Interlace (2011)
Single-Channel HD Video
Films used:
2001: A Space Odyssey – 2046 – Akira – Alien – Alien3 – Alien Ressurection – Aliens – Avatar – Children of Men – Coboy BebopCypher – ET – Equilibrium – Event Horizon – EXistenZ – Fantastic PlanetFlight of the Navigator – Futureworld – Galaxy Quest – Ghost in the ShellLogans Run – The Matrix – Predator – Predators – RoboCop – Star WarsSurrogates – Terminator 2 – The Last Starfighter – The Lawnmower ManThe Running Man – The Andromeda Strain – THX 1138 – Total RecallTron Legacy
For this piece I spliced up 36 different sci-fi films, combined together to become an interlace of cinema. This here is an excerpt of the first 8 minutes or so – I simply don’t have access to the computational power right now to put out a full render.
Originally I was hoping to work with 108 films, splicing 1 across 10 pixels each for a 1080 master, but again this was a bit of a strain on my Macbook.
36 seemed to be a nice number that balanced somewhere between being at times indecipherable, but also recognizable in other moments.
The piece was actually inspired by a passing comment made by Christian Marclay at a talk I attended in NYC. Marclay commented film wasn’t nearly as divisible as sound: the single frame is the most divisible one can go in film – sound, on the other hand, can be reduced to the tiniest fragment, completely severed from its original source. The cinematic frame, however is completely naked as itself, fully representing that image.
I used INTERLACE as a way of demonstrating this idea to be untrue, as the cinematic frame is obviously divisible further into itself, easily subject to the cut and splice and repetition of line, as much as a sound artist cuts a sound beyond a waveform.
INTERLACE then comes to be a kind of scramble. An interference, or horizontal concertina of film. It’s a play on the frame, a sandwiching of content into a ‘simultaneous cinema’.
Watching a multitude of films at the same time is ultimately pretty ridiculous. But it speaks to the streams of content ever-flowing through our RSS readers, web 2.0 feeds, and Bit Torrent channels, suggesting a new hybrid form of input more familiar to the digitally native non-linear sapien.
Preliminary Debut @
BYOB Melbourne, Tristian Koenig Gallery, South Yarra
December 16th 2011, 7 – 11pm