The Teaching & Learning Cinema invites you to “THIS TIME“, a film screening this Sunday, April 1st, 2007 6.30pm for a 7pm start at ‘Sydney’, Cleveland St (next to Fatima’s) (see http://officialsydney.com)
The screening follows along from a residency that Lucas Ihlein and Louise Curham have been doing in the majestic Track 12 at Performance Space’s new home at Carriageworks.

We’ll roll projector on some of the expanded cinema re-enactments we’ve been working on in the residency and some film prints we brought in for our research.

The prints come from the National Film & Video Lending Service in Canberra and from the Lux, the artist’s film archive in London ( why doesn’t Australia have one of these?). Performance Space are most generously lending a pair of beautiful Eiki 16mm projectors for the occasion.

From our recent work, marvel at the stamina of those who were there for the 24 hours for the ‘Long Film for Ambient Light’. As a kind of private experiment, we recreated the conditions for this 1975 work by Anthony McCall on March 16 and 17 down at the Performance Space. We’ll show a time lapse video (where one hour becomes one minute) and invite those who were there during the event to share their “mental residues”.

Also marvel at the stamina of the participants in our attempt to re-create William Raban’s 1974 film ‘Breath’. The film documents a walk up a hill by a group of walkers carrying whistles. Each shot matches the length of a whistle – a breath. Raban’s film was in the gentle English countryside. The Curham, Ihlein, Shaw version is North Era hill in the Royal National Park. We’ll show ‘Breath 2006′ and Raban’s original.

Enjoy our versions on 16mm film and miniDV of William Raban’s 1973 Expanded Cinema work 2’ 45”. In our reworkings (presented as ‘55 seconds’ (16mm film), and ‘6 minutes’ (mini DV)), we followed Raban’s recipe and projected an image of the projector screen, re-filmed it, projected that image, re-filmed it, projected, re-filmed and so on. The miniDV version has a velvety softness, and reaction between the iterations is a delight. Be part of Iteration 8 as we show you Iteration 7.

Of the films from the archives, we have William Raban’s ‘Angles of Incidence’ (1973). Raban describes this as an experiment in constructing three dimensional space on the two dimensional surface of the film.1 The film is exactly as it came out of the camera. It appears that Raban’s method was to fix a length of rope between a window and the camera and film all the possible views of the window that the rope would allow.

Lis Rhodes ‘Light Reading’ (1979): Those who attended the NowNow film screenings would have seen Lis Rhodes’ ‘Dresden Dynamo’, easily a stand out in visual dynamism with layer upon layer of re-printed lettraset stuck through the optical printer using all the printer lights. Light Reading has more of a polemic as a voice intones an essay on the role of the subject within the object of the film and the gaze of the camera, subverted by extended direct film animation and re-printing that is based on the light meter itself – the ‘eye’ of the camera if you like. This is a dense film but we found it very rewarding.

And the very cute John Smith 1976 film called ‘The Girl Chewing Gum’ – a wonderful spoof where the film director literally directs passing traffic. A subtly formal as it deals with the split between sound and image.

Okay so hope you can come and we’re looking forward to it immensely.

For a jpg flyer advertising the event visit this URL:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/152/435703456_c463d748bc_o.jpg

Cheers!
Lucas and Louise

In Raban’s film, the analogy to Cage’s “no keyboard work as such” is the fact that there is no filming work as such, at least not prior to the first event being staged. If Cage was working from within the idiom of music, in his attempt to make the audience aware of the ambient noises in the room at the present moment, to strive to conceive of these unstructured environmental sounds as music, then Raban was, to a certain extent, attempting to do the same thing but from within the idiom of cinema. Retaining the essential ingredients of cinema (visible projection of light over time, in the presence of an audience) but relinquishing the need for prior-recorded material. The desire to focus the audience’s attention on the here and the now was assisted by deliberately not “preparing” material before the show – so that we are all co-present in the moment of the work’s coming into being (rather than simply the consumer’s of a creative act carried out some time in the past. This fits perfectly with Malcolm Le Grice’s contemporary manifesto, in which he described this process as a focus on “real time/space”. (see http://www.luxonline.org.au/articles/real_time_space(1).html)

Cage’s method was incredibly simple. By not doing anything, the work is made. Raban’s by contrast (as we have been discovering) involves considerably more work, a kind of framing work in order to draw and focus that attention whilst retaining the idiom of cinema. Whereas Cage wrote a piece of music consisting of three movements each without anything more technical than a long pause, Raban’s required a technical intervention of a larger scale:
“[…] I really liked the idea that with film and using the black and white negative process one could actually create a Dutch picture of screens within screens, so that the film process became the event, the projection event that the audience would see, and that the projection of the film was the subject of the film itself.”

It’s possible that these technical requirements for the making of Raban’s work take it a little distance from the intentions of Cage. They produce a set of fascinating actions which hold the audience’s attention — these amount to a kind of visual pleasure, certainly a driving question like “how is this done?” which maybe takes us away from the present moment… (These are observations based on trying it out ourselves (albeit imperfectly)). Does this return us to the state of spectators of an event over which we have no control?
It seems that the audience members are aware that what they do in this moment will carry over into future iterations of the work – thus we are responsible in some way for the making of the work, at least for its content. And the nature of this interaction by an audience, I reckon, would be entirely dependent on the social makeup of a particular group. And THAT’s where things could get interesting — but you’d only know by trying it out.

Some technical things we noticed by reading the Raban interview:

“Two minutes forty-five seconds involves running a projector with no film in it at an empty screen and setting up a camera at the back of the audience so that their silhouettes are caught in that frame and the frames slightly larger than the projected screen and there’s a microphone placed at the front and I would go up to the front of the audience and I would announce Two minutes forty-five seconds, a camera is filming the audience watching the blank screen, sounds of the projection and the audiences responses are being recorded and I’d also give the date the time and the place of the projection event. After that projection I’d go away process the film to a black and white negative and the next day, if it was in a film festival or at the next occasion for doing the performance I would project the negative and again film that negative projected to this days audience and after I’d seen myself go off the screen, having announced the first day, I would go onto the screen again and announce into the microphone the title of the piece the date and the time and the fact that the audience were watching the film of last, of the last audience watching the blank screen and so on and so it would build up over a series of different performances but the film would only ever be two minutes forty-five seconds long because its history was contained within these receding screens that went back in perspective, positive negative, positive negative.”

Interesting to note from this:

“sounds of the projection and the audiences responses are being recorded” — so he WAS recording and playing back the sounds.

Also,
“if it was in a film festival or at the next occasion for doing the performance I would project the negative and again film that negative projected to this days audience”

– it seems from this that Raban is saying that there was only ever one version of the film – that it was nomadic in a way, that it travelled from one “film festival” or “occasion” – which goes against our theory that he did the work anew for each audience/venue/festival situation.

Questions remaining from this discussion by Raban: did the sound begin to have that Alvin Lucier resonation effect? Did the image start to break down and become incomprehensible? Was there an optimum amount of iterations? Did the audience become rowdy? Did they become docile? What kinds of experiences did audiences report in this work? What was the duration of two minutes forty five like?

“The apprehension of any artwork, static or moving, is a fleeting moment, as are all experiences. It is their mental residue that is important”.

And yet, in all the criticism and papers that have been written about McCall, (and a few of them refer to long film) nobody actually discusses their own personal experience – and the mental residue that remains as a result, of being there in person. It’s discussed as an art world “move” – an avant garde or conceptual response to the conditions of film and sculpture, the reductive approach in the tradition of minimalism, the found object tradition of dada (turning something non-art into art) etc etc, but never from a phenomenological, experiential perspective. Perhaps that’s what we can bring by setting it up again.

If we (and a few of our punters) are going to stay for the full 24 hours, there are a few things need ironing out. I don’t think we can have the space completely empty and clear. It would seem intolerable without something to eat, drink, and sit on. Or am I wrong? For me, the work isn’t “about” discomfort, and it’s not really about setting up a space to be a crisp minimal installation either. Although McCall wants to reduce external stimuli as much as possible (having no set “events” to stimulate us and make us unaware of the passing of time) does this extend to having absolutely nothing in the space at all? Where does the human body go, what does it do? Do we sit or lie on the hard floor, or can we use a cushion? Can we go outside for a breath of fresh air or a smoke? Can we sleep on the floor in the space? What different kinds of experiences will we have, depending on how we choose to “accomodate” ourselves? For really, a work of such duration begins to be a kind of work we “reside” in, something that becomes a living space, as the duration approaches the order of magnitude of life rather than of art. How much can we push the trappings of life away from this special time and space? Do we restrict mobile phone use in the room (this would not have been a problem in the 1970s). So many questions.

Today we did another iteration of “six minutes” and of “55 seconds”. They’re both getting more interesting, particularly the video one. What’s happening is that the voice of the “now-me” competes with the voice of the “video me” and also the voice of the “video video me” and so on. The “now me” tends to make a decision to not speak over the top of the “video me”, but to do it before or after. Thus the recession of time which is evident in the visual component of the work has its analogue in the recession of time in the audio component. The sequence tends to go NOW / YESTERDAY / DAY BEFORE /DAY BEFORE THAT etc, a literal recession. But what we discovered was that this means that our “six minutes” will eventually be full of these announcements of the present time. Two things result. First, there will be no “quiet time” left – the reflective or meditative time of just sitting in the moment. Instead, we will constantly be stimulated by these announcements of past dates, like a spoken index or autistic oral history which only announces its title duration date and place. Second, it means that although our timer is only set to six minutes each occasion, the ending of the work is pushed back and back, so the work is a little longer each time (it currently stands at seven minutes).

These things lead us to hypothesise that Raban didn’t use recorded sound in his 2′45″. So was his microphone stand there just to project his voice to the auditorium for now? Or are we really barking up the wrong tree? [*NB, more discoveries re sound in coming days -turns out he did use sound!]

We had a few technical problems with the 16mm film version of 55 seconds too. It seems there might be an issue with our camera, which is jittering and periodically out of focus (based on yesterday’s iteration, which was otherwise well framed and well exposed). And today’s film strip seems too light, underexposed? Although we’re yet to run it through the projector, so tomorrow will shed light on that one.

one final observation: we’ve bitten off more than we can chew. any one of the four pieces we want to work on would nicely fill our available time. some readjustment of expectations may be in order!
over and out
luca

Section 2.
16mm is now titled ‘55 Seconds’, video titled ‘6 Minutes’.
Issues: sound
Did Raban actuually record it or did he just speak it live so therefore he appears on camera speaking it. In the video, in standard use, it is present as a matter of course. it is a positive action to have no sound. Discussion Curham/Ihlein about sound [no evidence of Raban's use - does not appear on the frame enlargements which show entire frames inc edge marks and sprockets. No discussion in Hamlyn's 'Film Art Phenomenon'. Thinking through difficulty for Raban and 'liveness' in the spirit of the work means it is unlikely he did record sound [since confirmed he did]. LC and LI decide to proceed with sound work in its own right. Curham interested in the effct of these iterations – have not actuually heard the related sound pieces – ‘I am sitting in a room’ … Lucier (although I think we listened to this at Kellerberin). So the sound is particularly separate in the film version.

Section 3.
Discussion about the title for the video piece. Discovering that proposed 4′33″ evokes more than we wish (Cage too present). Discuss meditation, discuss time length, propose 6 minutes in title – dispense with ‘groovy’ addition (and Cage) by dropping the seconds. Places the emphasis of this piece squarely on the time. Use the egg timer to delimit 6 minutes. For LC, 6 minutes feels very long (pace of my life very fast).

Section 4.
Things that come to mind:
Today great engagement with the video piece where yesterday, the video felt like it did nothing to shape or sculpt the time and space in which we are operating where the film felt like it was carving out, delineating a chunk of space in the way that Breath seems to.

Moment of deflation in discussion about the difficulty of the film – implication – complication/difficulty of the film unnecessary, uninspiring. Many things unnecessarily hard, hard for no evident gain [greater thinking about the space].

Section 5.
McCall and thinking
- related actions – acquired Camera Obscura measurements
- viewed room at c. 8.30pm. Light still present, still light in sky. Evident in sitting, looking that the sky line, building sky line is very beautiful and takes us outside of this space. Not sure still what this is all about, what the meditation is all about.

[Dev for Curham art practice in this project - in film one cannot 'practice' per se. Musicians take themselves through the works of composers, they flesh these out and inhabit them as actors do with scripts. In drawing or painting, mimesis is a tool. In this attempt at mimesis, we are realising our own specific problems but we are finding this in our own bodies. We are mapping the actions of these artists onto our own bodies by doing these actions. What we are discovering is that ... [thought not continued].

Change the behaviour, the rest will follow [trying on some new behaviours - so may be all the Curham work is about trying to find tools for change, catalysts for change]. So in following the behaviour, actually in a sense we work backwards from the object to create the logic for our approach and as we go, we are filling this out. So we have an image of the Raban piece but we do not actually have a method. We have some of his comment eg Live in Your Head but we do not have an actual set of instructions in the way that we did for Breath. We have informed imagined scenarios about how Raban did it. We have comment I think from Raban to LI that if he did it now, he would do it on video.

LI comments that negativising the image is okay because this is a standard video camera feature. LC unsure but the reality of making this piece using this form demands it. It is interesting here how the newer tech has to mimic the older tech – so the newer tech cannot in itself offer a solution to this problem, it can only solve the problem through direct mimesis of the older tech. Mystique surrounds the older tech – shrouded in the mists of time etc etc. However mystique is the actual recording on video for Curham. Exactly how is video working? So the signal is

time base
.
lumens
.
sensor
.
fluctuation on sensor, electrical particles – sensor registers binary/analogue of fluctuations/pulses/modulations of wave on tape
.
electrical pulse