Ken Jacobs

Encompassing experimental film and video, essay film, gallery-based installation art, and digital art, Jihoon Kim establishes the concept of hybrid moving images as an array of impure images shaped by the encounters and negotiations between different media, while also using it to explore various theoretical issues, such as stillness and movement, indexicality, abstraction, materiality, afterlives of the celluloid cinema, archive, memory, apparatus, and the concept of medium as such.

Grounding its study in interdisciplinary framework of film studies, media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Between Film, Video, and the Digital offers a fresh insight on the post-media conditions of film and video under the pervasive influences of digital technologies, as well as on the crucial roles of media hybridity in the creative processes of giving birth to the emerging forms of the moving image. Incorporating in-depth readings of recent works by more than thirty artists and filmmakers, including Jim Campbell, Bill Viola, Sam Taylor-Johnson, David Claerbout, Fiona Tan, Takeshi Murata, Jennifer West, Ken Jacobs, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, Hito Steyerl, Lynne Sachs, Harun Farocki, Doug Aitken, Douglas Gordon, Stan Douglas, Candice Breitz, among others, the book is the essential scholarly monograph for understanding how digital technologies simultaneously depend on and differ film previous time-based media, and how this juncture of similarities and differences signals a new regime of the art of the moving image.

Tracing the blending of analogue film and digital animation technologies in the work of seminal avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs, this essay explores new possibilities for the radical materialist practices of the political avant-garde in the digital age. Jacobs’ recent use of digital processes to (re)animate photographs and films from the early 20th century complicates notions of photographic indexicality as historical trace in cinematic relationships between past and present. Now able to turn a range of different imaging formats across different historical moments into digital code, grain and pixel not only begin to merge, but they become images of time themselves. This blending of imaging formats from different periods produces what I call temporal composites, each format becoming a signifier of a particular historical moment which produce multiple temporalities in which photographic and digital materials exist simultaneously as a phenomenon of both past and present.

Nosso estudo tem como proposta analisar o informe, conceito formulado por
Georges Bataille, aplicando-o nas obras Cent mille milliards de poèmes, de Raymond
Queneau, Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son, de Ken Jacobs, e Patterns: Divided, Mirrored,
Repeated, de Gerhard Richter. Essas obras se abrem, através de dilaceramentos, para a
impossibilidade de lhes fixar limites, uma vez que elas geram excessos de significados, que
têm como fundamento a instabilidade da forma. Nesse sentido, o paralelo entre literatura,
cinema e pintura se desenvolverá a partir das relações que o informe nos oferece, no momento
em que o percebemos como um processo de decomposição não apenas da matéria, mas do
próprio ato de ver, que se volta contra si mesmo, ao se amparar na violência do nonsense
contra a estabilidade das normas científicas e acadêmicas.

Fin dalle origini, il cinema è stato pensato (e utilizzato) anche come dispositivo di mediazione e incontro tra il soggetto e le dimensioni non immediate dell’esistenza; l’immagine stessa è stata vista come luogo in cui si deposita, assieme a una traccia del reale, qualcosa di simile a un’essenza della vita altrimenti impensabile. Il cinema, dunque, come una specie di linguaggio per concettualizzare ciò che normalmente non si vede: di qui, una lunga vicenda – tra teoria e prassi – che lo inquadra essenzialmente come un dispositivo di rivelazione e scoperta di un non meglio definito (perché, nel tempo, diversamente valorizzato) al di là – un al di rispetto alle dimensioni fenomenologicamente conosciute e conoscibili del reale. Entro questo spazio di riflessione, la nozione di visione ha conseguentemente guadagnato uno statuto ulteriore, e l’immagine cinematografica – anche quando, e anzi proprio perché, traccia del reale – è stata investita di proprietà ontofaniche, di capacità di mediazione tra il soggetto e l’essenza delle cose, la loro verità o esistenza “piena”. Lo raccontano bene, tra gli altri, i percorsi di autori come Yervant Gianikian e Angela Ricci Lucchi, Martin Arnold e Ken Jacobs.

The work of the visual artist Christian Marclay draws from music and sonic culture and is known for its mixed-media work, including assemblages of records’ covers, deformed music instruments, videos and installations. With or without the actual manifestation of sound, he creates back and forth trajectories between the sonic world becoming mute and and the auralised visual sphere. The cultural historian Steven Connor has described the set of relationships between the aural and the visual created by Marclay as operating in the “domain of the parasonic”, yet without elaborating further on this notion. However, its usefulness to think about artworks that participate in both the visual and sonic spheres, with none of the latter overriding them – and which thus raise questions about the very corpus to which they belong: that of art history and visual culture and/or sound studies – might be appreciated by being brought close to another hybrid category: paracinema. The latter, first coined by experimental filmmaker and performer Ken Jacobs in the 1970’s and recently revived by the film scholar Jonathan Walley “identifies an array of phenomena that are considered 'cinematic' but that are not embodied in the materials of film as traditionally defined” (Walley) and explore a space at the intersection of artist’s film, performance and conceptual art. Hence, broadly, both the parasonic and the paracinematic are analogous in their formulation and both assert an escape from their conventional material, and coextensively, from the very categories by which scholars apprehend them. Drawing on Marclay’s and the paracinematic work of Anthony McCall, this paper will discuss epistemic possibilities and insufficiencies in art history and associated disciplines as they might appear when analysing such practices that posit themselves outside of or beside (para-) traditional mediums. Finally, by addressing the intersections and analogies of sound and visuality through the parasonic and the paracinematic, this paper will also discuss the fashioning of academic corpuses and their legibility in relation to disciplinary formations and their methodologies.

This paper analyses two recent works by American filmmaker Ken Jacobs that deal with aspects of remediation. The first is A Tom Tom Chaser, in which Jacobs records the telecine process that transforms the classic silent film Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son from chemical into electronic media. The film is riddled with poetic turns inviting the audience to rediscover the medial noise hidden by images. Moreover, Jacobs focuses on the moment of transition from a material medium (the film strip) to the immaterial (the image, the video), so that the noise brings the viewer closer to a perception or brief capture of the medium in itself. Images are both figured and disfigured along this process. The second work is The Guests, an unconventional 3D film in which Jacobs transforms a short take from a Lumière Brothers film by discovering unseen views of the original footage. In his remediation of the 3D technology, Jacobs employs the Pulfrich effect, which allows him to blur the images of the archival film and to create instances of uncertainty between the views coming from the two human eyes. As a result of this procedure, the characters in the film seem to look directly at the audience. The analysis of both films highlights the poetry of the typical manoeuvre by which Jacobs perverts the archival medium, whereupon the viewing mode between media denaturalizes the usual media gaze (framed and representational), focusing on the moment of viewing in itself. This, as a result, favours the medium for what it is and subverts the gaze that expects something representational, discursive, perhaps story-driven. There are artists who can shift back and forth between the two aspects of archival media: between the body itself and its image, between the moment of seeing and the point of view it creates. Ken Jacobs is one of the most interesting cases in terms of such transgressions in perspective. In his book, Breakdowns, Art Spiegelman depicts Jacobs facing the observer. There is a rectangle cutout placed against his left eye, suggesting he has a fragmented view of the observer – who also sees him. From the other side of the gaze, his perspective might be interrupted and cadenced by the frame of his choice. With this play between pictures and

During my time as a Visiting Scholar at NYU, spring semester, 2008, I wrote a diary to remember all the shows I attended, all the filmmakers I met and some of my reflections. Occationally I met filmmaker and editor Grahame Weinbren to share my experiences. He decided to publish an edited section of my diary in Millennium Film Journal. It is the most personal thing I've ever published, but I keep refering back to these experiences, and decided I want to share it here also. It's been a while...

Report of an exhibition framed within Hollis Frampton's notion of a meta-history of all visual arts, a place where painting, cinema, and photography would all be seen as branches on the same tree. Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. February-May, 2014.

During my time as a Visiting Scholar at NYU, spring semester, 2008, I wrote a diary to remember all the shows I attended, all the filmmakers I met and some of my reflections. Occationally I met filmmaker and editor Grahame Weinbren to share my experiences. He decided to publish an edited section of my diary in Millennium Film Journal. It is the most personal thing I've ever published, but I keep refering back to these experiences, and decided I want to share it here also. It's been a while...