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TASK
Undertake research into absence and representation in moving image and build
up your own argument about whether 'something is missing' in digital
representation. For example;
● In what ways can representation be defined by an absence?
● Why is this particular to animation and the digital world?
● What will the future be like?
Your argument can be in written, recorded audio or video form. Remember to
cite your sources.

Is something missing in contemporary visual culture? by filling the world with images are we attempting to hide, erase or obscure something?
question from course text.

"I don't really know how to make work that doesn't first deal with loss, or speak of loss. Because I guess I felt that loss, or insufficiency, or
inability and failure and negation generally are the absolute bedrock of making things. Which sounds perverse because obviously you are
generating something; you are creating something out of nothing. But actually...Representation, I feel like it is defined by an absence."
Ed Atkins, Ed Atkins interview: Something is Missing (2017) Louisiana Channel.

" Hyperlinks or It Didn't Happen is narrated by the failed CGI rendering of a recently deceased actor, PHIL, and follows a group of digital
beings-render ghosts, spam bots, holograms-as they search for meaning. Multiple storylines and materials collapse and converge to
raise questions about what it means to be materially conscious today and the rights of the personal data we release."
Cecile B Evans, Hyperlinks or it Didn't Happen (2014) Vdrome.org.

Paul Pfeiffer

Artist Paul Pfeiffer repurposes this 'digital tinkering' and puts the animated
technique of erasure to the purpose of refocusing the attention of his audience.
In The Long Count: Thrilla Manila (2000-2001), Pfeiffer used film images of
Muhammad Ali's title fights against Sonny Liston, George Foreman and Joe
Frazier. He reduced the film frames to single photographs and then reassembled
them into new films by digitally removing the fighters from the scene so that only
audience and the boxing ring remained. What remains is ghostly, schematic
flitting about the ring; the boxers are not seen, just an uncanny shadow as if the
boxers have suddenly become invisible. What becomes visible when the fighters
are removed is another form of violence that is otherwise less evident: the faces
of the - mostly white - viewers who are watching the black boxers.
"As always in Paul Pfeiffer's work, the erasure of the protagonists in
the Long Count leads directly to the traumatic backrooms of the
American Dream ."

Ed Atkins and Naheed Raza, Tomorrow Never Knows (2013)

first video cuts out sound bites. Making it edgy and nervy to listen to. You never know how much you are going to understand and when you will be cut off.

Cecile B. Evans, Hyperlinks or It Didn't Happen (2014)
Hyperlinks or It Didn't Happen follows a group of digital entities as they search for meaning and an understanding of their own condition. Narrated by the failed CGI rendering of a recently deceased actor, PHIL, he introduces these digital agents-render ghosts, spam bots, holograms-as they appear across various settings, genres, and modes of representation. Multiple hyperlinked storylines build, converge, and collapse around overarching ideas of existence beyond anatomy: the ways in which we live and work within the machine. Throughout, questions are raised about what it means to be materially conscious today and the rights of the personal data we release.
Hyperlinks or It Didn't Happen

http://dismagazine.com/dystopia/74959/hyperlinks-or-it-didnt-happen-cecile-b-evans/ Gives a list of the different allusions and surces.

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TASKUndertake research into absence and representation in moving image and buildup your own argument about whether 'something is missing' in digitalrepresentation. For example;● In what ways can representation be defined by an absence?● Why is this particular to animation and the digital world?● What will the future be like?Your argument can be in written, recorded audio or video form.

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Paul Pfeiffer interview: desiderata exhibition

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Paul Pfeiffer interview: desiderata exhibition

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The degree of manipulability is such that I do not think we can really think of ourselves as independent at this point.

The ways that images are produced and manipulated.

Artist Paul Pfeiffer repurposes ‘digital tinkering’ and puts the animated technique of erasure to the purpose of refocusing the attention of his audience.

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Paul Pfeiffer | Desiderata | film by Nikolai Saoulski VOSTFR

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Excerpt from Paul Pfeiffer, Jerusalem (2014)

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Paul Pfeiffer: Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 2001

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Paul Pfeiffer: Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 2001

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Pfeiffer Paul Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 2001

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Paul Pfeiffer - Sculptor, Photographer & Video Artist

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(At Home) On Art and Spectacle: Artist Talk with Paul Pfeiffer

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Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design (RMCAD)

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Paul Pfeiffer Artist Talk - VASD Patterns Series

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Paul Pfeiffer - The Saints  audio in an empty room

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Paul Pfeiffer - The Saints  audio in an empty room

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The Long Count: Thrilla Manila (2000-2001)

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The Long Count: Thrilla Manila (2000-2001)

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In The Long Count: Thrilla Manila (2000-2001), Pfeiffer used film images of Muhammad Ali’s title fights against Sonny Liston, George Foreman and Joe Frazier. He reduced the film frames to single photographs and then reassembled
them into new films by digitally removing the fighters from the scene so that only audience and the boxing ring remained. What remains is ghostly, schematic flitting about the ring; the boxers are not seen, just an uncanny shadow as if the boxers have suddenly become invisible. What becomes visible when the fighters are removed is another form of violence that is otherwise less evident: the faces
of the – mostly white – viewers who are watching the black boxers.

“As always in Paul Pfeiffer’s work, the erasure of the protagonists in the Long Count leads directly to the traumatic backrooms of the American Dream .”

http://www.digiart21.org/art/the-long-count

https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s2/paul-pfeiffer-in-time-segment/

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This video piece, made by Paul Pfeiffer in 2001, shows a fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, from which the two fighters have been digitally removed. The footage used is the actual TV broadcast of the event, therefore the piece uses the traditional angle and distance from the fight that viewers are used to seeing while watching boxing matches on TV. The viewer can see and hear the crowd react to the fight, but the two fighters have been digitally "erased" and are leaving visual imprints onto the film that resemble shadow-like ghostly figures.

In The Long Count, and other similar video pieces, Pfeiffer explores the relationship between images, objects and people through the concept of time. Pfeiffer explains that there is something very seductive about pre-digested images, and the huge amount of content that is offered to their audience. By removing the expected focal point, or main subject matter of these videos, Pfeiffer plays with the viewers' perception of such sports events, and teases our expectations that come from the way we are preconditioned into interpreting the footage of such pre-constructed events. The viewers are being shown an empty ring and a crowd cheering to what seems to be a non-event. However, our massive exposure to such pre-digested images, what they denote but also connote without the need for literal depiction, and the way these associations are deeply embedded in our culture-induced subconscious allow us to infer the "erased" subject matter and its visual non-representation becomes secondary when it comes to making sense of the images shown. By highlighting these automatic associations we make, Pfeiffer is showing the relationship between single images and their structures or network, and how these two are in fact hard to dissociate. In other words, Pfeiffer is asking through this piece who is using who, or is it images that make us or us making images? In our technology and media-driven world, we are no longer making content onto which we have full control. Rather, people and their media influence each other in a symbiotic way. People create media content, which influence their subconscious and eventually the way they create media content. Pfeiffer aims at revealing this synergy through his work and altering of pre-recorded and pre-constructed footage, and this how, in his own terms, he is a "poacher, translator and mediator rather than an author". Another possible interpretation of this work could be that it is an inquiry into our perception of reality through time, and how, in our visual culture, seeing is believing.

Jennifer Gonzalez, from Bomb Magazine, proposes that Pfeiffer

"used digital editing to address the question of historical visibility or invisibility, emphasizing the power of image culture to confer the status of the "real" onto the past or onto human bodies in the present" (http://bombmagazine.org/article/2543/paul-pfeiffer).

In other words, this piece would be playing with the assumption that something has really happened if there is a visual recorded trace of it. However, Pfeiffer shows that footage of an event can constitute a proof of its veracity even when the important subject matter is removed from it, as our cultural and sensorial conditioning is sufficient for the viewers to accurately guess it from its context. Another interpretation of the work by the New York times proposes this piece as a social commentary on race:

"The deletion of the two black athletes suggests that they are anonymous and expendable players in a centuries-old ritual; the faces that remain are predominantly white, and their avidity, spectatorship and even blood lust seems to be the focus of the work. But the faces might also be the cast-out, watching the forces of good and evil battle for their souls." (http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/15/arts/art-in-review-paul-pfeiffer.html)

This view, however, was not echoed by Pfeiffer who is more interested in the technical aspect of the video, and the people to structure relationship explained above:

"What I'm really interested in is where the medium fails, so that what you are seeing is the point at which the erasure can't happen seamlessly. If the editing was done perfectly, then you wouldn't see where the figure was at all, but in 'The Long Count' triptych you always do. There's always this trace of where the figure was, and in a way you're seeing the failure of my hand and the failure of the medium, and that's kind of the ghost that's left. And it's that point of failure that I'm really interested in." (http://www.pbs.org/art21/images/paul-pfeiffer/the-long-count-rumble-in-the-jungle-details-2001?slideshow=1)

Another video piece by Pfeiffer which uses the same technique is Fragment of a Crucifixion.

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The Long Count - 21st Century Digital Art

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This video piece, made by Paul Pfeiffer in 2001, shows a fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, from which the two fighters have been digitally removed. The footage used is the actual TV broadcast of the event, therefore the piece uses the traditional angle and distance from the fight that viewers are used to seeing while watching boxing matches on TV.

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Cécile B. Evans, Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen, 2014

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Cécile B. Evans, Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen, 2014

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Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen follows a group of digital entities as they search for meaning and an understanding of their own condition. Narrated by the failed CGI rendering of a recently deceased actor, PHIL,  he introduces these digital agents—render ghosts, spam bots, holograms—as they appear across various settings, genres, and modes of representation. Multiple hyperlinked storylines build, converge, and collapse around overarching ideas of existence beyond anatomy: the ways in which we live and work within the machine. Throughout, questions are raised about what it means to be materially conscious today and the rights of the personal data we release.

http://presentfutures.org/hyperlinks-or-it-didnt-happen

http://dismagazine.com/dystopia/74959/hyperlinks-or-it-didnt-happen-cecile-b-evans/
Gives a list of the different allusions and sources.

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Cécile B. Evans, Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen, 2014, trailer

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Ed Atkins and Naheed Raza, Tomorrow Never Knows (2013)

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Ed Atkins and Naheed Raza, Tomorrow Never Knows (2013)

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THE JERWOOD/FILM AND VIDEO UMBRELLA AWARDS - TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS 14 March – 22 April 2012

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Tuesday 10 April 2012

A lecture by Professor John Mullarkey titled Inventing the Future: On the Future Anterior and Philo-Fictions at Jerwood Visual Arts.

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'Tomorrow Never Knows' Exhibition Documentation