User:Nicole Hametner/Graduate Research Seminar 2013-TM4.01

Project proposal outline

Introduction

1) I will record (with a videocamera) nightshots and observe how the low light zones in the image can be perceived. The presentation takes form of projections in a multiscreen installation within a darkened room. Each screen is big enough to allow the impression of being surrounded by the (videographic) images. The reduced visibility in the dark scenes demands a look of concentration by the viewer. The seeking gaze encounters the core of the image itself and finds through the temporal moving noise in the underexposure the revealed object lying behind. One by one filmed in a (fixed frame), there are urban constructions followed by views of the harbour up to a vast scene of the dark sea. Given that the subject matter is the act of seeing itself and the thereby constructed image, the presented scenes rather show archetypes which the beholder can use as an anchor point before the image dissolves again in the dark. 2) In juxtaposition to the outside views (of transitory places), there will be projections of filmed portraits. For this second part of the graduation project I create a sequence of photographic portraits recorded with an additional counter zoom. Concretely the photo camera moves backwards while zooming in or the other way around. Afterwards the looped time sequence presents one image after the other with an interpolation between each one to ensure the illusion of a continuous movement. I use this effect with a black background to focus only on the alteration on the faces. The modification of the perspective provokes an illusive movement, barely recognizable. Both parts stand at the threshold between stillness and movement, between presence and absence. They present a constant becoming and fading each time at the limit of perception. The research I started in the second trimester is what I want to deepen for the graduation project. In that trimester my field of interest lay in a comparison of photography and video, from stillness towards the moving image, shifting from analog to digital. The construction of the image itself was looked at in a rather metaphorical way and expresses some philosophical and poetic aspects of its media specificity. In this final year I will investigate technical aspects of the (digital) moving image during the shooting, the postproduction and the final projection. Besides that I will reflect about the form of the video installation, the role of the observer and read some theory of cinema.

Testshooting, 2013

Tentative title: Oscillating Shadows

In the final presentation the spectator finds itself in a delimited space surrounded by large projection screens, (comparable with vibrating black paintings). The perception lies in the center of my investigation and is challenged by an initially slight disorientation, comparable to a situation at night in a forest where the eye has to adapt to the low light. Then filmed night shots appear on the screens, one with a view of large buildings, another one with a scene of the harbour and one with a view of the seaside. Though instead of having the blinding lights of the city and the industry in the center, the dominant part will be the dark zones in the picture. Because of the slight underexposure of the video there will be temporal moving noise, flickering of pixels, which provokes a vibration in the shadows. The aim is a composition of different low light areas, a result of more or less abstract images with an urban, industrial and natural background. (The scale of each screen monumentalize the picture and evokes the idea of standing in front of a full size landscape painting.) Next to these landscapes there will be vertical projections of filmed portraits evoking the theme of the gaze, another line of research that I have started in the second trimester mentioned above. I was influenced by the topic of the gaze in theory of the cinema, ideas of the psychoanalysis and the uncanny. Furthermore my interest in perception leads subsequently to the role of the observer. His implication while looking at an artwork become important, especially when considering Henri Bergson's idea that the image is an artificial product of mind. The filmed portraits will all be recorded with an additional counter zoom (vertigo effect). The thereby induced changing of perspective provokes a subtle movement. The look back to the audience and the slight deformation of the faces leave the spectator with an uncertainty about who is the one that is shifting. The current tentative title Oscillating Shadows suits to the video nightshots of landscapes as well as to the filmed portraits, while referring both times to the threshold of stillness and barely recognizable movement. Depending on the available space and the possible technical dispositiv, the films are shown either at the same time on different screens or in a sequence on only one. I would like to install translucent screen(s) hanged in the middle of the room, in order to varie between transparent window to the exhibition space and opaque surface with view on the filmed exterior scene. The semitransparency resumes the treshold that is inherent to the videographic nightshots themselves, where the underexposure can be seen as barrier between medium and revealed object. Hence the observer finds itself at a transitory passage, by his glance simultaneously here and there, he shifts between outside and inner world. I would like to create a psychological space that is situated between fascination and repulsion. On the one hand the blackness and vibration in the dark zones attract like a light. On the other hand the observer might have an anticipation linked to the idea of disappearance and loss. The feeling of an undefined menace could come up, like in Kafka's univers an obscure fear of getting lost. My attention is to evoke with the installation an affect that is situated between an nervous anxious feeling and pure contemplation.

Henri Fox Talbot, Rouen, 1843

Relation to previous practice

For a better understanding of how I got to that point, it is useful to look back at the origin of my investigations with photography and its originated time-based image.

• Self directed research essay
  

Several interests and points of research have built a background that serves as constant reference and flows into the concrete creation of a new work. It can be seen as a complex structure, where each part influences mutually the others. For example the current research on the construction of the image and the look at the behaviour of the medium can be found in previous photographic works and was then once more animated by curiosity in the digital moving image, what seemed for me to be the counterpart of the stillness in analogue photography. Furthermore the project with the gaze treats with its subtle movement the idea of presence and absence what constitutes the whole construction of the time-based image and links to my previous work Schwarzes Licht, 2010. The theme of the night always allowed me to talk about the process, the latent image and to reveal the unseen. To sum up the initial period of research, the theme of disappearance in photography led together with the theme of the „nocturne“ from the romanticism to the subject of the limit of perception.

• Relation to previous practice
  

The crucial unique instant while triggering the photograph turned into duration while using long time exposure, what I used a lot in my previous works. Now through thinking about the construction of the electronic moving image the factor of time again plays an important role and emerges the idea that the image as such is never present as a whole (Videophilosophie, Maurizio Lazzarato). This intriguing insight links to the role of the observer, its perception and the question where the actual image is created and what does it mean if it never exists all at once? These reflections increased my curiosity for the origin of the image, which can be understood as foundation that drives me in my current research. I am heading towards the construction and dissolution of the image, that moves between materiality and pure signal, between duration and instant, searching the missing link, the space and time in between at the threshold of abstraction.

Relation to larger context

I am approaching with a background in photography the electronic moving image towards the aspired aim to present the work in a (videoinstallation).

• Relation to larger context
  
  

Small projects/ practical steps

• Small projects to reflect about the graduation project
  

For the next test shooting I will record an image sequence with long time exposures (still images) and play them back with 24fps. As subjects therefore serve a watersurface, static buildings and the human figure. It is an experiment between duration and instant. Besides that I will investigate the stillness of the modell in the portraitshooting, the act of concentration, its focus on the recording camera and vice versa.

Thesis proposal

The shift from stillness to the moving image is based on my interest of the treshold to something that is in constant movement and thereby articulates the theme of presence/ absence and disappearance. In addition to that the juxtaposition of the analog photographic image and the digital moving image consequently evokes the question of indexicality and its materiality. My essay Black Box written in the second trimester approaches what is being transformed or "lost" in the analog digital conversion. For the thesis I would like to tie in with this point and ask the question about the construction of the image itself. Is the image dissolved during the process of conversion? And when it is argued that the digital moving image is under constant construction, in constant flow and therefore never there as a whole, where lies its origin and what or who is then responsable for the finally perceived image?

Bibliography

• Maurizio Lazzarato, Videophilosophy
• Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
• Laura U. Marks, How Electrons Remember
• Gilles Deleuze, The Movement Image and The Time Image
• Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time
• Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer and Suspensions of Perception
• Barbara and Joseph Anderson, The Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited
• Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World
• Between Stillness and Motion, Edited by Eivind Rossaak
• Laura Mulvey, Death 24 Times a Second
• Paul Virilio, L'Art à Pert de Vue
• Tanizaki Junichiro, Praise of Shadows
• TJ Clark, The Sight of Death
• Daniel Arasse, Anachroniques