There have been numerous exhibitions about the cinematographic experience in art since the hundredth anniversary of cinema. The structures of this mass medium and the entertainment industry in the 20th century have been analysed, and parallels drawn to art from the narrative structures, levels of meaning, constructions, clusters, and aesthetic approaches of film. The old media dictum about extensions of the body suited art very well, as film unites the disciplines in which human creativity unfolds: literature, acting, theatre, art, architecture, music. Not least, there were impulses coming from younger artists like Christopher Williams, Pae White and Jorge Pardo from Los Angeles/Hollywood at the start of the nineties that combined artistic and non-artistic discourses. These approaches suited not only artistic neo-conceptualism, but also the pluralisms in the post-modern »cinema of quotation«. The two pioneers of interactive installation art, Peter Weibel and Jeffrey Shaw, organised the comprehensive exhibition »Future Cinema« as a confirmation of and counter-trend to all these phenomena that are to be ascribed to »last century«. »Future Cinema« is based on material changes that provide new camera and projection techniques as well as making available new narrative forms and visual languages that anticipate future cinematographic developments in utopian fashion. At the same time, this is Shaw’s farewell as head of the Institute for Visual Media at the ZKM.

Conventional cinema is in a bad way, and not only in an economic regard. The sales figures and threatened bankruptcies of, first, the UFA cinemas and now the Multiplex cinemas in Germany are horrifying. And good old art-house cinemas have been a rarity for years. Hollywood’s hegemony is undisputed, standardised blockbusters conquer our cities on a regular basis, content and format have remained unchanged for decades, if one disregards a few films based on computer game myths, like »The Matrix« or »Fight Club«. Nevertheless, artists have long analysed the fascinating machinery and visual aesthetics of cinema, and disturb our belief in the dream factory with their dismantling of viewing conventions. Cindy Sherman was a pioneer with her »Untitled Film Stills« of 1977-80, and in 1981 Dan Graham visualised his idea of a kind of cinema that exposed the screen and the system of voyeuristic identifications instead of the machine. He wrote: »The cinema is however seen as the prototype for all other perspective systems that serve to create a social subject by manipulating his/her imaginary identifications.«

»If film is the art form of the 20th century«, as Peter Weibel stressed elsewhere, digital technology, Internet, Flash Players, MUDs, etc., represent a democratisation of the artistic means of production used by cinema, which in itself is authoritarian and anti-democratic. The rich palette of new interactive possibilities calls for a user that is included in the creative process. This should produce a greater closeness to the viewer and advanced films. But this pious desire is barely opposed by critical potentials. Extensions tend to be articulated by employing restricted formal (and technical) means and through concentration– this was demonstrated, for example, by the »DOGMA 95« series, born of the crisis in European cinema. The present optimism is burgeoning in the wake of these extensions (through reduction), an optimism that has struck the ZKM with great technological power like a self-guided creative cruise missile (freely adapted from Virilio’s »Cinema and War«). The main emphasis of the Karlsruhe exhibition is on transformations of the cinematographic apparatus that can be brought about by individuals. The decentral environments (which are also social spaces) even identify the viewer as the main protagonist. The experimental focus is thus on attempts to shape interactive, non-linear content. And, to distinguish it from the trivial big-screen forms of existing visual semantics, the media art of the future has the magic word »immersive environments« laid over it as a healing cloak. Both areas are concerned with individualists, artists who undermine or overcome the global standards (set by Hollywood). And it is precisely the stars of the genre, like Eija-Liisa Ahtila and Isaac Julien, who remain faithful to the big screen, following Dan Graham’s dictum about the power of the vanishing point that we have internalised, imaginarily and voyeuristically, as a framed rectangle (view from the window, tele-vision). Only perspective itself and the use of parallel projections allow us to feel the thrill of a multiple eye. They are exceptions among interactive visual codes, manoeuvred by mouse click, that mostly lack a narration, in the same way that the virtual space lacks a third dimension. The convergence, apostrophised by the curators, of the delocalised, digital online cinema between PC, television, and Net allows new experiences and leads to a loss of context, which is fed into the visual games again only after arduous construction (or long theoretical explanations next to the works). However, we out ourselves as spoilsports if we approach the works from this perspective. The new modes of interaction evoke the loss of a collective experience that, as a currently conspicuous phenomenon, is enough of an argument for the curators to call the user director and cameraman.

Over 50 installations, films, databases and projections illustrate this contemporary artistic practice, supplemented by a Web cinema programme curated by Nora Barry, which features forerunners since 1997. Barry emphasises the influence had by computer games or QuickTime on CD-ROM, and writes: »In January 1997, Macromedia put Flash 1.0 onto the market, an ›off the peg‹ animation package, and shortly after that RealWorks brought out RealVideo 1.0. Then, in July, Apple presented a Web version of QuickTime. The introduction of the Web-compatible programmes RealAudio and QuickTime made it possible to distribute video via the Internet. It was equally important that the modem speed had reached 28 Kbps, which was what made downloading and viewing of moving pictures possible in the first place. Like the theatre-related cinema, which owes its existence to public performances, Web cinema also needs a public to exist (properly).« In a way, »Web Cinema« and its history are the real, authentically contemporary part of »Future Cinema«. The dismantling of the optical apparatus is sometimes impressive. In »Soft Cinema«, Lev Manovich combines the Dogma rules with Mondrian’s picture designs and global visual information to produce a film mixture of a FJ (film jockey), partly random-generated, that flickers before one’s eyes. »Soft Cinema« engages with the question of how subjective experience can be represented in the global information society. Michael Naimark places us, less appropriately, on a rotating floor to produce dizziness in front of the commonplace panoramas. Jean-Michel Bruyère’s dome is gigantic; its panorama effect also looks back to the precursive form of cinema and thus hopes to open new perspectives. Really new, unsuspected creative possibilities are revealed by the newest multimedia installations of Pat O’Neill (»The Decay of Fiction«) and Peter Cornwell (»MetaPlex«), in which music clips represent the database basis and an interactive world view in the ambient look dominated by bar codes. Constanze Ruhm examines the role of woman in film in a similarly ambitious way. Her »Coming Attraction« is a net-based, constantly growing database installation; those interested in sociology will enjoy the female representations.

In the dark surroundings of the cave-like laboratory atmosphere, things can be touched, tried out, pushed and turned, as an anti-contemplative surrogate action – the window on the future of cinema’s final stage, or the cool neon-blue of a new Flash start in Plato’s grotto? Despite all the optimism, all the propagation of the interactive and the sometimes theoretical euphoria in this controversial exhibition, one feels the lack of the pattern of reality, the special image layer, that antiquated, physical surfaces without electric cords or the darkness of the cinema are still able to produce. However, the two works by Jim Campbell from Chicago are a true find and simply captivating. »Illuminated Average #1 Hitchcock’s Psycho« puts – in a similar way to the impressive film photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto – the visual information from the famous film into an inconspicuous slide (German: »Diapositiv«), and thus only seemingly casts a spell – »dia« still means »through«, and not, as with the cold screens, »off«. In the same way, »Church on Fifth Avenue« is made very simply from 768 LEDs behind a slanting plexiglass sheet; the disappearance of the dots making up the picture simulates movement – paradoxically, the future of cinema beckons to us from the beginning stages of moving pictures, and proves that better technology is no guarantee for better pictures, as they arise in the mind of the viewer as always, and nowhere else. Didn’t Peter Friedl’s »KINO« at documenta X in 1997 aim to convey to us precisely this transcendence?

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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