Martin Rumsby

Paul Sharits, The Whitneys, Len Lye & New Media
or
What To Do When Finding A Particle in Your Pixel

It was one of those languidly oppressive days of an Auckland spring. A moist tropical air mass had drifted down from Fiji and parked itself over the top half of the North Island. The cloud ceiling, a bright grey, hung over our earth and ocean creating an inversion layer, bouncing the heat of the volcanic isthmus back down onto us. A rainbow arched across the western sky and the clouds released a slow steady drizzle which set in and settled amongst us like a mortgage. I was walking across Albert Park toward the university when the drizzle turned to rain so I ducked into the Main Library for shelter. On Level Three, the film section. I saw a copy of William Wees' book LIGHT MOVING IN TIME. Opening Wees' book at Chapter Six there was a quotation from Jonas Mekas which Wees related to the films of Paul Sharits, Jordan Belson and James and John Whitney.

"For what is cinema really if not images, dreams and visions? We take one more step, and we give up all movies and we become movies: we sit on a Persian or Chinese rug smoking one dream matter or another and we watch the smoke and we watch the images and dreams and fantasies that are taking place right there in our eye's mind ... This is the ultimate cinema of the people, as it has been for thousands and thousands of years. " (Wees, 1992 p67).

What could that be about? Maybe something of the romantic aspect of art mixed with the utopian optimism of America in the 1960s. (Or should I say those privileged Americans not fighting in Viet Nam or struggling for recognition of African American civil rights? I mean who was sitting on a Persian rug 'smoking one dream matter or another,' watching the smoke and watching the images and dreams and fantasies in our eye's mind? George W Bush playing Puff the Magic Dragon? Remember the African American grunt in Oliver Stone's PLATOON (1986) saying something like, "You got to be rich to think like that. Rich people always fool the poor". With apologies to my own experiences of African Americans). Mekas' statement recalls Brakhage's eloquent, "Imagine an eye unruled by man made laws of perspective...." Though I prefer Martin Luther King's, "I have a dream....")

Certainly I would not ally Mekas with the Wees' hippie sentiments as evidenced by Wees' interest in Carlos Castaneda. The first time, I believe that I have ever seen either source quoted in a consideration of avant-garde cinema. I think of Mekas as a modernist. Maybe he believed in technology and hoped that we may be on the verge of a new era in artistic communication. That cinema was about to deliver us to some new realm of understanding. Of one mind talking to another in notions of images and dreams. (And the scary prospect that we all understand each other and come to think the same). From the point of view of cinema history think of the climaxes of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) and Nicholas Roeg's PERFORMANCE (1970). Both of these films appropriated experimental film techniques in attempts to take us on a semi-psychedelic journey to the centre of another's vision. Both made money and resulted in the sale of much lysergic acid. (Having said that I would add that the opening sequence of Kubrick's 2001 contains one of the finest examples of landscape filmmaking that I have ever seen).

What is technology and how may it help achieve new shared visions? Paul Sharits is one of the best of American avant-garde filmmakers to put this question to. And he offers many answers. Sharits is even more interesting in the light of absolute visions. His were works of investigation. Of applying his intelligence and his knowledge of art to the mechanics of cinema then harvesting the fruit of that dialectic.

Sharits lived in the eastern United States, the area most infected by contacts with European modernism from the 1930s onwards, as exiled artists like Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp and Hans Richter sought refuge in America. His works reflect that modernist influence in their analytical formality. It is as if Sharits asked, "What is cinema?" His answer, a series of still pictures which can create the illusion of movement when moving through a motion picture projection machine. Is there a type of movement, divorced from illusionism that is inherent in the motion picture projection process? Yes. Sharits' films illustrate that. By taking the basic element of film, the film frame and juxtaposing positive and negative versions of the same still image one against the other (in rapid movement when projected) Sharits does what all narrative filmmakers do. He composes in time, creating movement and conflict. Sharits shares with us what it is like to see through cinema. How this particular technology may alter our way of viewing ourselves and our world. He is inviting us to think of perceptual, mechanical and life things. If his works also suggest an erotic violence then he is only being honest. In T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968) he uses one word in the soundtrack: "DESTROY? repeated over and over so many times it is as if it has been cut up like the film. Are we hearing the word 'destroy' or are we hearing 'his straw' or 'history?' Maybe it is just his story. The tempo of beats in the soundtrack increases as the film progresses, then there is a period of silence during which we may contemplate the screen. When the sound resumes the tempo slows down then stops abruptly at the end of the film. The images consist of a still of a young man holding open scissors to his tongue as if to cut it off, then another still of a hand scratching a face. (Are the scissors on his tongue the scissors he cuts the film with? Is the hand that scratches his face the projector that scratches the film? Or is Sharits referring to the physical violence of cutting film? Like a sculptor chipping at stone. Maybe it is about cutting out language. Of finding new ways to say things: Destroy the past. There is violence in his life and there is violence in art. Every time the film is shown it degenerates. It acquires scratches, becomes worn and will eventually fall apart. Just as Sharits did. What did Jean Cocteau say? Something like, Every time I look into a mirror I see death at work. Each time I look in the mirror I am closer to my death. And Sharits takes the violence even further, creating a film that assaults the audience's senses. It is an aesthetic cinematic violence. Sharits' use of the WORD is also like modernist poetry. Recite Gertrude Stein's ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE saying it over and over again and slur the words a little so that it may become ROSE IS ARROWS IS EROS IS SORROWS meaning a rose is a symbol of love and love involves suffering or maybe it is the short biography of a woman named rose and her struggles through birth, sex and death. Speaking of which we also see genitals and a body being incised in Sharits' film. Histoire destroys his straw. Or, alternately, his straw destroys histoire. Meaning that time threatens to erase all trace of his existence but his production of artworks may help him overcome time. In art we can redeem ourselves.

Andre Breton said that beauty should be convulsive and Sharits took this to heart in his film EPILECTIC SEIZURE COMPARISON (1976). Broken down from a two screen installation piece, black and white footage of two male epileptics entering convulsive states are interspersed with colour frames to create a flicker effect. The Mexican American filmmaker Willie Varela told me that when Sharits showed this film in El Paso an epileptic in the audience did actually go into convulsions. Sharits successfully involved the audience in his work. As he said,

"Everything was done to allow the viewer to move beyond mere voyeurism and actually enter into the convulsive state, to allow a deeper empathy for the condition and to also, hopefully, experience the ecstatic aspect of such paroxysm." (Filmmakers Coop Catalogue No 7, 1989 p436)

This really gives new meaning to the American idea of an artist establishing a direct connection with nature. Sharits here, in manipulating the nature of film, hopes to affect the nature of the viewer. To induce us into some other state of nature. To alter our experience and perception of reality. Sharits anticipates interactivity, by going right into someone else?s consciousness and stimulating reactions. Though not for reasons of control.

In N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968) Sharits goes so far as make nothing out of something. We see a still image of a light bulb, cutting almost frame by frame from positive to negative. The light bulb of illumination and its opposite. It is like a question, "How can we know the unknowable?" As in T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G the titles are spelled out between the frames, introducing the notion of text as well as adding a structural compositional element leading us to believe that the film will finish sometime after we see the letter G. We are given a hint of the film's duration. (Hopefully it will finish before the restless get bored or confused and begin dreaming of California).

North America's West Coast is very outward looking, they know that the Pacific Ocean is out there and they are interested. Following the Second World War many US servicemen were stationed in Japan and, later, Korea. The more inquisitive of them picked up notions of Asian traditions and ideologies, such as Buddhism. These ideas began filtering back to the United States. Maybe some of these influences came to bear on Jordan Belson and James and John Whitney.

I would have to say, upfront, that I have a few problems with Belson and the Whitneys. Though there is no denying their achievement. Obviously all three were ahead of their time and must have been dismayed to see their films reduced to visual aids for 1960s psychedelia. There is a high level of art and craft in their work. There is a lot of work in their work. And this work is backed up by utopian ideals in a strange synthesis of western and eastern transcendentalism. In various ways they hoped, through their films, to elicit meditative, possibly even ecstatic, states in the viewer. To maybe help turn the viewer away from western acquisitiveness toward more holistic and centered realities. Theirs were futuristically inclined visions which may be best described as Spiritual Science Fictions. (Although I note that Jordan Belson looked at his films as documentary representations of spiritual states). The problem that I have with Belson and the Whitneys was stated by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his book ON THE WAY TO LANGUAGE. Heidegger said, "Modern thinking ... concentrates all available energy and 'interests' in calculating how man may soon establish himself in a world less cosmic space. This type of thinking is about to abandon the earth as earth ... All the rest that follows from such thinking is already the explosion of power that could blast everything to nothingness. All the rest that follows from such thinking, the technical processes in the functioning of the doomsday machinery, would merely be the final sinister dispatch of madness into senselessness." And, "We cannot see it any other way as long as we calculate, that is, compute the sufficient reason which rationalizes beings as the result of reason, reason's effects, and thereby satisfies our conceptualizations." (Heidegger, 1971 pp84, 86) This being a variation on McLuhan's the medium is the message, as our method is our madness. The tools that we use to achieve our goals determine the outcome of those goals. It is the domain of art and philosophy to somehow retool those tools and reorient our goals, hopefully in the direction of something ancient and authentic. (For example, Len Lye's Old Brain Thinking). For McLuhan, each new medium represented new possibilities for experience and thought.

At a lecture that I once attended at the Art Institute of Chicago Fred Camper said that he could tell that a film was from the West Coast even if his eyes were shut. This was on account of their eastern influenced, dream woven soundtracks. Camper has a point. Belson and the Whitneys use sound to complement the image rather than interrogate or extend it. So they, and Len Lye, use sound in the way that rock videos do. Of course, Belson, Lye and the Whitneys were doing this long before the first now dead rock star ever walked onto a stage and started appropriating experimental films in rock videos.

Jordan Belson's SAMADHI (1967) comes to us as something like the view of a spiritual astronaut traveling through inner space. In what looks like electronically generated imagery we see circular shapes, like planets, surrounded by auras which evoke cosmic genesis and evolution as they transform and metamorphize toward a union of subject and object. Interestingly, in the 1980s Belson was commissioned to create images of certain cosmic intangibles for the feature film THE RIGHT STUFF (1983) about the beginnings of the American manned space flight programme.

James Whitney's film LAPIS (1963-66) is realized in a precise, graphic way. Tiny dots swirl in circular motions around the screen in transformations of colour, scale and speed. The film evolves from black and white to colour and back to black and white again. The form of the film suggests the cyclical nature of life. At times its superimpositions and swirling, circular shapes resemble Busby Berkeley's cinematic choreography for Fred Astaire. At other times they evoke Australian Aboriginal depictions of dreamtime or imagined views through an electron microscope. In this it reminds me of Len Lye's TUSALAVA (1929) whose swirling biometric forms derived from an unconscious fused with Australian Aboriginal, Polynesian and modernist art. In TUSALAVA, Lye created forms which move in a circular motion, evolving to consume themselves before regenerating into new life. Whitney's representation lacks the tactility of Brakhage's THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS (1981)(See Landfall 210), the violence of Sharits' T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G or Lye's TUSALAVA. For all of its technique and painstaking craft LAPIS is a little too orderly, a little too perfect. It is a utopian ideal of a place too far away. It is perfect Abstract Illusionism.

Now here is a scary thought. (It is horror movie time). In the films of Belson and the Whitneys, some made over 60 years ago, we see the beginnings of computer graphics and digital imagery in cinema set to soundtracks either akin to electronic music or representative of other states. And all done for a reason, to represent 'higher purpose.' We see in their primeval computer like imagery, motion graphics and computer controlled camera movements, the beginnings of contemporary media art practices as represented in the recent crop of circular TV One (New Zealand) promotional logos through to Pat O'Neill's intricate single frame pans across land and cityscapes in WATER AND POWER (1989). Indeed, much that is heralded as the new can be traced back over a century of art history as themes that have moved from generation to generation, from medium to medium as restatement and reinterpretation in different media. So much of the 'new' owes its existence to its predecessors in Dada, Fluxus and conceptual art.

Marcel Duchamp, with his shifting of priorities from object to concept, was a key influence. Going on from film, the new seems to extend the idea of collaboration, from that between filmmakers and film technicians to a convergence of artists, engineers, programmers and scientists, bringing the theories and practices of media arts and the sciences together. Today, artists internationally are combining old and new technologies in interesting ways. Contemporary artists such as Eija-Lissa-Ahtila and Doug Aitken shoot on film, transfer to video and project digitally. Mathew Barney shoots on video which he then transfers to film for projection. These and other artists, such as Tracey Moffat, William Kentridge and Rodney Graham, exist at the cusp of intermedia, negotiating the intersection of film, media and new technologies. Notions of spectatorship and audience involvement with new media have also changed as an aesthetic based on depth, narrative and meaning is being overhauled by sensual experience and spectacle. The idea of the moving image has evolved from pictures that move toward transformational images, images that can be digitally manipulated to evoke different senses of reality and representation, maybe even a different sense of the possibilities of life and art.

In Australian Jeffrey Shaw's THE LEGIBLE CITY (1988-91) the viewer navigates their way through a simulated city represented by words and phrases formed into buildings and streets through which the viewer can peddle and steer a stationary bicycle. Computer generated 3-Dimensional letters that form words appear on screens before the viewer/cyclist as he glides through a textual architecture based on maps of actual cities. The viewer/cyclist/reader constructs his own narrative by choosing a path through the labyrinth. In so doing the divide between the library, the gymnasium and the art gallery is bridged as the viewer's consciousness, perception and prejudices shapes the narrative. Has the gymnasium been brought into the gallery or has the gallery invaded the gymnasium? The borders between art and life are blurred as the viewer actively participates in the reading of the work and creates their own unique experience of it.

New media may now be about to redefine our expectations of artistic pleasure as something that no longer needs to take place in an arts centre and no longer need to be called art. The best that we can hope for from new media is that art and its power relations as we have known them will disappear and be replaced by something more decentralized and democratic. Internet art, created on the world wide web, such as New Zealander Josh On's THEY RULE (2001) (www.theyrule.net) may help to bring about autonomous reality communities, activist groups linked by telecommunications networks and defined by consciousness, ideology and desire. Art without dealers, curators and other economic intermediaries. Who will broker artificial art produced by artificial intelligence for artificial audiences? (Were knights in armour the first cyborgs and the invention of God our first attempt to create artificial intelligence?)

The invention of photography and cinema seriously questioned painting's status as a privileged medium of representation as artists began to incorporate technology as another tool of seeing and thinking. Technology such as telescopes, microscopes, and cameras help us see what is not normally visible to the naked eye, or select and isolate passing moments or phenomena to allow closer examination and analysis. And what was seen and analyzed through technology, say Edward Muybridge's DESCENDING STAIRS AND TURNING AROUND from his photographic series ANIMAL LOCOMOTION, (1884-85) was later brought into play as art by Marcel Duchamp in his painting NUDE DESCENDING A STAIRCASE, (1912).

Today, digital technologies have overhauled photography in the same way that photography overhauled painting. Whilst painting and photography will remain with us their meaning and their status within the visual arts has changed. New technologies create new textual experiences and new ways of representing the world and experience, new conceptions of selfhood and community and new ways of reading.

Nancy Burson's BEAUTY COMPOSITES (1982) and HUMAN GENE MACHINE (2000) uses digital technology to question notions of photographic veracity and conventional aesthetics and to help us to maybe think and see in new ways. Burson creates what seems to be a photograph of someone who does not exist. In BEAUTY COMPOSITES Burson morphs the faces of several female movie stars into a single face, thereby synthesizing a contemporary ideal of female beauty: this is how we see or what we look for and what does it tell us about ourselves?

Former Japanese model Mariko Mori has taken control of her own image in a series of digitally manipulated images which blend Buddhism with Japanese kitsch and western concepts. Describing herself as Andy Warhol's daughter and Marcel Duchamp's granddaughter she appears, today, as Jeff Koons' transcendental Asian cousin.

Fascinated by the possibilities of technology Mariko explores relationships between fantasy and reality. In BIRTH OF STAR (1996), Mariko appears as a plastic Japanese pop star doll coyly playing to a camera. But something dark seems to lurk behind her representations. Whilst recognizable, Mariko's work also appears to be new, it is freshly familiar. She plays with our desire; we want it even though it is unattainable.

Of course technology does have a sinister aspect, one only has to marvel at the television representation of the pyrotechnic gymnastics of 'smart' weapons blasting emerging economies back to the middle ages and the surveillance of virtually every living thing on the planet, the notable exceptions being Osama Bin Laden and approaching TSUNAMIS. It is mistaken to believe that today we are all wired together in some transphysical community - many forms of labour, transportation and communication are still based on physical activities. As are the creation of communication technologies, synthesized from toxic materials in developing nations.

Australian Denis Beaubois addresses his concerns about the sinister side of technology in his work, IN THE EVENT OF AMNESIA THE CITY WILL RECALL (1996). For this videotaped performance piece Beaubois selected twelve public surveillance sites in Sydney, Australia. He then visited these sites for three days and attempted to engage the surveillance cameras in a dialogue. Standing before the cameras Beaubois addressed them with a series of messages written on large hand-held cards, attempting to initiate a conversation with his unseen surveyors. Technology may have infiltrated almost every aspect of our daily lives but how much input do we have, what can we can access and to what extent can we participate in and derive benefits from technology?

Technology is sold to us as a labour saving, productive means, a greater efficiency for the benefit of humankind, but for many it has resulted in less privacy, longer and more stressful working hours (often for less pay), or unemployment. Our New World economies may be performing miracles but those at the bottom of the heap are increasingly marginalized as the benefits of increased productivity are siphoned off by employers, bureaucrates and politicians. Notions of equality and equitability are rapidly disappearing from New World societies and so the need arises for cameras to scan public and workplace environments looking for deviant behaviour. We will only be equal as consumers. Our decentered, supersized, franchised new world exists within margins leaving room for plenty of people outside those margins. We are being protected from ourselves. Beaubois' work offers just the slightest glimmer of hope, humanity and humour in the human presence at work behind surveillance technologies when he asks the cameras to respond to his requests. The camera nods up and down in assent, or waves sideways in dissent. Yes, we can communicate with our hidden surveyors, but only in a primal vocabluary couched in less linguistic ability than a parrot.

Could it be that the computer and digital forms of image manipulation represent a New World in themselves, affecting our view of the world and our relation to it? New media and digital art, drawing on something of the Whitney's precedence, could help to redefine our notions of cinematic reality and realism. (Whatever future currency that realism may have within art). The physical world may begin to fade from view as ideas become more important than physical representations and how we think becomes a more important principle than how we see. We can go on from there to examine the very root of our ideas and thought processes, how we form them and where they come from, possibly leading us to change the way that we think. If that sounds familiar it is because they are key concepts of avant-garde artistic activity now being reapplied in digital art forms. Although, in our time, nothing is in more danger of becoming tired, oppressive and empty than the new.

With all this in mind and a break in the weather I made my way up to Karangahape Road to attend the Particles to Pixels Symposium, subtitled Moving Image Culture in the Footsteps of Len Lye. The very name of the event caused me trepidation. Was this to represent the bypassing of our experimental filmmaking history in attempt to establish a whakapapa between Len Lye and contemporary digital artists to confer validity on the new whilst continuing to bypass our still living, or should I say still born, experimental film history?

The great thing about preconceptions is testing them and discovering the error of one's prejudices and, hopefully, growing as a result. I had such enlightenment at the Particles to Pixels Symposium which was ably organized by Miriam Harris, Janine Randerson and Eu Jin Chua of the Design School at Unitec. The Symposium included such luminaries as Roger Horrocks, Wystan Curnow, Stella Brennan, Tessa Laird and the American animator Stephanie Maxwell. It was a friendly and, at times, light hearted gathering. All of the speakers professed a debt to Len Lye as discussion ranged across Lye's movement aesthetic,

it's relationship to the body, poetics, irrefutable proof of Lye's Asian genealogy, visible and invisble phenomenologies, composing motion and music and Lye's influence on a contemporary American media artist. All this and more interspersed by a screening of, mostly, graphic experimental films, videos and new media. For me the Symposium was a revelation. As Tessa Laird said at the opening of the second day, "I felt like I had met the extended family that I never knew I had, all these Len Lye enthusiasts that I never knew existed." It was like a homecoming to discover a whole new generation of local media artists inspired by and working out of the tradition of avant-garde cinema.

The screening was bookended by the 1958 version of Len Lye's FREE RADICALS at the beginning and TRADE TATTOO (1937) at the end. With COLOUR BOX (1935) in the middle. The programme of short films included flashes of brilliance, echoes of Brakhage, and the hope of the second (or is it the third?) generation of New Zealand experimental filmmakers.

FREE RADICALS is a black and white film in the barest sense of the word. White lines scratched into black film leader and synchronized to a soundtrack of African drumming. The scratched lines weave themselves through various two and three dimensional permutations as an elemental line, like lightning flashes, evoking creation in its most primal form.

In the symposium's opening address Roger Horrocks talked about Lye's aesthetic of movement as an original conception of art that continues to be relevant. How Lye trained himself to be sensitive to movement then began to apply that training to composing motion through motifs that he developed for representing motion: tense vertical or horizontal lines, zig zags or lightning flashes, accents triangles, pirouetting signs and asterixes that won't stay put. Lye strove to break motion down to its essential elements then put it back together according to his cinematic and kinetic principles. His was a type of body art through which he channeled the movement of the world into a dance of his hands as he scratched wriggling, jumping, crazy lines directly into the surface of film.

FREE RADICALS is such an enduring classic of world cinema. It is truly interstellar. A zero point of cinema. The sort of film that should be sent off in deep space probes to communicate with other civilizations. On discovering FREE RADICALS 5000 light years from now, just left of the Milky Way, how grand these civilizations would think we were. Maybe they would even call us Gods. But then they don't know what we know and without our art to guide them they never will.

Stephanie Maxwell's REFLECTING POOL (7 minutes, 2004) Opens with an out of focus shot of light shimmering across the surface of a pool of sparkling waters. In this it is reminiscent of the opening of Stan Brakhage's SONG 21 (1966). Pixillated shots of shells and stones intermingle in an abstract play of indeterminate colours, forms and shimmering reflections. Is this a reflecting pool of thought? The film builds to a crescendo of sound and image, an elemental chaos, followed by a more meditative phase with softer, out of focus, images evoking biomorphic forms.

Wellingtonian Lissa Mitchell's BOWL ME OVER (6 minutes, `1995) was a scratched and hand painted direct film of an art historical journey through the South Island invoking the spirits of Rita Angas, Colin McCahon, Mina Arndt and John Gully. BOWL ME OVER bore an uncanny resemble to Donna Cameron's NEW MOON (1989) (See Illusions #27) a film which Mitchell assured me that she had never seen. (Cameron, from Brooklyn in New York, also professes a debt to Len Lye). New Zealand experimental filmmakers seem to be gaining ground. In the early 1980s we were about thirty to fourty years behind the Americans. Now, on the evidence of the similarity between Mitchell's and Cameron's work, produced just six years apart, it really does seem as if some of us are beginning to break away from the social, from the story, and from the explanation.

Miriam Harris introduced us to the ennervating work of the Canadian film artist Steven Woloshen. For one familiar with the history of Canadian avant-garde cinema (see Illusions #28) Woloshen's work is even more astounding in that it steps right away from the concerns with photographic representation, documentary forms of experimental filmmaking and ample funding. He is a true individualist a self funded filmmaker, earning his living as a driver for a cinema studio. Woloshen jokingly says, "George Clooney produces my films but he doesn't know it."

Woloshen describes DITTY DOT COMMA (3 minutes, 2001) as a motion picture musical salute to visual punctuation. An obvious homage to Len Lye, incorporating scratched, painted maybe even baked footage the film rollicks along on an ebullient soundtrack of jazz music.

For THE BABBLE ON PALMS (4 minutes, 2001) Woloshen appropriated film off-cuts, parts of the film that the cameraperson uses for tests, partially covering the lens with their hand. Woloshen then adorns the sucession of hands with vibrant camerlaless animations of exotic filagrees, spinning vortexes and crazy lines as a mad sort of sign language for psychic palm readers. The psychic realm is humourously underscored by a soundtrack of Indian music.

It can be easy to forget, amidst the babble of the new, that there are still filmmakers working entirely with film. Woloshen is one such artist and his work exuberant with the life, verve and the creative spirit of Len Lye.

Tessa Laird digitally reworked Lye's first film TUSALAVA playfully re-presenting it as A FLIP AND TWO TWISTS (being a play on the title of Lye's sculpture Trilogy) (3 minutes 32 seconds, 2005). Laird described her process thus, "... the closing sequence of ... TUSALAVA, flipped on its side and given two twists - black and white becomes shades of green, and a soundtrack is introduced." The mid-nineties psychedelic dance music track transforms TUSALAVA's weta like head, revolving 360 degrees on its neck, extending it's tongue, as a record player arm and needle, into the spinning disc, becoming a predatory dance music DJ, spinning discs, adding new meaning to the idea of the timelessness of art or simply updating TUSALAVA to a contemporary context (It worked. Not that there is anything wrong with the original TUSALAVA. Now there are two TUSALAVAS, one for our time and one for all time).

Stella Brennan's 2-channel video ZenDV, (2003) seemed the polar opposite of Lye's work. Whereas his films were painstakingly crafted and bore the unmistakable mark of his own hand Brennan privileges the artist's mind. For her concept rather than craft are the territory of art. One half of ZenDV is a blue screen intersected by a scratch and specks of dust. The other half are colour bars used to calibrate video signals. These bars also include dust and dirt particles. As a fitting marker of our place in time it is all machine made.

Seeing still images of this work reproduced in, say, a catalogue one could assume that it is a work of high modernism. A flat blue plane intersected by a straight, white vertical line, lightly sprinkled with a few white specks and a hair. Or a rigidly symetrical arrangement of blocks of pure colour, again sullied by a random assortment of dust, dirt and hair. As such they may suggest a transcendent realm which admits something of the chaos and uncertainty inherent in life. Or maybe the impossibility of a higher order ever gaining ascendency.

But this is not quite so in Brennan's work. As the dust and hair are electronically generated, rather than real, they create altogether different associations. The dust and hair are created by filters in the Final Cut Pro digital editing system. As such they are meant to lend texture and authenticity to digital images. In the same way that sepia tints create an aura of nostalgia and history in photography. Or woodgrained finishes on plastic radio and TV cabinets or automobile dashboards evoke notions of quality and craft. It is an odd feature of progress that as one technology usurps another it initally attempts to mimic that which it will replace.

Hence lightbulbs that look like candle flames. The very feature of dust and scratches on film that was so annoying to filmmakers and projectionists, who did everything they could to eliminate them, becomes, in the age of electronic cinema, a marker of authenticity, something desirable. Even if it is fake. The electronically generated dust, dirt and hair keep reappearing on the screen at exactly the same place and time. They are not random. They are programmatic.

Brennan has taken her cue from ZEN FOR FILM by Nam June Paik in which he continuously projected a loop of clear, transculent film which, as it passed through the projector, accumulated dust, hair and scratches. This, Paik may have asserted, is the true nature of film, its absolute materiality. The irony here is that digital images do not deteriorate the same way that film images do. Dust, scatches and hair on a video tape, video heads or in a hard drive register differently. Digital life processes are different from analogue ones. Every time a digital artwork is shuffled from one hard drive to another it will change. Each DVD copy that is burned from the original changes, being made again and differently. Every monitor the artwork is shown on will reproduce a slightly different blue. How is it that something can be always the same yet always different? Unchanging and changing at the same time. Is that Zen?

Jae Hoon Lee's A LEAF (3 minutes 35 seconds, 2004) evokes Stan Brakhage's THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS (1981) but once again we have moved from the analogue to the digital. A LEAF appears to be a continuous pan along a seemingly never ending leaf, set against a soundtrack of cicadas. Lee had scanned leaves for a year before digitally threading them together as evocation of the growth cycle of plants. One thinks of a strip of film passing through a movie projector.

In her paper, titled Accents and Silences, Janine Randerson introduced us to the sonic sculptures of Anit Pitaru. An Israeli artist resident in New York, Pitaru cites Len Lye as a major influence on his interactive animations which incorporate design, movement and performance. (See http://www.insertsilence.com http://www.pitaru.com and http://www.showstudio.com).

For her own interactive video installation PEACE IN SPACE presented at the Film Archive in Wellington through July and August, 2005 Randerson suspended four curved perspex

screens from the ceiling, hovering like flying saucers above the viewer, onto which she projected various images. Each dome had its own theme and title - Polar Shift, Pink Shift, Red Shift and Blue Shift, all different but related toward a greater whole. Mini borealis. Walking under one of these spiritual parasols, galactic equators or circles in the sky, the viewer triggered light sensors which in turn activate various programmed image, light and sound sequences. Randerson appropriated images of cellular and celestial bodies by scanning books on science, microbiology, internet sites and 3-D animation. PEACE IN SPACE harked back to Jordan Belson's spiritual science fictions of the 1950s and 1960s (Belson collaborated with the composer Henry Jacobs on a series of concerts incorporating abstract and cosmic imagery combined with electronic sound between 1957 and 1959) and the musical compositions of Alexander Scriabin who attempted to correlate music and colour as a colour organ in his symphony PROMETHEUS, THE POEM OF FIRE (1910). Just as Scriabin attempted a synthesis between science and spirituality in art Randerson's PEACE IN SPACE also represnts a convergence of art, science and technology as a collaborative work between her, the audio artist Jason Johnston and the Human Interface Technology Laboratory all toward the utopian ideal of the demilitarization of space.

Coming at a time when I had almost completely given up on the idea of experimental film ever being given its due in New Zealand the symposium was a welcome relief. We have had practitioners working continuously in this arena for 35 years now, many of them notable artists. Yet our arts and cultural institutions, particularly those mandated to support our moving image culture, have demonstrated a spectacular indifference to the idea of film as art. This being more ironic in that the greatest work by one of our greatest visual artists, Len Lye, were his experimental films. But then the New Zealand mentality is particularly adept at repositioning a cinematic art work such as FREE RADICALS as a rock video.

To a distant observer many of the New Zealand made media art works appeared to have been made by people removed from themselves, more willing to comment on external rather than internal events, their work more formal than self revealing or confessional. Some of it even seemed cold. A little more humour and revelation of human foibles and folly, maybe in the tradition of George Kuchar or Joe Gibbons would be welcome. Certainly any curated screening of works influenced by Len Lye are bound to be graphic but we could also incorporate something of the playful nonsensicality of Robert Breer or the zaniness of his daughter Emily into our tradition. That is a part of the beauty of Lye who was able to both encompass the formality of modernism whilst also infusing it with life and energy. Maybe our media artists could become a little more casual and careless about their work and their soundtracks a little less serious. Too often we heard portentous soundtracks sounding something like advanced European music of the early Twentieth Century. Active and imaginative interaction between sound and image have been a hallmark of the Amerrican avant-garde cinema, but in our work the sound seemed to be merely accompanying the images, rather than interrogating them. At times it seemed as if the makers lacked confidence in the power of their images and editing. Maybe they were trying too hard to reach out and communicate. The main thing, though, is that people are continuing to produce interesting work in genres derived from avant-garde cinema. It will be a great day when our legion of professional media arts office holders and educators start to support such work in an energetic and meaningful way with something of the depth and integrity of film artists. But maybe such hope is as utopian as Jonas Mekas' dreams, imaginings and visions of cinema.

REFERENCES

Broderick, Peter: SINCE CINEMA EXPANDED: Interview with Gene Youngblood in Millennium Film Journal, Nos 16/17/18 Fall/Winter 1986/87 pp 55-66

Filmmakers' Cooperative Catalogue No. 7, New York Filmmakers, NY 1989.

Frye, Brian: INTERVIEW WITH JONAS MEKAS, in Senses of Cinema www.sensesofcinema.com

Greene, Rachel: Internet Art, Thames&Hudson, London, 2004

Harris, Miriam: THE CANADIAN CONNECTION: Steven Woloshens's Ebullient Creations. Talk at the Particles to Pixels Symposium, Auckland, September 3, 2005

Heidegger, Martin: ON THE WAY TO LANGUAGE,

Harper & Row, New York 1971

Horrocks, Roger: FIGURES OF MOTION. Talk at the Particles to Pixels Symposium, Auckland, September 3, 2005

Lister, Martin/Dovey, John/Giddings, Seth/Grant, Ian & Kelly, Kieran: NEW MEDIA: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, London 2003

Manovich, Lev: WHAT IS DIGITAL CINEMA?, http://jupiter.ucsd.edu/%7Emanovich/text/digital-cinema.html

Paul, Christiane: DIGITAL ART, Thames & Hudson, London 2003

Reminiscences of personal conversations with Fred Camper 1986-1995.

Rush, Michael: VIDEO ART, Thames & Hudson, 2003

Sitney, P Adams: VISIONARY FILM: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000 Oxford University Press, NY 2002

Wees, William C: LIGHT MOVING IN TIME: Studies in Visual Aesthetics and Avant-Garde Film, University of California Press, 1992