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

Introduction

The research proposal I developed in the second trimester is definitely what I want to deepen in the last year of my master studies. For that I will investigate technical aspects of the digital moving image during the shooting, the postproduction, the installation of the final projection as well as look at the technical construction of the video image. The self-referential language allows asking abstract questions about the dematerialization during the analog digital conversion and the loss of indexicality, what leads to a philosophical approach to the image and the notion of time. Besides that I will reflect about the form of the video installation, the role of the observer and read some theory of cinema.

In the final video installation the spectator finds itself in a delineated space surrounded by large projection screens. 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. 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. Together with a 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 of an urban, industrial and natural landscape. In addition to these three landscapes there will be projections of filmed portraits, either timed in direct reaction to the night shots or screened simultaneously in a rather loose and open rhythm to each other. For this second part I create a sequence of photographic portraits of women 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.

My interest lies in a confrontation of photography and video, from stillness towards moving image, shifting from analog to digital. I want to focus on their media specificity, by which I mean their mechanism, their materiality, how time behaves and where the question about the origin of the image leads. These reflections allow me to articulate thoughts about absence/ presence and disappearance, night/ perception and psychoanalysis and generally the border of the visible. (With the ambition to achieve a good balance between theory and practice to strengthen the completion between concept and production > thesis…)

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 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. 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 about the conception of the moving image increase my interest for the origin of the image, which can be understood as foundation that drives me in my research. (construction of the image/ origin of the image/ disappearance/ existential questions/ latent image/ perception/ how time behaves/ instant and duration/ metaphorical meaning of the process/ philosophical and poetic aspects of their media specificity)

Relation to previous practice

Several interests and points of research over the years have built a background that serves as constant reference and flows into the concrete creation of a specific work. It can be seen as a complex structure, where each part influences mutually the others. For example the project of the construction of the image and the analysis of the behaviour of the medium is based on older 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 again the idea of presence and absence what constitutes the whole construction of the time-based image and links to my previous work Black Light, 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.

References

Paul Virilio, L’art à perte de vue
Junichiro Tanizaki, In praise of shadows
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its discontents
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
Henri Bergson, Matter and memory
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the observer
John E.Mc Grath, The staging of the spectator
Laura Mulvey, Death 24 times a second
Mary Ann Doane, The emergency of cinematic time
Kaja Silverman, The threshold of the visible world
Maurizio Lazzarato, Videophilosophy
New Media Art, Videoart, Videoinstallation
Persistence of vision and adaption of the eye
Marc Rothko, Black Paintings