“This film exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time. It contains no illusion. It is a primary experience, not secondary…the space is not referential; the time is real, not referential.” McCall said. Projection film created an opportunity to experience a film in a way that is only closely matched by witnessing a live play. Except even in the live play, though the space may not be referential, time within the narrative typically is. The projection, in the case of Line Describing a Cone, is not a story that was recorded on a set somewhere and then replayed. It is a story that is unfolding before the viewers in real time, not a playback. This experiment with temporal and special elements of time make room for new experiences that projection film can bring.
In Viola’s Video Black there is a constant emphasis on how a body perceives the world through sight. What is real or true is constantly changing and dependent on the context with which a reproduced image is made and, in turn, viewed. Security cameras act as an all-seeing eye for a specific, fixed point in space. It can record hundreds of thousands of hours of footage though it lacks a greater context and the information will inevitably be destroyed once the camera is no longer of use. Paintings acted as a form of iconography for religious purposes, creating a difference perception of space based on a spirituality that took priority above a reproduction of what the eye can see. With new technology, reproducing the perspective a painter experiences changes the perception of the work to something more collaborative. Where it starts talking about how looking into the eye as a way to understand the oneself as well as the “other” is where it lost me. Understanding one’s own existence thr...
I'm even going to pretend to understand how the five segments of this piece conjure a narrative, or even the relationship between them. So instead, here are some moments I found thought-provoking. I. Frampton relates his friend's disturbing, recurring two-part nightmare: he lives two entire lifetimes. But each one feels like half of a whole rather two experiences lived fully. In the first, he is an heiress who must spend every moment of her life being surveilled. In the next, he is the heir to that heiress's fortune, but he must spend his life watching the footage. All of his life experiences are derived through watching those films. This made me consider the two extreme, camera-based lives of the imagined individuals. One, with whom the camera's gaze has been present since birth, and the other, whose entire worldview was informed solely by the camera. II. Mount Fujiyama is apparently visible from any place in Japan. Thus, any perception includes this. Not exactl...
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