization that the projected image was only an image and yet one that . . . was real.”67 Additionally, by admitting to the audience the falsity of the image and simultaneously concealing where that image comes from, Robertson could create an element of anxiousness and anticipation in the spectator. Rossoni 33 E.G. Robertson’s Phantasmagoria, engraving from Le Magasin Pittoresque, 1845. Robertson’s model thus prefigures the concealment of the apparatus as part of the post-1906/8 “institutional mode of representation.” A dichotomy between apparatus demystification and concealment can hence be considered an important factor leading to the IMR, although usually the emphasis is placed on factors like editing techniques and camera mobility. This dichotomy resurfaces in projection-based performances, though the element of liveliness stays whether the viewer can see the artist or not. In seeing the apparatus, one is reminded of Gunning’s assertion that “[e]arly audiences went to exhibitions to see machines demonstrated . . . rather than to view films. It was the Cinématographe, the Biograph or the Vitascope that were advertised, not Le Déjeuner de bébé or The Black Diamond Express.”68 Similarly, one often attends an expanded cinema Rossoni 34 performance based on the reputation of the “showman” in conjunction with either past experiences or some kind of gained knowledge about “what they do.” Ken Jacobs offers a prominent example of this tendency; the apparatus as attraction. He has constructed a number of projector machines, which he performs with for years at a time, in which the name of the machine is also the overarching title of each performance (this is not always the case, though original/independent titles still make use of the projector). The first of these is the Nervous System, a set-up he used from 19752000. It consists of two identical motion picture film prints on two 16mm analytic or 35mm filmstrip projectors capable of advancing one frame at a time and freezing single images on screen. An exterior shutter, in the form of a spinning propeller positioned between the two projectors, is used rapidly to alternate between, blend together, the two frames by interrupting the projections with imageless intervals . . . . Using short film sequences projected as a series of stills, the Nervous System operates on the temporal and spatial difference between two near-identical film frames that are often only one frame apart from one another in filmic sequence.69 The result of the Nervous System differs with each performance. It can, for example, be single-screen, multi-screen, superimposed, etc. The first five pieces devised for the system in particular accentuate the idea of the apparatus as attraction. They are THE IMPOSSIBLE series, beginning in 1975 with THE IMPOSSIBLE: Chapter One “Southwark Fair” and ending in 1980 with THE IMPOSSIBLE: Chapter Five “The Wrong Laurel. The Nervous System typically re-works footage from early cinema, with Billy Bitzer’s 1905 film Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son appearing in three of the first five THE IMPOSSIBLE series. Importantly, Jacobs would always reveal the apparatus, leaving it visible to the audience. Rossoni 35 This branding of the apparatus also resides in Jacobs’ follow-up and revision of the Nervous System, the Nervous Magic Lantern. Immediately with the title Jacobs invokes the magic lantern. He first devised the system in 1990 and committed to it in 2000, after ceasing to perform the Nervous System. The Nervous Magic Lantern operates on the same principal as a traditional magic lantern projector: objects and transparencies, placed between a bright theater lamp and an arrangement of lenses, are projected at large scale and with no definable edges onto a projection screen or wall. An external spinning shutter, such as that used in the Nervous System, is mounted in front of the lens, introducing a heavy strobing effect that sets the “externalized” image in perpetual 3-D motion.70 Ken Jacobs, Nervous Magic Lantern at the Blackwood Gallery, 2011. Rossoni 36 Nervous Magic Lantern (Ken Jacobs, 2011). As can be seen in the pictures of Jacobs’ performance, the image well exceeds the screen. Jacobs’ screening space knows no boundaries, which in turn enhances the 3-D effect of the film and extends the imagery into the audience’s space of reception.71 In the Nervous Magic Lantern Jacobs revitalizes the spirit and physical body of the magic lantern in an unparalled manner. While others have imbued the idea both consciously and unconsciously, Jacobs has gone to the extreme by not even using film in his projector, which of course the magic lantern of the 17th-20th century could not do, unless we consider the scientific experiments of the lantern.72 While this apparatus lacks the sequential or chapter-like structure of the Nervous System, which can be seen initially as an advertisement for the machine, the Nervous Magic Lantern more readily acknowledges the tinkerer as showman by first off (and as he had done earlier), creating a machine that is entirely unique, and secondly, by creating projection material that is original and ephemeral. Whereas the Nervous System usually sampled and re-worked Rossoni 37 early films, the lantern’s abstract-expressionist and gradually transforming imagery is pure Jacobs; like lanternists who used to paint their own slides. Additionally, a performance may be shown silent or to the accompaniment of live music or field recordings. Unlike the Nervous System, however, in the Nervous Magic Lantern the apparatus is concealed from view. Jacobs does not specify why, but perhaps it has something to do with the extra hint of “magic” and wonderment that Robertson achieved with the Phantasmagoria. Conscious or not, expanded cinema artists who concentrate on isolating the projection apparatus reinvigorate the paradigm of the itinerant magic lantern showman. Both are, very often, tinkerers, those who invent or revise previous technologies to alter the act of projection. Once the apparatus is assembled, the tinkerer must travel to exhibition spaces with his machine and projection material in hand. The apparatus is often revealed, exposing its mechanics and source of imagery. The showman then projects those images and manipulates them live, by hand or with the aid of mechanical devices, to administer a sequence of images existing in ephemerality. Similarities, both conscious and unconscious, can also be found between other pre-cinematic and expanded cinema occupations, as we shall see in the next chapter. Large scale film events like the spilling over of imagery from the screen and onto the walls found in Jacobs’ Nervous Magic Lantern are still relatively contained. Rossoni 38 Chapter Two - Cinema Without Borders As I discussed in the last chapter, there are strong parallels between certain forms of precinematic optical entertainment and the projector performances of artists working in expanded cinema. This can be a conscious decision, like Ken Jacobs’ Nervous Magic Lantern performances, but more often it is unconscious and unintended. The same is true with another form of pre-cinematic art that also bears strong resemblance to forms of expanded cinema: the panorama. The panorama was a 360° painting developed by the Irish-born painter Robert Barker in 1787 and made its first exhibition, a view of Edinburgh, in London in 1799. “La nature à coup d'oeil,” as Barker called it, was a radical break with the world of traditional painting, offering viewers a virtual, immersive environment. It erupted the canvas beyond the limitations of the frame in a way that went well beyond the boundaries of even fresco painting, creating an ultra-realistic simulacrum. Hence it is often referred to as ‘painting without borders.’ The panorama’s influence on cinema is well documented.73 Technical issues aside, the panorama, like cinema, opened viewers to illusionistic representations of reality, transporting them through space and later - with the development of the moving panorama - time. One of the primary motivations of expanded cinema is activating the space of reception. The artists discussed in chapter one do this by hand-manipulating projection devices live, creating an ephemeral experience. Like the operators of the magic lantern and other projection devices, however, these artists, who often use multiple projectors, layer the images overtop one another, creating composite images. This is true not only of Rossoni 39 Bruce McClure, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, but also Jürgen Reble and the French group Metamkine. Though the notion of expanded cinema tends to be rather inclusive, a clear distinction can be made between artists working with single-screen/composite imagery and those working with multi-screens and/or the surrounding space of reception. Artists like Jordan Belson, Stan Vanderbeek, Carolee Schneemann, David Hall, Lis Rhodes, and Steve Farrer all create extended multi-screen environments reminiscent of the panorama’s immersive characterization. Tracing traditional cinema to the panorama, as numerous scholars have done, disregards one of its main features: that attendants could walk around the observation platform and decide what to look at and for how long. They were completely surrounded by images. To recall Gunning’s assertion from the first chapter, there are immense technological and socio-cultural divides between early cinema and avant-garde film. The same can be said for the panorama and multi-screen cinema. Like the panorama’s radical break with perspective and the framed painting, immersive film environments challenge traditional screening practices. At a physical level there are numerous examples of specially designed 360° cinematic screens that try to achieve an effect similar to that of the panorama. Notably, these imitations first appear shortly after the advent of cinema, which was itself responsible for the panorama’s rapid decline in popularity. At the 1900 Paris Exposition, Raoul Grimoin-Sanson introduced his ten-projector, 360° Cinéorama, which showed views on 70mm film taken from a hot air balloon. Also debuting at the Exposition was the Lumière brothers Maréorama, which simulated the view one would have from the deck of a ship. Fred Waller developed Cinerama in the 1950s, though it involved three synchronized 35mm projectors onto a 146° convex screen.74 The Walt Disney Studio was Rossoni 40 responsible for the 360° Circorama at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, and the infamous Expo ’67 in Montreal, the “fair of film,”75 featured two panoramic film displays, Carousel and Canada ‘67. One of the most iconic examples of expanded cinema in Britain is Steve Farrer’s The Machine (1975), a 360° screen utilizing one centrally located modified projector-device. But the screen itself need not be a true panorama to function as an immersive environment. Aldo Tambellini’s Black Zero (1965) for instance, uses a variety of projection devices all pointed in one general direction. He does create a number of composite effects, but his images are not placed precisely overtop one another. Rather, they intersect at odd angles that combine with various shaped images: rectangles, squares, and circles, and they are not fixed on a screen, or even a wall for that matter. Sometimes one or more images will be slanted halfway against the wall and the ceiling, or a corner in a room. Nevertheless, the effect creates an immense and entrancing visual field that is difficult to assimilate into an all-encompassing view. One of the things that the panorama – and its related successor, the Diorama76 – share with these forms of expanded cinema is that they require a specially designed, purpose-built structure. Rossoni 41 Raoul Grimoin-Sanson, Cinéorama, at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Aldo Tambellini, Black Box (1965). This image is from the artist’s Black Gate Electromedia Theatre in New York. Rossoni 42 Barker’s new form of painting required a new kind of structure for its display. The panorama “aimed to simulate as completely as possible – from the viewing platform – the experience of a given scene as though the viewer were on that very spot.”77 Stephen Oettermann, in his rigorous international study The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium describes the 19th century zeitgeist as being one by the bourgeoning bourgeois class’s fascination with travel and tourism. Industrial mechanization made doing so incredibly easier than ever before, as new forms of communication and locomotion, including the telegraph, train, steamboat, and the hot air balloon, rapidly increased the pace of modern urban life. In the wake of the industrial revolution working hours became more regulated and the accompanying accretion of leisure time, now necessary to rejuvenate the worker for the next day of work, brought about new forms of entertainment. This newly developed cultural ethos of exploration lead to an intense infatuation with the idea of “horizon,” from the ideological point of view as much from a technological, cultural, and artistic perspective. By definition the horizon was an unknown and distant place. Never before had conquering it seemed so tangible. “It is no accident”, writes Oettermann, “that the discovery of the horizon and the first successful balloon flights occurred at about the same time. One could almost believe the balloonists’ ascents were fueled by people’s cravings to experience the horizon.”78 Traveling to distant and “exotic” places may have become far easier, but to do so was both expensive and time consuming. The panorama, then, was a successful substitute for would-be travelers, a form of “armchair tourism.” Distant locales were transported into major urban centres like Paris and London, and a new painting brought about a new journey. As one observer Rossoni 43 commented, “[p]anoramas are among the happiest contrivances for saving time and expense. . . . What cost a couple of hundred pounds a half century ago, now costs a shilling and a quarter of an hour.”79 The panorama clearly satisfied the inquisitiveness of its modern audience, as evidenced by its incredible popularity worldwide. It is estimated that between 1870 and 1900, 100 million people visited the 300-400 panoramas located in Europe and North America alone.80 Technologically, the panorama offered a rapid break with artistic antecedents: a new phenomenon and form of entertainment. It broke outside of the frame and contained perspective of Renaissance painting and beyond the restrictive nature of the stage. Later on, it was able to satisfy the public’s hunger for verisimilitude while not subscribing to the decontextualization inherent in the photograph. For the illusion to be convincing there could be no breaks or distortions in the visual field. Indeed, one of the important differences between panoramic illusion and that of trompe l'oeil is that the former “lacked a visible framing device.”81 To access the panorama attendants would enter through a tunnel located beneath the viewing platform. This prevents a doorway from breaking the illusion. The viewing platform was large enough to fit a crowd of people, who could leisurely walk around the platform and ‘enjoy the view.’ The painting scene was usually of an impressive and unobstructed view of nature or a cityscape. Later popular fads combined with the rise of nationalism and resulted in a number of scenes depicting epic war battles, or other important historical moments that helped to forge the nation as an “imagined community.”82 The steps necessary to create a painting that duplicates in exact detail a free-floating view that Rossoni 44 matches how the human eye naturally perceives the same view was an exhaustive and highly complicated process. A cross-section of Barker’s panorama, 1792. Exterior view of the panorama rotunda. Rossoni 45 From the preliminary steps, which involved an artist traveling to and finding an ideal viewpoint, sketching the view onto a number of paper sheets (later daguerreotypes were used) which the painting would be based off of, to the final product took approximately one year, depending on the size of the canvas, skill of the painters, and scope of the project. Various sized canvases were erected, usually between one and two thousand square feet, but could be much larger. Anton von Werner’s Panorama of the Battle of Sedan (1883) was, for instance, over 7000 square feet.83 In the 1830s the size of the canvas became more or less stabilized at a diameter of one hundred feet and a height of forty-five to fifty feet.84 Before the bare canvas was painted it weighed approximately four tons, which doubled once painting was completed. Extreme care was taken when erecting the rotunda and hanging the canvas. Even a small ripple in the fiber could spoil the illusion. Integrated into this complex technological system was its lighting mechanism. For the traditional painter the angle of light and shading presented little problem. He simply chooses a lighting effect they like or that suits their purpose and carefully shade their subjects so as to maintain credibility of light sources contained within the picture. The panorama painting, on the other hand, must privilege its lighting source in a threedimensional manner in order to appear as naturalistic as possible. Hence certain parts of the painting will appear too bright, as if one is looking at the sun, and others too dark. To make matters more complicated, the light source on the canvas must coincide with the panorama’s physical lighting system. To solve this dilemma natural daylight illuminated the canvas through skylights hidden above the viewing platform. In keeping with the complete replication of nature the ceiling was painted to look like the sky or some kind of Rossoni 46 canopy, and hence the light emitting from outside the building was convincingly portrayed as sunlight. When viewers looked down from the platform they would see an equally realistic foreground. In some cases, objects and three-dimensional cutouts, such as trees, animals, and even human figures, would be added so as to enhance the effect.85 What I have described up to this point has largely been the physical characteristics of the painting’s supporting elements: its size and spatial layout. Even the skyline and ground can be considered additions to the main display, the detailed painting. The technology behind the painting’s illusion is considerably more complicated and carries with it a rich historical divergence whereby perspective, in the Renaissance tradition, expands to such a degree that it becomes unnoticeable. I will return to this idea later when discussing the subjective perceptual effects of multi-screens and, to borrow from Gene Youngblood, the notion of an “expanded consciousness.”86 Before I do so, however, I will return to discussing the importance of alternative exhibition sites in expanded cinema in comparison to the standard movie theatre. The conventional space of reception in commercial cinema utilizes a three-part system. The audience sits stationary in the middle with a screen in front of them where motion pictures are projected onto from behind them. Just as projection performance artists counter the notion of a film being “complete” once it leaves the cutting-room, other artists challenge the inactive space of reception that exists between the projection booth and the screen. It is thus fitting that a 2009 conference on expanded cinema held at the Tate Modern in London, England, was entitled “Expanded Cinema: Activating the Space of Reception.”87 Unlike the panorama, which necessitated a minimal diameter for Rossoni 47 the illusion to function properly, the space of an expanded cinema event need not be as strict to be considered immersive. Such events can be substantially large, like John Cage and Ronald Nameth’s fivehour inter-media event HPSCHD (1969) – which involved eleven one hundred foot screens enclosed by a ring of one hundred and twenty-five foot screens, fifty-two loud speakers, 8000 slides, and one hundred films - staged in the 16 000-seat Assembly Hall at the University of Illinois in 1969. On the other hand, implementing small spaces can be a strategy in itself, like the sonic reverberations achieved by Carla Liss in her piece Dovecoat at the 1973 Independent Avant-Garde Film Festival in London. Jonas Mekas, reporting on the festival for his ‘Movie Journal’ column in the Village Voice, wrote: “In the room, five or six 8mm projectors throwing images of doves, flying or just strutting, as seen from the depths of some well or tower – in any case, they fly in this round circle against the sky, as the sounds of the fluttering wings and cooings is reproduced in the room, from all sides.”88 John Cage and Ronald Nameth’s HPSCHD (1969) at the University of Illinois. Rossoni 48 As with many of the apparatuses created by projector performance artists, viewers attend not necessarily for a specific showing of films, but to see the constructed space itself. Many of the most prolific reoccurring multi-screen and intermedia events are referred to by the site’s name. In the 1960s Stan Vanderbeek created the Movie-Drome, a dome shaped structure that like the panorama, had to be entered via a tunnel in the middle of the floor. Beginning in 1958 Milton Cohen developed the Space Theatre, which Youngblood describes as “a rotating assembly of mirrors and prisms adjustably mounted to a flywheel, around which is arranged a battery of light, film, and slide projectors.”89 From 1957 to 1959, Jordan Belson and Henry Jacobs transformed San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium into the site of psychedelic “Vortex Concerts.” It is not so much that these artists preferred alternative spaces so much as it is they necessitated specific environments to demonstrate their respective concepts. Stan Vanderbeek standing in front of his Movie-Drome in Stony Point, New York. Rossoni 49 Interior view of the Movie-Drome. Centers: A Ritual of Alignment performed at Milton Cohen’s Space Theatre, 1969. Rossoni 50 Aside from the panorama’s primary role as a tourist attraction, it also laid claims as an educational tool. Professionals in the field of “geognosy,” the study of the earth (cartography, biology, geology, and geography), commended the panorama for its accuracy and precision. At the time of the panorama’s launch, artists were still encumbered by the idea of what an aesthetically pleasing picture should look like. Distorting and altering the view for cosmetic reasons was a difficult tendency to overcome. “Geonostic” drawings were aided by technical devices like the camera obscura or the “Claude glass,” a small convex mirror, that transferred three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional surface. Hans Conrad Escher von der Linth (1767-1823), a Swiss student and artist, describes the inherent difficulty in transitioning from artistry to scientific illustrations: Artistic considerations must be disregarded in these geognostic drawings. Art demands a perspective of distance, harmonious lighting effects, avoidance of harsh contours and all strikingly jagged forms, but the geognost has no need for the first two, while contours and jagged edges are of the greatest importance to him. The aim of a geognostic illustrator is to seek out with a telescope those lines in a distant massif that may one day provide him with information about the stratification of other massifs as yet completely unknown to him. An artist, on the other hand, must pay no attention to nearby strata with clear profiles, because they produce a harsh effect and would interfere with the aesthetically pleasing play of light and shadow.90 Information was not exclusive to only scientifically literate attendants. According to Oettermann, the panorama’s status as a “public” enterprise, rather than a private collection, necessitated changing the themes and subject matter of its exhibitions to better suit the needs of its diverse audience:91 Representations of mythological and allegorical figures comprehensible only to educated connoisseurs now gave way to realistic cityscapes, recognizable to hard- Rossoni 51 headed businessmen and even property dealers. And scenes from biblical or church history were replaced by recent political events, such as battles or sieges, that would be of interest to the average newspaper reader.92 The panorama also worked to visually supplement information and descriptions of places and events that before the 1840s could only be read about in newspapers.93 Brochures and booklets were sold as accompaniment pieces to the panorama. They contained “[a]s a rule . . . only extensive , indeed sometimes exhaustive, geographical and historical descriptions of the locale depicted.”94 Here one is reminded of the lecturers that would accompany magic lantern performances and narrate background information and/or narratives to the viewers. None of the brochures or other publications ever made any reference to or supplied information on the panorama structure itself. Again we are reminded of the important differentiation between magic lanterns that are placed in front of the screen, revealing the mechanism, and those that project from behind, concealing the apparatus from view. Historically: [t]he mimicking of the real has long been noted as a feature of “low-brow” cultural production and of popular taste. . . . Indeed, the deliberate revelation of the means used to produce the illusion has often been a defining element of more advanced art and of a more sophisticated attitude toward film and photographic media.95 It is interesting to note then, that many multi-screen systems have also laid claims as new forms of information exchange and as potential educational tools. Nowhere was this more evident than at Expo ’67. According to event staff, Expo’67 featured 5000 films, and some of the national pavilions had up to 300 films. But it was not the sheer number of films being shown that led some filmmakers to exclaim, “Expo will change film-making history more than any other event in history.”96 It was Rossoni 52 that the majority of the films, certainly the most memorable, were incorporated as specially designed architectural structures. A keen Youngblood writes: While videotape cartridges and cable television will bring conventional cinema into the home on an individual level, society will seek its communal mythic experiences in elaborate intermedia environments found today only at world expositions where the average citizen is able to experience, for a limited time, the wealth and inventiveness that is kept from him in everyday existence.97 Youngblood was not alone in his enthusiasm for such unique spectacles. Indeed, his wildly optimistic reverence for special events and their potential impact is actually less bold than some of the claims made for technologies featured at Expo. The cover of Life magazine’s 14 July 1967 edition reads “Revolution in film at Expo 67. MOVIES THAT BLITZ THE MIND.” An accompanying article by Frank Kallper makes the claim, after having been witness to various exhibitions at Expo: “[m]ost of these mixed-media devices will make their way into American culture. Theaters will have to be built especially for multiscreen shows and no school will be complete without its mixed-media auditorium.”98 Colin Low, creator of Labyrinth (1967), suggested that educational possibilities were possible but only with certain technical advancements.99 Similarly, Francis Thompson100, co-creator of We Are Young (1967), a six-screen film project, stated “[t]his could be the most powerful communications medium . . . ever devised, but it would have to be used with enormous care.”101 Thompson’s cautious advice, that multi-screen must be used with “enormous care” likely responds to the negative feedback that underachieving exhibitions drew. Austin F. Lamont commented, “[s]ome of the films showed that some film-makers failed to think out their purpose clearly, emphasizing merely the spectacular gimmick. Others failed to Rossoni 53 coordinate film structure with architects and designers.”102 The problem for these critics and filmmakers was that while many were excited about the potential of multiple screens, no one was sure how to proceed while adapting it for narrative uses. Richard Fleischer, director of the split-screen film The Boston Strangler (1968), believed that “multiple image techniques should not be used for “informational” purposes, but rather to create a mood or atmosphere.”103 Likewise, Norman Jewison, director of The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), felt that using these techniques for anything other than story-telling aides “”pulled [the audience] out of the proscenium”, an undesirable effect . . .”104 Film technologies created for Expo were predominantly being advocated as potential enhancements for narrative cinema. But there is a profound difference in the kinds of films that succeed in the mainstream market, like those by Fleischer and Jewison, and those presented at Expo. The former use multiple images within a single screen, whereas many of those commissioned for Expo feature multiple screens in specialized facilities that cannot be accommodated on a single screen. International expositions naturally spawn large projects with high investments. The public expects technological innovations to appear at such occasions. Tom Gunning observes this practice dating back to the early twentieth, including the Pan American Exposition in 1901 and the St. Louis Exposition of 1914. As mentioned previously, the 1900 Paris Exposition featured Grimoin-Sanson’s 360° Cinéorama, as well as the Lumière brothers Maréorama.105 Expo was no different. It “provided filmmakers with the opportunity (money, prestige, presentation, and so on) to work on a large scale, developing some aspect of the Expo theme, “Man and His World.”106 Rossoni 54 Francis Thompson worked with Alexander Hammid to produce We Are Young (1967), using six curved screens in a 600-seat, 12-sided auditorium. The film followed two young girls relocating to a big city, and the multiple screens were used to provide multiple angles and simultaneous coverage of them doing things like riding motorcycles and dancing at parties. The total screen area was just shy of 3000 square feet, about seven times the size of a normal commercial theatre screen, and twice that of Cinerama. Thompson had already created a number of multi-screen environments, and expressed interest in further exploring the idea of cinematic immersiveness: What I would like to see is a theatre with so great an area that you no longer think in terms of a screen: it’s the area you’re projecting on. Your images should come out of this great, completely surrounding area and hit you in the eye or go off into infinity. So you’re no longer working with a flat surface but rather an infinite volume.107 Another one of Expo’s most popular sites was Roman Kroitor’s Labyrinth that like We Are Young was funded by the National Film Board of Canada. Labyrinth, however, required a far more complex structure. It was a five-story building divided into three chambers, each of which contained a different screen concept. The first chamber, and reports suggest it as the most memorable, placed viewers in one of four vertically stacked oval balconies, surrounded by 800 speakers. A vertical screen nearly 50 feet high was fixed to the wall, while a second screen lay vertically on the floor beneath the viewing platforms. In continuance with Expo’s theme, the various films in each chamber depicted the international ascent of humankind. Thus, for instance, a montage compared a Russian astronaut being launched into space with Ethiopian ritual dancing. It should be noted that montage brings the exploration of distant spaces to the viewer, an effect Rossoni 55 similar to the “armchair tourism” that historically was essential to the panorama’s success. The two screens in the first chamber work in unison, maximizing the space by forcing viewers to look back and forth between the two. A Japanese child, appearing on the wall-screen, throws a stone toward the screen, which subsequently splashes on the floor-screen. Expo also saw the realization of the Walt Disney-backed Circle-Vision, a complete 360° field comprised of nine screens that served as the exhibition space for Canada ’67 (Robert Barclay, 1967). It was essentially a travelogue of Canadian themes and scenery. Shatnoff remarks: “Look front, look to either side, look over your shoulder, you see a scene much as if you’re in a round glass observation car. . . . [N]o matter where a viewer stands in relation to a 360° image his peripheral vision is involved . . .”108 Other observers were less enthusiastic, since one could not physically see the entire film at once. Whereas with the panorama, a static image, one can freely walk around and take time to study in detail the painting. Rossoni 56 Alexander Thompson and Alexander Hammid’s We Are Young (1967). Roman Kroitor’s Labyrinth (1967). Rossoni 57 Circle-Vision 360°. Technical innovation and popularity aside (Expo drew 50 306 648 admissions, totaling approximately 16 million different people)109 the much-lauded cinematic forms that emerged from Expo were doomed in the long run. First off, they were far too difficult and expensive to produce. 450 non-professional actors were needed to film We Are Young, which took nine months to shoot and another five to edit. Its total running time was only 22 minutes. Labyrinth took three years to produce, cost $4.5 million, and only had a running time of 45 minutes. A four-man crew shot Canada ’67 over the course of nine months, utilizing a number of land and sea vehicles, including a specially designed 450 lbs. nine-camera configuration affixed to a converted B-52 bomber.110 The other main problem was that like the panorama, the buildings were far too specialized of a structure to be easily adapted to other uses.111 In fact they may have even been less practical. How many uses can there be for a 50-foot screen on the wall with another screen on the floor below it? Three years after Expo ended, in 1968, the donated national Rossoni 58 pavilions were reopened as a public exhibition named after Expo’s theme, “Man and His World.” Interest gradually died down until the area closed permanently in 1981.112 In terms of educational claims, both Expo ’67 and Expo ’70 led John Driscoll to conduct a research experiment in 1973 on the validity of “simultaneous film learning”113 within the classroom. The experiment is a follow-up to Frank R. Hartman’s 1961 study, “Recognition Learning Under Multiple Channel Presentation and Testing Conditions.” Despite the gap between the two studies, and the incredible growth of computer technology in that brief time span, the reports are similar in their findings. Hartman finds that in certain conditions, multiple channel presentations were more effective than single channels. Simultaneously exposing students to “redundant” audio and pictorial is more effective than exposing them to only one of them. When interference between the two occurs, it is the visual that is least affected.114 “Children”, writes Driscoll, at least today’s visually conditioned children, can attend more than one screen image and more than one sound track simultaneously and still learn from them. If producers put more than one image on the screen, there is at least some evidence that what they create might be educationally useful as well as aesthetically curious.115 While multi-media clearly has a place in the modern classroom, none of the educational claims made by those who attended or worked at Expo ever materialized, despite the findings of Driscoll and Hartman. It is interesting to note, however, that computers and interactive touch-screen boards are now firmly apart of a child’s classroom. Keyboard typing has replaced lessons in cursive writing. Such ideas of “expanded” communication form a part of the much larger cultural discussion on multimedia made popular by the work of Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, and Norbert Wiener. These writers were interested in cybernetics, Rossoni 59 systems theory, and new forms of communication and media technology. According to Wiener, “[i]nformation is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it and make our adjustment upon it . . . to live effectively is to live with adequate information.”116 According to Youngblood, however, access to information, even in the “Paleocybernetic Age,” is obstructed by commercial cinema and television. A stabilized, enduring film language discourages experimentation and hence the discovery of new forms. “We . . . have found entertainment to be inherently entropic, opposed to change, and art to be inherently negentropic, a catalyst.”117 Beginning in the 1960s new forms of computer technology, increased global communication, and the increasing visibility of avant-garde/ “underground” cinema, changed humankind’s environment, creating what Youngblood refers to as the “intermedia network.”118 “The cinema isn’t just something inside the environment; the intermedia network of cinema, television, radio, magazines, books, and newspapers is our environment, a service environment that carries the message of the social organism.”119 Youngblood’s ideas of cultural entropy and advocacy for synaesthetic art echo those of Dick Higgins, an artist associated with the Fluxus movement, who in the mid-1960s saw intermedia as a liberating combination of happenings, event pieces, chance music, computer art, and mixed media films.120 Trying to adapt these kinds of technologies to suit narrative films, like most of the exhibitions at Expo did, is a difficult task. The success of commercial films that approach such considerations are few in number and limited in terms of experimentation, using multiple images but not multiple screens. Some of them date back to the silent era. Suspense is likely the earliest example of split-screen, dating back to 1913. One of the more technically innovative early films Rossoni 60 was Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1926), filmed in Polyvision: a system that uses three adjacent screens and was a precursor to Cinemascope.121 The dominant form of film and television, however, has always been single-screen. Even when rapid contrapuntal imagery is used, it still appears sequentially, and does not appear on the same picture plane. As mentioned previously, there are exceptions dating back to the 1920s, but as Friedberg notes, “these exceptions also prove the rule. The rapid and recent remaking of cinematic, televisual, and computer-based forms of imaging and display force us to note, in retrospect, the remarkable historical dominance of the single-image, single-frame paradigm as an intransigent visual practice.”122 (192) Multiple screens are ill suited to fit the needs of commercial cinema. Roman Kroiter remarked that “multi-screen is to singlescreen as poetry is to prose.”123 This is to say that multi-screen cinema actively challenges the viewer by foregrounding its mode of address. The “entropy” of commercial narrative cinema has long been sustained, and radically breaking outside its set of conventionalized tropes has historically been one of the projects of the avant-garde. Excitement over the potential of new technologies like those showcased at Expo parallels that of the panorama. Angela Miller states: “[d]espite pedagogical and educational claims routinely made by panoramic entrepreneurs and promoted through the publication of explanatory pamphlets that accompanied the panorama, their appeal . . . was that of a dramatic and sensationalized access to the real . . .”124 They both offered temporary access to spectacle as entertainment. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the panorama met its demise in the early years of cinema. It could simply not compete with the newfound popularity and spectacle of film. Its static nature was superseded by images that moved in real-time through a multitude of spaces. This occurred even before the Rossoni 61 codification of cinematic language around 1906. Six decades later, multiple screens and alternative architectural venues are once again kept at bay by the popularity of mainstream cinema, which had by this time been secured as narrative single-screen cinema. Similarly, the cultural and artistic environment that the panorama grew out of was one of deep-rooted longevity in perspective and the fine arts. Central perspective supposes a fixed point of vision of the viewer. Mathematically, all vanishing points are composed to lead the eye to meet this central spot that coincides with the horizon. To view the painting properly, to see it in correct perspective, one must stand in precisely the exact spot that aligns with this fixed point. Other techniques, such as double-framing, further enclosed the pictorial within the frame.125 Oettermann thus claims that “[t]he special quality and significance of the panorama lie not in its similarity to earlier art forms, but in its divergence from them. What may appear to resemble and build on older art has in fact acquired new meanings and functions: in more ways than one the panorama represents a break with the previous history of painting.”126 In order to create a realistic view, a substitute reality, Barker had to rid the painting of this central locus. After he opened his first panorama, Barker portrayed himself as “not just the inventor of an ingenious amusement, but as a radical artistic inventor who had swept aside the conventions of landscape painting.”127 Oettermann explains how Barker was able to do so on a technical level: Now if there is a viewing point for every point of view, this means two things for the panorama: first, all viewing points become one vis-à-vis the horizon, and second, the infinite number of points of view are matched – theoretically – by an infinite number of viewing points from which observers can look at the picture without distortion. Clearly, practical limitations will arise, but when the mathematical viewing point was actually constructed as a platform, there was room for up to 150 people to view a panoramic painting at the same time.128 Rossoni 62 Essentially, then, what Barker did was create an “infinite” number of perspectives that amass to the degree where a singular point becomes imperceptible. Doing so was revolutionary in another sense as well, in that the panorama created a democratization of perspective. There was no longer a fixed position from which to view the painting correctly.129 As Jonathan Crary summates, “[o]ne was compelled at the least to turn one’s head (and eyes) to see the entire work.”130 This factor was one of the reasons the panorama succeeded so well as a popular entertainment. It was also why it came under criticism from the cultural elite. Unlike previous art forms, no specialized knowledge was necessary to enjoy the panorama. Thus, “[i[f the power of high art was to select, idealize, and refine experience, the power of the panorama was to simulate it.”131 According to John Constable, Eugène Delacroix, and others, the panorama was not art because it too closely resembled nature. Constable wrote in 1823, “[a]rt pleases by reminding, not deceiving.”132 This criticism of unmediated reproduction would also hamper photography from being considered an art, as well as cinema thereafter. It is important here to delineate the panorama’s relation to cinema in terms of spectatorship. Like cinema, the panorama situates the viewer in front of a substitute reality. Friedberg writes: The panorama did not physically mobilize the body, but provided virtual spatial and temporal mobility, bringing the country to the town dweller, transporting the past to the present. The panoramic spectator lost, as Helmut Gernsheim described, “all judgment of distance and space” and ”in the absence of any means of comparison with real objects, a perfect illusion was given.”133 As Gernsheim indicates, part of the criticism of the panorama was rooted in a fear that that illusion “could result in an inability to perceive reality.”134 Replacing reality with representation is also a phenomenon linked to modern alienation, a defining characteristic Rossoni 63 of cinematic spectatorship. In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord writes “[i]n the spectacle, one part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of this separation. What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.”135 At risk of a teleological determinism, it is worth noting that the panorama’s successors, the moving panorama and the diorama, move closer to the level of passive immobility associated with theories of cinematic spectatorship. Contrary to the panorama, where viewers are still mobile in the sense that they can walk around and choose what to look at, even if being confined to a virtual reality, those who attended moving panoramas and dioramas were seated in a fixed position as representations of nature move in both space and time.136 Friedberg notes: Both the panorama and its successor, the diorama, offered new forms of virtual mobility to its viewer. But a paradox here must be emphasized: as the “mobility” of the gaze became more “virtual” – as techniques were developed to paint (and then to photograph) realistic images, as mobility was implied by changes in lighting (and then cinematography) – the observer became more immobile, passive, ready to receive constructions of a virtual reality placed in front of his or her unmoving body.137 However, it is beyond the scope of this study to explore fully these off-seeds of the panorama.138 Still, while apparatus theorists in the 1960s and 1970s would attempt to account for the ideological positioning of the cinematic viewer (the spectators immobility and fixity in relation to the screen), the panorama, more so than its descendants, falls outside the paradigm of apparatus theory, as does expanded cinema (and avant-garde cinema in general). Rossoni 64 Apparatus theorists attempted to characterize a cinematic dispositif and its effects on the spectator as a subject. Though their theories differ in many respects, Friedberg summarizes that all of the major apparatus theorists: Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, Stephen Heath, and Jean-Louis Comolli, “assumed a direct and unquestioned genealogical continuity between Renaissance perspective, the camera obscura, and the photographic subject.139” Baudry, for instance, locates the construction of the fixed cinematic point in Renaissance art rather than the model of perspective developed by Greek art. He writes, “the pictorial construction of the Greeks correspond to the organization of their stage, based on a multiplicity of views, whereas the painting of the Renaissance will elaborate a centered space. . . . The center of this space coincides with the eye which Jean Pellerin Viator will so appropriately call the “subject.”140 Hence, the multiplicity of views is subsumed by the monocular aperture of the camera, which coincides with the central focal point in Renaissance perspective. This in turn forms a “virtual reality.”141 Likewise, Heath situates Renaissance perspective as the foundational model for cinema and photography as “a machine for the reproduction of objects (of solids) in the form of images realized according to the laws of the rectilinear propagation of light rays, which . . . constitute the perspective effect.”142 Friedberg uses Stan Brakhage as a filmmaker who challenges the laws of perspective in both his films and manifesto, “Metaphors on Vision”, “without invoking “ideological critique.””143 But, as she continues, “his filmmaking was still reliant on the spectatorial conditions of a darkened room and a viewer facing framed, luminous moving images projected onto a screen. As films complicit with the conditions of exhibition and display, they rely on the projective properties of light in a dark room.”144 Rossoni 65 The claims made by apparatus theorists, Friedberg contends, is both reductive and teleologically determinate in that it eschews the proper historical lineage of the camera obscura as a model for central perspective. Also questioning suture theory, she instead proposes: “it is not narrative and not the optics of projection that recenter the spectator, but the frame itself. It is the consistency of the frame that performs the unity of space, not narrative. Even in films where shots are geometrically variant, the frame positions the viewer.”145 This claim is much more accommodating to avant-garde cinema than those of apparatus theory. Avant-garde cinema challenges the passivity required for apparatus theory, and as a predominantly non-narrative art form, is outside the boundaries of suture theorists. But as Friedberg noted in regards to Brakhage’s work, most of the avant-garde cinema that has been produced still relies on the single screen. Except, of course, for the kind of immersive, multi-screen environments found in expanded cinema. Questioning traditional projection and viewing protocols, multi-screen is to single-screen what the panorama is to perspective. The idea of “expanded consciousness” and pursuit of intermedia art forms, as espoused by Youngblood, explode the viewer’s identification with not just the subject, but also the screen. To create a virtual image free of central perspective, we recall that Barker had to form an infinite number of perspective points that in their gross accumulation nullified their independence. Likewise, expanded cinema artists utilize an abundance of projection devices and competing images that neutralize fixed perspective. Vanderbeek’s Movie-Drome, for instance, would use not only film and video projections, but theatre, dance, and other performative art. According to Vanderbeek, the Movie-Drome functioned as such: Rossoni 66 In a spherical dome, simultaneous images of all sorts would be projected on the entire dome screen . . . the audience lies down at the outer edge of the dome with their feet towards the center, thus almost the complete field of view is the domescreen. Thousands of images would be projected on this screen . . . this imageflow could be compared to the “collage” form of the newspaper, or the three ring circus . . . (both of which suffice the audience with an collision of facts and data) . . . the audience takes what it can or wants from the presentation . . . and makes its own conclusions . . . each member of the audience will build his own references from the image-flow, in the best sense of the word the visual material is to be presented and each individual makes his own conclusions . . . or realizations.”146 Daryl Chin seems to confirm the Movie-Drome’s intended perceptual bombardment in his review of the Stan Vanderbeek Retrospective at Anthology Film Archives in 1977. He recalls: “As many as thirty images would get projected all around, enveloping, surrounding, engulfing the viewers.”147 Vanderbeek’s development of multimedia, not just in his film/video work, but also in his writings, as a tool of mass communication that activates the spectator’s space and reforms audience reception is one of the most vital formulations in both the history and theory of expanded cinema. Despite its cult status, however, the Movie-Drome was a “brilliant failure” in that there were technical issues that Vanderbeek could not overcome, ending the Drome’s screening history rather prematurely.148 Also using a dome-like structure for projections were Jordan Belson and Henry Jacobs for their “Vortex” concerts at the Morrison Planetarium. Like the Movie-Drome, the intent of a Vortex concert was to assail the senses. To that end, Jacobs designed the sound to suit the complex rotating sound system of the planetarium, which had around 40 speakers and enabled him to control the direction of the sound with great precision. Belson handled the visuals, using approximately 30 projection devices, including “the planetarium’s star and rotational sky projectors, kaleidoscope and ‘zoomer’ projectors, Rossoni 67 strobes, slide projectors, rotating prisms, 16mm film projectors, and interference pattern projectors,” all of which projected onto the 65 foot dome surface.149 Belson and Jacobs describe their apparatus in the Vortex IV program: Vortex is a new form of theatre based on the combination of electronics, optics and architecture. Its purpose is to reach an audience as a pure theatre appealing directly to the senses. The elements of Vortex are sound, light, colour, and movement in their most comprehensive theatrical expression. These audio-visual combinations are presented in a circular, domed theatre equipped with special projectors and sound systems. In Vortex there is no separation of audience and stage or screen; the entire area becomes a living theatre of sound and light.150 Henry Jacobs (left) and Jordan Belson at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco. Rossoni 68 Planetarium projector shown equipped with two interference-pattern projectors. It is worth recalling the panorama’s claims as an educational tool, and that both Belson/ Jacobs’ Vortex concerts and Vanderbeek’s interactive piece Cine Dreams (1972) were staged in planetariums, the latter being shown at the Strasenburgh Planetarium in Rochester, New York. The battery of sensations delivered by both these forms, and their emphasis on instruction, recalls Oetterman’s description of edifying perception to reflect more modern sensibilities. He writes: “[p]anoramas became a medium of instruction on how to see, an optical simulator in which the extreme sensory impression, the sensational new experience, could be practiced over and over again, until it became routine . . . Panoramic paintings became a pattern for organizing visual experience.”151 Working against established cultural codes, expanded cinematic environments, by contrast, cannot be ‘mastered’ and the sensations not easily subdued. Rossoni 69 The panorama painting, initially having an ‘infinite’ number of things to look at, greatly intensifies the viewers’ visual stimuli, forcing them to teach themselves how to look at the new form properly. It is, however, one picture. Images in cinema change 24 times a second. Multiplying the number of image alterations already inherent in the cinematic medium, and to place those formulas over and across special distances, ensures that viewers will be unable to digest the stimuli thrown at them. The Vortex concerts and the Movie-Drome may situate viewers in fixed, if unorthodox, positions, but create active rather than passive spectators. And like the panorama, one is “compelled at the least to turn one’s head (and eyes) to see the entire work.”152 Other well-known examples of multimedia environments include the highly publicized San Francisco art troupe US Company, or as they are more commonly referred to as, USCO. Formed in 1962 by Gerd Stein, Stephen Durkee, and Michael Callahan, they were heavily influenced by LSD experiments, which led Durkee to assert that “the strobe is the digital trip.”153 A promotional brochure for a 1968 USCO presentation at New York's Whitney Museum of Art described the group this way: USCO "unites the cults of mysticism and technology as a basis for introspection and communication.”154 The group was also known to associate with video artist Jud Yalkut and Stewart Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog. A number of other prominent multimedia groups were also well known to the public, having primarily performed light shows at rock concerts. In New York the most popular group was Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, who used strobes, other kinds of lights, and dancers in accompaniment with the Velvet Underground and Nico. Coming from a stronger avant-garde tradition was Single Wing Turquoise Bird, based out of Los Angeles. They used a wide variety of Rossoni 70 projection mechanisms, including 16mm, 8mm, video, liquids, and laser interferometry. Youngblood describes them thus: “[t]hey don’t produce an object in the sense that a movie is an object; they produce software, not hardware. We witness an expression of group consciousness at any given moment. The range of their vocabulary is limitless because its not confined to one point in time, one idea, one emotion.”155 Collectively, these groups represent then-new experiments with new forms and combinations of technology that surround the audience in dynamic, booming auditory-visual environments. Single Wing Turquoise Bird performing at Art Forum in 2011. Rossoni 71 An image from a SWTB performance. The works I have primarily described here have been American. Furthermore, they emphasize multiple projections on walls and occasionally specially designed projection surfaces that add a sculptural element. Expanded cinema in Europe, particularly Britain, is no less prolific, though different in very fundamental ways. A.L. Rees believes that “common to all US work . . . was the exploration of new forms of subjectivity in art, and a reinvigorated expressionism that challenged the formal boundaries of art media”.156 The UK, and in Europe generally, was much more gallery based. Works emerging in this environment were also “less absorptive and participatory than in the American variants, [and] the intent was to provoke differences in perception rather than new totalities and fusions.”157 Rees may generalize UK expanded cinema as “less participatory,” but two of the films featured in the Tate’s “Expanded Cinema: Activating the Space of Reception” exhibition clearly demonstrate a combination of audience and spatial involvement as well as with more structural-materialist forms of perception. Rossoni 72 The first of these is Lis Rhodes Light Music (1975-7), a dual-screen projection event that has each 16mm projector sitting on the ground facing each other. The images bear a clear material resemblance to the optical variable density soundtrack, resembling a number of dark bands fluctuating in thickness. The result, Nicky Hamlyn suggests, “is a sense that we are ‘seeing sound’ as opposed to “hearing image.’”158 Hamlyn also testifies to the work’s function as a fully participatory cinematic environment: The image, meanwhile, could be experienced in a number of ways: through direct concentration on the screen, through looking at the activated walls of the room, and through literal interaction, by stepping into the path of the beams, as well as watching others do the same. The work is thus environmental and interactive, para- and ex-cinematic.159 Whereas the conventional spectator is seated in a fixed position directly in line with the screen for the duration of the filmic event, viewers of Light Music can either stand or sit on the floor, and are invited to freely engage with the joint apparatus. If someone devises a new relationship to the film beyond what Hamlyn lists, they are encouraged to do so. Practically any combination or variation is possible. The only thing that is unattainable is to view the film as one would in a traditional cinema, that is, from a fixed position directly in front of the screen. The two screens are separated far enough apart that “[i]t is difficult, if not impossible, to watch the two screens at once.”160 Even without instruction or provocation, viewers are therefore motivated to move around the space and discover what kinds of viewing positions are possible. Rossoni 73 Lis Rhodes, Light Music (1975). We have seen that expanded cinema reconfigures traditional notions of space, both in terms of what is visible on-screen and the screen’s extension into the viewing area. In the case of Light Music, the space of projection and reception are the same. Other multiscreen/image artists keep the viewing position separate form the screen while still questioning the spatial identification soaring overhead. Cinema, however, is time and space. Avant-garde cinema contests the conventional perception of narrative time. The structural-materialists of the 1960s and 1970s explore the time-base of cinema even further. In narrative cinema everything is done to reduce awareness of the actual screening time and spatial immobility. In contrast, structural-materialists invert this relationship, prioritizing spectator time and making the viewer acutely aware of their physical presence and the duration of the film. Expanded cinema comes from a similar theoretical approach, but at times forms a much more ambiguous relationship. Malcolm Rossoni 74 Le Grice, drawing from his own work, identifies four alternatives to narrative time: nonrepresentational abstraction, structural or structural materialist, post-narrative symbolic, and expanded cinema.161 Time in expanded cinema, he writes, “breaks down the singularity of the experience – but more particularly breaks any assumption that there is a singular (authorized) interpretation based on matching spectator experience to artistic intention. Meaning becomes latent and unfixed”, and the viewer becomes “aware of occupying the space of the presentation.”162 In Light Music, time becomes foregrounded by the viewers’ interaction with it. They can step into the middle of the beams and measure their body movements against the shifting lines of the projectors. Steve Farrer’s The Machine (197788) accomplishes something similar, in that it organizes time perception with viewers contained within its visual circumference. The Machine is a custom 35mm projector that doubles as a camera.163 It is turned on its side so that the film runs through it horizontally rather than vertically.164 The camera/projector spins once the motor is engaged, therefore both films and projects only one kind of shot, a circular pan. Unlike in conventional film projectors, the shutter has been removed, resulting in a single panoramic picture with no black gaps separating each sequential frame; a continuous image. However, the camera/projector is only half of the total apparatus. The Machine’s projection surface is a specially designed 360° panorama. At one level, then, the combination of the single picture with the panorama screen replicates Barker’s panorama, offering an unbroken view. But it is much more complicated than that. The camera mechanism still only records with one single lens as it spins around, rendering it incapable of replicating a true 360° view, which as we have seen, requires multiple cameras. Instead, “[w]hen the film is Rossoni 75 run at the original speed at which it was shot, it is paradoxically both in constant motion and at the same time static in relation to the projection surface (as a caterpillar track remains “still” in relation to the ground as the vehicle runs over it.”165 Since only fragments of the total circumference are filmed at a time, the viewer would literally have to quickly spin in a circle to follow the continuous sweeping motion. External view of Steve Farrer’s The Machine’s panoramic screen. Rossoni 76 A glimpse of The Machine’s circular sweep. Steve Farrer standing with The Machine at the Tate Modern Oil Tanks in 2009. Rossoni 77 Hamlyn refers to it as “a kind of spatial temporal spiral” whereby “it becomes the viewer’s job to create the scenario they wish from the continuous sweep of the projector’s beam, as opposed to being subjected to a predetermined order of fixed images.”166 Jihoon Kim believes the inability to fully take in the image prevents The Machine from creating an immersive space: “[i]nstead, the continuously moving camera-projector prevents the viewer from being immersed in the image space, as it undermines a stable perceptual identification with the image.”167 However, Kim is neglecting the implications of the very ineptitude spectators face when surrounded by The Machine; a sense of helplessness as the flickering light bombards the audience from literally all sides, and physically overwhelms the possibility of perceptual mastery or containment. Farrer reinvigorates the panoramic art form but subverts its purpose from stable simulacrum of reality to a fragmentation of cinematic parts and codes. The spectator becomes aware of the individual mechanisms compromising cinema proper: the screen, projector, film, and their own relation to them. The panorama’s access to “the real” made it a phenomenally popular form of entertainment with an equally impressive commercial longevity. It functioned as an inexpensive and easy form of armchair tourism while also claiming to have educational and documentary value. More importantly, it was a radical break with artistic tradition, breaking out of the long history of central perspective. The panorama is often discussed in relation to cinema because of its convincing representation of reality and its standing as an immersive environment. Too often, however, those same writers who link it as a predecessor to cinema forget the relative freedom of the spectators, who were free to Rossoni 78 move and gaze at their own respective will. Later, with the diorama and the moving panorama, viewers became more permanently fixed and made into passive spectators, robbed of their mobility. These are the codes that incorporate commercial narrative cinema. Expanded cinema arose at a time of incredible technological change and around new theories of communication as heralded by McLuhan et. al. Artists working in this mode of experimental intermedia combine these various ideas into strategies of synaesthesia, information exchange, and as ways to challenge the classical codes of commercial cinema. As Youngblood declares, “[w]hen we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness.”168 Synaesthesia and “expanded” consciousness have been influential concepts since the early 20th century. As I discuss in the next chapter, synaesthesia in art has existed long before expanded cinema of the 1960s, though the combination of art forms is often overlooked, overshadowed by the modernist idea of medium specificity. Rossoni 79 Chapter Three – Black Box, White Cube, and the Proscenium Arch. In the first chapter I discussed the theoretical and philosophical parallels between two temporally disparate forms of optical light play, the magic lantern and projector performances. In the second, I again focused on the conceptual reinvigoration of earlier art forms within the origins of expanded cinema in the late 1950s/early 1960s, that of the panorama painting and immersive cinematic environments. This chapter will similarly explore interactions between earlier art forms - theatre and sculpture - and their subsequent reappraisal beginning in the 1960s through installation art (exemplified by David Hall, Anthony McCall, Tony Sinden, Paul Sharits, Michael Snow, Ian Breakwall and Nam June Paik) and film performances incorporating theatrical elements( as in the work of William Raban, Malcolm Le Grice, Gill Eatherly, Guy Sherwin, Peter Weibel, VALIE EXPORT, Paik again, Tony Conrad, Carolee Schneemann, and Birgit & Wilhelm Hein). The work of these artists not only harks back to the much older models of sculpture and theatre, but also, and more importantly, also functions as a kind of ‘hybrid’ art that seems to reinvoke and indeed continue the project of concretizing “synaesthesia,” the blending or crossing-over of human senses, first taken up by early modernists in cubism, orphism, color light organs, and futurism. These works are also divided by the historical categories of modernism and postmodernism. Modernist concerns with medium specificity undergo a dynamic shift once postmodernism paradoxically abandons Rossoni 80 materialist concerns while simultaneously expanding the field of introspection through mixed media configurations. A common unifier amongst early modern art movements was the influence of music. Synaesthesia is a rare neurological condition in which “sensory perception of one kind may manifest itself as a sensory experience of another”, for example, tasting sound or associating certain numbers with colour.169 While synaesthesia can affect any of the five senses, within art circles it most frequently refers to and incorporates musical ideas. Due to its ephemeral, intangible nature, music is often regarded as the most abstract form of art. Consequently, musical ideas were enormously influential in the development of abstract art, influencing art forms like cubism, orphism, symbolism, synchronism, and futurism, but also influencing the natural sciences, who sought to find a linkage between colour and musical harmony. From Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century, the colour theories of Goethe in the eighteenth, to Hermann von Helmholtz in the nineteenth, philosophical theories and treatises on the relationship between colour and music were rampant.170 Unlike the apparatuses discussed in the first two chapters, sculpture and theatre are far less idiosyncratic mediums than magic lanterns and panoramas, nor are they mediated by technology as an apparatus. In comparison they can almost be considered timeless. It is not necessary to undergo a detailed history of either one’s genesis. However, it is essential to consider the practical application of each when surveying the development of contemporary media art, let alone expanded cinema. Indeed, theatre and sculpture are inseparable elements from the theorization, practice, and review of expanded cinema. I have decided to chart an analysis of these two art forms within a Rossoni 81 single chapter for the practical reason that they both function as corporeal mediums. In different ways, surely, but one does not need three-dimensional glasses to convince oneself of their verisimilar presence. Unlike cinema, one can walk around a sculpture to view it from a variety of angles and distances, and linger unassumingly at a small detail. In the theatre we are once again seated. But mobility is not needed for us to see all sides of the action, or to believe that the actor is really present. The actor turns and calls out to us, unfolding in real-time and space. Cinema, including both film and video, is the Swiss army knife of the arts. It can be been combined with other media in plethora of ways, more of which are becoming manifest in the ongoing digital revolution. It is arguable that cinema in its near 120-year existence has undergone more radical transformations than any other preceding art form. Starting with Edison’s Kinetoscope in 1888, the first ten years alone saw the evolution from private peephole moving pictures to awkward devices (the Skladanowsky brothers’ Bioscope), the Lumière brothers’ static one-minute long takes; Méliès’ trick films, the beginning of camera movement in Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), the formation of an institutionalized film language brought about by Griffith around 19068.171 But even before 1900 and the impending influence of modernism, the idea of merging art forms was well conceived, though as we shall see, the execution of ‘hybrid’ art was to make a profound acceleration in the 1960s. The period of the enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries maintained a strict separation between the arts, as perhaps best exemplified by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1776 study Laocoon, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry.172 These ideas differ from those of romanticism, which advocated for artistic convergence. The German painter Rossoni 82 Philipp Otto Runge wrote that “[m]usic, after all, is always that which we call harmony and serenity in all three arts. There must be music through words in a beautiful poem, just as there must be music in beautiful picture, and in a beautiful building, or in the diverse ideas expressed in line.”173 In 1849 Richard Wagner published a treatise entitled The Artwork of the Future. Though independent of one another, this text more thoroughly expands Runge’s idea. Wagner appeals for a synthesis of the arts in what he calls the “Gesamtkunstwerk”, or “total artwork.” He proposes the fusion of the “trinity sisters” of art - dance, tone, and poetry and the subcategories of painting, architecture, and music – as a means to counter the state of the modern opera, which he accuses of being stagnant, lifeless, and elitist.174 Opera may technically sample each of the arts but they remain detached, revealing themselves sequentially and in isolation from one another. He describes the modern opera thusly: Opera becomes the mutual compact of egoism of the three related arts. To rescue her supremacy, Tone contract with Dance for so many quarters-of-an-hour which shall belong to the latter alone: during this period the chalk upon the shoe-soles shall trace the regulations of the stage, and music shall be made according to the system of the leg-, and not the tone-, vibrations; item, that the singers shall be expressly forbidden to indulge in any sort of graceful bodily motion, - this is to be the exclusive property of the dancer, whereas the singer is to be pledged to complete abstention from any fancy for mimetic gestures . . .175 Wagner believed the drama as the ideal medium to incorporate each art, “for reason that its art is not complete until every helping artifice be cast behind it, as it were, and genuine life attain the faithfullest and most intelligible show.”176 Importantly, the artist must work with the greater public’s interest in mind, appealing to and satisfying the taste of those who do not possess, in Bourdieu’s terminology, the “cultural competence” necessary to comprehend or “decode” the high art status of opera.177 Wagner details the role each Rossoni 83 particular medium will fulfill and how the artist will benefit from contributing to the whole. For instance, in architecture: The Scene has firstly to comply with all the conditions of “space” imposed by the joint . . . dramatic action to be displayed thereon: but secondly, it has to fulfill those conditions in the sense of bring this dramatic action to the eye and ear of the spectator in intelligible fashion. In the arrangement of the space for the spectators, the need for optic and acoustic understanding of the artwork will give the necessary law, which can only be observed by a union of beauty and fitness in the proportions; for the demand of the collective . . . audience is the demand for the artwork, to whose comprehension it must be distinctly led by everything that meets the eye. . . .178 Every aspect of the drama’s production will compliment the other at the service of the audience. In a radical departure from Elizabethan theatre, Wagner required the orchestra to remain hidden in a lower pit from the audience. Concealing the means of production ostensibly enhances the audience’s identification with the stage narrative. Wagner was finally able to bring practice to theory in 1876, when construction had finished building his ideal, specially designed theatre: the Festpielhaus in Bayreuth. Contemporary theatre aside, the framework of Gesamtkunstwerk provocatively foreshadows classical cinematic spectatorial codes. Noam M. Elcott makes the comparison: “[t]he production of concealment . . . belongs less to an underlying commodity logic than to the dispositif in which cinema would come to thrive. For the concealment of the orchestra at Bayreuth proved to be but the first series of innovations, many of which translated so easily into cinematic terms as to seem prophetic.”179 Though incorporating a variety of media, Wagner’s conception of artistic compounding seems to find semblance more in the likening of commercial cinema than what is now recognized as mixed media, or Rossoni 84 ‘multimedia.’ The audience enters the Festpielhaus, a site-specific building (like picture palaces), to sit in a darkened auditorium, where the music emits from an unknown source, and where all the spectator’s attention is directed towards the action on center stage, which is intellectually unchallenging. As discussed in chapter two, apparatus and suture theory attempted to explain the model of cinematic identification; the basic arrangement of cinematic viewership is comparable to Wagner’s Festpielhaus whereby spectators sit in a darkened room and become passively engaged with the on-screen action. By contemporary standards Wagner’s proposal for artistic fusion seems weak and unconvincing in comparison with multimedia art. Writing well before the advent of cinema, he could not have known the complexities that the medium of cinema would make available. Still, if Wagner’s total-drama comes across simply as contemporary stage theatre, and commercial cinema is heavily influenced by it, this remains an important consideration when reviewing the birth and practice of modernism in the 20th century. As Peter Tscherkassky explains, the key shift that led to modernism was the replacement of enlightenment doctrine with philosophical rationalism.180 Art was liberated from its subservience to religious art and in its stead turned inward towards selfexamination. A radical break with the past meant abandoning inherited norms and prerequisites; objective representation gradually gave way to non-objectivity, abstraction, and dissonance. But there were other important influences on the development of modernism as well. Increasing urbanization, industrialization, science – particularly motion pictures – led artists to interpret the world as increasingly fast-paced and, after World War One, inhuman. Thus the relation between Wagner’s harmonious music-drama Rossoni 85 and conventional cinema gains tract in comparison to modern art and the self-referential politics of modern theatre, as exemplified, for example, in Bertolt Brecht’s “Epic Theatre,” which also unified music and multimedia, but to different ends. Modernism was intrinsically linked to a philosophical and artistic interest in synaesthesia, particularly the search for an analogy between music and the other arts. This coincides with what John Berger has referred to as “the moment of cubism.” It was Picasso, he writes, who around 1907 introduced fragmentation and temporality into modern art. “Cubism broke the illusionist three-dimensional space which has existed in painting since the Renaissance”181 and abandoned “the habit of looking at every object or body as though it were complete in itself.”182 Music plays an important influence on cubism in general, but especially in the work of its two most revered artists, Picasso and Georges Braque. Both often included musical symbols into their paintings. For example, in the former’s Still Life on a Piano (1910-1911) and Violon “Jolie Eva” (1912), and the latter’s Violin and Poster (1912), which includes in text the names “Mozart” and “Kubelick”, as well as Hommage à Bach (1912), which does the same with Bach’s name. Picasso’s Still Life on a Piano (1910-1911). Rossoni 86 As an inherently abstract art-form, that is, immaterial (other than notes on a page), the impact of music on Cubism seems like a natural extension. As Karin V. Maur notes: The disintegration of the unified pictorial space, the fragmentation of the object, the autocratic employment of liberated motif elements, the autonomy of color, form, and line, and the increasing dynanism of all three – these developments, which took place between 1908 and 1914 in the guise of Cubism, Futurism, Orphism, Vorticism, or Synchronism – were basically directed towards opening visual art to the dimension of time.183 Painting is a static medium, whereas music is in a constant state of flux. The systematic and formal appraisal of musical forms on painting was a global affair, and can also be seen in the diverse work of, for example, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, the Czech orphist František Kupka, the American synchronists Morgan Russell and Stanton MacdonaldWright, Wassily Kandinsky, Daniel Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné, et. al.. All sought to find a direct synathestic link similar to Newton’s early theories. Importantly, a number of these artists also experimented with colour light machines. These were machines that in general used coloured plates, prisms, and mirrors to produce coloured projections onto a solid surface. Many of them, like British artist Alexander Wallace Rimington’s early device (1895), appeared to be an ordinary organ or piano, but instead of emitting sound they produce coloured light projections. Unfortunately the only supporting documents of these early machines are rare archival photographs. But Rimington provides a detailed and sensitive, if somewhat selfindulgent, description of his performance: A delicate primrose now appears, and with little runs and flushes of pulsation leads through several passages of indescribable cinnamon colour to deep topaz. Then suddenly interweavings of strange green and peacock blue, with now and then a touch of pure white, make us seem to feel the tremulousness of the Rossoni 87 Mediterranean on a breezy day, and as the colour deepens there are harmonies of violet and blue green which recall its waves under a Tramontana sky. More and more powerful they grow, and the eye revels in the depth and magnificence of the colour as the executant strikes chord after chord among the bass notes of the instrument.184 Rimington describes the device as a subtle and ephemeral shifting array of abstract colours. Composed of abstract, free-floating, non-objective imagery, it is clear how his colour organ attempted to express the non-corporeality of music. It should be noted that many of these experimental machines were first devised in the same period as modernism, though somewhat later, once the logical progression of modernism demanded the need to move beyond the still easel.185 1912 Russell and Macdonald-Wright devised a kinetic light machine that used coloured tissue paper, though it never materialized. Baranoff-Rossiné presented his “piano optophonique” in 1922 at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Baranoff-Rossiné described his performance in a letter to the abstract painters Robert and Sonia Delaunay. His commentary is typical of the kind of sentiment expressed by various colour organ artists: My apparatus gives me an unusual freedom in exploring dynamic painting that I could hardly have dreamed of before. An artist is no longer a slave to the surface . . . but lord of his ambitions and master of his freedom. That is where a really immense field for creation of paintings opens up. There are billions of paintings that appear to be expressing a multitude of desires kaleidoscoped into a mere moment. Music is, of course, a compromise with the audience. Like music, a painting should always be in motion.186 This last statement by Baranoff-Rossiné, that “[l]ike music, a painting should always be in motion” is complicated by the work of later colour organists like the Danish Thomas Wilfred and the Hungarian Alexander László. Rossoni 88 Both of these artists began working in the early 1920s, when research into colour music machines had dissipated and cinema was already well established. This was a full decade after the futurists Ginna and Corra had worked on painting films (now considered lost), though it is doubtful that Wilfred or László ever saw them, though whether or not they had seen the films hardly seems consequential. They were working in a medium undoubtedly “cinematic” but imperatively outside of “moving pictures” in the technical sense.187 This is also the decade that saw the proliferation of avant-garde film in the French ‘impressionist’ cinema and in the German “graphic” or “absolute” cinema of Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Walter Ruttman, and Oscar Fischinger. Particularly in the work of the Ruttman and Fischinger is a definite sensuousness and visual rhythm that is akin to music. Such is the case that Fischinger, one of the most celebrated abstract animators in history, collaborated with László in 1925 by providing animated visuals to his “Farblichtmusik,” or “colour-light-music” performance piece. William Moritz notes that Fischinger’s images “proved overpoweringly modern and dynamic” and were cancelled after a few performances.188 By 1926 Fischinger was working independently on a number of multiple projector performances. Entitled “Raumlichtkunst,” Fischinger believed he had created a new art form.189 While his films can be considered the very pinnacle of “visual music,” his description of the apparatus is far more ambitious and more akin to Wagner’s proposed synthesis of “total artwork”: “[o]f this Art everything is new and yet ancient in its laws and forms. Plastic – Dance – Painting – Music become one. The Master of the new Art forms poetical work in four dimensions . . . Cinema was its beginning . . . Raumlightmusik will be its completion.”190 Moritz interviewed László, who confirmed Rossoni 89 that he had seen Fischinger’s solo performance R-1 – Formspiel in Munich in 1926. Moritz writes: “Fischinger . . . prepared his own multiple-projector shows (including some of the imagery from the László shows) with three side-by-side images cast with three 35mm projectors, slides to frame the triptych, and at climatic moments, two additional projectors which overlapped the basic triptych with further colour effects.”191 Provided all the evidence, Fischinger can perhaps be credited with conducting the first art piece that can be considered, retrospectively, to be expanded cinema, a claim that has barely registered in historical discussions of expanded cinema. Raumlichtkunst at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012. Nevertheless, Fischinger’s use of multiple films is a strong measure of the potential that cinema can provide in creating a total synthesis of the arts. Cinema can incorporate painterly images moving in space to musical rhythms. Yet if one recalls the project of modernism, the reflexive scrutinization of a medium’s materials and properties, a contradiction emerges. How can an artwork investigate its own medium specificity while at the same time reference another medium, as Picasso and others did with music? Before investigating the paradigmatic shift in medium specificity, we must first review how the theory has impacted the arts since the 20th century and how it has been reinterpreted beginning in the 1960s. Rossoni 90 In “Modernist Painting”, Greenberg states: “The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered ‘pure’, and in its ‘purity’.”192 Thus for Greenberg, the primary limitation of painting also becomes that which best defines it, in this case its flatness. Rudolf Arnheim is perhaps best known for promulgating along similar lines a listing of cinema’s shortcomings in Film as Art. Among them, he lists the reduction of imagery from three-dimensional to two-dimensional, the loss of colour in black-and-white-stock, the loss of non-visual senses like smell, and in silent cinema – the loss of natural sounds. As with Greenberg, he states that these limitations are not really shortcomings, but are in fact best understood as the source of cinema’s expressive potential. If the filmmaker does not stress these shortcomings, “[t]here is serious danger that the film maker will rest content with . . . shapeless reproduction.”193 But as Noël Carroll has demonstrated, the theory itself is rife with flaws and contradictions once pursued to its most literal degree. For example, Carroll asks “why urge artists to make certain that they exploit the peculiarities of their medium if this is unavoidable and bound to happen anyway?”194 A great deal of artistic excellence would be unnecessarily be sacrificed if Arnheim’s theory came to fruition. Medium specificity has been a productive concept for the practice and theorization of avant-garde cinema. John Hanhardt argued in 1976 that it was so profound and prominent as to be considered the central concern behind the entire history of the avant-garde film: “[t]his cinema subverts cinematic convention by exploring its medium and its properties and materials, and in the process creates its own history separate from that of the classical narrative cinema. It is filmmaking that creates itself out Rossoni 91 of its own experience.”195 For Malcolm Le Grice, exploring cinema’s material essence is an important consideration in the face of commercial cinema, which has always “been dominated by the aim of creating convincing illusory time/space, and eliminating all traces of the actual physical state of affairs at any stage of the film, from scripting, through shooting, editing, printing, promotion to projection.”196 The highly toted structural film movement of the 1960s and 1970s has often been read as the culmination of medium specificity in cinema. As the 1960s wore on and structuralism seemingly provided an abundance of solutions to its own inquiries, an important shift occurred. One of the charges against the “second wave” of structuralism was that it simply reiterated the same material processes again and again. Jonathan Walley examines this paradigmatic following structuralism in his essay “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film.” The 1970s/1980s period marked the transition from the “essentialist paradigm” of medium specificity towards an interest in historiography and the early years of cinema. Historians have termed this movement the “New Talkie” or the “New Narrative,” films that reconsider both the relationship between the avant-garde and narrative as well as material concerns.197 Walley proposes that another emergent alternative to structuralism deserves equal consideration. “Paracinema,” he writes, identifies an array of phenomena that are considered “cinematic” but that are not embodies in the materials of film as traditionally defined. That is, the films I am addressing recognize cinematic properties outside the standard film apparatus, and therefore reject the medium-specific premise of most essentialist theory and practice that the art form of cinema is defined by the specific medium of film. Instead, paracinema locates cinema’s essence elsewhere.198 Rossoni 92 The two primary examples he gives are Paul Sharit’s “locational” installation pieces and Anthony McCall’s radical “film” Long Film for Ambient Light (1975). Scott MacDonald describes it as “an installation, without projector or a screen or film, which refers to conventional cinema - a single electric light bulb reflects on the white paper covering the installation windows (“screens”) during a twenty-four hour installation period – from the greatest distance possible.”199 McCall invokes the metaphysical aspects of cinema – light, a darkened space, and duration – without any of their corporeally bound qualifiers. These and similarly non-filmic “films” operate not as materialized but as dematerialized works. Anthony McCall’s Long Film for Ambient Light (1975). Rossoni 93 Paracinema is closely aligned with conceptual art. Both forms exemplify the transition paradigmatic of what Rosalind Krauss calls “the post-medium condition.” She suggests the term “technical support” as a more appropriate expression of postmodern introspection that avoids the “unwanted positivism” of the term “medium,” while simultaneously signaling the dissolution of boundaries between mediums.200 Video served as a prominent tool and medium within conceptual art because of its ability to easily record lengthy live events (often Fluxus) and for its non-materiality, therefore bypassing the trappings of a commodified art object. Paradoxically, conceptual art is dependent on the idea of a formal medium as a way of justifying its negation. Walley suggests that “[b]y seeking out cinematic qualities or effects in nonfilmic materials, and often fleeting or ephemeral ones like light and time, paracinema opened up a much more heterogeneous range of cinematic practices than what the film medium as we know it could offer.”201 That an artwork can interrogate its own absence is useful when examining Greenberg’s vehement opposition to mixed media in a period that habitually incorporated musical ideas into other fixed mediums like painting. Here it is useful to consider Greenberg’s stance on collage art, invented by Braque and Picasso around 1910. Cubism, as we recall, can be defined as the collapse of the painted image onto its material signifier, its surface flatness. Anything that goes against this is considered unnecessarily “decorative.” But the notion of the “decorative” could also be invoked as an analytical concept, given the right context and applied correctly. “While on the one hand it could degenerate into superficial ornament, into the pejorative status or the negative decorative,” as Gill Perry argues, “it was also the element which could articulate the abstractness of the work, which would structure an art of ‘pure Rossoni 94 surface.’”202 In a similar vein, Greenberg writes: “[i]f the actuality of the surface – its real, physical flatness – could be indicated explicitly enough in certain places, it would be distinguished and separated from everything else the surface contained.”203 Hence, a reference outside the context of the painterly surface is permissible only if it forces comparison and recognition of that surface. The relatively inconspicuous tack casting a shadow on the top of the frame in Braque’s Still Life With Violin and Pitcher (1910), for example, is visually at odds with the rest of the painting. It breaks the surface into two distinct planes, suggesting deep space, which in turn makes enhances the flatness of the literal plane. Still Life With Violin and Pitcher (Braque, 1910). Even this explanation does not satisfactorily account for the experimentation with music in modern art. Colour organs are a prime example of something that cannot be Rossoni 95 reduced to an extreme substance, even when juxtaposed with its polar opposite. It is not “painting” because it is flat, or not flat, just as it is not “music” because it is silent. It is a synthesis of the two. Perhaps the discrepancies in Greenberg’s modern art and all its nuanced forms can be explained by lack of recognition. Modernist art critics and scholarly trends have focused on Greenberg’s provocative theory to the point of accepting it for the whole of modernism. Judith Zilczer believes that the role of musical analogy in early modern art has been underestimated, yet “[f]ar from an evasion or a source of aesthetic confusion, the powerful idea of visual music fueled the search for purity in the visual arts even as it spawned the birth of new hybrid genres.”204 Thus a complex dualism appears in modernist art between medium specificity and synaesthesia. The former demands much more formal stricture while the latter is more inclusive. While it stems to reason that these forms be set in opposition to one another, as we have seen in the work of Picasso, Braque, et. al., they can also be mutually correspondent and might have originated concomitantly. This insight helps us make light of the work being done by expanded cinema artists starting in the 1960s. The notion of expanded cinema is an extremely elastic concept attempting to account for over fifty years worth of practice where the only clearly shared conception is the heterogeneity of forms and assemblage of new media. Variously termed “intermedia,” the creation of new artistic forms and the potential for introspective analysis of those forms leads us to oblige that just as McCall’s Long Film for Ambient Light is “cinema,” so are, for instance, the explosive light shows of Exploding Plastic Inevitable in 1966-67. Gene Youngblood attempts to account for the profusion of cinema’s presence in what he calls “the intermedia network.” He writes, Rossoni 96 The cinema isn’t just something inside the environment; the intermedia network of cinema, television, radio, magazines, books, and newspapers is our environment, a service environment that carries the messages of the social organism . . . .In earlier periods such traditional meaning and value communication was carried mainly in the fine and folk arts. But today these are subsumed amongst many communicating modes. The term ‘arts’ requires an expansion to include those advanced technological media which are neither fine nor folk.205 That everything around us possesses cinematic potential echoes the romantic sensibility of fusion and synaesthesia. A.L. Rees notes that for Jonas Mekas “expanded cinema instantiates the primacy of the dream as an analogy for film, into which it might be finally absorbed by virtue of shared hypnagogic imagery and the dissolution of the senses.”206 This also explains why many of the foremost practitioners of expanded cinema began elsewhere; theatre for Robert Whitman, and painting in the case of Schneemann and Vanderbeek. The advent and eventual access to video equipment was to play a critical role in creating new dynamics for artists. This is especially true for those approaching experimental cinema from, as Annabel Nicholson distinguishes between, “artistfilmmakers” (she mentions Schneemann, Conrad, and Sharits) and “artists who make films,” who make manifest certain ideas using the medium of cinema, selecting it for its suitability to whichever project requires it, and who are consequently less technically proficient. 207 As a wholly new technological medium and not an off-branch of some other, video needed to be interrogated in the modernist sense. However, one of the realizations that quickly became apparent is that video itself is extremely elastic and suitable for creating new medium amalgamations. Rossoni 97 Video also created a new oppositional binary between television and itself, just as historically one of the main projects of avant-garde cinema had been to work against the state of commercial cinema. Video art shifted the battlefront from the movie theatre to the living room, where television’s explosive popularity turned it into a common piece of “furniture” found in the household. Vito Acconci explains that [j]ust as furniture fits into a room and takes up floor space inside a house, sculpture fits into and takes up space in an art-exhibition area. Take this “thing”: it isn’t as big as a room, so it’s only furniture; it isn’t as big as architecture, so it’s only sculpture. In its early days, the TV set took, inside the house, the position of specialized furniture: the position of sculpture.208 Video and sculpture synthesized to form installation art. The other primary difference that video made apparent was its liveness. William Kaizen makes note that even when delayed by several hours, television was always thought of by its audience to be live.209 Mike Leggett and Ian Breakwall, who collaborated often on projects dealing with the televisual apparatus, vividly describe the cultural compulsion to associate liveness with television: Study and observe the piece of equipment known as a television receiver in its most common environment; the living room, the lounge, the drawing room, whatever you may call it. . . . Functioning perfectly, is it not just simply a 21” picture window? Another standard lamp in the corner? A constantly changing pattern of new wallpaper? . . . Between 20 and 30 million people watch television each night: the engaging guest who’s staying permanently, who’s impossible to ignore and won’t tolerate being turned off. For so many people to entertain such an insufferable guest is intolerable.210 While immersive film environments made by artists like Vanderbeek and Belson (and as discussed in chapter two) proliferated around this same historical period, video enabled truly interactive spaces. One could walk around a video installation as a sculpture in a Rossoni 98 museum, but in this case, the sculpture (or at least components of it) change in real-time as video images. This is of course an aspect of its medium specificity that clearly distinguishes it from film, where the exposed stock must be sent off to a lab or taken to a dark room for processing. With video one could record an image, which had the additional innovation of direct sound-to-image recording, and play it back immediately afterwards. One could set up a monitor or closed-circuit television station and watch the image as it was recording in real-time, create loops between the multiple channels, and combine imagery. Such is the flexibility of video that Francis Torres hailed it as “the art of the possible.”211 Installation and participatory cinema meant the removal of the apparatus from the so-called “black box” of the movie theatre and into the “white cube” of the gallery, which was itself a difficult transition for artists.212 A number of pieces developed early on were concerned with exploring new perceptual possibilities that could be created for the spectator, a process more investigative of the updated cinematic dispositif than of the stark (im)material of video. David Hall’s 1975 installation Progressive Recession at the Serpentine Gallery is a good example of this tendency. Nine cameras and nine monitors were set up into units, with the camera directly above the monitor, with a live feedback connecting each camera to a different monitor than the one below it. The physical result is that “[a]s the viewer moves through the space, he/she is progressively distanced from his/her image.”213 Hall intended the installation to force spectators to consider their “condition poised between the real and the virtual.”214 Hall’s piece synthesizes the mediums of sculpture and cinema while also exploring and interrogating the new spectatorial and exhibition relationships founding installation art. Here the viewer is no Rossoni 99 longer merely watching the artist’s work in the fixed formulation of the theatre/projection space (film is almost always pointed to and focused on a flat surface), but interacting with it and incorporating their bodies into the “projection” event itself. Other installations, like Steina Vasulka’s Allvision (1976) or Michael Snow’s De La (1971), also incorporated live camera feeds into the surrounding environment. Unlike Hall’s Progressive Recession, however, they are not dependent on the spectator’s physical presence to engage its internal process. Both use rotating cameras to survey their surroundings that are then displayed on monitors. In Vasulka’s case, two cameras face inwards towards a large mirrored sphere with two monitors set up to either side of the sphere. The work creates a “machine vision” of itself that enables the spectator to view the object from three potential angles simultaneously. The candid appearance of the sphere emphasizes the discrepancy between natural unmediated vision and the shifting glare arising from electronically mediated vision. A piece like Tony Sinden’s Behold Vertical Devices (1974/6) has a much more concentrated sculptural alignment, whereas Wojciech Briszewski’s From X to X (1976) extends outward, turning its surrounding gallery walls into part of the work’s closed-circuit. All these examples feature the video monitor as an integral component. Technologically, up until the mid-1980s video projection was not only expensive and unreliable, but of horrendous pictorial quality. Artists instead experimented with the sculptural possibilities brought about by adding and/or rearranging the television box. Even this relatively uncomplicated concept, however, could lead to complex configurations not possible with analogue film, which again points to the medium’s ultra- Rossoni 100 elastic properties. Chris Meigh-Andrews describes some of the simple yet intricate challenges a spectator may face: Viewers confronted with a bank or array or monitors in a gallery or exhibition space were immediately required to assess the implied relationship between the images on display. A multi-channel work challenged the viewer to engage the work on a spatial level; she/he was deliberately left free to make decisions about the order of priority of the images and the relationship between the multiple screens and the viewing position, and to consider the space between the monitors, their relative size, and even the method in which they were mounted or displayed.215 Progressive Recession (David Hall, 1975). Rossoni 101 Allvision (Steina Vasulka, 1976). Behold Vertical Frames (Tony Sinden, 1974). Another tendency in video installations was to explore the limitations and shortcomings of video as a medium, recalling both Greenberg and Arnheim’s belief that these are actually areas of strength and should be emphasized. Most of the cameras available to artists in the early 1970s used light-detecting pick-up plates called vidicon Rossoni 102 that recorded things in black-and-white. The tubes were very sensitive to bight light, and if held in front of bright source would flare and produce an after-image in negative that would fade after a few seconds. Hall utilized this effect in a video and later adapted it into an installation piece entitled Vidicon Inscriptions (1974-76). Stephen Partridge explains how the installation worked: “[u]pon approaching the video monitor, the viewer would trigger a lens attachment and be briefly ‘exposed’ under very bright film lights positioned to either side of him/her. The subject’s head and shoulders would first appear on the monitor normally, but would slowly disappear to be replaced by a negative ghostly version.”216 The effect reveals “the clear materiality of [the] electronic form.”217 The primary property of video is its liveness. Since it is in not bound to a physical material like celluloid, it is more abstract and akin to the ephemeral nature of music. Installation and television, however, provide a skeletal if temporary physical form. In this way “it is closer, both rhetorically and technically, to the present tense of theatre than to film.”218 In “The Politics of Culture: Institutional Change”, Stuart Laing suggests the 1960s be read as a period best characterized by the live cultural process. He writes, This emphasis on the live event, the cultural process (‘performance’, ‘happening’) rather than the fixed product was a central feature of much would-be revolutionary culture of the decade which explains both why many existing cultural institutions simply could not accommodate new work and also why live theatre, although not in the traditional ‘proscenium arch’ sense, became the paradigmatic form of the counter-culture.219 Laing also cites poetry performances, such as those by Pete Brown and Mike Horovitz, the American poets Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, jazz festivals, and openair concerts as representative of the period’s live culture. Theatre is an important Rossoni 103 constitutive element for both the proliferation of new artistic categories and as a way of examining those categories. It seems fitting that theatre, long set in opposition to the motion picture industry, find its assent with cinema not through radical divergence (by either medium) but in consonance with one another. The two mediums have a long and tenacious relationship. Because they vied over popular appeal and, all pedagogical distinctions aside, many likened film to theatre, modernist theorists and practitioners were particularly adamant about distinguishing film from theatre, and vice versa. Georg Lukács wrote in 1913 that “[t]he stage is the absolute present,”220 whereas “[t]he essence of the “cinema” is movement in itself, an eternal variability, the never-resting change of things.”221 Threatened by the new and popular form of entertainment, theatre suffered dwindling attendance numbers and risked fading out of relevance and out of commercial sustainability. As the newcomer, however, cinema was eager to establish itself as a respected art form by creating its own language independent of “canned theatre.” Herbert Tannenbaum, an early contributor to film theory, argues along Greenbergian lines that the two should be kept strictly separate: The photographic image is by no means an inferior imitation of the theater . . . [O]ne attempts wish such a comparison to conflate two areas of human artistic endeavor that are built upon entirely different laws, that wish to achieve entirely different effects, and that do not at all mutually interfere with one another if only each type of art is conscious of its borders and strives, within its area of activity, toward the perfection that enables both, each for itself, to create for mankind beautiful hours of solemn artistic pleasure.222 Artists in the 1960s were very “conscious of the borders” between cinema and theatre, and in turn, they exploded the frame. As Laing explaines, theatre and/or liveness in this Rossoni 104 context had moved beyond the proscenium arch. Expanded cinema lowered the stage to include everyone in the spectator’s position; it raised the entire floor so as to bring everyone to the artist’s arena; it transformed the screen into an actor; and carried the arch into the street. Different types of theatrics emerge within a broad field of concerns and analytical directions. The most obvious form of theatre occurs when actors step in front of an audience and perform. Birgit and Wilhelm Hein performed variety show-like acts in their Movie Show (1982). In one number, Die Monster, they wore Frankenstein masks while dancing wildly in the path of the projector beam to kitsch rock. Tony Conrad has frequently performed Bowed Film (1974-2006), where he sits on the floor straining a loop of film taught with his head while “playing” it with a violin bow. As with early investigations between music, painting, and colour, there are divergent paths that choose performance as a critical inward gesture just as there are those whose ‘intermedia” cannot be disconnected. In Vienna we find strong examples of the former. Peter Weibel opened an evening’s program in 1967 with an Action Lecture 1, during which he stood in front of a 8mm projector’s beam while reading aloud theoretical texts on cinematography. In another piece, Nivea (1967), he held up a Nivea beach ball in front of the white screen while the sound of a camera running was played from a tape recorder. Both pieces acutely strip down cinema into its bare components. Weibel differs from structural or structural-materialist filmmakers in that he does not pin down one of cinema’s properties. Rather, “[t]he intention behind both Actions was to release constituent elements of film director, light, sound, camera, projector - from their illusionistic unity and reconstellate Rossoni 105 them.”223 Weibel collaborated with VALIE EXPORT on a number of works in 1968. Among the most notorious of these is EXPORT’s Tapp und Tastkino (Touch Cinema). Standing outside on a busy street, EXPORT strapped a box to her chest that was open on both ends. The far side was decorated so as to look like a small stage, and people on the street were invited to reach inside the box, past the ‘curtain,’ to feel her bare breasts. In an interview with Duncan White, Weibel explains that before Tapp und Tastkino was slowly turned into a feminist piece it was first formulated with primarily abstract material concerns.224 If sight is representational, than touch is tactile. The hands of the volunteer may be able to feel but they are deprived of visual pleasure. This is a reversal of traditional cinema where one can see as a voyeur into the diegetic realm but is incapable of touching it. A “[t]actile reception counteracts the fraud of voyeurism,” writes EXPORT.225 Primarily formal yet minimalist, Tapp und Tastkino negates cinema via theatre and forces to the surface their perceptual qualifiers. Tapp und Tastkino, (VALIE EXPORT, 1968). Rossoni 106 Carolee Schneemann represents the opposite of this tendency towards theatre. Her performances, like Ghost Rev (1966), Illinois Central (1986), and Snows (1967) use materially diverse media as a basis for a form of synthesis rather than for an opposition of ideas like in conceptualism. EXPORT and Weibel break down the components of cinema, Schneemann creates new forms that in turn can potentially lead to new medium amalgamations. She makes this distinction fairly clear in an interview with Gene Youngblood: [I]n intermedia theatre, the traditional distinctions between what is genuinely “theatrical” as opposed to what is purely “cinematic” are no longer of concern. Although intermedia theatre draws individually from theatre and cinema, in the final analysis it is neither. Whatever divisions may exist between the two media are not necessarily “bridged,” but rather are orchestrated as harmonic opposites in an overall synaesthetic experience.226 In Snows, a “kinetic theatre” piece, she combines performance and film “in order to ‘extend the visual densities’ of the live event.”227 The film projections came from her earlier 1965 film Viet-Flakes, in which she photographed newspaper photographs of the Vietnam war with a magnifying lens. These images were projected against a white disc at the back of the stage while two additional projectors swung 360 degrees around the stage. A number of actors gave improvised performances, responding to the images, each other, and an ‘audience-activated electronic system’ so that “movement and related imagery spilled onto the “snow bound” audience.”228 The sheer profusion of diverse imagery – performers, swinging lights, newspapers, and combining pre-planned with improvised methodologies - results in the idea of synaesthesia in its highest, most complete form. Rossoni 107 Snows (Carolee Schneemann, 1967). As we have seen, the idea of synaesthesia and medium specificity both proliferated around the turn of the twentieth century. It was the most alluring intellectual art trend of the time up until the 1960s shift towards postmodernism and the impact of conceptual art. Lost in this same time period, however, are works of art whose interest in merging art forms was not to emphasize differences between media but to create new art forms that can then be scrutinized by others. The “live” culture of the 1960s and the advent of video art provided ample fodder for experimentation in combining new media, especially video, while also promulgating investigations into the materiality of these new media. The ability by artists to lead these investigations while amongst an everbroadening media field is promising for our contemporary culture that may soon no longer have access to the medium of motion pictures. Analogue film has been the source and inspiration for a rich and exciting history of expanded cinema and avant-garde film. Rossoni 108 Undoubtedly new forms will be discovered and similarly interrogated, ensuring a continuingly innovative and provocative regenerative lifecycle for the arts. Rossoni 109 Conclusion This thesis only begins to delve into the rich and intricate history of expanded cinema. But as I have attempted to show, by considering earlier forms of image art we can see that ideas and methods in artistic practices are often cyclical in nature. Technology impacts artists in a variety of ways, creating new forms of cinematic production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption that require careful consideration. It also allows the revisitation of these earlier ideas and expansion or further development. Yet the role of technology is more complicated than that, and impacts different artists in different ways. On the one hand, new technologies allow us to see, read, and learn about things that we would otherwise have no way of accessing. Contemporary artists can more easily research and receive inspiration from contact with their artistic ancestors, while revisiting those older concepts with new technology, as exemplified by Ken Jacob’s Nervous Magic Lantern. Or the opposite can be true, and artists will revolt or abstain from using newer technologies by reverting to more personal, organic ways of producing imagery, like projector performance artists who rely on the factor of ‘presence’ which is absent in digital projection. There are also artists who readily embrace new technology in the Youngblood, McLuhan-esque kind of hybridization. Yasunao Tone, an improvisational musician who associated with happenings, experimental music, and digital art in the 1960s, acknowledges this dichotomy: “When a new technology appears which makes old technology obsolete, two typical reactions occur: some artists discover an abnormal use for the new technology in order to expand artistic expression, and sometimes the obsolete Rossoni 110 technology itself becomes an art form.”229 Vanderbeek exemplifies the former; he gave up painting and hand-animation to explore computer technology as an art form by simultaneously working as a Fellow at the György Kepe’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT and as an artist-in-residence for the Television as Art programme at the legendary WGHB station in Boston. The same can be said for a number of British artists that I have discussed, like David Hall, David Dye, and Tony Sinden, who began working with video as soon as it was commercially available. More recently, Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal has worked with computer and internet art using remote controlled webcams, video games, and even having a web camera mounted to a titanium plate implanted on the back of his skull. That new technologies combine with more traditional media to create new forms allows for a ecological state of artistic development. As I have shown, this has been the case with expanded cinema and pre-cinematic optical devices and art forms. Modern projector performances and magic lanterns both utilize the live manipulation of images. The role of the lanternist is that of a showman, whose skill and craftsmanship cultivate a certain level of star status. In the age of cinema, however, the projectionist is usually regarded as a neutral technician rather than a tradesman; one who administers the film but does not shape it. Isolating the projection at the back of the auditorium in a soundproof booth removes the projector as a distraction from the screen diegesis. In contrast, by placing the projector amidst the audience, or by making the role of the projectionist evident, artists are able to turn the projector into an instrument and the auditorium into a concert arena. While projector performances have been performed since the 1960s, with Ken Jacobs in the US and Nicky Hamlyn in the UK as two of the preeminent forerunners, Rossoni 111 they have become increasingly popular in the last decade. This includes Bruce McClure, Luis Recoder and Sandra Gibson, Metamkine, Alex MacKenzie, and Ben Russell. The impending discontinuation of motion-picture film stock manufacturing, the so-called “death of cinema,” though perhaps an overstatement, makes the work of these artists more important than ever. We live in the midst of the digital revolution. As I have mentioned earlier in chapter one, images are increasingly being carried further out of the hands of their original makers, in more formats and sizes than ever before. Projector performances demand we come to them, not only to see the film, but also to see the film “played” or manipulated live before our eyes. DCP systems have already over-taken 35mm film projectors as the standard in exhibition, and films now come on hard-drives rather than on reels. McClure et. al. remind us that cinema exists beyond screen stars and narrative plots, that there is a history of skilled craftsmen whose invisibility behind the scenes has not, after all, gone unnoticed. Immersive cinematic environments also provide alternatives to commercial exhibition. Like panoramas, they surround and overwhelm the spectator. The panorama painting is often compared to cinema in that it lured viewers into accepting a false reality as true, as an illusionistic substitute. The avant-garde has historically countered this correlation by creating cinematic environments that combat immobilizing structures like those critically outlined by apparatus and suture theorists in the 1970s. In expanded cinema practices, viewers are presented with multiple screens that throw a curve in Charles Musser’s “history of screen practice.” Immersive cinema environments also negate Anne Friedberg’s inclusive theory that “it is not narrative and not the optics of projection that recenter the spectator, but the frame itself.”230 The creation of large-scale Rossoni 112 exhibition sites seems to be increasingly important, if difficult, in today’s digital culture. What was once only available in a movie theatre and 35mm film can now be seen on small phone screens and computers. Films can be easily paused and resumed, disrupting the context that films were originally designed to be theatrically seen. New commercial technologies have been developed to improve the “realism” of a diegesis, including vast improvements with 3D technology and seats that move in accordance with the screen action (similar to the Mareorama and Hale’s Tours). These technologies, however, are geared towards creating even more passive spectators by way of greater identification with the narrative. Expanded cinema explodes the idea of passive identification and demands the viewer actively decide what to look at or attempt to figure out exactly how to look at the overabundance of pulsating images. Interactive connectivity between technology and spectatorship results in immersive environments. This includes the visual scanning that one must do in an environment like Vanderbeek’s Movie-Drome, but it also includes installation art and certain theatrical performances. In Snows (1967) Carolee Schneemann hid SCR electronic switches underneath the audiences seats, so that their behaviour (quiet, excited, loud) would affect the projectors’ illumination as well as signal cues to the performers, who would then alter their actions. Installation art is the most interactive form of cinema in a number of ways. Like sculpture, viewers can walk around and choose their position in relation to the images as opposed to staring straight ahead or having them cascade around you. There are also artists like David Hall, who created work that operates only when viewers are present or interact with the piece. These works also demonstrate what “cinema proper” is not: that is, commercial/conventional cinema is not three-dimensional, Rossoni 113 interactive, or formed in the moment. Multimedia pieces demonstrate the enduring effectiveness of a notion of medium specificity even within postmodernism, often by combining dissonant media to create stark comparisons that emphasize what cinema is not and what it can be. This again harks back to the idea of regenerative growth, where new media will continue to develop and be probed in the process. At the same time, expanded cinema revisits earlier forms of technology while recontextualizing their purposes. Roughly seventy years passed before artists took up a great number of these devices and methods, like the magic lantern and panorama, in the 1960s. As we move on into the digital world, a world that will very likely not include “film” as we know it, it is interesting to think about what other earlier forms or art and methods will be revisited by new artists. It is interesting to note that in contemporary commercial cinema, VHS has replaced Super-8 as the “vintage” look featured in nostalgic scenes. Perhaps early video mixers and image processors will be taken up again. Whatever the state of cinema may be, expanded cinema will continue to offer dynamic possibilities and solutions in the realm of contemporary multimedia art and avant-garde cinema. Rossoni 114 End Notes Notes to Introduction 1 Jonathan Walley proposes expanding recognition of “the idea of cinema” to include paracinema and Conceptual art. See his essay “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant‐Garde Film,” in October No. 102 (Winter 2003), 15‐30. 2 A.L. Rees, “Expanded Cinema and Narrative: A Troubled History,” in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 12. 3 VALIE EXPORT, “Expanded Cinema: Expanded Reality,” in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 288‐298. 4 Schneemann writes: “[m]y first impulse: to attack media celluloid hallucination flat linear dimension stream light beam: flesh it paint it draw dimensions from projected imagery into image in concrete motion. Actual. That audience is going to FEEL us and were going to feel them” [sic.]. ‐ Carolee Schneemann, “Free For Recollections of New York,” in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 96. 5 On this topic I recommend Bart Testa’s Back and Forth: Early Cinema and the Avant­Garde as well as Jeffrey Skoller’s Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant­Garde Film. 6 This is one of the few occasions when I will use brackets around the term “film” in the context of expanded cinema, the other when I discuss paracinema, for which brackets are a necessary use. I use the term film, or cinema, in an inclusive manner derived from Jackie Hatfield. She writes, “I would prefer to use the term cinematic to describe what I do as an artist. I do not use film, but I do make cinema – it moves, it is composed of moving images. Bill Viola makes cinematic work, although working digitally; Chris Hales, Malcolm Le Grice and Grahame Weinbren make cinematic work although working electronically and digitally.” By extension, and important to this thesis, the term cinema also includes elements of theatre, music, sculpture, painting, and Paracinema/Conceptual art. See Jackie Hatfield, “Some Reasons for a Review of the Avant‐Garde Debates Around Narrativity,” in Millennium Film Journal (Winter 2003), 50‐65. Rossoni 115 7 Markman Ellis, “’Spectacles within doors’: Panoramas of London in the 1790s,” in Romanticism Vol. 14:2 (2008), 142. 8 Ibid., 142. 9 Junius Adams, “Entertainment for the Space Age,” in Highlights of Vortex: Electronic Experiments and Music, Folkways Records LP (1959) FSS 6301: http://media.smithsonianfolkways.org/liner_notes/folkways/FW06301.pdf 10 Ibid. Notes to Chapter One 11 I borrow the term “post‐medium” from Rosalind Krauss. See “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post­Medium Condition, (Thames & Hudson, 1999). 12 Tom Gunning, “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film,” in Film Before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: U of California P, 1883), 355. 13 If expanded cinema is a formally narrower category, a sub‐sect of the avant‐garde, what does one call the reversal of such a process? Non‐expanded cinema? Can the avant‐garde reach a point so far “forward” as to turn the corner onto a one‐way street? Seemingly logical answers: normal, standard, common, typical, are unquestionably inadequate. 14 Gunning, “Unseen Energy,” 366. 15 See Jean‐Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Movies and Methods Vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985), 531‐542; Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (London: Macmillan Press, 1981), 28‐29; also see Bart Testa, Back and Forth: Early Cinema and the Avant­Garde (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1992), 23‐47. 16 See Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The MIT Press, 2006), 59‐93. 17 18 Ibid., 80. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick; New Jersey: Rutgers U P, 1995), 119. Rossoni 116 19 Charles Musser, “Toward a History of Screen Practice,” in History of the American Cinema. Vol. 1: “The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907.” Ed. Charles Musser (Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York; Collier Macmillan Canada: Toronto; Maxwell Macmillan International; New York, 1990), 15‐54. 20 Gunning writes: “[c]ontemporary film theorists have made careers out of underestimating the basic intelligence and reality‐testing abilities of the average film viewer and have no trouble treating previous audiences with similar disdain.” Gunning, “(In)Credulous Spectator,” 115. 21 In his manual Book of the Lantern, T.C. Hepworth provides advice on how to correct ‘imperfect projection’ and restore proper registration of dissolving views. Mistakes often led to comical effects. Hepworth describes one such humourous incident: “First of all there came a woman in a peasant’s dress. This was followed by a man whose lower extremities were clothed in tight‐fitting white unmentionables. It so happened that one figure occupied on the screen exactly the same place as the other, so that when the lady was slowly dissolved into the gentleman, the astounding effect was produced of her clothes gradually melting from her form.” Hepworth, The Book of the Lantern. Being a Practical Guide to the Working of the Optical (or Magic) Lantern (London: Wyman and Sons, printers, 1888), 272‐3. 22 Gunning, “(In)Credulous Spectator,” 117. 23 See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, it’s Spectator, and the Avant‐Garde,” in Early Film: Space, Frame Narrative, eds. Adam Barker and Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 56‐62. 24 Gunning, “Unseen Energy,” 356. 25 Ibid., 361. 26 Here Bruce McClure is an interesting case, as a conscious/unconscious artist. In 2006 he was interviewed by Brian Frye (Rail): Rail: So, would you say the stroboscope was the lead into your eventual filmmaking? McClure: Yeah, it was an attempt to address what might be called a proto‐cinematic approach to filmmaking, one that didn’t involve a lot of technology, although the stroboscope is a fairly recent, technological thing. But short of doing flipbooks, . . a hyped up, souped up phenokistascope. The technology was more sophisticated than just a rotating disk with slits cut in it that you look at, a painted image on a mirror, you know? Rossoni 117 McClure used stroboscopes in his early career as a way of avoiding the use of a camera, film, and other production materials. He has always been more interested in the projector itself. Once he moved past the stroboscope, his deliberate reinvigoration of pre‐cinematic methods subsides. See Brian Frye, “Bruce McClure with Brian Frye,” in The Brooklyn Rail (July‐Aug., 2006), sec. Film. 27 Indeed, the term is “notoriously difficult to pin down or define” and includes such diverse examples “from the vividly spectacular to the starkly materialist”, from Stan Vandeerbeek’s “synthetic multimedia” Movie­Drome of the 1960s, to the “analytical and primal cinema” of the 1970s Filmaktion screenings in the U.K. See A.L. Rees introductory chapter, “Expanded Cinema and Narrative: A Troubled History,” in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011): 12‐23. 28 One could justifiably break it down even further and isolate the screen. But since those interested in projection and those who investigate reception space often approach the screen surface in similar ways, I think it best to share this category with both parties. 29 A good example of this latter tendency (and that I discussed in the introduction to this thesis) is Nicky Hamlyn’s 4 X Loops (1974‐), which uses four projectors to form striking visual patterns. The projectors are usually cast separate from one another, though they do sometimes overlap somewhat (and in one section of the performance, all four projectors overlap one another). Regardless, one can clearly determine that Hamlyn is controlling the projectors one at a time, whereas in a large scale image environment like Vanderbeek’s Movie­Drome, for instance, there are so many images that live manipulation would be unnoticeable, unless Vanderbeek were to move a projector’s beam around the ceiling of the dome, drawing attention to its mobility. 30 Musser, 17, 20. 31 Ibid., 17. 32 This insistence on exposing the mechanism calls to mind the self‐referential efforts of the structural/materialist wave in the 1960s and 70s, with films like George Landow’s Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (1966) and Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) serving as but two examples. Rossoni 118 33 Numerous manuals and catalogues list the multitude of available mechanical slide effects. These mechanical slides made dissolves and slide movement easier for the lanternist, and include, for instance, slipping slides, chromotropes, the Pandiscope, the Choreutoscope, the Cycloidotrope, etc. The Indispensable Handbook to the Optical Lantern, compiled and ed. by Walter D. Welford and Henry Sturmey (London: Iliffe & Son, 1888), 336‐345. 34 Marcy’s Sciopticon Manual has an article entitled “Traveling by Magic” that describes the benefits and joys afforded by the device, even in one’s own home: “[g]ive us the Sciopticon, with the necessary slides, before a screen or a white wall, and we will carry you as fast or as slow as you wish, wherever the foot of man has trod, in excellent and comfortable style.” Marcy, 128. 35 Samuel Highley wrote about the educational possibilities of magic lanterns on numerous occasions. In 1870 he argued that magic lanterns could aid in assisting learning about subjects like astronomy, botany, physiology, history, geography, etc., by providing visual aids to students learning materials. He writes: “[i]n recent years came the application of photography to the magic lantern, and it became apparent that that which had only been employed for mere amusement was destined to become, in the hands of the professor and schoolmaster, an important philosophical instrument of great educational value.” Highley, “Optical Instruments X: Apparatus Employed for Educational Demonstrations,” Technical Educator: An Encyclopadeia of Technical Education (London, Paris, and New York: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1870), 244. Also see Highley, Optical Instruments XXII: The Magic Lantern,” Technical Educator: An Encyclopadeia of Technical Education (London, Paris, and New York: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1870), 231‐234. 36 See the collection of The Magic Lantern Journal articles “’Can Any of the Readers of These Pages Inform me who Originally Invented Dissolving Views?’.” In Magic Images: The Art of Hand­Painted and Photographic Slides, Dennis Crompton, David Henry, and Stephen Herbert, eds. (The Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain, 1990), 15. 37 Though generally associated with the computer age, and more often than not with the gallery space rather than the theatre, the term “multi‐media” comes to mind here. Here we have multiple mediums, projected imagery, music, and oratory, synthesizing to create a single performance piece. Could the magic lantern be considered an ancestor to contemporary multi‐media art? 38 Despite its indications, the Stereopticon is neither some kind of primitive yet highly advanced form of 3‐D, nor any kind of dual‐slide projection. Rather, it is a result of the practice of cutting stereographic slides in half and using them separately as lantern slides. Rossoni 119 39 Musser marks this transition to photographic slides as the midpoint between the three most pivotal developments in the history of “screen practice,” the first being the initial development of the magic lantern in the 1650s, and the last being the projection of chrono‐photography around 1895. Also see Ramsaye, Terry, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1926). 40 See the tenth footnote in Deac Rossel’s essay “Double Think: The Cinema and Magic Lantern Culture,” in Celebrating 1895: The Centenary of Cinema, ed. John Fullerton (London: J. Libbey, 1998), 33‐34. 41 Deac Rossell, Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies (New York: State U of New York P, 1998), 14‐15. 42 Dai Vaughn, “Let There be Lumière,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: BFI Pub., 1990), 63‐67. 43 Rossell, “Double Think,” 31. 44 Rossell, Living Pictures, 11‐12. 45 Ibid., 15. 46 See [Cinema.1, Magic Lanterns] [Electronic Resource] 1754‐1892 (Marlborough, England: Adam Matthew Digital, c.2007). 47 She writes, “[p]erformance’s only life is the present. It cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations . . . Performance occurs over a time which will not be repeated . . . and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control,” qtd. in White, Duncan, “Expanded Cinema: The Live Record,” in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 29. 48 Russell’s admiration for pre‐cinema is evident even on his website, where he refers to himself as an “itinerant media artist.” www.dimeshow.com. 49 I have seen Bruce McClure perform on three occasions. At the Media City 18 last year, I asked him if there was a way I could view more of his performances. Grinning, he told me “if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.” Rossoni 120 50 Jonathan Walley, “’Not an Image of the Death of Film’: Contemporary Expanded Cinema and Experimental Film,” in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 247. 51 William C. Wees, “The Apparatus and the Avant‐Garde,” in Cinema Canada, special edition on Film and the Future (no. 97, June 1983), 45. 52, Laszló Moholy‐Nagy, “Production‐Reproduction: Potentialities of the Phonograph,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, eds., (New York; London: Continuum, 2004), 331. 53 Ibid., 332. 54 John Oswald, “Bettered by the Borrower: The Ethics of Musical Debt,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, eds., (New York; London: Continuum, 2004), 131. 55 Tara Brabazon, Popular Music: Topics, Trends & Trajectories (Los Angeles: Sage, 2012), 115. 56 One loses a great deal of the meaning in these works when viewing recorded performances. A factor that makes researching them somewhat disheartening. 57 Malcolm Le Grice, “Time and the Spectator in the Experience of Expanded Cinema,” in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 160‐170. 58 While this is often the case, with McClure the “performance” seems to carry on outside the film‐piece itself. He is very much a performer when he addresses the audience before or after his film. His comical, somewhat maniacal behavior is reminiscent of a vaudeville act. 59 Although in iterinant performances, lecturers would often revise or restage slides to reinterpret them for local audiences. 60 Although many lantern audiences were illiterate, some shows were held at scientific institutions and universities such as the Polytechnic Institution that were for more educated audiences well versed in media literacy. 61 Noël Burch, “A Primitive Mode of Representation?” in Early Film: Space, Frame Narrative, Adam Barker and Thomas Elsaesser, eds. (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 221. Rossoni 121 62 Ibid., 221. 63 Ceram, 28‐32. 64 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993), 23. 65 In fact, attendants of the Phantasmagoria were first exposed to a “pre‐show” before entering the main auditorium. In the exterior corridor Robertson laid out a number of popular scientific experiments for viewers to admire before the main show. See Erkki Huhtamo, “Peristrephic Pleasures: on the Origins of the Moving Panorama,” in Allegories of Communication: Intermedia Concerns From Cinema to the Digital, John Fullerton and Jan Olsson, eds. (Rome: J. Libbey Publishing, 2004), 244, footnote 83. 66 Musser, 24. 67 Ibid., 24. 68 Gunning, , “The Cinema of Attractions,” 43. 69 William Rose, “Annotated Filmography and Performance History,” in Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs, Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur, eds. (Oxford; New York: Oxford U P, 2011), 270. 70 Ibid., 273. 71 There are also recorded instances of magic lanternists projecting onto the ceilings and members of the audience. 72 There were also a number of “slideless” magic lantern set‐ups that projected light through glass tanks filled with water. Chemicals and dyes could be added to the water and the reaction and circulation of the additive could be observed. L.J. Marcy, a Philadelphia optician who invented the “sciopticon,” lists a number of possible chemical experiments in his Sciopticon Manual. For instance, “Experiment 4th. Into a tank of water drop slowly a strong solution of acid perchloride of tin. This on the screen will resemble the eruption of a submarine volcano. When a pretty strong solution has thus been made in the tank, put in it a strip of sheet zinc, and long leaf‐ like blades if metallic tin will at once be seen to shoot out in all directions.” Plants and small insects could also be added, and as with chemical reactions, their form and movement could be observed in great detail. L.J. Marcy, Sciopticon Manual, 6th ed. (Philadelphia: James A. Moore, printer, 1877), 85‐6. Rossoni 122 Notes to Chapter Two 73 See Angela Miller, “The Panorama, the Cinema, and the Emergence of the Spectator.” Wide Angle, Vol. 18:2 (April 1996), 34‐69; Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993); Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin­de­Siècle Paris (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998); For a comprehensive history of the panorama, see Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997). 74 For an insightful article on the financial backing and technical history of Cinerama, see Hazard Reeves, “This is Cinerama.” Film History, Vol. 11:1 (1999), 85‐ 97. Hazard Reeves was a key contributor to the creation of Cinerama. He was not only a producer and shareholder, but designed the multi‐channel surround‐sound system. Also see Fred Waller, “The Archeology of Cinerama.” Film History, Vol. 5:3 (1993), 289‐297. 75 Judith Shatnoff, “Expo 67: A Multiple Vision.” Film Quarterly, Vol. 21:1 (Autumn, 1967), 2‐13. According to event staff, Expo’67 featured 5000 films, and some of the national pavilions had up to 300 films. Some filmmakers were quoted as saying “Expo will change film‐making history more than any other event in history.” See Austin F. Lamont, “Films at Expo – A Retrospect.” Journal of the University Film Association, Vol. 21:1 (1969), 3‐12. 76Numerous variations of the panorama were subsequently developed, including the extended panorama, double extended panorama, cosmorama, neorama, moving panorama, cyclorama, myriorama, and scene panorama. 77 Sophie Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (New York: Routledge, 2008), 121. 78 Oettermann, 13. 79 Schwartz, 151. 80 Oliver Grau, “Into the Belly of the Image: Historical Aspects of Virtual Reality.” Leonardo, Vol 32:5 (1999), 367. 81 Thomas, 121. Rossoni 123 82 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London; New York: Verso, 1991). 83 Grau, 367. 84 Early panoramas were still experimenting with different sized canvases and buildings. Before the size became more‐or‐less standardized, viewers who attended relatively small‐sized panoramas experienced feelings of dizziness. Though the illusion suggested they were very far away, their close physical proximity to the painting resulted in viewers covering great distances in few steps, causing disorientation. According to Oettermann, “this effect can still be experienced at the panorama in Thun, Switzerland; painted in 1814 it is the oldest panorama still in existence; it has a diameter of only thirty‐seven feet” (59). 85However, some complained that these objects ruined the effect since they were stationary and not a part of the painting itself. Other flaws could be detected as well. As mentioned earlier, the proximity between the viewer and painted wall could undermine the illusion if it was too short. Sophie Thomas points out that “[a]nother was the sheer profusion of visual detail, which surrounded the viewer completely, and undermined any stable viewpoint – though this surfeit, and the inherently excessive nature of the illusion, was the very thing that made the panorama so sensational” (16). 86 Youngblood, Gene, Expanded Cinema. (New York: Dutton, 1970), 130. 87 The conference was conducted by David Curtis and Duncan White, and featured many of the essays featured in the 2011 anthology Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. The conference also featured artists talks with William Raban, Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Weibel, and Valie Export, as well as a number of performances and pieces by important artists such as David Dye, Stephen Partridge, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, Tony Hill, and recreations of work by Jordan Belson and Oskar Fischinger. 88 Jonas Mekas, “Expanded Cinema: Extracts from Village Voice ‘Movie Journal.” Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 78. Mekas spells Liss’ piece “Dovecoat”, but according to the BFI website and other sources it is spelt “Dove Cote.” Regardless, each of Mekas’s daily reports on the festival, as well as coverage of other expanded cinema events, have been compiled in the anthology cited above. 89 Youngblood, 371. 90 Oettermann, 34. Rossoni 124 91 Magic lantern performers also had to adjust their respective routines based on an audience’s regional diversity. 92 Oettermann, 32. 93 Friedberg, Window Shopping, 24. 94 Oettermann, 60. 95 Miller, 43. 96Austin F. Lamont, “Films at Expo – A Retrospect.” Journal of the University Film Association, Vol. 21:1 (1969), 3. 97 Youngblood, 352. 98 Frank Kappler, “The mixed media – communication that puzzles, excites and involves.” Life, July 14, 1967, 28C. 99 Andreas J. Rabe, “Multiple Image Techniques.” Journal of the University Film Association, Vol. 21:1 (1969), 22. 100 Thompson and his partner, Alexander Hammid (husband of Maya Deren) made numerous multi‐screen films prior to We Are Young. Their multi‐image film To Be Alive was a smash hit at the New York World’s Fair in 1964, and won a Special Award from the New York Film Critics Circle. It is also interesting to note that the film was originally barred from Oscar consideration because of its three‐screen format. A single‐screen 70mm version was then created, and the film won the award for Best Documentary Short Subject in 1965. 101 Rabe, 21. 102 Lamont, 11. 103 Rabe, 20. 104 Ibid, 21. 105 Tom Gunning, “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film,” in Film Before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: U of California P, 1883), 362. 106 Shatnoff, 3. Rossoni 125 107 Youngblood, 358. 108 Shatnoff, 2. 109 Lamont, 3. 110 Kappler, 28C. 111 Oettermann, 59. 112 Many of the buildings deteriorated simply because they were not built to last much longer than Expo itself. Some even burnt down, while Buckminster Fuller’s infamous “geodesic dome” is now the Montreal Biosphere. 113 John Driscoll, “Some Psychological Bases for Split‐Screen Utilization.” Journal of the University Film Association, Vol. 25:1 (1973), 6. 114 Frank R. Hartman, “Recognition Learning Under Multiple Channel Presentation and Testing Conditions.” Audio Visual Communication Review, Vol. 9:1 (1961), 24‐43. 115 Driscoll, 7. 116 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings; Cybernetics and Society (New York: Avon Books, 1967), 26‐7. 117 Youngblood, 65. 118 See Youngblood, 54‐9. 119 Ibid, 54. 120 See Dick Higgins chapter “Intermedia”, in Horizons, the Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1984),18‐28. 121 Henri Chrétien got the idea for his “hypergonar” lenses after seeing Napoleon in 1926. The lens system eventually led to the creation of Cinemascope. For a detailed description of the development of Cinemascope, see Stephen Huntley, “Sponable’s Cinemascope: An Intimate Chronology of the Invention of the Cinemascope Optical System” in Film History, Vol. 5:3 (Sept. 1993), 298‐320. 122 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2006) 192. 123 Rabe, 21. Rossoni 126 124 Miller, op cit 55. 125 A simple example of double‐framing is two trees on either side of the painting. It thus creates a natural frame within the frame, hence “double‐frame.” It is also a popular technique in cinema. John Ford, for instance, would often use doorways and fence lines to create natural frames. 126 Oettermann, 22. 127 Barker also “billed his picture as an “improvement on painting, which relieves that sublime Art from a Restraint it has ever laboured under.” See Thomas, 17. 128 Oettermann, 32. 129 There were, nevertheless, attempts to reproduce class distinctions within the panorama apparatus. In some cases, panoramas were erected with two viewing platforms. The lower platform was larger and could house more people, and was also cheaper. However, the view from this platform was slightly distorted. To view it properly, patrons had to purchase a ticket to the higher platform, which was both more expensive and smaller in size. 130 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990), 113. 131 Miller, 44. 132 Ibid, 44. 133 Friedberg, Window Shopping, 22. 134 Grau, 367. 135 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), 10. 136 Louis Daguerre created the diorama in 1822. Significantly, he began his career in creating theater sets and designs, for which he was to be very successful at. He worked for years as an assistant to the panorama painter Pierre Prévost. 137 138 Friedberg, Window Shopping, 28. Many of the sources listed thus far also discuss the diorama, including Oettermann, Friedberg, Thomas, and Miller. Also see Louis Daguerre, An Historical Rossoni 127 and Descriptive Account of the Various Processes of the Daguerréotype and the Diorama, by Daguerre, (New York: Kraus Reprint), 1969. 139 Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 74. 140 Jean‐Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus”, in Movies and Methods, Vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols, (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985), 534. 141 Ibid, 534. 142 Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema, (London: Macmillan Press, 1981), 28. 143 Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 77. 144 Ibid, 77. 145 Ibid, 84. 146 Stan Vanderbeek. “Culture Intercom.” In Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 82. 147 Daryl Chin, “Down Memory Lane; Found Forms.” In Stan Vanderbeek Retrospective; Anthology Film Archives (1977). “Expanded Cinema/ Multi Image Installations: http://www.stanvanderbeek.com/ 148 According to Mark Bartlett, “Vanderbeek soon abandoned the Movie­Drome because he was unable to resolve two problems: the interference of projector noise with the audio component of the work, and the reflective surface of the dome itself that interfered with the quality of the still and moving imagery.” Mark Bartlett. “Socialimagestics and the Visual Acupuncture of Stan Vanderbeek’s Expanded Cinema.” In Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 52. 149 Cindy Keefer. ““Space Light Art” – Early Abstract Cinema and Multimedia, 1900‐ 1959.” (2005), Par. 36. Center for the Moving Image. 12 Sep. 2012 <http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/CKSLAexc.htm> 150 Ibid, par. 35. 151 Oettermann, 22. 152 Crary, 113. Rossoni 128 153 Rees, A.L. “Expanded Cinema and Narrative: A Troubled History.” In Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 13. 154 Fred Turner, “Stewart Brand Meets the Cybernetic Culture,” Edge: the Third Culture, (March 2006): <http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/turner06/turner06_index.html>, par. 35. 155 Youngblood, 394. 156 Rees, 14. 157 Ibid, 14. 158 Nicky Hamlyn. “Mutable Screens: The Expanded Films of Guy Sherwin, Lis Rhodes, Steve Farrer and Nicky Hamlyn.” In Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 216. 159 Ibid, 216. 160 Duncan White. “Expanded Cinema Up To and Including its Limits: Perception, Participation and Technology.” In Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 231. 161 Malcolm Le Grice. “Time and the Spectator in the Experience of Expanded Cinema.” In Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 165. 162 Ibid, 169. 163 Recalling the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe, which doubled as a portable camera and projector. 164 This particular aspect finds its predecessor in Vistavision, a widescreen process developed by paramount in the 1950s that ran its 35mm raw stock horizontally. 165 Rod Stoneman. “360 Degrees .” Artscribe No. 11 (Summer 1989), 12. 166 Hamlyn, 218. Rossoni 129 167 Ji-hoon Kim “Reassembling Components, Hybridizing the Human and the Machine: Cross-disciplining Expanded Cinema and the Possibilities for a Discourse of Interfacing.” Artnodes No. 11 (2011), 88. <http://www.academia.edu/2366216/Reassembling_Components_Hybridizing_the_Hum an_and_the_Machine_Crossdisciplining_Expanded_Cinema_and_the_Possibilities_for_a _Discourse_of_Interfacing> 168 Youngblood, 41. Notes to Chapter Three 169 Jeremy Strick, “Visual Music,” in Visual Music. Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900, ed. Kerry Brougher, et. al. (Los Angeles: Thames & Hudson, 2005), 15. 170 Judith Zilczer, “Music for the Eyes: Abstract Painting and Light Art,” in Visual Music. Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900, ed. Kerry Brougher, et. al. (Los Angeles: Thames & Hudson, 2005), 25‐87. 171 There are of course other important figures, creations, and movements leading up to “cinema proper,” some of which I have covered in the preceding chapters, but many of these arguments are often teleological or seemingly argumentative for the sake of argument. This include the ridiculous claim that “cinema” did not exist before Griffith. See the first chapter of Bart Testa’s Back and Forth: Early Cinema and the Avant­Garde, (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1992). 172 Clement Greenberg references Lessing’s publication in his 1940 essay arguing similar lines of medium specificity, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro, eds. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge U P, 1990), 61‐75. 173 Karin V. Maur, in The Sound of Painting (New York; London; Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1999), 10. 174 Richard Wagner, “The Art‐work of the Future,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Vol. 1, trans. William Ashton Ellis. (New York: Broude Brothers, 1966), 132. 175 Ibid., 153. 176 Ibid., 188. 177 Pierre Bourdieu, “Introduction to Distinction,” in The Cult Film Reader, Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik, eds. (New York: Open U P, 2000), 388. Rossoni 130 178 Wagner, 184‐185. 179 Noam M. Elcott, “On Cinematic Invisibility: Expanded Cinema Between Wagner and Television,” in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 40. 180 See Peter Tscherkasky, “The Framework of Modernity. Some Concluding Remarks on Cinema and Modernity,” in Film Unframed: A History of Austrian Avant­ Garde Cinema, ed. Peter Tscherkassky, (Vienna: sixpackfilm, 2012), 311‐316. 181 John Berger, The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 21. 182 Ibid., 23. 183 Maur, 44. 184 Qtd. in Arthur Jerome Eddy, Cubists and Post­Impressionism (Chicago: A. C. McClurg Co., 1914), 140‐141 185 Many, but not all. Louis Bertrand Castel, a French Jesuit priest, is generally regarded as having built the first colour organ, or clavecin, in 1734. Another colour organ was invented by Bainbridge Bishop in 1877. Only with technical improvements in electric illumination around 1900 were these kinds of machines really able to be function properly. 186 Zilczer, 49. 187 For a detailed description of their painted films, and other Futurist films by Anton Giulio Bragaglia, see Birgit Hein, “The Futurist Film,” in Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film 1910­1975, (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979), 19‐21. 188 William Moritz, Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger. (Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana U P, 2004), 203. 189 Though most of the complete films are lost, The Center for Visual Music salvaged enough of Fischinger’s material to recreate a three‐screen installation piece at the Whitney in 2012 entitled Space Light Art. Reporting on the exhibit, Ken Johnson writes: “it has a brightness and chromatic intensity you would expect to see in work from the psychedelic ‘60s. Pulsating circles, flowing organic lines and blinking rectangles; a found film clip of a spinning globe; and the momentary cartoon apparition of a young girl in a hooded, fur‐trimmed coat together create an exhilarating phantasmagoria of abstraction and metaphor.” See Ken Johnson, “The Rossoni 131 Lines and Shapes of a Mystical Stenography: ‘Signs & Symbols’ and Oskar Fischinger at Whitney Museum” The New York Times, July 27 2007, C25. 190 Cindy Keefer, “”Raumlichtmusik” – Early 20th Century Abstract Cinema Immersive Environments,” in Leonardo Electronic Almanac 16: 6‐7. (30 Sep. 2009): http://www.leonardo.info/LEA/CreativeData/CD_Keefer.pdf 191 Moritz, 12. 192 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Art in Modern Culture: an Anthology of Critical Texts, Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris, eds., (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 309. 193 Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art, (Berkeley; Los Angeles: U of California P, 1969), 35. 194 Noël Carroll, “The Specificity Thesis,” in Film Theory & Criticism: Introductory Readings, 7th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, (New York: U of Oxford P, 2009), 294. 195 John G. Hanhardt, “The Medium Viewed: American Avant‐Garde Film,” in A History of the American Avant­Garde Cinema, ed. Marilyn Singer (New York: The American Federation of Arts,), 22. 196 Malcolm Le Grice, “Real Time/Space.” Arts and Artists, Vol. 7, No. 9, Issue 81, (December 1972), 29. 197 For instance, Ernie Gehr’s Eureka (1974), which refilms footage of Market Street in San Francisco around the turn of the century, or going back slightly, Ken Jacobs’ Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (1960. A good example of this trend in expanded cinema, rather than single‐screen, is Le Grice’s four‐screen (although it is also available in single‐screen, After Lumière – L’Arroseur arose, first shown in 1974. Jacobs’ reshoots his own version of the popular early comedy and “first narrative” L'Arroseur Arrosé, shot by the Lumière brothers in 1895. 198 Jonathan Walley, “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant‐Garde Film,” in October, No. 102 (Winter 2003), 18. 199 Scott MacDonald, interview with Anthony McCall in A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, (Berkeley; Los Angeles; Oxford: U of California P, 1992), 165. Rossoni 132 200 Krauss: ““Technical support” has the virtue of acknowledging the recent obsolescence of most traditional aesthetic mediums (such as oil on canvas, fresco, and many sculptural materials, including bronze or welded metal), while it also welcomes the layered mechanisms of new technologies that make a simple, unitary identification of the work’s physical support impossible (is the “support” of film the celluloid strip, the screen, the splices of the edited footage, the projector’s beam of light, the circular reels?)” See “Two Moments from the Post‐Medium Condition,” in October, No. 116 (Spring 2006), 56. 201 Walley, 30. 202 Gill Perry, “Primitivism and the ‘Modern,’” in Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century. Charles Harrison, Francis Frascina, and Gil Perry, eds., (New Haven: Yale U P, 1993), 62. 203 Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 72. 204 Zilczer, 82. 205 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema. (New York: Dutton, 1970), 54. 206 A.L. Rees, “Expanded Cinema and Narrative: A Troubled History,” in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 12. 207 Annabel Nicholson, “Artist as Filmmaker,” in Arts and Artists, Vol. 7, No. 9, Issue 81, (December 1972), 20. 208 Vito Acconci, “Television, Furniture, and Sculpture: The Room with the American View,” in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, David Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, Eds. (New York: Aperture Foundation, 1990), 128. 209 See William Kaizen,“Live On Tape: Video, Liveness, and the Immediate,” in Art and the Moving Image. Ed. Tanya Leighton. (London: Tate Publishing, 2008): 258‐ 272. 210 They issued this statement in a flier, Moving Wallpaper in the TV Lounge, handed out at Plymouth College of Art in 1971. See David Curtis. Artists’ Film and Video in Britain. (London: BFI Publishing, 2007), 221. 211 Torres writes: “The fundamental characteristics of multi‐media installation are its formal flexibility and its capacity to incorporate new media as they have become available and establish links with other disciplines.” See “The Art of the Possible,” in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, David Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, eds. (New York: Aperture Foundation, 1990), 205‐210. Rossoni 133 212 According to Malcolm Le Grice, this transition was one of the most difficult to overcome barriers for the burgeoning generation of video artists. “The biggest problem to be dealt with is creating a physical ‘venue’ for this kind of work. The most suitable existing possibility must lie in performance or installation in the art gallery situation, and this requires the back up of a pool of suitable equipment which can be transported, with performance or installation for longer than a one‐night stand. Meanwhile the work will continue to develop and be seen under inadequate conditions.” Le Grice, “Real Time/Space,” 43. 213 Duncan White, “Expanded Cinema: The Live Record,” in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 35. 214 Joanna Heatwole, “Media of Now: An Interview With David Hall.” Afterimage, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Jul/Aug 2008), 17. 215 Meigh‐Andrews continues: “A further potential level of signification would be articulated by the artist who had control of the images across multiple screens as well as within the electronic space of the single screen, and this was of course in addition to any manipulations of the soundtrack, including the possibilities of sound projection.” See “Video Installation in Europe and North America: The Expansion and Exploration of Electronic and televisual Language 1969‐1989,” in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 127. 216 Stephen Partridge, “A Kick in the Eye: Video and Expanded Cinema in Britain,” in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 140. 217 Ibid., 140. 218 Kaizen, 264. 219 Stuart Laing, “The Politics of Culture: Institutional Change,” in Cultural Revolution? The Challenge of the Arts in the 1960s. Moore‐Gilbert, Bart, and John Seed, Eds. (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 90. 220 Georg Lukács, “Thoughts Toward an Aesthetic of the Cinema.” Polygraph 13, (2001), 13. 221 222 Ibid., 15. Herbert Tannenbaum, “Art at the Cinema (1912),” in German Essays on Film. McCormick, Richard W. and Alison Guenther‐Pal, eds. (New York; London: Continuum, 2004), 5. Rossoni 134 223 Hans Scheugl, “Expanded Cinemas Exploding” in Film Unframed: A History of Austrian Avant­Garde Cinema. Ed. Peter Tscherkassky. (Vienna: sixpackfilm, 2012), 131. 224 Peter Weibel, “On the Origins of Expanded Cinema,” in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 193. 225 VALIE EXPORT, “Expanded Cinema: Expanded Reality,” in Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. Rees, A.L, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 296. 226 Schneemann continues: “Intermedia theatre is not a “play” or a “movie”; and although it contains elements of both, even those elements are not representative of the respective traditional genres: the film experience, for example, is not necessarily a projection of light and shadow on a screen at the end of a room, nor is the theatrical experience contained on a proscenium stage, or even dependent upon “actors” playing to an “audience.” Youngblood, 365. 227 White, 25. 228 Ibid., 26. Notes to Conclusion 229 Yasunao Tone and Chritsian Marclay, “Record, CD, Analog, Digital,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, eds., (New York; London: Continuum, 2004), 345. 230 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2006), 84. Rossoni 135 Bibliography Acconci, Vito. “Television, Furniture, and Sculpture: The Room with the American View.” In Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, edited by David Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, 125‐135. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1990. Arnheim, Rudolf. Film as Art. Berkeley; Los Angeles: U of California P, 1969. Bartlett, Mark. “Socialimagestics and the Visual Acupuncture of Stan Vanderbeek’s Expanded Cinema. In Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film, edited by A.L. Rees, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, 50‐61. London: Tate Publishing, 2011. 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Tony Sinden, 1974. Black Zero. Aldo Tambellini, 1965. Bowed Film. Tony Conrad, 1974. Canada ’67. Robert Barclay, 1967. Dovecoat. Carla Liss, 1973. HPSCHD. John Cage and Ronald Nameth, 1969. Labyrinth. Roman Kroiter, 1967. Light Music. Lis Rohdes, 1975-7. Long Film for Ambient Light. Anthony McCall, 1975. Movie-Drome. Stan Vanderbeek, 1963. Movie Show: Die Monster. Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, 1982. Nervous Magic Lantern. Ken Jacobs, 2000. Nivea. Peter Weibel, 1967. Progressive Recession. David Hall, 1975. Raumlightmusik (or, R­1 – Formspiel). Oskar Fischinger, 1926. Snows. Carolee Schneemann, 1967. Space Theatre. Milton Cohen, 1958. Tapp und Tastkino. VALIE EXPORT, 1968. The Black and the White Gods. Ben Russell, 2008. The Machine. Steve Farrer, 1977. Rossoni 144 Untitled. Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, 2008. Vidicon Inscriptions. David Hall, 1974. Vortex Concerts. Jordan Belson and Henry Jacobs, 1957. We Are Young. Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid, 1967. Rossoni 145 Rossoni 146 Rossoni 147