When Analog Cinema Becomes Digital Memory

Tafler, David.
Wide Angle, Volume 21, Number 1, January 1999, pp. 181-204 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wan/summary/v021/21.1tafler.html

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Fig. 1. Ken Jacobs and The Nervous System, performance at the Pacific Film Archive,
Berkeley, October 1994. Photo by Ken Paul Rosenthal.

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When Analog Cinema

Becomes Digital
Memory
by David I. Tafler
Introduction: Memory as Open Territory
For a brief moment in time, film/videomakers may join with empowered spectators and open up the boundaries of the cinema machine. In a unique reflexive
environment, film/videomakers and spectators can unravel their own memory/
history. Each, in their own way, may dredge the matrix of their home environmentthe country landscape, the urban grid, the tenement clusters, ethnic
neighborhoods, farmhouses, barns, and the recorded ghosts of their occupation.
The landscape models the intersections in their work, complex networks of
intermittent movement, commerce, and ideas. The bonds stretch between the
text and the spectator. Memory and technology become inseparable, the effects
of each structuring the other. Prodding a living memory, the tools mediate the
social experience and the social, political implications of the captured image.
Efforts to explore the relationship between the social and the technical have
taken many forms by many artists. Media artist Peter dAgostino describes a
childhood experience of flinching and ducking when the 3D objects came flying out of the cinema screen in the nineteen-fifties. He imagines how Lumires

David I. Tafler is Head of the Communication Department of Muhlenberg College

in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He has written extensively on interactive media and
new technologies and co-edited a book with Peter dAgostino titled TRANSMISSION:
Toward A Post-Television Culture. He is currently working with the Pitjantjatjara and
Yankunytjatjara people in central Australia on the development of their telecommunication environment.

WIDE ANGLE V O L . 2 1 NO. 1 (JANUARY 1999), pp. 177-200.

OHIO U NIVERSITY SCHOOL OF F ILM

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Train Coming Into The Station prompted some discomfort on the part of an audience that realized the illusion but could not break away from reacting to its
shocking effects. While the high tech of the eighteen-nineties now looks
relatively crude, at the turn of the century people ducked and scrambled out
of the way of this virtual train reality.
In the nineteen-sixties, Austrian film artist Peter Kubelka designed a cinema
theater which enclosed the spectator in a wooden cocoon. Wooden partitions
isolated the individual from the other members of the audience in order to
minimize the possibility of anything distracting the spectator from his/her relationship with the images projected on the screen. Not surprisingly, an individual experiences the cinema differently when isolated from the audience.
For example, laughing patterns change when partitions break up the group.
At times, audiences can lose their restraint. Spectators can lose their individual
identity or willingness to process information individually. Group identity prevails. In a commercial venue, teenagers will vocally deride the manipulative
conditions of a film by collectively resisting its operation. The audience resists
the films passion and its emotional engagement by calling attention to it. They
scream back at the characters by taunting the walking spectres. In a non-commercial screening, for example at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
adult audiences fresh from their odyssey through galleries of abstract paintings
will vent their displeasure at watching an abstract film. When an audience
yields to the filmmakers temporal control, its expectations narrow.
We continue to invent the cinema. As film becomes video becomes digital, the
cinema remains a fluid vehicle, perpetually in process, unstable in its projection
and reception, and more difficult to interpret and deconstruct.1 Accompanying
each shift, options appear that expand the possibilities for resistance within the
text by forming gaps in the flow of the experience. Those intervals provide an
opportunity for reconstructing meaning. The forks in the road set up decisionmaking junctures. Each becomes a moment of silence, a negative space. Positioned to maneuver within those gaps, film and video makers and spectators
can incrementally break down and gradually rebuild the codes binding them
in their experience.

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Newer interactive work restores temporal freedom, but at what cost? New
decisionmaking intervals affect the arrangement of movie fantasies and
speculations. At the very least, the maker/spectator pauses and assesses the
situation before the text can move on. The prevailing cinema, television, departs from the coherence of classical drama. Navigating branches that overlap,
intersect, and diverge in different directions, home television spectators channel
graze, mute, record, replay, or ignore given sequences. Television commercial
interruptions and their offspring MTV (music television) reinforce these interruptive, fragmenting, and often abrasive patterns.
No longer ceaselessly restoring the illusion of the homogeneous and the continuous, television, nevertheless, approaches the real by confirming the
spectator in his or her natural relationship with the world, reduplicating the
conditions of his or her spontaneous vision and ideology.2 Only the reality
out there has changed. In that revised reality, specific socially motivated representations trigger programmable memory. Most common, the instant-replay
experience, prevalent during the screening of sporting events on commercial
television, generates a brief intervalic fascination for a fleeting event. It invests
that event with inflated importance, accompanying it with a dramatically
charged voice-over that makes the moment into an immediate memory. In the
cinema, dramatic, non-diegetic music may have the same effect.
Analog causality creates seminal moments within a play of events. It shapes or
choreographs particular gestures and actions within an overall sequence. Seamless, ephemeral, and manipulable, key events rise and fall with causal regularity,
changing gradually, occasionally more dramatically, but always progressively in
response to numbers of stimulating factor(s). Within this fabricated encounter,
the individuals experience, feeling, and thought flows with each dramatic wave.
Interruptive junctures disrupt the continuity and restore the boundaries between the spectator and the screen.
Decisionmaking presents variables in the formation of a collective memory
where makers and viewer-participants hover between recorded events and
their after effects. A number of film and video artists have probed this terrain
bridging early and late twentieth century techno-social transitions. Filmmakers

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who continue to work in a post-futuristic niche ruminate on the short-lived

world captured and recreated by a mechanical cinema. Videomakers, a half a
generation later, mark films electronic genesis. Technologically, the positioning
of the spectator becomes significant.

Spectator and Screen

The move to digital media marks a site of convergence for so-called experimental/avant-garde film and video, the two major exploratory moving image
canons of the past thirty years. As both film and tape become technical anachronisms, their memory and legacy open the portal for a second reading.
DAgostinos cybernetic installation VR/RV: a Recreational Vehicle in Virtual Reality
explores the video to VR (virtual reality) genesis and the geography of representation inscribed by this transition. Filmmaker Ken Jacobss analytical study of
an old short Tom, Tom, The Pipers Son reinvents the cinema, revisiting its origins,
probing the boundary between fascination and meaning. One hundred years
ago, George Melies used the cinema to build his own fantastic narratives,
while the Lumire Brothers rooted their films in documenting everyday actualities. Looking at their work today sews together traces of the inscribed events
recorded in their fluid encounter with a shifting conceptual and technical environment. That environment threatens to disappear altogether over time.
Digital media anticipates the complete devolution of the screen by building a
cinematic experience that is made to happen in your head. At the same
time, it adheres to the old apparatus and the century old ways of manipulating
perception. The living factor becomes the presence of the artist as the producer who makes the decisions to modify the recorded experience. No longer
in charge (of the television remote), the spectator sits back and cognitively
dives into the screen. The images on the screen cohere within the spectator.
There is a violent decentring of the place of mastery in which since the
Renaissance the look had come to reign; to which testifies, in my opinion, the
return, synchronous with the rise of photography, of everything that the
legislation of the classic opticsthat geometrical ratio which made of the eye
the point of convergence and centring of the perspective rays of the visible 3

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From old film technology, the filmmaker assembled a time machine for unlayering
the multi-dimensional reality recorded on the film. Hybrid machines comprised of odd shutters and analytical projectors warp the temporal-spatial experience opening a portal through which Jacobs and his audience plunge into
the elisions shaped by the text. The mechanically driven intermittent system
provides a path on which an audience moves forward conceptually, at the same
time encountering images from the past.
The use of retooled film technology warps one hundred years of motion picture
history. The projector mechanism disassembles footage recovered one frame
at a time. Slowing down the film, disrupting its illusion of another reality, the
event emerges as an interactive experience. The event exists somewhere out
there, a projection forged somewhere in the cerebral cortex. DAgostino describes it as experiencing an apparition happening in front of the screen; a
seancesomething coming out at me, a kind of magic; vaudeville shows that
take the cinema back.4 When the separation breaks down between the spectator and the screen, the human eye loses its immemorial privilege; the
mechanical eye of the photographic machine now sees in its place, and in certain aspects with more sureness.5 Digital cinema deconstructs the mechanical intermittent processing of images. It compresses, transmits, and unravels
visual information. Higher level operations supplant the eye.
On the simplest level, over 127 million receptor cells respond to light stimulation in each eye. Only one million fibers, however, transmit that information
along the optic nerve. The wiring in the eye reduces the registered signals,
compresses the information to shifts in contours and contrasts, colors, and patterns. A complex reconstruction, a figuration of associations, recollections, and
recognitions creates the illusion of a retinal image, a condition that an individual
with normal vision takes for granted. In short, new cinema experiences bypass the illusions, the perspectival renderings that reinforce those illusion. They
penetrate the codes of classic Western representation, pictorial and theatrical.
In essence, deep focus yields to deeper stimulation.6
According to Buckminster Fuller, ninety-nine percent of the universe remains
invisible. Forming the remaining one percent, a repository of permanent

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referents anchor all experience and memory. The construction of randomness,

ordering chaos, becomes a key component of the interactive installation. The
interactive program forms a web of jumps and starts, a matrix of problematic
intersections and decisions. Each choice made, each path bears different complications. Within the virtual, metaphoric, and spiritual dimensions of their
work, interactive media artists weigh the variables. Within the programmed
interstices of the installation, the spectator forms his or her own virtual, metaphoric, and spiritual linkages. First person experience will not guarantee closure.
In his stories of cycles, dreams, and passing generations, writer Jorge Luis
Borges places narratives decisionmaking junctures within this ephemeral first
person territory. He resists a rational determination that events must cohere
within some absolute system along a uniform linear plane. In The Garden of
Forking Paths, Borges drew
an infinite serious of times, in a dizzyingly growing, ever spreading network of
diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of timethe strands of
which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through
the centuriesembrace every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In
some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet
others both of us exist7

Borges strips away the shrouds cloaking day to day artifice and reveals its fugitive underpinnings. He deconstructs time, challenging dimensional linearity
and rational coherence. Time remains fluid, ephemeral, and immaterial.
Comolli, in Machines of the Visible, refers to the social relations that govern
the cinema spectator exchange, image verisimilitude, and plot engagement, as
a self-deception: the spectator expects to be fooled and wants to be
fooled.
There is no spectator other than one aware of the spectacle, even if
(provisionally) allowing him or herself to be taken in by the fictioning
machine, deluded by the simulacrum: it is precisely for that that he or she
came We want to be both fooled and not fooled, to oscillate, to swing
from knowledge to belief, from distance to adherence, from criticism to
fascination.8

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As seductive and powerful as the semblance to reality may seem on the screen,
other factors mediate the engagement between the spectator and the text.
Jean-Louis Baudry describes one factor as simply the satisfaction of self-deception. In his article The Apparatus, Baudry writes:
Freud hypothesized that the satisfaction resulting from hallucination is a kind
of satisfaction which we knew at the beginning of our psychical life when
perception and representation could not be differentiated, when the different
systems were confused, i.e. when the system of consciousness-perception had
not differentiated itself
A perception which can be eliminated by an action is recognized as exterior.
The reality test is dependent on motricity. Once motricity has been
interrupted, as during sleep, the reality test can no longer function.9

The spectator prospects these differences between cinematic artifice and its
encompassing reality, between reception and motricity. After the events have
transpired, how the spectator processes their history has its own reality.
History has no meaning outside of the positions constructed by the storyteller.
In TLON, UQBAR, ORBIS TERTIUS, Borges suggests that it reasons
that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as
present hope, and that the past is no more than present memory.10 Historic
events serve merely as synecdochic bridges crossing the strands of personal
experience with institutionalized memory. Memory exists ontologically as
malleable raw material. Within this fabrication, symbols, signs, critical events
or their presentations, often markers of cataclysmic disruption, prevail.
Viewer-participants become problematic gatekeepers when they mediate their
own memories.11 Framed, positioned, determined in their raised questions,
they discover that their identity remains entirely fabricated by outside forces.
In The Circular Ruins, Borges taps this despair. Toward the end, the voyager with relief, with humiliation, with terror, understood that he also
was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.12 Fully programmed,
each decisionmaking moment becomes a part of the illusion. The options
have no true choices. Every path leads home.

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In her essay The Memory of the Senses, Part I: Marks of the Transitory, C.
Nadia Seremetakis describes memory as a protean abstraction within the perceptual process.
Memory is the horizon of sensory experiences, storing and restoring the
experience of each sensory dimension in another, as well as dispersing and
finding sensory records outside the body in a surround of entangling objects
and places. Memory and the senses are co-mingled insofar as they are equally
involuntary experiences. Their involuntary dimension points to their
encompassment by a trans-individual social and somatic landscape.13

Cybernetic media goes one step further. It erases the boundaries of the body.
The individual becomes both a sender and a receiver, and a reservoir of information. The media apparatus revisits the material previously stored in the
subject and helps rebuild the individuals memory along the lines of a particular mediated condition.14
Theorist Jean-Louis Comolli argued that changes in media apparati and techniques mirror audience demands, desires, fantasies, speculations. These
social factors take precedence in the formation of what Comolli calls the cinema machine.
The cinema is born immediately as a social machine, and thus not from the
sole invention of its equipment but rather from the experimental supposition
and verification, from the anticipation and confirmation of its social
profitability, economic, ideological and symbolic. One could just as well
propose that it is the spectators who invent cinema15

As information resources supplant manufacturing capabilities, as cinema tools

become interactive, their changing operating systems structure inscribed memories differently in the retrieval and fabrication of memorable events. Cybernetic
systems guide the individual through an experience shaped by short and long
term memory. The individual self-navigates toward his or her own reception.
Uncertainty tempers decisionmaking activity. With the passage of time, other
events and perspectives compound, distance, compromise, and modify lingering
ties. Other moments establish new buffers, new junctures binding the event
with exceedingly peripheral if not unrelated memories. Some filmmakers

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work excavates memory by recovering old film footage and restaging its captured events. The image becomes raw material, conjuring illusions that go far
beyond the recorded objects and figures originally seen on the screen.
My avant-garde is very reactionary, because I am still quite concerned about
quality of film and the hit of the machine on our history and on our psyches.
Before it is all whisked away, I actually want to reflect upon it and deal with
its machine quality.16

For Ken Jacobs, eash frame operates as a potential junction in its relationship
to the frame before and after it. Compounding the complexity of moving so
deliberately from one frame to the next, a second projection system intermittently and systematically probes the same material. Working with two identical strands of filmvery, very short pieces of filmJacobs builds sixty minutes of intense experience out of sixty seconds of footage.
The demarcation of frames segments the continuity and provides numerous
opportunities for interceding in the flow of the text. Each frame becomes a
digital switch, a stop-start decisionmaking junction, a site of commotion and
interaction. Jacobs calls these moments
eternalism: unfrozen slices of time, sustained movements going nowhere
unlike anything in life (at no time are loops employed). For instance, without
discernible start and stop and repeat points a neck may turn eternally.17

Each stop and start, forward and reverse temporal decision that he makes
flicks a switch. Crossing each junction corresponds to the mental synapse triggered when moving from frame to frame, shot to shot.
In the sixties, Paul Sharits built repetitive series of visual icons, signs, and colors
into filmic loops. Tony Conrad manipulated light in The Flicker. Hollis Frampton,
a photographer who became a filmmaker, continually juxtaposes the two. Unravelling the cinematic process on the screen, Stan Brakhage, Ernie Gehr, and
others worked the image at the cognitive level of the spectators reception.
Restoring cinema as theater, they pushed the magic lantern process. In their
paracinematic performances, these artists choreographed the stops and starts

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and synaptic leaps of cinematic time and space. They built junctures using
lights, projected images, filters, and performers. On the stage, they created a
virtual environment, then placed their performers into that imaginary space.
The audience, though not immersed in this virtual world, still entered into a
manipulated sensuous experience but remained aware of the manipulation.
In the shadow play of the seventies, Jacobs severed the two dimensional constraints of the screen by moving the audience into an ephemeral three dimensional world. On the cortical edge, Jacobs played with binocular stereopsis.
The spectator donned a pair of Polaroid glasses, with respective lenses positioned at right angles to each other. Operating on the same psycho-perceptual
principles as the head mounted displays (HMDs) used for enabling virtual experience, each lens confined each eye to the reception of a different temporally displaced overlapping image projected through a corresponding Polaroid
filter.18 Manipulating these binocular, omni-oriented displays, Jacobs constructed an imaginary space into which he projected his performers.
Despite its cybernetic overtones, the shadow play performance differed markedly
from the configuration of most contemporary VR installations. In dAgostinos VR/
RV installation, the experience of the spectator almost but does not replicate the
experience of riding in a recreational vehicle (caravan). The driver wears the
helmet but everyone else experiences the phenomenon on screen, watching
through the drivers eyes. DAgostino points out that the installation operates on
the same conceptual level as the camera on the moon. The monitor captures the
excitement of the performance, of an experience taking place in the spectators
real time, but taking place in a different, in an imaginary or distant space.
Jacobs does not enter VRs realm of surrogate experience. Jacobss performance space stretched to the tip of every spectators nose. Phantoms danced
with live performers. The screen on the proscenium wall ballooned outward
visually enveloping each individual spectator, forming an arc from his or her
particular seat, within his or her head. The visual system rendered an abstract
pattern as a coherent vision, a viewer shared fascination that doesnt necessarily adhere to any commonplace physical law.

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Jacobs began this exploration in the dark. In his feature length film Tom, Tom,
the Pipers Son, Jacobs resurrects and then disembodies a short chase film made
by the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company in 1904. The mutoscope
film depicts a boy running from his fellow townspeople with a pet pig that he
playfully absconded. A chase sequence ensues. Jacobs reshoots the film, fragmenting the action into a series of finite events. Jacobs
took this old movie and translated it into the modern film sensibilities. He
rephotographed it, dissected it image by image, frame by frame, detail by
detail, and came up with a movie of his own, seventy-five minutes long. He
achieved two things: he created a film of much greater visual and formal
impact than the original; and he set up a precedent of film translation.19

Jacobs does more than rupture the flow of the film. Slowing and stretching the
sequence, violating the continuity, breaking down each movement into its
constituent gestures, each frame becomes a trace not only of the original staged
event, but of a relationship between the contemporary viewer and a representation of past actors/characters/actions. The experience of Jacobss film constructs the bridge between a contemporary audience and a cinema being born.
My camera closes in, only to better ascertain the infinite richness (playing
with fate, taking advantage of the loop-character of all movies, recalling with
variations some visual complexes again and again for particular savoring),
searching out incongruities in the story-telling (a person, confused, suddenly
looks out of an actors face), delighting in the whole bizarre human
phenomena of story-telling itself and this within the fantasy of reading any
bygone time out of the visual crudities of film: dream within a dream!20

The cinematic apparatus serves as a vehicle for studying the real people, the
actors playing characters in front of the camera. The analytical overlay retraces
the inscribed record of each small action captured on the emulsion and explores
the meaning of its viewing and reviewing many years later.
Each frame becomes a governor. Each individual image offers the option of
moving foward, backward, or repeating the frame. Jacobs choreographs the
movement of the film through each of those decisionmaking junctions. By
slowing and arresting the film, by weighing, revelling in, or analytically assessing each continuity decision and motion, a spectator joins the filmmaker in

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Fig. 2. Ken Jacobs and The Nervous System, performance at the Pacific Film Archive,
Berkeley, October 1994. Photo by Ken Paul Rosenthal.

mining the existing film, as Jacobs himself describes it.21

The individual attends to a specific part of the frame. The spectator focuses
on one or on another element of the image. Each movement inscribes a metalevel event. Only one step removed from the action, the viewer watches
Jacobs travel through the antique text, constructing junctures and then pushing the buttons to plunge deeper and deeper into the material on the screen.
Jacobs effaces the illusion of real movement. A single frame, a photograph
embodied in the film remains the absolute and indivisible entity, frozen in
time and potentially frozen on the screen. The movement back and forth
through that captured moment becomes a catalytic event at the core of a secondary cinematic discourse. Prospecting the gaps in the films deconstruction,
the viewer participates in that discourse.
In his more recent work, Jacobs manipulates memory using his invention called
The Nervous System to reconfigure audience perception and cognition. The

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spectator sits down, the lights dim and the image comes ona strange, flickering, sometimes indecipherable array of shadows, patches of emulsion, traces of
a recording. Ken Jacobs navigates the audience through a series of dual screen,
syncopated film projections. He uses two projectors, modified by a large frontal
shutter, to present spectacles that combine and overlap syncopated filmic images of recorded individuals and captured events. The two overlapping images,
each coming from one of the two independently operated projectors, flow in
and out of sync with each other. As the images divide, wander, and periodically
combine, the spectator perceptually stitches the two components together. The
cognitive nature of that converging operation constantly changes as it fluctuates from decisionmaking moment to moment.
Beyond excavating memories, Jacobs uses The Nervous System not as a prosthetic
device for resurrecting old images but as a time machine for moving freely within
virtual memory. In Two Wrenching Departures, Ken Jacobss two longtime
associates, the late Bob Fleischner and Jack Smith, perform a free form ballet
choreographed by the rhythm and elision of Jacobss reenactment.22 Jacobs
arrests and restructures their gestures; he distills the moments closing in on (to
allow the expansion of) ever-smaller pieces of time.23 The movement from
each frame to the next opens that fresh territory for sentient exploration.24
if picking at the texture of cinema, at the end of its filmic phase, seems
about as inward as one can get, its because the name of this digging tool Ive
devised, The Nervous System, also designates a main territory of its search, that
place where weve blithely applied mechanism to mind willy-nilly producing
that development of mind known as cinema.25

Having recorded the original footage, Jacobs annotates the imprint of the
event. His decisionmaking marks an active trace of his own time, a passage
behind both cameras.
At his Nervous System presentation of Ontic Antics (a play on a segment of an old
Laurel and Hardy film) at the New York Film Festival in October 1998, Jacobs
explained his fascination, his excavation of time and place.
Im dealing with a phenomenon of movies, and movies in our lives and
imaginary characters like Laurel and Hardy.

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Im trying to locate something. What is this odd thing? Im not someone that
lets go of things easily. History is not over for me. Im plagued by it. Im not
through with it. I dont like everything whisked away as quickly as it is. I
come from Williamsburg, but I might as well come from across the globe its
all changing so quickly. Your hometown becomes another part of the planet
after twenty or thirty years. None of us can go home again. There must be
some desire on my part not to give a glancing interdiction to things. The few
things, people, the few places that I meet up with I want to hold, to taste, to
savor, to cry, to suffer, whatever it is. It has to do with attention.26

The image flattens out and the negative space, the holes in the image, become
more prominent. In the figure-ground oscillation, the spectator enters into the
past, probing the darkness, as if the gaps in the film trigger the synapses in the
brain, at times in a one-to-one pas de deux.
With Jacobs behind the projector, The Nervous System captures the paradox of
all cinematic performance. The filmmaker occupies the unseen space beyond
the screen, behind the projector. In Stan Brakhages 1962 film Blue Moses, the
camera turns around at the direction of the onscreen character to ostensibly
find the cameraman. Instead, it reveals a source of light coming from the projector. No, its hopeless, the characters cries lamenting the impossibility of
crossing the cinemas temporal spatial boundary.
The events transpire within the spectators head. When watching The Nervous
System performance of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the viewer works hard to
assemble a gestalt from the vibrating traces of shapes and bodies, pulsating black
smudges on a gray background. Eventually, the scene coheres but not on the
screen. Similar to the fusion that transpires when binocular vision presents itself as a
single image, the performance emerges somewhere out there between the viewers
eyes and the screen, inhabiting a projected dimension of the viewers mind.
The Nervous System distorts the sender-message-receiver model.27 Orientation
shifts with the transformation of experience. Head mounted displays, touchscreens, and other devices mimic this operation of the mind. They, however,
immerse the individual within the experience rather than the experience
within the individual. In contrast to the smoking mirrors and magic of a Jacobs
performance, the VR spectator entraps him or herself in an enclosure, a helmet,

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a CAVE, a vehicle. As dAgostino describes it, the spectator enters a VR/RV

a virtual reality recreational vehicle (caravan).28 Like Paul Sharits, Tony
Conrad, Scott Bartlett, and other film artists, Ken Jacobs anticipates this shift
at the same time resisting its implied metamorphosis.
For a number of years, film artists tinkered with both the material of recorded film
and the apparatus that restores its captured and implied movement and revisits its
latent content. They have stopped, reworked, and, in the process, reinvented film
technology. Jacobs continues to resist abandoning the fundamental character of a
mechanical chemical medium that inscribes visible images on an emulsion base, of
an intermittent process that gives recorded images life. Moving frame by frame
through a linear presentation, his film or video performances anticipate the stopstart pattern of an interactive presentation. His interactive performances allow the
viewer to participate in the mediation. They unravel and dissect the meaning of the
recording process while compiling the cumulative effects of the inscribed memories.
For these film artists, the text remains separate. When Jacobs sifts through
the archaeological remnants of a filmic past, he attempts to, in his own words,
draw some of it out for a deep look, sometimes mix with it, take it further or
at least into a new light with flexible expressive projection.29 Surprisingly,
mechanical film technology can indeed replicate the cognitive sophistication
of the more contemporary plug-in devices.
The cybernet can make narrative into a longer term fascination. Mediating
the engagement, more branches lead off in a greater number of different directions. An increased number of variables clock the contextualized changes.30 A
time out in the installation, in the form of a moment or juncture, helps the individual to process events through the malleable membrane of his or her own
personal experience, before that experience slips into unconsciousness.

Knots in the Weave

When the analog experience goes digital, each branch or fork mediates the
boundaries of the text. As knots in the weave, they coalesce to form larger

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junctions that tie together the multiple influences, and threads surrounding a
seminal event. Each player provides one more subroutine to the design of an
installation. If retained in machine memory, each subroutine contributes to
the growing context of the piece. The piece hovers between the actualities
recounted and the fantasies and voyages that it enables.
Efforts to suture the shrinking distance between the spectator and the screen
have an ongoing history. Each challenges the boundaries between an individual
and the larger audience. The ersatz interactive system available to QUBE
subscribers, a two-way interactive cable-TV technology in Columbus, Ohio,
took the form of a console attached to the television set. It enabled the home
viewers to participate in the programs by pushing one of five response buttons. DAgostinos Proposal for QUBE (1979) critiqued this corruption of twoway interactive television, its potential as well as its shortcomings. Delimited
choices do not empower decisionmaking. DAgostino compares the viewer-consumer to Sherlock, Jr., a character in a Buster Keaton film by the same name.
Keaton, the protagonist, dreams that he has the capacity to climb into the silver
screen and participate in the action. QUBE encourages this kind of fantasy.
DAgostino, however, found that the prescribed interaction only operates on the
level of a simpleminded game show. Since QUBE controls all the options, public participation remains circumscribed. In dAgostinos Proposal for QUBE, the
audience would structure by consensus the sequence of a tape comprised of five
segments: a text, newspaper, photograph, film, and video performance. DAgostino
factored in one hundred twenty possible variations.31 Although encouraged by
QUBE to do his proposal, bureaucratic red tape and delay prevented dAgostinos
tape from being aired.32 Sherlock, Jr. runs into the screen and gets thrown out.
Peter dAgostinos installation TRACES stretches the somatic landscape across
electronic dimensions. TRACES uses the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic
bomb to frame its cataclysmic memory, an event beyond experience. Balancing personal reminiscences with global perceptions, in TRACES dAgostino
weaves together fragments of his own recollections and observations as part of
a generation that lives with the threat of total annihilation. Revisiting his elementary school, the artists walk down the quiet, interior corridor retrieves
the memory of countless air raid drills.

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Co-existent with the installations

images of a time once lived,33 a
TRACES website (http://www.
temple.edu/newtechlab/TRACES)
links to live images of the Green
Peace Rainbow Warrior trying to
block French nuclear testing in the
South Pacific. Like the radio interplay of Jacobss Blonde Cobra, the
live images on the web do not necFig. 3. Still from TRACES. Peter
dAgostino, 1995.

essarily sync with those of the installation.34 The web, however, pre-

sents a parallel event from another time and place that repositions the spectator in his or her contextual experience. If somebody wants to break through
the screen and tell you what the reality was about,35 then their reaction will
contribute to the evolution of the text.
Nam June Paiks retrospective Electronic Super Highway: Nam June Paik in the 90s,
morphs memories of a small town America that has changed over the past
thirty-five years. Historic signs, figures, and temporal indicators from an almost
nostalgic Americana evolve and dissolve across its own emerging electronic landscape. Paiks installations exercise a subtle control over the spectators attention
and processing. The electronic array fills in the contemplative space, removes
the silence between shots, shrinks the spectators conceptual maneuverability and
regulates the frame surrounding memory, a continuous ebb and flow with no divide.
Paik transforms the myths, those images of a recently expired sensibility: a wooden
billboard, an old post office reminiscent of the WPA mausoleums, the one room
schoolhousea decaying image of a living mythinto forty video sculptures.36 A
somewhat equivocal advocate of new electronic technology, Paik chronicles the
changing world. His work restages contemporary history into a flowing compression of events. Wandering through the global community, the couch potato still
remains passive. The viewer, now an internet resident of what Paik calls Cybertown, walks through the respective pavillions, changing the channels from site to
site with each becoming another contextual and structural proscenium.

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Virtual reality, cybernetic experiencethe most far-reaching phase in the evolution of interactive technologyharbors the capability for recording the narrativein-process, the history of the participants decisionmaking activity. Like all new
technology, it risks becoming excessively systematized by everyday experience.
Current VR has not yet achieved the means to construct a full cybernetic experience. VR remains a not yet realized destination. A simple prosthetic device,
contemporary VR only suggests the freedom of liberating the mind from the
prison of the body.37 Nevertheless, controlling the synaptic process does allow
the voyager to enter cyberspace. That crossover satiates some latent desire.
The dream machine, however, has its blatent flaws. DAgostinos 1990 installation TransmissionS: In the WELL musters the false hopes and inflated fantasies vested in the world of electronic experience.38 Nested within a conical
towera totemic wellTransmissionS engages its own contradictions. The
installations features include an interactive touchscreen, a ceiling projection,
and an image of an eye glaring back at the viewer through a peephole. The
text of the touchscreen took the history of the electronic cinema and wove it
together with two tragic memories fortified by their television coverage: a
short visual segment of the space shuttle Challenger explosion, and excerpts
from Italys twenty-four hour coverage of a failed rescue of an entrapped Italian boy who had fallen into a well and who eventually died.39 The cathartic
effect becomes that of madness and imagination. Advanced communication
technology falls short of rescuing its subjects from the symbolic and ancient
terrors of falling from the sky and dropping into the earth.
Cyberspace, however, suggests alternative outcomes. According to Norbert
Wiener, feedback is a method of controlling a system by re-inserting into it
the results of its past performance.40 A more integrated feedback system allows the spectator to alter the method and pattern of performance. On the
other hand, too much freedom may inhibit interactive installations feedback
systems from truly provoking an insightful experience.
Graham Weinbren and Roberta Friedmans The Erl King and Weinbrens later
installation Sonata make the continuity contingent on the viewer-partipants
own fascination. Each derives from tales, references, and psychoanalytic

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parables. They situate characters within complex literary settings overloaded

with evocative material. Not so easily seen, portals open and close within each
segment that bridge sequences and reveal hidden enigmas. When the spectator wanders into the text, he or she can bounce about the images or plunge
into the cavities surrounding their construction. Discovering some small part
of the elusive interactive structure helps the viewer now become participant in
his or her reconstruction of the latent text.
Jeffrey Shaws The Legible City situates itself somewhat differently. It evolves from
the viewer-now-become bicyclists navigation of a fabricated urban grid of words
posing as buildings. At each intersection, the viewer-cycler can turn or proceed.
The viewer literally cycles through this landscape forced to notice, to read the
environment. That fascination, the novelty of activated perception and its attendant cognitive processing can last indefinitely, until one grows wary or weary.
In The Erl King, at each bridge or interval, the viewer-participant can make a decision. Each decision, in turn, leads to a different path which leads to another
decisionmaking moment, and so forth and so on. The text becomes interactive
and the level of interactivity becomes directly proportional to the number of
critical nodes that operate within the text and the multiplicity of interrogations
that appear at each juncture. In The Erl King, those junctures seem limitless
through an array of options that traverse each scene and fluctuate within each.
Sometimes, a menu appears on the screen. Most other times, touching the
screen will recreate the sequence adding or deleting characters, reconfiguring
audio-visual sync relationships. As the matrix of decisionmaking moments pulls
the audience away from the ideological drivers of a linear narrative text, in
the process it reinvests them with other emerging codes and structures.

The Cybernetic Future

The installation format enables the video artist to break the constraints. Unfortunately, the most advanced systems preclude their own distribution.
DAgostinos installations occupy that edge. His most technically advanced,
VR/RV, simulates a recreational vehicle (RV) traveling through a virtual environment of utopian hopes and dystopian fears. The voyager travels in a simulated

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recreation vehicle (RV), a comfortably familiar shielded environment.41 Each

decisionmaking site forms the connecting tissue, the temporal markers conflating
the space and time of the atomic experience with the cybernetic adventure.
VR/RV explores the genesis of electronic technology. In this environment, the
viewer-participant lies suspended, hovering between reception and illusion.
In the midst of that immersion, dAgostino interrogates the meaning of illusion
by asking how do you criticize VR in VR? His work turns in on itself, questioning process as well as content.42
DAgostino intentionally calls attention to the artifice. Buildings become
transparent. The mountains resemble paper mach models. He interrogates
the effects of VR immersion and inhibits the seduction of the voyager. Some
distance prevails. The cybervoyager does not become Peter Pan, Im flying;
a critical border splits the voyager enabling his or her intellect to examine the
effects of the overwhelming seduction of the immersion. According to
dAgostino, VR needs definition, needs recontextualization.43 While William

Fig. 4. VR/RV: A Recreational Vehicle in Virtual Reality. 1994 Peter d'Agostino.

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Gibson in his cyberpunk novels charts the implicit terror of VR, dAgostino
establishes the links between the cybernetic horrors that exist on the inside
and outside of cyberspace. Fifty years of memories anchor the passage into
any form of metaphysical future.
A protean apparatus that immerses the voyager in a topology of ideological constructions might never supplant the video game. Alas, a value system predicated
on achieving highest scores will probably remain the prevalent system for venting frustrations and playing out obsessions. That sort of system, however, does
have the capacity to compile insights. Not simply a recording tool, a VR environment can allow the viewer-participant to analyze and explore the meaning of
his or her activity. At the same time, the spectator might shape his or her distance to the text and position within the rubric of the piece. Ken Jacobs describes
the border between staged memories and open-ended excursions. He explains:
This is not an improvised work. These are all chosen moments, chosen
operations. There are a lot of things that I am doing back there and there are
a million other things that can happen beyond what youre seeing.44

All sorts of things can happen between the frames. VR permits the spectator
to get at some of that uncanny stuff that cannot be photographed with the
camera, that cannot be made except in the brain. When the recollection becomes a reworkable memory, the voyager can appropriate the virtual event.
The investigation sustains an active dialectic that permits the voyager to
achieve a heightened awareness. Otherwise, the electronic drug seduces the
passive spectator en route to refabricating his or her history and memory.

Notes
1. An interactive platform depends upon the technology that makes storage and
processing of an expanding number of subroutines possible. Fortunately, trends
develop and patterns emerge that allow for subroutines to converge with only small
variations marking their difference.
2. Jean-Louis Comolli, Machines of the Visible, in Film Theory and Criticism:
Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985), 755.
3. Comolli, 743.

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4. Discussion with Peter dAgostino, September 20, 1998.

5. Comolli. Machines of the Visible.
6. The notion of the retinal image takes its place alongside persistence of vision in
the bin of convenience misrepresentations of complex human processing activity.
7. Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths, trans. Helen Temple and
Ruthven Todd, in Ficciones (New York: Grove Press), 100.
8. Comolli, 758-59.
9. Jean-Louis Baudry, The Apparatus, Camera Obscura no. 1 (Fall 1976): 115.
10. Jorge Luis Borges, TLON, UQBAR, ORBIS TERTIUS, trans. Alastair Reid, in
Ficciones (New York: Grove Press), 25.
11. A recurrent theme, for example, in work like Akira Kurosawas Rashomon.
12. Jorge Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins, trans. Anthony Bonner, in Ficciones (New
York: Grove Press, 1962): 63.
13. C. Nadia Seremetakis, The Memory of the Senses, Part I: Marks of the Transitory, in The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (Boulder,
Colorado: Westview Press, 1994), 9.
14. See Jonathan Steuer, Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining
Telepresence, in Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality, Frank Biocca and Mark R.
Levy, eds., (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associations, 1995), 36-7.
15. Comolli, 742.
16. Ken Jacobs, New York Film Festival, October 11, 1998.
17. Ken Jacobs, notes from the artist.
18. HMDs work on the same principle of binocular parallax as 3D glasses.
19. Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema 1959-1971 (New
York: Collier Books, 1972), 350.
20. Filmmakers Cooperative Catalogue No. 6 (New York: The New American Cinema
Group, Inc., 1975), 132.
21. Ken Jacobs, notes from the artist.
22. Drawn from a portion of the footage shot by Jacobs for his film Star Spangled To
Death.
23. Ken Jacobs, notes from the artist.
24. Ken Jacobs, notes from the artist.
25. Ken Jacobs, notes from the artist.
26. Ken Jacobs, New York Film Festival, October 11, 1998.
27. The spectator experiences the recorded moment as a kind of dance, a pas de trois,
an interdimensional embrace between living and dead performers. The Fleischner/
Smith and Jacobs collaboration operates from both sides of the screen, from both sides
of the projector, across the impenetrable divide separating the living from the dead.
Conjuring up traces of their existence, Jacobs projects his own previous relationship as
an implied part of the ongoing continuum. The projector becomes a medium for bringing the two performers back to life, a time machine stretching across the continuum.
28. A discussion with Peter dAgostino on September 20, 1998.
29. Ken Jacobs, notes from the artist.
30. Building memory begins by separating an event from other branches clouding and
restraining its history and continuity. An individuals mediation, the retention, dissection, or elision of an event springs from both the omniscient forces that lie beyond the
central text, and the key interlocutors nested within the text itself. The interlocutors
within the text, salient points along a track, take the form of voices or other auditory

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instruments, symbols, camera operations and visual devices, or any combination of the
above. The individual, drawing from his or her own personal experience, brings the
omniscent variables to the encounter.
31. Peter dAgostino:
The Proposal for QUBE tape incorporates five segments ranging from theoretical concerns to everyday events and are in the form of: a text, a newspaper, a photograph, a
film, and a video performance. Given these five segments the audience would, by the
consensus of their response, determine the sequencing of the tape and see the results
of that process. The formula I derived for the work was 5x4x3x2x1 to show that this
simple structure would yield 120 possible variations for editing the final sequence. (I
was making reference to Eisensteins formula of 1+1=3, his theory of film montage as a
collision of ideas, to make a statement about the kind of complexity that video and
computer technology had now reached as it specifically relates to montage.) The apparent novelty of producing a videotape editing, in effect, by a public opinion poll.
32. H. Drohojowska, Dont Touch Now Dont, LAIC Journal, Los Angeles, Spring
1977.
33. Scenes of Hiroshima on the annual anniversary of the bomba staged die-in near
the dome, the camera lingering on the faces of young Japanese men and women, capturing the incomprehensibility of the living mimicking death before the devastated
structure that represents ground zero; scenes of Nagasaki, Pearl Harbor, and New York
City; scenes of the Japanese landscape take shape: a village, the forest, barbed wire,
looking through the window of a train, a finger pointing, a waiting room, neon lights;
scenes of passing trees, homes, small villages, unexpectedly lead to an image of the
Empire State Building, the sound of ticking, and graffiti ridden, post-apocalyptic, derelict neighborhoods in New York City; Machito Square, brick building, streets and alleyways in the neighborhood where Peter dAgostino grew up. The reflection of the
videomaker on the glass door to an apartment dwelling dissolves to the 8mm 1950s
home movie footage of the dAgostino family gathered upstairs in their living room
watching television; scenes of a birthday cake, a barbecue, a Communion procession, a
local marquee announcing the introduction of cinemascope.
34. Ken Jacobss film Blonde Cobra requires that the projectionist follow a complex set
of instructions syncing live talk radio with specific sections of the film during its presentation.
35. Attributable to Peter dAgostino.
36. Electronic Super Highway: Nam June Paik in the 90s was organized by the Museum of Art, Inc., Fort Lauderdale and Exhibition management Inc., in Cincinnati. It
opened November 1, 1994, at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, then moved to the
Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio. After its installation at the Museum of American Art in Philadelphia from October 1995 to January
1996, the exhibitil will travel to the San Jose Museum of Art in California, the Jacksonville Museum of Art in Florida, the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the
Nelson-Atkins Museum of art in kansas City, Missouri, and finally the Honolul Academy of Arts in the fall of 1997.
37. Frank Biocca and Mark R. Levy, Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality, ed.
Frank Biocca and Mark R. Levy (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associations, 1995), 7.
38. TransmissionS: In the WELL, installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. See
David Tafler, Der Blick under der Sprung, (The Look and the Leap), Kunstform,
Bd. 103, September/Oktober 1989.

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39. The images include visual references to Edison, Marconi, and Mikola Tesla, the
respective founders of the motion picture, wireless telegraph, and alternating current.
40. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York:
Doubleday & Co., 1954), 61.
41. The voyager travels down a two lane highway bordered by billboards. Each billboard shows the images of memories related to the sites thematically encountered on
the map. Moving image fragments of war move the voyager to four separate points on
a map: he West (the Rockies), the East (Philadelphia), the Mid East (the Persian Gulf
War), and the Far East (Hiroshima). Hiroshima and the Persian Gulf War replace the
heartland of the United States, the Mid West, with the bombed out overseas test sites
of American techno-miliary expeditions.
42. Discussion with Peter dAgostino.
43. Discussion with Peter dAgostino.
44. Ken Jacobs, New York Film Festival, October 11, 1998.

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