59 Sequences and Fragments

Zehar #59

59 Sequences and Fragments

What are we going to continue to call cinema exactly? This is what Erik Bullot wondered when it came to establishing the relationship between cinema and modern art. If we consider the answer by employing the rigorous approach that is standard practice when we come to classifying things according to disciplines, then we may well fear that film has a rather uncertain future; however, on the other hand, if we try to provide a response to this question from the sphere of art, or the visual arts, which is a hybrid discipline, that has long been corrupted by other fields of knowledge and practices, we will be able to look towards the future optimistically. And although nowadays we may no longer be interested in the answer, the way in which it is framed, on the other hand, entails the potential for change that the motion picture currently has.

 

However, this change had already begun with the advent of the video camera. As artists were aware of its potential, they wanted to use this new device as a political tool, and gave a foretaste of what was to become an explosion with the digital camera: the boundaries between amateur and professional, analogue and digital, and fiction or documentary have gone beyond the genre of film and have given rise to a new scenario. It is now quite common to find installations in galleries in museums in which images converge from several projectors, that no longer correspond to the characteristic sequence followed in a linear narrative, that cinema has displayed so well, but reflects a serial, non-linear editing method. These “constructive ruptures” not only warn us that large-scale narratives are impossible, but also open up new courses of action, that are more modest, but are no less creative for all that.

 

“We are in the age of partial objects, of bricks, and leftovers or waste. We no longer believe in the false fragments that, like the pieces of an ancient statue, expect to be completed and stuck together again to form a unit that is also the original unit”, Deleuze and Guattari said in Anti-Oedipus. It looks as of they had written this sentence with editing software. This is the tool that enables us to build up a whole unit by starting out from fragments that previously could have another kind of unity, and which, in turn, may take on other different forms. It’s all about continuing to experiment and not merely fitting in with what is visually correct


zehar59_en.pdf — PDF document, 1664Kb

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Spivak or the voice of the subaltern. Neus Carbonell

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is considered to be one of the most influential theoreticians in contemporary thought. Born in Calcutta in 1942, she moved to the United States in the mid-1960s to take a PhD in Comparative Literature. Since then, a solid academic career has turned her into one of the bestknown critical voices of the moment. Her work displays a broad range of interests and influences, including deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis and education, though it is in the area of post-colonial studies that her influence is strongest. Her work has often been classed as heterogeneous and fragmentary: heterogeneous both in its interests and in its defense of a postcolonial reality which is in itself disparate and impossible to homogenise; fragmentary, because her work, which owes much to deconstruction and psychoanalysis, resists any total or totalising representation.


Carbonell_en.pdf — PDF document, 107Kb

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Winter Toys. Begoña Vicario

What is the reason why someone decides to work in animation?
How do they develop and produce their work?
Where is the boundary between cinema, animation and art?


These are just some of the questions that Begoña Vicario raises when she deals with her friend and colleague Isabel Herguera’s professional career.


Vicario_en.pdf — PDF document, 90Kb

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Harun Farocki/Image (circum)volution: On the Installation Schnittstelle (Interface). Christa Blümlinger

How does a filmmaker arrive at the artform of the museum installation? Farocki finds himself in a small, albeit eminent group of like-minded filmmakers. In their installations, Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, Raúl Ruiz or Peter Greenaway, whose films negotiate the relationship between word and image in equally radical fashion, conduct similar investigations into their own or each other’s images, scenically bringing to account the metamorphoses of cinema through more recent audiovisual apparatus.


Blumlinger_en.pdf — PDF document, 117Kb

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Up-tight Methodology. Miren Jaio

The following is a description of two videos by Iñaki Garmendia with explanatory notes.


Jaio_en.pdf — PDF document, 89Kb

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The “Making of” as Working Material (Concerning production, distribution and dissemination). Arturo, Fito Rodríguez Bornaetxea

The author gives an account of the experiences from the Art and Electricity and Tester projects which the Fundación Rodríguez has worked on during the last few years. In the text he reflects on the working process and the dissemination of these projects, and raises questions that are applicable to the creation of contemporary culture in general.


Rodriguez_en.pdf — PDF document, 93Kb

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Contemporary music versus experimental music*. Iban Urizar

FORUM. This space is temporarily devoted to disseminating debates taking place about sound production and the [UN]COMMON SOUNDS project.


Urizar_en.pdf — PDF document, 74Kb

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On Music as An Invitation to Nobility*. Carmen Pardo

FORUM. This interview is taken from a conversation between Daniel Charles (DC) and Carmen Pardo (CP) in Madrid on 15 February, 2006, in which the two subtly and profoundly analyse the relationship between philosophy and music and John Cage’s conception of music as an invitation to nobility, in the Buddhist sense of detaching the emotions, and its relationship to and difference with Nietzsche’s thinking on music. They also address other questions, such as the problem of redefining sound in the light of Deleuze’s input.


Pardo_en.pdf — PDF document, 114Kb

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Smile Machines. María Morata

transmediale.06
Akademie der Künste, Berlin
From the 3rd of February to the 19th of March 2006

A useless amiable robot reacts awkwardly to the presence of visitors, almost as if it were looking for someone to stroke it. Another starts to get exasperated, the more people try to help it, and a mechanical, ramshackle mobile, made of mundane objects, turns over waste material and moves it around. Petit mal by Simon Penny, Helpless Robot by Norman White, or Remue-mènage by Jean-Pierre Gauthier are just some of the works that members of the public had to deal with on their visit to Smile Machines. The exhibition, curated by the art historian and lecturer at the University of Paris I, Anne-Marie Duguet, opened this February at the transmediale. 06. Festival for art and digital culture in Berlin.


Morata_en.pdf — PDF document, 85Kb
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