ICERI2012 5th International Conference of Education

Research and Innovation Madrid, (Spain) - 19th - 21th November 2012

 

Paper:

THE NEW NARRATIVE PRACTICES IN THE EXPANDED CINEMA:

INTERRELATIONS BETWEEN CINEMA AND VIDEO ART INSTALLATION. A RESEARCH WITHIN THE ACADEMIC

FRAMEWORK

J. Segura Cabañero, G. Robles Reinaldos, T. Simó Mulet              Indexed  in  the  ISI  Conference  Proceedings  Citation  Index      URL:  http://thomsonreuters.com/conference-­‐proceedings-­‐citation-­‐index/      Indexed  in  Google  Scholar  

THE NEW NARRATIVE PRACTICES IN THE EXPANDED CINEMA: INTERRELATIONS BETWEEN CINEMA AND VIDEO ART INSTALLATION. A RESEARCH WITHIN THE ACADEMIC

FRAMEWORK J. Segura Cabañero, G. Robles Reinaldos, T. Simó Mulet

Universidad de Murcia (SPAIN) jesusegu@um.es, grobles@um.es, tonisimo69@gmail.com

Abstract Since the early twentieth century, the development of cinema with his new visual qualities becomes an important starting point for the study of new artistic forms of expression and perception techniques. Here, the object of these studies is usually the specific form of the media themselves and their suitability as a means of artistic expression. The artists explore the aesthetic possibilities of film. Always there has been also an interest in the study of optical phenomena beyond the framework of classical media such as film and video. The expanded concept of media art makes obsolete the boundaries of the transmission of the image itself, and provides other means of expression in the artistic process as for example in the media installation art. This paper will address Expanded Cinema and its relationship with the formal assumptions and processes of the cinematic medium, based on four case studies of artists exploring the filmic languages in their work with artists like Kevin McCoy, Douglas Gordon, Rodney Graham and Mark Lewis. This research is incorporated in a broader academic framework inside the university. It is one of the lines of research that takes part in the Master in Arts Production and Management of the faculty of fine arts in the University of Murcia.

Keywords: Cinema, video art, installation, university, education.

1 INTRODUCTION During the 20th century, the art of storytelling has undergone drastic changes and has survived many crises, these have given the possibility to transform, adapt and restructure the forms and narrative methods. Narrative art, traditionally understood as a description of the course of real or imaginary events, has been moving its own methods and speeches through formal, technical, and socio-political changes according to the expression of the evolution of the society. Despite all the censures involved and outages, the narration as a cultural practice seems to have experienced a Renaissance to late 20th century and early 21st century.

Surprisingly, this can be seen not only in literature and the cinema and the other arts, but also in the electronic media, such as the Internet for example. But even a means already very established as video art being used since the 1960s to narrative strategies and the establishment of a form of narrative that raises a number of questions: does these audiovisual practices really constitute a resurgence of a kind of art that entails the image in space artistic production like installation? And if so, how are represented these new stories before the new interdisciplinary artistic practice?

To try to form a series of ideas about these issues, we have worked on different historical and discursive events that have marked somehow the evolution practices of multimedia, like expanded cinema and installation art.

2 EXPANDED CINEMA: NEW NARRATIVE PRACTICES Since the beginning of the 20th century, the development of the film with its new Visual qualities is an important starting point for the artistic study of new forms of expression and perception techniques. This also occurs in the development of other means of communication. Here, the object of these studies is often the specific form of the own media and their suitability as a means of artistic expression. And artists, especially painters, explore the aesthetic possibilities of the film. In the light of the film is considered an extension of the artistic spectrum, a means of transferring paint to the dimension of the movement.

Proceedings of ICERI2012 Conference 19th-21st November 2012, Madrid, Spain

ISBN: 978-84-616-0763-11642

There has always been also the interest in the study of optical phenomena beyond of the framework of the media classics such as film and video. An extended concept of multimedia art leaves the borders of the transmission of the pure image obsolete and provides other means of expression in the artistic process. This includes architectural features as well as the light and sound. Usually what is enlargement of the studies of perception into three dimensions, overcoming two-dimensional media of the image possibilities.

In the 1960s, the performance is used increasingly as a resource for the sensory perception of the space. In the so-called "Expanded Cinema" (expanded cinema), describing everything that goes far beyond typical technologies of production and the film screening, Visual conventional formal languages are also exceeded by the extension of the film in space. The term appeared in the context of multimedia performances and live performances of artists such as Stan Vanderbeek and Carolee Schneemann, mainly. Jonas Mekas was also one of the precursor experimental filmmakers of the expansion of cinema in the multimedia show, optical experiments and film performances. Jonas Mekas in his influential article "On the Expanding Eye" 1964 (Mekas, 1972) [1] promulgated a series of subversion to overcome static and literary narrative of the single image of the film, with the adoption of the Visual resources of the optical flicker, oblique look, the multiplication of screens and images or techno-synaesthesia. Often, the art and technology are interlinked; they test new screening technologies and the audience is integrated into the event. Joachim Paech describes the utopia of this movement as:

A new vanguard in which film would be extended to all areas of information and communication, the performative and the knowledge, or to put it briefly, the social and cultural life. On the one hand, the art becomes a means of social information; at the same time, new media also performing its task in information with artistic media, whereby information is generally identified with the transformation. (Paech, 2002: 125) [2].

In a society full of media, in the 1960s, the attitude of the artists before the technology was still contradictory. While some sought to counteract its effects promoting practices not media such as performance, others decided to explore the possibilities of new media, such as the video and the computer. In his book Beyond Modern Sculpture, (1968 Burnham) Jack Burnham refers to kinetic art, light sculptures, robotics and cyber art as new ways of sculpture. And in the context of this shock wave was coined the term "Expanded cinema" to characterize an increasing number of proposals for expansion of the cinematic experience.

The film expanded sought primarily to neutralize the "linearity" of the classic film narrative and its visual prominence. To this end, he proposed the multiplication of projection screens, the use of light as a cosmetic agent, the abolition of boundaries between art forms, stimulation of the corporeality of the spectators and the free play with cinematographic techniques. Experimental filmmaker Paul Sharits also advocated the abandonment of the illusion and imitation and enter directly into more dramatic, i.e. the expansion of retinal and material resources of the film: the screen surface, projection, etc. As well as working the narrative language of video and film elliptical, interrupted and improvised (Rees, 2011: 14). [3].

The term was resumed in a text today classic, Expanded Cinema Gene Youngblood (expanded cinema) (Youngblood, 1970). In this, the author welcomes the Alliance of the film with the video and computer, and prophesies about the possibilities of holographic projections. Youngblood was the key point of these experiences his synesthetic character, its ability to capture the public, generating expanded States of consciousness.

Avant-garde designers and architects by then pursued the same objectives. In different versions of Mind Expander (1967-69), the Viennese group Haus-Rucker-Co sought to boot people from their immediate environment making them to enter in a universe of sensations. The sensory bombardment was, in fact, a property of the world's media that architects like Archigram Group also went to investigate. Their projects are awash in images, posters, displays, scale changes, space devices, speakers and luminous signs that make explode the traditional modern city limits, nearing the later imagery of the cibercities. The influential essay of Rosalind Krauss the sculpture in the expanded field was published in 1978. In this, the author highlights producing works, which are under discussion between the landscape and the architecture, by dissolving the boundaries between artistic practices and cultural activity.

Valie Export thus defined the expanded cinema, as an extension of their artistic experiences in the performance:

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Today, expanded cinema is electronics, digital cinema, the simulation of space and time, the simulation of reality. Expanded cinema of the 1960s, as part of the alternative or independent cinema, is an analysis carried out in order to discover and make new forms of communication, the deconstruction of a dominant reality. Expanded Cinema, it should also be considered in the context of the evolution of the political situation in the years 50 and 60; on the one hand, in the revolts of the student movement that fought an attack against the dominant power of the oppressive State, and, on the other hand, in the artistic development of this period who sought a new definition of the concept of art. His aesthetic aims to raise awareness of improvements and changes in the sensitivity, structures and conditions of communication, visual and emotional, as well as to be able to perceive once again our sense perception. It was a question of the abolition of the old values of the outdated aesthetics (Export, 1967: [Online]). [4].

3 KEVIN MCCOY: THE FEAR IN ART Horror Chase is a direct assault on the traditional linearity of cinematographic narrative. It is a long sequence of horror movie inspired by Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn of Sam Raimi (1987) considered as a classic of the genre. The scene where Ash, the character originally played by Bruce Campbell, is pursued by an invisible evil force that finally owns not only is one of the most brilliant Visual moments of the Raimi movie, fate also fairly summarized the horror film genre.

The material of the remake made by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy is played through a custom team of software and hardware, which constantly varies the speed, and direction of the film in real time. Playback algorithm creates infinitely without repeating the persecution, intentionally false but nevertheless frightening.

4 DOUGLAS GORDON: 5 YEAR DRIVE-BY «5 year drive-by» refers to the duration of the storyline of «The Searchers,» the Western by John Ford. With a guaranteed happy ending, John Wayne needs five years—therefore the installation’s title—to find a kidnapped child. The actual film lasts 113 minutes and the installation just under seven weeks. The rest is a matter of calculating: comparing the duration of the film’s storyline to the duration of the film, and having five years, seen in relationship to seven weeks as 113 minutes, yield roughly three minutes. Gordon stretches these three minutes to fill the entire 47 days of the exhibition. The projection moves single frame by single frame, so that a second of film time lasts approximately six hours. Viewers imagine a stationary shot, when what they see in reality is a sequence: before a picturesque Western landscape, a posse on horseback makes itself ready to ride down into the valley. With John Wayne most likely in the lead.

5 RODNEY GRAHAM: THE PERFORMER How I became a ramblin' man is the second of a trilogy of short dramas that Rodney Graham has produced between 1997 and 2000. The film refers to the Western musical genre in which the artist, dressed as a benign wandering cowboy riding his horse across a landscape of meadows and eventually stops singing a melancholy song about his solitary life. In the artistic practice of Graham, the film explores the structure of the loop and the fact of playing a role. The circular structure of the film denies the possibility of a narrative resolution, suggesting instead a journey infinitely repeated.

6 MARK LEWIS: THE SHOT AS ART Mark Lewis (1958, Hamilton, Canada) began its work with the picture looking for, within the wide range of possibilities offered by this means, those images that come you more to the study of nature and its connection with the man's life. From here he joined the world of the image in motion. It is a logical evolution experienced by many authors in recent years. From the representation "still" featuring the picture obviously is searched and asked for more. Move from static, as trying to dive into the possibilities of the work and its background and make both landscapes and characters come to life in an attempt to more than develop the action.

On the other hand, his work in video, in film we should say to be more exact, has not ceased to that point of photography, both at levels as it is the aesthetics of each of his works filmed and also that the end of each work in the latter half is over photography that's filming. In many videos, the camera takes

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a slow movement on a particular matter to end up in a still image that, in many cases, acts as the culmination of the work. For Michael Rush, perhaps the best connoisseur of his work, "Mark Lewis enjoys the final moments... for Lewis, the final moments allowed a certain freedom to investigate what has been left behind, even if the rest of the world to move in a different direction".

7 CONCLUSION We see that the research on the different disciplines of film, video art and installation that appears separately within the grades and degrees in fine arts. But the proposition that we do here is to integrate these debates within a broader framework within the university academics. As mentioned at the beginning, we participate in the Master in Arts Production and Management of the Faculty of Fine Arts in the University of Murcia. And this is where we place our proposal of different artistic disciplines converging in the same discussion and treated in a creative process. The temporalities of audiovisual artworks are one of the keys to the convergence of film and video art in the deconstruction of their own languages. The idea of including the spectator in the emotional and visual activation of the work of art is another key to understanding this convergence of artistic disciplines that we have been talking in our research. On the one hand the use of temporary deconstruction of visual image allows scrutiny and dissection of the medium and its reconstruction in the exhibition space. The spectator activation in response to visual storytelling allows the extension of the audiovisual in space. With these resources we propose the hybridization between sculpture installation and audiovisual media. The extent of film and video in real space. At the same time we claim that hybridization in university studies as a way to overcome the barriers between different artistic disciplines.

REFERENCES [1] Mekas, Jonas, "On the Expanding Eye," reprinted in Movie Journal: The Rise of the New

American Cinema, 1959-71 (New York: Collier, 1972),

[2] PAECH, Joachim, Gente en el cine: cine y literatura hablan de cine. Madrid: Cátedra, 2002

[3] REES, A. L., WHITE, Duncan, BALL, Steven y CURTIS, David, (ed) Expanded Cinema, Art, Performance, Film. Londres: Tate Publishing, 2011.

[4] Export, Valie, Expanded Cinema as Expanded Reality, 1967. [en línea], [Consulta: 4 julio 2011] http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/28/expanded_cinema/

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