Audiovisual language besides the screen

• Grant number: 14/04837-5
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Visiting Researcher Grant - International
• Start date: August 19, 2014
• End date: August 26, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Video Arts
• Principal Investigator: Marcus Vinicius Fainer Bastos
• Grantee: Marcus Vinicius Fainer Bastos
• Visiting researcher: Erika Balsom
• Visiting researcher institution: King's College London, England
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Exatas e Tecnologia. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Unreproducible: Cinema as Event. Digital media reignite the radical promise and supreme threat the copy has embodied since at least the development of photographic media in the nineteenth century. Throughout the twentieth century, film and video were persistently aligned with the democratization of distribution, a mantle that has since been inherited by new media. However, both then and now such promises of access are countered by a variety of responses that attempt to curtail mobility and reassert the necessity of a controlled, "authentic" image, whether out of economic, aesthetic, or conceptual motivations, or some combination thereof. This talk will explore such responses through a focus on the examples of Gregory Markopoulos' Eniaios (1948-c.1990, exhibited 2004-), an eighty-hour film cycle made to be projected only in a single field in the Peloponnese, and Paolo Cherchi Usai's Passio (2006), a live film performance. Conceiving of cinema as event, these works push back against the alignment of the moving image with access. Through site-specificity and liveness, respectively, they claim for the moving image the singularity of the event. Working with photochemical film in an age of obsolescence, they are particularly notable when considered in relation to a contemporary visual culture predicated on the simultaneous dream and nightmare of perpetually available images circulating across numerous formats and exhibition situations. Gestures like these intervene into standard scenarios of circulation and exhibition and make these processes - normally occurring after the work has been "released" from the author - into an integral part of the work's conceptual framework, thereby exploding traditional boundaries between text and context. Here, circulation is stopped in its tracks and the moving image is wedded inextricably to a particular place and time. In a world of frenetic mobility, they choose stasis. This talk will probe what is at stake in adopting such a position with regard reproducibility and circulation, two of the key issues confronting visual culture today. (AU)