If anyone visiting the exhibition »MindFrames« at the ZKM in Karlsruhe was reminded of an airport hall, there could have been several reasons for this. First, there were the lit-up, dynamic display boards that, updated every minute, announced the times and terminals not for departing planes, but for the next presentations of videos and sound files in the surrounding black boxes. Secondly, all the exhibits were directed towards the State University of New York in Buffalo, or, to put it more precisely: what one headed for were works by the professors – seven men and one woman – who taught media art there between 1973 and 1990 – in other words, works on the threshold between the analogue and the digital eras. And thirdly, the easily accessible cubicles allowed visitors to quickly immerse themselves in a strange world and return from it just as quickly, just like a holiday package. But anyone who strolled through the Karlsruhe hall without a tight itinerary and with the relaxed enjoyment of an exhibition flâneur, patiently watching presentations before clicking their way quickly through the image, sound and text files on offer in the central studio laboratory, was taken on an interesting journey by this blend of media apparatuses. This however had more to do with the different careers and crossovers of the artists presented than with the seductive friction between immersive and informatory types of viewing.
Hollis Frampton, for example, first worked as a poet and photographer before he became one of the most respected filmmakers of the American neo-avant-garde. His film »nostalgia« (1971) in particular combines those two practices into a subtle essay in which photos from Frampton’s collection are burned one by one on a hotplate. It is always a small surprise when the heat sets the paper copy on fire. And the fire always withdraws each picture – portrait or interior – from the view of the viewers, creating renewed tension, while a voice off screen is already describing the photo to be expected in the next scene. Subtly, »nostalgia« thus configures the meaningful and the elementary by means of their individual forms of appearance and disappearance. But, more than this, the film also reflects on different manners of remembrance, like those of the autobiographical and those triggered by the period that elapses between the description and the picture itself.
Woody Vasulka, who comes from Brünn, also works with phenomena of elapsed time. However, narrative elements play a merely subordinate role. Vasulka, a trained engineer, explicitly contests the hegemonies of interpersonal narrative and the portrayed face. Instead, he concentrates on experiments with electronic feedback. This arises in video when a camera films the monitor, which at the same shows the recorded image, resulting in a loop of recording and visual playback. When Vasulka includes objects and actions in this - so to speak - autoerotic mechanical process – the movements of a hand in »Vocabulary« (1973), for example -, the small differences in the superimposed video signals lead to optical echoes in the light-and-shade contours of the film, which transform the filmed motifs into abstract grid structures. The power of such technical artefacts is increased when the optical feedback is connected with acoustic feedback. Vasulka, together with his wife, the Icelandic violinist Steina, is one of the pioneers of video art. In the 1970s, they founded the legendary »Electronic Kitchen« in New York, a centre for electronic music, video and performance. Their wide-ranging experiments using hardware and software for electronic generation of images have resulted in a body of works that can now be seen as the unconscious of electronic image production and thus is now rightly being rediscovered.
Paul Sharits’ films, on the other hand, highlight the materiality of image generation with far more minimal means. He also has an echo effect in mind when he changes the colour background for his flicker films for each frame. In this way, he wants in particular to refer the object represented in the foreground, whether a face or a weapon, back to the visual and make it clear that every depiction is in a frame. Where Sharits refers to the rectangle of the screen, the Karlsruhe curators, Steina and Wood Vasulka, along with Peter Weibel (also ex-professor in Buffalo) and Thomas Thiel, refer to the whole system of media attention (»Mindframes«). Symptomatically, they do not present Sharits’ »Epileptic Seizure Comparison« (1976) in the open gallery space as a film installation with visible projectors, as the artist himself did, but as a black-box projection. The flashing single-frame pictures of convulsing epilepsy patients and the stroboscopic rhythm of red and green fields of colour, accompanied by the shrill machine sound, completely surround the viewers, meaning that the film is not so much informed by an identificatory process – whether of a sympathetic or deconstructive nature; instead, the convulsive flickering causes any cognitive attention to take second place to pure retinal stimulus, producing an almost hypnotic effect.
The capers of reflexive perception can been seen in even greater variety and more humorously in Tony Conrad’s work. With »The Flicker« (1966), this all-round artist, born in New Hampshire, created the prototype of the avant-garde genre of the same same, and thus became the co-founder of Structural Film. At the same time, as a member of the band »Theatre of Eternal Music« alongside John Cale, Angus MacLise, Marian Zazeela and La Monte Young, he was one of the major figures in musical minimalism. Here, the microtonal shifts in the violin- or drone-playing undermined the usual perception of chromatic tonal systems or encoded harmonies. Conrad saw a practice like this partly as opposing the representative patterns of American and European methods of composition. In the course of his conflict with fellow ex-band member La Monte Young, however, he has discovered that the reductive and improvisatory procedures of minimalism do not automatically preclude romantic artistic gestures: Young still claims copyright on the productions of that time and refuses to make the recordings available to the other band members. Conrad’s works in Karlsruhe reveal how suspiciously he has come to regard the consolidation of principles of form and authorship, perhaps because of this quarrel: in them, the entire range of media production is recombined in ironic fashion, from strict formalism to participatory television magazine show, from minimalistic concert excerpt to a document of grotesque performance. For example, in »That Far Away Look« (1988), Conrad mixes the gestures of a correspondent (between the USA and Japan) with the deportment of an art scholarship holder and the rituals of private life. With »In Line« (1986), he addresses the viewers both as educator and hypnotist. Finally, in »Your Friend« (1982), we see him as a dadaist film presenter who holds the film roll like a shower, allowing the celluloid to uncoil over his head. Conrad deconstructs the various genres, media formats and thus a wide range of modernist procedures in an obsessive and self-ironic fashion. It thus seems logical that this radical improviser is the only one of the artists presented in Karlsruhe still to hold a professorship at the Department of Media Study at Buffalo.

MindFrames – Media Study at Buffalo 1973–1990, ZKM, Media Museum, Karlsruhe, 16 December 2006 to 25 March 2007.

http://www.zkm.de/mindframes/
http://zkm.oasis-archive.eu
http://www.vasulka.org/
http://tonyconrad.net/blog.htm

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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